Loading ...DARPA’s Chilling Pre-COVID Blueprint: Predict, Manufacture, & Deploy Pandemics On Demand
A sprawling, multi-institution effort for “predicting” future pathogen characteristics, developing vaccines “in advance of need,” and building the very systems intended to validate those predictions.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent the early 2010s constructing what may have been the most ambitious predictive vaccine-development infrastructure ever attempted: a sprawling, multi-institution effort designed to determine the future characteristics of purported pathogens before they emerged and ultimately use those predictions to develop drugs and vaccines before they were needed.
The program, known as PROPHECY—short for Pathogen Defeat—was announced in 2010 under Broad Agency Announcement DARPA-BAA-10-93 and was managed by DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.
Yesterday, this website reported that DARPA’s PROPHECY program expanded into the laboratory of coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric years before the COVID-19 pandemic and nearly a decade before the DARPA/DEFUSE proposal documented all three defining structural features of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein prior to the outbreak.