A whistleblower report suggests that the Defense Department may have misclassified federal grant documents containing key information on creating the virus that causes COVID-19. The misclassification allegedly led to a flawed U.S. intelligence investigation into the pandemic’s origins.
Marine Corps Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy, now head of the military’s Warfighting Lab in Quantico, Virginia, discovered in July 2021 that the unclassified grant proposal, titled Project DEFUSE, had been improperly uploaded to a classified portal. Murphy alerted his chain of command to the misclassification. Despite being unclassified, the DEFUSE proposal—considered by some scientists as strong evidence that COVID-19 was engineered in a Chinese lab—was not included in an August 2021 Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report on the virus’s origins.
Murphy, unable to determine why the proposal was over-classified, noted that the document, submitted to the Intelligence Community by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was omitted from the final ODNI assessment. In a letter to Intelligence Community Inspector General Thomas Monheim, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) called for a full investigation into whether the DEFUSE records were mishandled or suppressed, citing potential conflicts of interest.
The ODNI’s review, ordered by Biden in May 2021, returned a divided conclusion on COVID’s origins. While most agencies could not conclusively favor one theory over another, the FBI and Energy Department leaned toward a lab-leak explanation. The DEFUSE documents detail plans to engineer a coronavirus with characteristics identical to SARS-CoV-2. EcoHealth Alliance, a Manhattan-based nonprofit, submitted the DEFUSE proposal to DARPA in 2018, though it was not funded.
EcoHealth has since been barred from federal funding for allegedly violating National Institutes of Health (NIH) biosafety protocols. Between 2014 and 2021, it conducted gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where SARS-CoV-2 is suspected by some to have originated.
Marshall expressed concern over possible conflicts of interest among private-sector scientists consulted during the intelligence probe, highlighting connections to the WIV and reliance on federal grants. Despite repeated denials from EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who have dismissed claims of a lab origin for COVID-19, scrutiny persists.
Senator Marshall and molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright have called for a comprehensive investigation to uncover any potential misconduct or obstruction during the federal probe into COVID-19’s origins. So far, representatives for the ODNI, the Pentagon, and related parties have not responded to requests for comment.
