Anatomy of the Pandemic State

Part 3: The Feeding Trough: The incredible story of how DARPA bet $25 million on a failing pharma company to usher in the mRNA vaccine era and the private sector DARPA that wants to rule the world

Quick Read

In the previous installment of the “Anatomy of the Pandemic State” series, we traced the origins of the pandemic state and how it was the fuel in the jet engine that catapulted Dr. Fauci to the most powerful bureaucrat in American history. The Pandemic State used the post-9/11 anthrax attacks on American soil to obliterate the distinction between public health infectious diseases and biodefense, and recategorized both as inseparable matters of national security. Infectious diseases came to be treated on a war footing and invoked the full might of the gargantuan national biodefense apparatus. This led to an “arms race” driven by the promise of windfall profits and drove research and cures for diseases that didn’t exist or hadn’t infected humans, giving rise to an incredibly lucrative multi-billion dollar public-private apparatus that grew like a mushroom cloud in the decades since the inception of the pandemic state. If Fauci’s NIAID was the circumference of the Pandemic State, DARPA is the hub of the wheel from whence every action (or “countermeasure”) radiates. This installment is an exposition of how DARPA became the brain or nerve center of the pandemic state, funded the creation of mRNA vaccines and other novel therapeutics in search of a pandemic and has spawned a supranational private sector DARPA with world domination ambitions.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is one of the most fascinating government organizations in existence. It is arguably the most powerful, most productive, most secretive and the least investigated military science agency in the world. Founded in 1958 as ARPA in response to the launch of Sputnik by the USSR and the start of the Space Race, it’s a petri dish of experimental technology. This publicity-shy 220 employee organization with a massive $4.122 billion annual budget has created some of the most consequential and life-changing interventions in human history while obscured from the spotlight of public attention. The nimble military science research agency doesn’t typically invent things itself. Rather, its officials look across the American scientific landscape — to universities, military labs and defense contractors and funds cutting edge research that carries a high risk of failure but also with the potential of transforming and reshaping human existence.

Some of their more spectacular inventions include the Internet, the GPS, graphical user interface and mouse, Siri (yes, Siri), HAARP, or the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program and so many more.

However, DARPA’s most impressive feat—more impressive than their ability to alter the course of humanity through technological wizardry is their ability to keep themselves out of the public eye despite being a taxpayer funded entity beholden to public disclosure and transparency. For a masterful exposition of all things DARPA, I’d refer you to Annie Jacobsen's book: “The Pentagon's Brain”

So what does DARPA have to do with the Pandemic state? Everything. Did you know that the DOD, (DARPA’s parent agency) and not the CDC coordinated every element of the pandemic response? You can read about it here:

The DOD, not the CDC, orchestrated and funded major elements of the US pandemic response

What you’re about to read is the prehistory of how DARPA near single-handedly seeded mRNA technology via their partnerships with private corporations and mainstreamed a class of drugs previously relegated to the thrash bin of experimental therapies with no clinical applications.

In the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and the anthrax bioterrorism that followed shortly thereafter, DARPA began to invest in ways to respond faster and use technology to accelerate vaccine development and speed up pharmaceutical manufacturing. If you read part one of this series, you’d know that the 2001 anthrax attack was the spark that ignited the biodefense “arms race” for so-called countermeasures against all sorts of infectious threats, real and imagined. While this can be read as a standalone essay, part one of this series defines the history and architecture of the pandemic state and places Dr. Anthony Fauci at its apex. Click on the link below to take a trip down pandemia wonderland.

Anatomy of the Pandemic State

How DARPA Birthed mRNA vaccines and put Moderna on the map

The year was 2010. An Air Force doctor and DARPA program manager named Dan Wattendorf became obsessed with rapid pandemic response and moved it to the top of DARPA’s priority list.

Wattendorf asked: what if we have a global pandemic and it's a novel pathogen? He argued the normal 3 to 10 year wait for a vaccine was unacceptable and proposed using mRNA to create a vaccine in days and weeks instead of the normal multi-year process.

“If we need to deploy someone in harm’s way and it’s a new virus, you don’t have time to wait for a new vaccine,” Wattendorf said. “That could be a decade.”

