By Jessica Rose at Brownstone dot org.

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Chairman Rand Paul has been collecting and releasing documents as part of the ongoing (what is it now, 6 bloody years?) investigation into SARS-2 origins. You can find that here. It is "largely accepted" that SARS-2 is of natural origin and that it "most likely" arose through natural zoonotic evolution (either in an animal host or during early human transmission) and thus not a laboratory construct, thanks to this paper published on March 17, 2020 in Nature Medicine.

The featured files that I have dug into include 1. the New Slack Messages: Proximal Origin Authors Privately Doubted Their Own "No Lab Leak" Conclusion which includes a condensed version and a full version of the messages, and 2. Fauci's Two-Decade Relationship with the Intelligence Community.

This article will focus on the former Fauci 'n' Intel friends document. I will write up a Part Deux on the Proximal Origin Authors' (Kristian Anderson, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, and Robert Garry) Slack exchanges.

The released Fauci 'n' Intel friends document contains a lot of emails, but what caught my eye was the 5-page memo on "page 70" written by DARPA fellow and Marine Major Joseph Murphy 1 on August 13, 2021 to the Inspector General. This 5-page memo can also be found here.

His memo is an analysis of undisclosed (and ultimately DARPA-rejected) EcoHealth Alliance Defusing the Threat of Bat-Borne Coronaviruses (DEFUSE) proposal documents (found unmarked on a DARPA system) as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated as a leaked American-engineered recombinant bat coronavirus – he suggests a vaccine precursor – developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). He describes having the opportunity to "sit in the back-row," which positioned him to hear government revelations firsthand, while also being privy to observing and reading the field. Indeed, because of his position and role – as a Marine, no less – he had a rare "bird's eye view" on the true goings-ons.

This memo suggests a massive coverup from within.

This memo that gave me pause – not because the information itself was new or surprising to me, but because it existed inside intelligence communities yet was deliberately hidden since 2021. What bothers me even more is that after filing his concern through a formal DoD Hotline Case, the Director of Maintaining Technology Advantage Jessica Appler, rejected it outright, claiming that his findings were "not substantiated."

Let's be rational. Simply based on "the coincidental" – almost simultaneous – existence of the DEFUSE proposal and the WIV and the unique furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2, was it not worth taking his findings into consideration and perhaps launching an investigation considering the context?

His memo raised legitimate questions that have yet to be properly addressed or adequately answered.

N.B. I spoke about this memo with Viva Frei on July 22, 2026.

The memo

Page 1

The Major writes:

SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus. It was created by an EcoHealth Alliance program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), as suggested by the reporting surrounding the lab leak hypothesis. The details of this program have been concealed since the pandemic began. These details can be found in the EcoHealth Alliance proposal response to the DARPA PREEMPT program Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) HR00118S0017, dated March 2018 – a document not yet publicly disclosed.

I wonder if this Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) HR00118S0017 document was disclosed if the Major's findings would be rendered "substantiated?"

To be clear, because all of these acronyms can be quite confusing, DEFUSE was a specific ~$14+ million proposal submitted by EcoHealth Alliance (led by Peter Daszak, with partners including Shi Zhengli at the WIV, Ralph Baric at UNC, and others) under DARPA's PREEMPT program. It was pitched by EcoHealth Alliance at the PREEMPT Proposers Day event (early 2018)...