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In August 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci received a U.S. intelligence report suggesting the COVID-19 virus was developed in Chinese and U.S. labs as a bat vaccine, that it subsequently leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that it contained characteristics that would make it resistant to mRNA vaccines.
The report, authored by Joseph Murphy, a major with the U.S. Marine Corps, and printed on Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) letterhead, was part of a tranche of documents Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released Thursday as part of his ongoing congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
The documents show that not only did Fauci receive the DARPA report, but that in an Aug. 25, 2021, email to National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials, he called it “important.” “Let us discuss my going down to the White House to review the report,” Fauci wrote.
The document tranche also contained evidence that Fauci cultivated ties with intelligence agencies at least as early as 2003, the same year he received a CIA report warning of the dangers of genetically manipulating coronaviruses.
Fauci later used these intelligence connections to sway the intelligence community to support the zoonotic theory of COVID-19’s origin, the documents show.
We have further proof that Dr. Fauci had deep connections to the intelligence agencies. When COVID-19 came about, he leveraged those connections to steer the intelligence community away from the idea that a lab leak took place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We now know a lab… pic.twitter.com/xjlr97T9bO
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 12, 2026
The newly released information corroborates the testimony of CIA whistleblower James Erdman before the U.S. Senate last month. Erdman testified that Fauci led a multi-agency cover-up of COVID-19’s lab origins and that his role in the cover-up “was intentional.”
“These documents reveal a breathtaking level of manipulation — official narratives carefully engineered to shape high-level government policy,” said Stephanie Weidle, executive director of federal watchdog group Feds for Freedom. “This is corruption.”
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the revelations sound “more like a plan than a mistake or a ‘leak.’” He said:
“You can’t tell me that the scientists involved didn’t know what the outcome would be. The combination of the human recombinant virus … and a gene therapy ‘vaccine’ that was used to circumvent all other therapies that could have saved lives, created a monster of a virus, as SARS-CoV-2 mutated to stay beyond the reach of the shot.”
Paul released the documents just days after he revealed that he intends to interview Fauci in Congress later this month. In a letter to Paul dated June 9, Sen. Gary C. Peters (D-Mich.) referenced Paul’s “planned transcribed interview of Dr. Anthony Fauci later this month.”
No further information about this interview is publicly available as of press time. The Daily Caller first reported about the forthcoming interview on Tuesday. Sen. Paul’s office did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
Fauci accepted proposal for gain-of-function research involving bat viruses
According to the DARPA document (see page 70), dated Aug. 13, 2021, SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, “is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus.”
It was created at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, also known as the WIV, and U.S. institutions with the help of researchers from the EcoHealth Alliance. The virus then leaked from the Wuhan lab in August 2019.
“The details of this program have been concealed since the pandemic began,” the document states, noting, though, that the details match those contained in two research proposals, the DEFUSE proposal and the PREEMPT project.
The EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal involved altering bat viruses by inserting a spike protein with a furin cleavage site, to cause the virus to infect human lungs. PREEMPT involved the cultivation of Egyptian fruit bats.
University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., and Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., submitted the DEFUSE proposal to DARPA in 2017. Although DARPA rejected the proposal, scientists have suggested the rejection didn’t shut down the project.
After DARPA rejected the DEFUSE proposal, the Aug. 13, 2021, report states that DARPA then “settled with NIH/NIAID” — or the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led at the time by Fauci. According to the report:
“DARPA rejected the proposal because the work was too close to violating the gain-of-function (GoF) moratorium, … despite what Peter Daszak says in the proposal (that the work would not … ).
“As is known, Dr. Fauci with NIAID did not reject the proposal. The work took place at the WIV and at several sites in the US, identified in detail in the proposal.”
Baric and Fauci also closely collaborated with Peter Daszak, Ph.D. — the former president of EcoHealth Alliance, who had financial ties to the Wuhan Lab and played a key role in promoting the zoonotic theory.
In 2024, HHS suspended funding for the EcoHealth Alliance for not monitoring the safety of its coronavirus experiments.
