This post was published by Jon Fleetwood. Support him by subscribing at Substack and following at Instagram / X / Facebook.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a program in early 2018 called PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) whose stated goal was to identify and stop future pandemic threats before they entered the human population, according to program documents.
Unlike traditional outbreak investigations, which attempt to reconstruct the animal origins of purported pathogens after outbreaks occur, PREEMPT sought to “predict” those origins in advance.
In 2018.
The year before the COVID-19 pandemic started.
The year before we were told SARS-CoV-2 came from nature.
DARPA wanted researchers to identify which animals would harbor future threats, which mutations would enable species jumps, which locations would become outbreak hotspots, and under what ecological conditions future human pathogens would emerge from nature.
The agency described the effort as a “radical departure from current practice.”
“The PREEMPT program represents a radical departure from current practice, aiming to target viral biothreats within the animal reservoirs where they originate and preempt their entry into human populations before an outbreak occurs.”
In other words, DARPA was no longer interested merely in responding to purported pandemics after they appeared.
It wanted to predict and characterize them beforehand.
Predicting the Spillover Story Before the Spillover
PREEMPT was not simply a wildlife surveillance program.
DARPA required researchers to build “predictive” models capable of estimating the alleged likelihood that a future human-capable pathogen would emerge from an animal reservoir in a geographic hotspot.
The models were expected to capture viral evolutionary trajectories, species-jump mutations, ecological drivers, transmission bottlenecks, and spillover probability.
Researchers were instructed to combine wildlife surveillance, environmental information, sequencing data, ecological variables, and socioeconomic information into continuously updated predictive systems capable of forecasting future emergence events.
DARPA further encouraged the use of “real-life ecosystems and natural hosts” to experimentally validate these predictions and improve future forecasting accuracy.
Historically, the wildlife origin story of a purported pathogen was reconstructed after the fact.
PREEMPT sought to predict that story beforehand.
From Genetic Alibi to Wildlife Alibi
The program appears to fit naturally alongside DARPA’s earlier PROPHECY effort.
As previously reported by this publication, DARPA’s 2010 PROPHECY program sought to predict the future evolution of viruses, identify important mutations before they emerged, and develop drugs and vaccines “in advance of need.”
If PROPHECY sought to build the genetic backstory of future pandemic pathogens, PREEMPT sought to build the wildlife backstory as well.
Put more bluntly:
PROPHECY sought to build the genetic alibi.
PREEMPT sought to build the wildlife alibi.
Then PREEMPT Produced DEFUSE
PREEMPT did not remain an abstract modeling exercise for long.
In March 2018, just months after DARPA launched PREEMPT, EcoHealth Alliance, Ralph Baric’s laboratory at the University of North Carolina, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and U.S. government collaborators submitted DEFUSE directly into the PREEMPT program itself.
Internal government records identify DEFUSE as a PREEMPT proposal and document U.S. Geological Survey participation in the effort.
The timing is difficult to ignore.
The same DARPA program that sought to “predict” the wildlife reservoirs, spillover pathways, and ecological origin stories of future human pathogens also produced a proposal that documented all three defining characteristics later associated with the purported COVID-19 pathogen:
- a furin cleavage site insertion,
- human-optimized receptor-binding domain residues,
- and the two-proline spike stabilization strategy later incorporated into the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
DEFUSE remains the only known pre-pandemic proposal documenting all three characteristics together in a single document before the emergence of COVID-19.
In other words, the same DARPA research ecosystem that was building predictive wildlife origin stories for future pandemic pathogens was simultaneously documenting the precise molecular characteristics of the pathogen that would purportedly emerge from wildlife less a year later.
The Chronology
The sequence is remarkable.
- 2010: DARPA launches PROPHECY to “predict” the future evolution of viruses and develop countermeasures before they are needed.
- January 2018: DARPA launches PREEMPT to predict the animal reservoirs, spillover pathways, and ecological origin stories of future human pathogens.
- March 2018: DARPA receives DEFUSE, a proposal involving EcoHealth Alliance, Ralph Baric, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology that documents all three defining characteristics later associated with SARS-CoV-2.
- Late 2019: The world is told that a novel coronavirus emerged from wildlife through a natural spillover event.
Viewed through my In Silico Theory of pandemic origins framework, the chronology appears less like a collection of unrelated biodefense projects and more like a complete explanatory architecture:
- first the genetic backstory,
- then the wildlife backstory,
- followed by experimental validation,
- and finally the pharmaceutical response infrastructure.
Bottom Line
The year before COVID-19, the United States military’s premier advanced research agency launched a program dedicated to predicting the animal reservoirs, spillover pathways, and ecological origin stories through which future human pathogens would purportedly emerge from nature.
Months later, a proposal submitted directly into that same DARPA program by EcoHealth Alliance, Ralph Baric, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology documented all three defining structural characteristics later associated with SARS-CoV-2.
Then COVID-19 happened.
And Ralph Baric became one of the most significant defenders of the wildlife-origin narrative in the United States.
Whether readers view PREEMPT as prudent biodefense planning, a predictive surveillance system, or something more consequential is ultimately up to them.
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