Rocky Mountain Lab developed a self-spreading Ebola vaccine
And a new interview on this crazy subject
On January 30, 2018, DARPA gathered the largest group of “mad scientists” at the Pentagon. The event — DARPA PREEMPT Proposer Day — brought together 30 academic teams to pitch wild ideas for controlling Mother Nature and her nasty viruses.
Jim Gimlett, the leader of this military biodefense project, aimed to “preempt” spillover events before they reached humans. He was a biodefense star within DARPA, traveling with a posse of assistants and managing a $40 million budget for five winning teams. His request for bids (or BAA) was an unclassified project posted on DARPA’s Twitter account in 2018. He wanted scalable delivery methods, also known as self-spreading vaccines.
In 2024, during testimony before the Congressional COVID committee, Gimlett confirmed that his interests included self-spreading vaccines and coronaviruses from China. He also testified that members of NIH and CDC were present on January 30, 2018.
Before the pandemic, his strategy focused on vaccinating wildlife—especially bats, which are a reservoir for pathogens like rabies, Marburg, Ebola, and coronaviruses such as MERS and SARS. From DARPA’s January 2018 request for proposals (BAA):
Despite biosurveillance efforts around the globe, new viral outbreaks continue to outpace preparedness efforts and show no signs of abating. During the first three quarters of 2017 outbreaks of avian influenza A (H7N9), Chikungunya, MERS coronavirus, Ebola, Seoul virus, Hepatitis E, Hepatitis A, Yellow Fever, Lassa, and Zika viruses were recorded.
Infectious agents are detected only after an outbreak—that is, after an animal pathogen has adapted to become capable of infecting humans. Consequently, the outbreak response is largely reactive and not initiated until after an epidemic has already begun. The PREEMPT program represents a radical departure from current practice, aiming to target viral biothreats within the animal reservoirs where they originate and preempt their entry into human populations before an outbreak occurs.
Gimlett famously rejected the expensive $14 million Defuse bid from Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric, who had proposed vaccinating Chinese bats against SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In January 2022, Fauci was accused of funding it, but he never saw “that” DARPA Defuse grant.
One of their early partners on the losing DARPA Defuse proposal was Vincent Munster from Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML); however, his name also appeared on four other PREEMPT bids that day.
RML was effectively quadruple-dipping. Munster was linked to proposals from Columbia University, EcoHealth Alliance, Montana State University, and UK researcher Michael Jarvis.
That last team — Jarvis’ group — pitched a self-spreading Ebola vaccine built on CMV or another herpesvirus. Among its collaborators was Munster’s boss at RML, Heinz Feldmann.
Above is Feldmann’s DARPA PREEMPT proposal slide, and below is the list of five winning teams. Munster eventually won with Montana State University, while his German boss, Heinz Feldmann, won with Jarvis at the University of Plymouth.
The second winning DARPA team at RML:
Self-spreading vaccines aren’t science fiction; Jarvis and Feldmann published their work in Nature many years ago.
Given its high-species specificity and ability to spread, CMV [herpes virus] may also be suited towards development as a ‘self-disseminating’ vaccine to target wildlife populations involved in EBOV zoonotic transmission (bats and great apes).
Where did the self-spreading vaccine idea come from?
Michael Jarvis is an international figure, born in California, raised in the UK, educated in the United States, and now a virologist specializing in herpes at the University of Plymouth. Similar to how Baric provides vaccine vectors to Munster, Jarvis would do the same for Feldmann.
Jarvis said he met Heinz Feldmann at RML around 2007. They combined their expertise (using CMV in Feldmann’s lab animals) and developed the idea of contagious vaccines over the past two decades.
50:00 for the CMV DARPA tech talk, and 1:17:00 for the question about shedding.
In 2008, while at OHSU in Oregon, Jarvis published research on immune evasion, a necessary evil of self-spreading vaccines, which is also present in COVID-19. Ironically, it was immune evasion (COVID’s asymptomatic spread) that led Major Murphy to the DARPA Defuse files, hidden in a top-secret Pentagon folder.
In 2011, Jarvis and Feldmann co-authored a study on a self-disseminating Ebola vaccine for monkeys in Africa. They described the future characteristics of COVID-19, including its ability to spread, its capacity to target geographically inaccessible wild animal populations (e.g., bat caves in China), the potential for reinfection (boosters), and vertical transmission via breast milk from mothers to their offspring.
Yes, COVID-infected moms immunized their newborns through “vertical transmission” of antibodies via breast milk. This man-made pandemic has turned all of us into RML lab rats.
Just before the pandemic, Feldmann’s BSL4 lab at RML housed Syrian golden hamsters and deer mice while working on the DARPA PREEMPT project with Jarvis.
In the presentation above, Jarvis stated that he visited RML in February 2020 as part of his annual trip to maintain his BSL4 training. The Brit stayed in Montana for over a year, publishing some incriminating data on Syrian hamsters.
“We determined the infectious dose to be only five infectious particles, making the Syrian hamster a highly susceptible model for SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
For reference, most animals outside the RML kingdom need 100,000 infectious particles. In self-spreading vaccines, the vaccine vector (e.g., herpes, Lassa, VSV, rabies, SARS) is less important than the animal transmission models (e.g., Rousettus bats, hamsters, deer mice, etc).
More from that RML FOIA
The Rise for Animals FOIA from 2017 is the gift that keeps on giving. The document even referenced the type of bat cages inside RML.
The bat “roost box” and “1 over 1” lab bat cages.
RML even had Select Agent approval for SARS-like genomes:
Rise for Animals also filed 2019 FOIA requests targeting Baric’s UNC and a huge Iowa deer research lab. By the way, Jarvis researched the development of a self-spreading deer vaccine.
The global populace is largely oblivious to the hazardous potential of self-spreading vaccines, whether due to accidental release or intentional administration.
The endeavour may be commendable, although it is fraught with significant risks.
Amazingly people have almost gotten over the SARS CoV 2 disaster, with most clueless about it being a self-spreading vaccine to begin with, albeit in horseshoe bats in China.
Self-replicating vaccines have the obvious potential to revert to lethality and are potentially an ELE: Extinction Level Event, similar to to the Meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Their development is nothing short of potentially catastrophic.