Wattendorf had ideas for a solution. In 2010, he took to a conference room at DARPA headquarters in Northern Virginia.

At the time, the Obama administration was emphasizing the need to step up pandemic response capabilities in the wake of the H1N1 outbreak, and consequently DARPA established the agency’s first biotechnology office in 2014.

In the conference room, Wattendorf outlined his ideas to agency higher-ups. The result was a program called ADEPT, which invested $291 million from 2011 to 2019 in an array of technologies — including a credit card-sized device for rapid antibody discovery developed by the Vancouver-based firm AbCellera.

“It may turn out to be the most important program from my time at the agency,” said Regina Dugan, who ran DARPA from 2009 to 2012.

Chief among Wattendorf’s targets for the program: delivering vaccines and antibodies by implanting viral genetic code directly into humans.

Traditional vaccines inject what’s known as an antigen — usually a piece of live or deactivated virus to provoke a person’s immune system into producing a protective response that includes antibodies and cellular immunity. Antigens are typically manufactured in a long process that involves growing live virus in chicken eggs in bioreactors.

Wattendorf wanted to inject viral genetic code directly into humans and turn the human body into an antigen factory that used its own cellular machinery eliminating the need for traditional manufacturing processes. The immune system would supposedly recognize the antigen in the cells and launch a protective response.

By 2010, scientists had tested the idea using DNA with mixed results. They made protein, but they didn't produce enough. They lacked potency, so there wasn't a strong immune response. Wattendorf wanted to try its single-stranded sibling RNA.

At the time, many considered it a fool’s errand. RNA is unstable in the environment and highly susceptible to degradation. It was unclear how to get it into a human cell. Over at the National Institutes of Health, where Wattendorf previously worked, research into DNA vaccines was presenting enough hurdles. Few wanted to take the risk of trying RNA, too.

“Skeptics cited the lack of evidence that it would work, and Dan cited the lack of evidence that it wouldn’t,” his boss Regina Dugan recalled. “That’s very typical of a DARPA program.”

In 2012 with the ADEPT:PROTECT program, DARPA began investing in the development of gene-encoded vaccines, a new category of preventive measures based on DNA or RNA. The picture below is from DARPA. (Note how they use the word “bioreactor” to describe humans)

In 2013, DARPA awarded an obscure Massachusetts-based company, Moderna Therapeutics, a Grant for $25 Million to Develop Messenger RNA Therapeutics.

DARPA’s funding choice was a real head scratcher. Moderna had no viable products and a legacy of failure to boot. A 2016 STAT investigation found that the company had created a caustic work environment driving away top talent in its pursuit of secrecy. Failed experiments were met with reprimands and on the spot firings. Multiple highly placed executives had quit. Even more intriguing, the company had published no data supporting mRNA technology and secrecy was so paramount that job candidates were made to sign nondisclosure agreements before coming into interview. “It’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes,” said a former Moderna scientist. Although Moderna had moved its first two potential treatments into human trials, none were listed on the public federal registry, clinical trials.gov. The company's CEO Stéphane Bancel, had no experience running a drug development operation when one of biotech’s most successful venture capitalists tapped him to lead Moderna. He’d spent most of his career in sales and operations, not science.

Moderna’s big breakthrough came in March 2013, just a few months before DARPA invested in them. That’s when Moderna — which had just 25 employees — signed a staggering $240 million partnership with UK pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. It was the most money pharma had ever spent on drugs that had not yet been tested in humans. For AstraZeneca, this deal was a head scratcher given that they had just laid off 1600 scientists.

Did AstraZeneca know about DARPA's masterplan to use Moderna to bring mRNA technology into the mainstream of pandemic deployment and the promise of windfall profit that lay therein?

Why else would a pharmaceutical giant hemorrhaging money and laying off thousands of employees invest $240 million in a company with no products, a toxic work environment and at a time when big name executives were jumping ship?

But it gets better. Before the end of 2013, Moderna would turn heads again with a $110 million investment round, followed by a high-dollar partnership with biotech giant Alexion.

