Engineering Contagion: "Corona-Thrax" and The Darkest Winter

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Since the name of the Corona-thrax researcher is redacted, there is no way of knowing if he or she is affiliated with the university or a separate institution, corporation, or government agency. Regardless of who is conducting this experiment, however, it is possible to examine the history and motivations of the man who ultimately signed off on itthe Center for Vaccine Research's director, Paul Duprex.

Paul Duprex: DARPA-Funded Researcher and Gain-of-Function Enthusiast

Paul Duprex is a former chief scientist for Johnson & Johnson whose subsequent foray into academia was largely funded with research grants from the NIH and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Much of Duprex's research has focused on recombinant (i. e., genetically engineered) viruses or viral evolution.

In terms of his research funded by DARPA, Duprex was most closely associated with DARPA's "Prophecy" program, the creation of which was overseen by Michael Callahan. Callahan's suspect past and his ties to the origin of the current Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan, China, were the subject of a recent Unlimited Hangout article by Raul Diego.

In that article, Diego notes that the now-defunct Prophecy program had "sought to 'transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive' through algorithmic programming techniques" and that the program further "proposed that 'viral mutations and outbreaks' could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development."

By all indications, Prophecy was DARPA's first major foray into "predictive" AI-powered health care, which has expanded considerably in the years since. It also involved a component, which Duprex was particularly involved in advancing, whereby the "predictive" viral evolutions algorithms would be "validated and tested . . . by using multiple selective pressures on at least three closely related virus strains in an experimental setting."

Such experiments, like this study by Duprex, involved the genetic engineering of three viral pathogen strains and then seeing which would become most transmissible and virulent in an animal host. Such studies are often referred to as gain-of-function (GOF) research and are incredibly controversial given that they often create pathogens that are more virulent and/or transmissible than they otherwise would be. It is also worth noting that UPMC, before Duprex joined the center, had also received millions in funding from DARPA's Prophecy program "to develop in vitro and computational models for predicting viral evolution under selection pressure from multiple evolutionary stressors."

Duprex has also been involved in conducting research for DARPA's current INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, a successor to Prophecy that "aims to harness viral evolution to create a novel, adaptive form of medical countermeasuretherapeutic interfering particles (TIPs)that outcompetes viruses in the body to prevent or treat infection." TIPs are genetically engineered viruses with defective genomes that theoretically compete with real viruses for viral components in the human body but "evolve with" the viruses they are meant to protect the body against and are "susceptible to mutation over time."

The goal of the INTERCEPT program is to use TIPs as "therapeutics" and have them injected into the human body to "preemptively" protect against the virus from which a particular TIP was developed. It is worth noting that, while DARPA frames much of its gene-editing research (including its "genetic extinction" technology research) as being aimed at promoting either human or environmental health, it has also openly admitted that these same technologies are of interest to DARPA for their ability to "subvert" the genes of human adversaries of the US military via "genetic weapons."

Duprex led an INTERCEPT study published in February of this year in which he and his coauthors explored how to create a synthetic TIP of the Nipah virus, a deadly virus with a fatality rate of over 70 percent. In that study, they used both wild and genetically engineered strains of Nipah virus. Notably, the Clade X pandemic simulation, which will be discussed in detail in the next installment of this series, involved a genetically engineered combination of the Nipah virus and a parainfluenza disease.

Clade X took place in 2018 and was led by much of the same team that was responsible for the 2001 Dark Winter bioterrorism simulation, including former FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. Another notable participant at Clade X was Julie Gerberding, former CDC director and current executive vice president at Merck, which has close ties to UPMC as well as the Center for Biosecurity's failed "21st Century Biodefense" project.

A few months after publishing the study funded by DARPA's INTERCEPT program, Duprex coauthored another study on the use of synthetic "nanobodies" (i. e., bioengineered synthetic nanoparticles acting as antibodies) that was published in August. This effort mirrors other DARPA "health-focused" projects. That study was funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the NIH, and Israel's Ministry of Science and Technology.

In addition to his ties to DARPA programs involving the genetic engineering of viral pathogens, Duprex is a leading advocate for controversial gain-of-function research and was appointed to direct UPMC's Center for Vaccine Research less than three months after the federal moratorium on GOF research ended.

In October 2014, five days after that moratorium was first imposed, Duprex gave a talk to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity entitled "Gain-of-Function Studies: Their History, Their Utility, and What They Can Tell Us." In the talk, he asserted that "cross-species infection studies have already helped to improve surveillance in the field, have shed new light on basic influenza virus biology, and could assist in growing vaccine viruses better" and argues against the recently imposed moratorium.

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