Federal grant documents that contained a “blueprint” for creating the virus that causes COVID-19 may have been wrongly classified by the Defense Department, leading to a “flawed” probe of the pandemic’s origins by US intelligence agencies, according to whistleblower documents exclusively obtained by The Post.
The whistleblower, Marine Corps. Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy — who now runs the military branch’s Warfighting Lab based at Quantico, Va. — discovered in July 2021 that the unclassified grant proposal, known as Project DEFUSE, had been uploaded to a classified portal and notified his chain of command.
The DEFUSE proposal, which has since been cited by scientists as “smoking gun” evidence that COVID was engineered in a Chinese lab, was not included — despite being unclassified — in a final Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report on the virus’ origins released in August 2021.
Murphy was unable to uncover why the proposal had been over-classified, and it was never used in the ODNI report, despite the fact that it had been submitted to the Intelligence Community (IC) by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he worked at the time.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) revealed the whistleblower files in a Thursday letter to Intelligence Community Inspector General Thomas Monheim and called for a thorough investigation into whether “the DEFUSE records were impeded, misdirected or if the significance of the proposal was downplayed by advisors or staff.”
“The ODNI assessment remains flawed,” added Marshall, pointing to the documents as well as earlier reports that “conflicted individuals may have censored the laboratory-origin related intelligence.”
“[I]f true, this signals an alarming breach of integrity in the investigative process,” he said. “Today I write with urgency to request that your office investigate the federal government’s COVID-19 origin analytical process and results.”
On May 26, 2021, President Biden ordered ODNI to launch a 90-day investigation into whether the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed more than 1.2 million Americans, began with a laboratory accident or was the product of natural spillover from animals to humans.
The review resulted in the US Intelligence Community returning a “divided” verdict on COVID origins, saying a lab leak and and natural spillover were equally likely. Only the FBI and Energy Department pointed to a lab leak as the most likely cause.
The DEFUSE papers, however, reveal plans to engineer a coronavirus that would have had identical characteristics to SARS-CoV-2.
Manhattan-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance submitted the proposal to DARPA in May 2018 — but it was never funded.
EcoHealth has since been suspended, however, from receiving all federal grants after it “likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety” and failed to submit reviews of experiments it conducted at the now-infamous and debarred Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The COVID pandemic originated in the same Chinese city — more than 800 miles from the closest bats that could have infected humans with the SARS-CoV-2 viruses — at a lab that was world-renowned for its research on bat coronaviruses and conducted US-taxpayer funded, gain-of-function experiments on them from 2014 to 2021.
The “Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses” grant, as it was titled, involved University of North Carolina researcher Dr. Ralph Baric and Wuhan of Institute Virology collaborator Dr. Shi Zhengli, nicknamed the “bat lady” for her expertise in the subject.
They planned to conduct risky gain-of-function experiments — one of the reasons DARPA denied the grant — to increase the infectiousness of bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.
Marshall’s missive noted that Baric may have been one of the private sector scientists that ODNI consulted during its probe, an obvious conflict of interest since he previously admitted to being a part of the IC agency’s Biological Sciences Experts Group.
“Undisclosed conflicts of interest may have included professional reliance on federal grants, a bias towards risky pathogen research projects, or collaborative relationships with the WIV,” the Kansas Republican said.
Gain-of-function experiments were also still conducted, eventually leading to EcoHealth’s suspension, via $1.4 million in grants and subgrants that flowed from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
EcoHealth has repeatedly denied that it funded the research — contradicting sworn testimony from NIH Principal Deputy Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak — and a spokesperson previously told The Post its work had not “violated any terms of NIH’s grant” and “oversight of experiments adhered to NIH grant award conditions.”
Those grants greenlighted “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains” between 2014 and 2019, according to a June 2023 Government Accountability Office report.
Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield suggested on a biosecurity panel at the University of North Carolina in October that even unfunded projects can be tested under other research grants.
Drafts and notes of DEFUSE obtained by US Right to Know also show EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak saying he would “downplay” the involvement of the Wuhan lab when asking for DARPA to fund the project.
Redfield is one of several former intelligence and public health officials — including newly nominated CIA Director John Ratcliffe — who believe a lab leak is the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Intercept first revealed the existence of the DARPA grant proposal, which proposed the “exact feature” of a furin cleavage site later found in the virus, in September 2021.
According to the whistleblower documents, the agency dismissed that the proposal had been improperly uploaded to a classified network without official markings, in violation of federal policy.
“[T]he storage, handling, and marking of the documents in question is consistent with DARPA and DoD policies and procedures concurrent with the origination of the files,” a controlled unclassified information report from the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General noted.
Murphy’s disclosures “do NOT support the allegation of concealment/cover-up or withholding information from interagency partners with a legitimate need to know,” the report states.
Daszak and Fauci have strenuously denied that the COVID pandemic started from a laboratory accident or originated from gain-of-function experiments at the WIV — with the former NIAID director frequently smearing lab-leak proponents as “conspiracy theorists.”
In his letter, Marshall countered: “No SARS2 genomic or serological evidence was found in the over 80,000 domestic and wild animal samples tested in China.”
A CDC workshop held in China in May 2019 also concluded that zoonotic spread was incredibly unlikely, saying that: “Of the 30 most dangerous zoonotic pathogens poised for outbreak in China, coronavirus only ranked as number 21,” he wrote.
A year earlier, a joint EcoHealth-WIV study found “that Wuhan inhabitants had very low risk of exposure to bat coronavirus infections and used 240 samples from the Wuhan population to establish the control group benchmark for their studies,” Marshall added.
Marshall concluded by urging Monheim to find out whether “an integrity breach occurred during the federal probe and that the ODNI assessments may have errors, omissions or manipulated intelligence.”
“The OIG investigation can uncover any deliberate actions which may rise to the level of misconduct, false statements, obstruction of federal proceedings, conspiracy, conflicts of interest, or infractions of administrative or civil laws,” he added.
Rutgers University molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright told The Post on Thursday that an inspector general’s investigation into the matter would be “a first step” toward accountability for COVID’s origins.
“I agree with Senator Marshall that DoD and IC officials likely engaged in ‘deliberate actions which may rise to the level of misconduct, false statements, obstruction of federal proceedings, conspiracy, conflicts of interest, or infractions of administrative or civil laws’ and that a DoD OIG investigation is needed, as a first step, to expose and ensure accountability for such actions,” Ebright said.
Reps for ODNI, the Pentagon and Monheim’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Murphy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.