If you truly believe a dying company with a legacy of failure was given a $450 million cash infusion by pharma giants—the same year DARPA invested in them—based on the altruistic urge to further science, I have a bridge covered in spike protein to sell you.

In early 2015, Moderna disclosed a $450 million financing round, the largest ever for a private biotech company. This month, the company broke its own record, raising another $474 million.

Indeed, this jaw-dropping trajectory of Moderna's meteoric rise tracks neatly in lockstep with DARPA's investment. The graph below speaks for itself. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes’ian genius to deduce that Moderna’s ability to attract record-breaking investment was due to industry insider intel on the Department of Defense’s all-in push to enthrone mRNA as the future of biodefense and vaccinology, and Big pharma was clamoring for a piece of the fledgling goose that promised to lay golden eggs of blockbuster profits. (The STAT investigation does not mention DARPA once in the article, although they remain mystified by the flow of pharma dollars.)

In March 2020, Moderna was the first company in the United States to enter Phase 1 trials with a covid-19 vaccine using RNA. The company injected its first test into a human 66 days after receiving the virus’s genetic code.

The first company (Moderna) in the United States to enter clinical trials with a vaccine for COVID was funded by DARPA. So was the second company (Inovio Pharmaceuticals) although almost no one has heard of it.

You see, in addition to funding mRNA technology, Wattendorf had also continued DARPA investments in vaccines delivered using DNA.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals, funded by DARPA, entered Phase 1 trials for its DNA-delivered covid-19 vaccine in April 2020, making it the second DARPA funded company to enter trials in the United States. However the Department of Defense discontinued funding for the phase III trials of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate citing broad availability of other COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S

DARPA began funding Pfizer at the same time

Around the same time in 2013 that DARPA invested $25 million in Moderna, they gave Pfizer $7.7 million for research on mRNA vaccine technology.

While DARPA’s role in single-handedly making Moderna a pharmaceutical behemoth is obscured but easily discoverable fact, DAPRA’s simultaneous funding of Pfizer, at exactly the same time, and for the exact same reason has been practically erased from history.

The screenshots below from 2013 bear testament to DARPA’s monomaniacal obsession with mRNA, and so invested were they in ensuring the success of their mRNA push that they hedged their gamble to mitigate any risk of failure by simultaneously betting on two horses in the race.

What makes this mystery even more mysterious is that the actual defense contracts have vanished from the DOD website. However, based on this information, we can safely surmise that, by 2013, DARPA had decided the future of biodefense and vaccinology lay in turning human beings into “bioreactors” (their own language from the ADEPT program) and they would spare no (taxpayer) expense to realize their vision.

The Feeding Trough and the Revolving Door

Perhaps the most vividly descriptive explanation of how DARPA works goes to journalist Tim Shorrock when he wrote “DARPA is a feeding trough for the private sector”

Shorrock says close to 100 percent of DARPA’s budget goes to the private sector, and to back up his claim, quotes an interview transcript in which Dan Kaufman, former director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office boasts: “Well, so first of all, right; remember everything DARPA does is actually done all through contract, so we’re not a lab. So everything we do is—is money that we give out to the private sector or to universities or other public things, so all, all the work is done out there.”

The outsourcing revolution began with the end of the Cold War, when 377,000 federal jobs (including hundreds in intelligence and defense) were eliminated in the mid-1990s under Vice President Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative. At precisely the same time, President Bill Clinton— who wanted the agency to have their fingers in many more commercially profitable ventures and expand scope of operations beyond the defense sector—persuaded DARPA to drop the “D” for defense (it was restored in 1996.) This is still on their website.

Sensing a windfall business opportunity, companies began hiring retired intelligence and defense employees and contracting them back to the agencies they had once worked for. Business boomed in the aftermath of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed shortly thereafter, when intelligence and biodefense spending rained faster than former government employees now in the private sector could catch it.

This led to a consanguinity between intelligence and biodefense agencies so terrible that it often became hard to tell them apart. Former government employees were recruited for their first-hand knowledge of how to deftly navigate the maze of bureaucratic red tape and leverage connections to benefit their new corporate paymasters. Then, not infrequently, these individuals passed through the “revolving door” back into a government job, where, through inexplicable coincidence, they were at the forefront of passing laws, creating regulations and inking contracts benefitting their former private employers. This is also how most lobbyists are made.