NIH virologist Vincent Munster, Ph.D., also listed as a partner in the DEFUSE proposal, has maintained ties with Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance — including a paper they co-authored in 2022 on Nipah Virus detection in bat roosts.
In April, Baric lost his NIH grants and the University of North Carolina placed him on leave.
Last week, Munster and NIH researcher Claude Kwe Yinda, Ph.D., were charged with conspiring to smuggle biological materials, including deactivated monkeypox virus samples, into the U.S. from Africa — and allegedly lied to authorities about what they were carrying.
‘The story gets complicated’
The SARS-CoV-2 virus was likely intended to be used for a bat vaccine before it leaked from the Wuhan lab, according to the DARPA report. “The purpose of the EcoHealth program, called DEFUSE in the proposal … was to inoculate bats in the Yunnan, China caves where confirmed SARS-CoVs were found,” the report states.
However, the virus “leaked and spread rapidly because it was aerosolized so it could efficiently infect bats in caves, but it was not ready to infect bats yet, which is why it does not appear to infect bats.”
The report suggests that SARS-CoV-2 had characteristics that made it easily transmissible among human populations.
“The reason the disease is so confusing is because it is less a virus than it is engineered spike proteins hitch-hiking a ride on a SARSr-CoV quasispecies swarm. The closer it is to the final live attenuated vaccine form, the more likely that it has been deattenuating since initial escape in August 2019,” the report states.
“A year after DARPA denied this proposal to create chimeric bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a novel bat virus with a furin cleavage site began infecting humans in Wuhan. No other closely related virus has this furin cleavage site,” RealClearInvestigations reported in April.
The documents Paul released contain emails showing that Fauci was aware of concerns about the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site early during the pandemic.
In a January 2020 email thread, Fauci responded to concerns from virologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., and immunologist Jeremy Farrar, Ph.D., about the presence of the furin cleavage site.
In a Jan. 31, 2020, email, Fauci wrote, “I just got off the phone with Kristian Anderson and he related to me his concern about the Furine site mutation in the spike protein of the currently circulating 2019-nCoV.”
In a later email related to these concerns, Fauci wrote, “The story gets complicated.”
DARPA: Mass vaccination actually increased risks from SARS-CoV-2 virus
The virus also contained characteristics that made it difficult to treat or prevent with mRNA vaccines, the DARPA report suggested.
“The gene-encoded, or ‘mRNA,’ vaccines work poorly because they are synthetic replications of the already-synthetic SARSr-CoV-WIV spike proteins and possess no other epitopes” — or the part of an antigen that the immune system recognizes.
The report adds:
“The mRNA instructs the cells to produce synthetic copies of the SARSr-CoV-WIV synthetic spike protein directly into the bloodstream, wherein they spread and produce the same ACE2 immune storm that the recombinant vaccine does.
“Many doctors in the country have identified that the symptoms of vaccine reactions mirror the symptoms of the disease, which corroborates with the similar synthetic nature and function of the respective spike proteins.”
The DARPA report suggested that mass vaccination campaigns actually increased the risks from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, in a manner replicating that of gain-of-function research, which increases the virulence or transmissibility of viruses. It stated:
“The potential for SARSr-CoV-WIV to deattentuate requires immediate attention. Live vaccines have been found to deattentuate in the past.
“If this is the case with SARSr-CoV-WIV, then the mass vaccination campaign actually performs an accelerated gain-of-function for it. Since it is designed for bats off of a human-susceptible SARS-CoV, vaccinating humans against it actually gains its function back towards a more deattenuated human-susceptible form.”
For the same reasons, other pandemic-related interventions such as masks would be ineffective in stopping the spread of COVID-19, the report states.
“The reasons why nonpharmaceutical interventions like masks and medical countermeasures like the mRNA vaccines do not work well can be extrapolated from the details. Masks or mRNA vaccines would not work for this material,” said former pharmaceutical research and development executive Sasha Latypova. “It is a chemical aerosol poisoning agent. DARPA knows this well.”
Certain characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 made alternative treatment options, such as ivermectin, more effective in treating COVID-19, the report suggests.
