Edward Snowden exposed government surveillance of its citizens. Daniel Ellsberg exposed government lies. US Marine Major Joseph Murphy exposed something larger: the biodefense blueprint behind a pandemic that killed millions. Snowden’s leak sparked a worldwide debate about privacy. Murphy’s leak — the DARPA DEFUSE proposal — should have sparked a global reckoning about the real origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) serves as a venture capital arm of the world’s largest bureaucracy: the Department of Defense. It funds high-risk academic research to protect US troops from future threats.
One team proposed modifying bat coronaviruses to spread more effectively—not among humans, but mammalian bats. Testing would occur in Wuhan, where the right bat colonies existed. This was not a fringe idea. It was a biodefense concept encouraged by DARPA under the first Trump administration.
Taken together, the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, plus FOIA documents, emails, and peer-reviewed papers, support Murphy’s hypothesis: SARS-CoV-2 was created in US labs but tested in Wuhan, where it accidentally leaked. This theory has since been debated in the scientific literature, including Nature.
The U.S. intelligence community did not miss this. It moved the unclassified 2018 DARPA project, advertised on Twitter, into a classified 2021 folder.
The 2018 Blueprint
The very agencies that claimed to be searching for answers had the facts all along, stored in a top-secret folder. They knew that Peter Daszak (EcoHealth), Zhengli Shi (WIV), Linfa Wang (Duke), and Ralph Baric (UNC) had proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and testing them on Chinese bats in Wuhan.