This brings us back full circle to the post 9/11 landscape. One one hand you had the Department of Defense (through DARPA) doling out multi-million dollar contracts to private contractors (Read: pharmaceutical companies) to develop “countermeasures” against all sorts of bioterrorism threats, real and imagined, but mostly imagined. On the other, the Bush-Cheney administration’s landmark pandemic-biodefense directive called “Biodefense for the 21st Century” spurred the ascension of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from a relatively obscure public health agency to the centerpiece of national biodefense and made its director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, more powerful than most four star generals and consequently the most powerful bureaucrat in American history. Did you know that Donald Rumsfeld served as chairman of Pharma giant Gilead Sciences from January 1997 until being sworn in as George W Bush’s 21st Secretary of Defense in January 2001? (Now’s a good time to read Part one of this series, where this is covered in exquisite detail.)

Anatomy of the Pandemic State

The feeding trough and the revolving door isn’t a glitch or a bug. They are defining features, without which the entire thing would cease to exist. It’s like a Secret Santa that brings gifts all year long. It’s a lead blanket impenetrable to the x-rays of FOIA requests. The magic of the revolving door allows the people laying out the trough to also become those feeding from it. And the cherry on top of the public-private sundae is the plausible deniability that saves many a skin when things go horribly wrong, as they invariably do. For a masterclass in how this all ties together, see the last four years.

For a scholarly exposition on how the revolving door and regulatory capture works, read part 2 of the Anatomy of the Pandemic state series here:

Anatomy of the Pandemic State

So successful was the DARPA business model of outsourcing research to the private sector that it has now all but rendered itself obsolete. So much of today’s DARPA exists almost completely outside the halls of government, instead residing entirely within the the bowels of the private sector where it remains accountable to no one except its “stakeholders.” If this sounds hyperbolic, consider where the agency’s former top brass now work:

Regina Dugan, Dan Wattendorf’s former boss at DARPA and ex-Facebook , Google and Motorla, is now the CEO of Wellcome Leap, a non-profit organization founded by the Wellcome Trust.

Wellcome Leap is, in essence, a “private sector DARPA” that copies the organizational architecture of the agency that birthed it, but is unfettered from the odious performative transparency required of its government elder.

Dugan’s new boss is Wellcome Trust director, Jeremy Farrar, who boasts an impressive resume that includes top positions at The WHO, Institut Pasteur among many others. Farrar was one of the key signatories on the March 2020 Lancet Paper that declared "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." What fantastic coincidence that this same Lancet paper was ghost written by EcoHealth boss Peter Daszak who asked the two other DEFUSE scientists, Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang (performing gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses with Daszak’s NIH funding) to not sign it, so as to obscure each other’s close working relationship: “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice”
And calling Wellcome Leap a private sector DARPA is no exaggeration. Wellcome Leap’s R3 (RNA Readiness Response) Program has taken DARPA’s mRNA work to a level incomprehensible to the mind of the average citizen and (un)surprisingly has sparked the curiosity of not one reporter in corporate media.

Its main funder, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was conceived in 2015 and formally launched in 2017 at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. It was co-founded and co-funded with US$460 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The concept for CEPI was outlined in a July 2015 New England Journal of Medicine paper, titled "Establishing a Global Vaccine-Development Fund", co-authored by Wellcome Trust Director and Dugan’s boss, Jeremy Farrar, American physician Stanley A. Plotkin (co-discoverer of the Rubella vaccine), and Adel Mahmoud (developer of the HPV vaccine)

There’s hardly a piece of the pandemic pie that Bill Gates and the WEF don’t have their fingers in. Regular readers of my writing know that The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security conducted Event 201, an October 18, 2019 tabletop exercise in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, just one month before the first known case of COVID-19. The scenario, and again, I quote verbatim “..simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.” You can read all about it here:

Anatomy of the Pandemic State

But wait, there’s more!

The CEO of CEPI, Richard Hatchett, used to be the Director for Biodefense Policy on the United States Homeland Security Council and devised the concept of social distancing as part of the pandemic planning team under President George W. Bush.