“Many of the early treatment protocols ignored by the authorities work because they inhibit viral replication or modulate the immune response to the spike proteins.
“Some of these treatment protocols also inhibit the action of the engineered spike protein. For instance, Ivermectin (identified as curative in April 2020) works throughout all phases of illness because it both inhibits viral replication and modulates the immune response.
“Of note, chloroquine phosphate (Hydroxychloriquine, identified April 2020 as curative) is identified in the proposal as a SARSr-CoV inhibitor, as is interferon (identified May 2020 as curative).”
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Fauci was warned about risks of gain-of-function research in 2003
The documents Paul released this week also shed light on Fauci’s intelligence ties. In 2003, Fauci received a CIA report, “The Darker Bioweapons Future,” warning that “engineered biological agents” could lead to effects potentially “worse than any disease known to man.”
While the CIA report doesn’t mention gain-of-function research by name, it cites several examples of cases where viral transmissibility or virulence were enhanced.
The documents also contain an invitation for Fauci to participate in a July 2021 National Security Council briefing related to then-President Joe Biden’s inquiry regarding COVID’s origins — for which Fauci was exempted from a COVID-19 test.
According to Erdman’s Senate testimony last month, the Biden inquiry — and Fauci’s efforts to cover up the likely laboratory origins of COVID-19 — resulted in the White House publishing an August 2021 report that was inconclusive about the virus’s origins — even though intelligence agencies by then had evidence of a lab leak.
A March 6, 2020, email from then-NIH Director Francis Collins referenced the “Proximal Origin” paper published in the journal Nature Medicine, which found that COVID-19 emerged naturally. The paper was widely used to refute the lab-leak theory. Collins suggested that he and Fauci quietly contributed to that paper.
“FYI, this is work that Tony [Fauci], Jeremy [Farrar] … and I helped with, but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper,” Collins wrote.
“What came afterwards was information warfare,” said Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD’s senior research scientist. “The world was convinced the virus had bat origins — yet it did not infect bats.”
“The censorship in the first two years was incredibly heavy,” Latypova said. “Everyone, including currently ‘awake’ outlets like Tucker Carlson, enthusiastically endorsed the narrative of natural origin, and anyone who questioned this as bogus (myself) was kicked off all social media platforms.”
Will Fauci come clean when he testifies?
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a critic of gain-of-function research, said Fauci has a lot to potentially answer for in his congressional interview — and that Biden’s preemptive pardon of Fauci, issued last year, won’t protect Fauci if he lies before Congress. Ebright said:
“Because Fauci’s autopen pardon covers only federal crimes that Fauci committed before Jan. 21, 2025, it does not protect Fauci from prosecution for lying to Congress in a Congressional transcribed interview or public hearing in 2026. He will not even be able to repeat previous lies with impunity in a Congressional transcribed interview or public hearing in 2026.”
Ebright said Fauci has three options — responding truthfully and “confessing that he committed conspiracy to defraud, fraud, perjury, misuse of federal funds, destruction of federal records and obstruction.” Or he can provide false testimony and risk perjury charges, or feign mental incapacitation and inability to recall.
“Erdman testified before the Senate that Fauci actively worked through the intelligence community’s COVID origin task forces to advance his own agenda and steer … COVID-19 policy,” Weidle said. “These revelations should shock no one. Yet the question remains: will anything actually be done about it?”
Related articles in The Defender
- CIA Whistleblower Fears Retaliation, as Rand Paul Promises More COVID Cover-Up News Next Week
- CIA Whistleblower: Fauci Led Multi-Agency Cover-Up of COVID Lab Leak Evidence
- Virologist at Center of Coronavirus Research Loses NIH Grants, University Places Him on Leave
- ‘I Don’t Recall’: Fauci Unable to Answer Key Questions in Pandemic Probe
- Officials With Ties to Wuhan Institute Still Conspiring to Discredit Theory That COVID May Have Leaked From Lab
- Fauci, Other ‘Bethesda Boys’ Colluded to Suppress COVID Lab-Leak Theory, U.S. House Committee Report Finds