Now, why is it that an organization whose publicly stated goal is to produce nearly 3 times the doses of mRNA vaccines than exist humans on this planet, in one month—an organization led by the former head of DARPA, funded by Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, the guy who insisted that COVID lab leak was crazy conspiracy theory and the guy who invented social distancing— not pique the curiosity of one elected member of congress nor a single investigative journalist worth their salt?

Could it be because CEPI was in bed with Fauci’s NIAID in 2020 and continues to partner with Pfizer and Moderna to this very day?

Dan Wattendorf, the DARPA program manager and the driving force behind seeding mRNA through Moderna and Pfizer now works at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Remember, this is the same Gates Foundation that co-founded CEPI, through which it funds his former boss Regina Dugan. Pure coincidence, I’m sure. As you can see in the synthetic food symposium invite below, Dan’s penchant for editing human genes has been put to good use through his boss Bill Gates’ mission to genetically modify your food supply.

Epilogue: The past predicts the future

Plotted as a function over time, the growing concentric circles of the military-industrial complex intersected and became imperceptibly intertwined with those of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex post 9/11 anthrax and COVID-19 respectively. Indeed, the entirety of the pandemic response—from shutting down society to producing vaccines that hijack the host immune system and the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization is based on DARPA’s bioweapon attack playbook. Regardless of how effective these countermeasures were, declaration of national emergencies most certainly accomplishes one thing with 100% efficacy: it suspends constitutional rights and allows the bureaucratic superstate near totalitarian control over the citizenry. The machine is now self-aware and can replicate itself.

But this wasn’t some haphazard accident of circumstance.

The sentiment at the uppermost echelons of power is that a national government (and therefore DARPA) is a largely antiquated notion, and all policy must be promulgated and implemented at a global scale. No, this is not some tin foil hat conspiracy.

Regina Dugan lays it all out in no uncertain terms in her 2022 article entitled Changing the Business of Breakthroughs:

“DARPA was designed specifically to serve US strategic interests, but we are convinced that its model can be retooled to increase the number and pace of breakthroughs needed to address global challenges.”

She explains how national governments and borders are constraining forces that must be supplanted by “philanthropy” (read: Bill Gates, WEF, Jeremy Farrar and company as global overlords) if we are to survive global warming and the next pandemic. She asserts an an urgency so dire that borders, elections, or the will of the people participate in them are stumbling roadblocks to their grand plan to save the planet through philanthropic fiat.

“And at a time when humanity is in urgent need of action, philanthropy can act quickly, without concern for election cycles or the lengthy process of realigning political will and global economic incentive structures”

She goes on to explain how the future is a global technocracy and they’re building it faster than you can comprehend.

The resulting Wellcome Leap Health Breakthrough Network is arguably the largest, most readily “activatable” network in the world, encompassing more than 650,000 scientists and engineers globally.

In my Iatrogenic Shudras essay, I propounded a definition of bureaucratic superstate thusly: “This conglomerate functions as a quasi “super state” that occupies the stratosphere above the constitutional protections of the nation-state and hence is beholden to no citizen but only to their collective self-interests.” It’s time to add supranational and global to the conglomerate part.

We’re rapidly inhabiting a world that no longer exists. One where individual and national sovereignty, autonomy and self-determinism are outmoded, vestigial even, and instead replaced by humans as units of consumption and vectors of disease who must be permitted to use only what is equitably theirs.

And the only way to survive the inevitable apocalypse, they tell us, is to cede our sovereignty to the philanthro-corporate cartel that gave us gain of function, mRNA vaccines, vaccine mandates, social distancing, lockdowns, synthetic meat, 15-minute cities, and of course this gem below:

In other words: If we want to live, we must put the people who created the problems in charge of fixing them. The arsonists are the firefighters now.

This piece turned out way longer than I’d originally intended because I was seized upon by the conviction that splitting it into two parts would adversely impact continuity and the reader’s ability to see the big picture in full context. So thank you for sticking around till the end. As always, your support is greatly appreciated. Be sure to read my other articles. Please and comment and be sure to subscribe for the next installment. I look forward to reading your comments.