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From Jeff Childers’ COVID & Coffee Blog, 11-22-24
Rounding out today’s jab news, I offer this week’s new DARPA Grant Proposal Solicitation, published to Twitter/X two days ago attracting remarkably little notice. First, in DARPA’s own words, the government’s high-tech skunkworks is seeking “innovative” proposals for “rapidly” counteracting “gene editing technologies.” They call it Project Riddle, or RIDDL for short:
The paltry 120 comments were, as you would expect, one hundred percent harshly critical. DARPA must have known that would happen; the situation’s urgency must require more public exposure. On its grant website page, DARPA stated that the countermeasures are urgently needed to “serve as a rapid response to the accidental or intentional misuse of gene editing technologies.”
DARPA can’t be worrying about mRNA technologies, can they, since we have been repeatedly reassured mRNA shots are “real” vaccines and definitely not genetic therapies. So.
Perhaps most troubling, DARPA rejected in advance anything anybody has already thought of. It is explicitly asking for out-of-the-box thinking. Think big! The request summary coldly said, “Research that generates incremental improvements to the existing state-of-the-art is specifically excluded.” Deeper in the specifications, DARPA made clear it doesn’t care what the answer looks like, the agency needs something really radical: “The RIDDL program is agnostic to the methods and approaches employed for discovery or design of novel inhibitors as long as they are potentially transformative. “
DARPA’s grant also explained it is being fast-tracked; approvals will follow the sleek OTP (Other Transaction for Prototype) purchasing process that we saw used during the covid emergency.
DARPA wants results within 30 months (2.5 years). They are in a hurry.
Even on its face, without any conspiracy thinking, the proposal makes a lot of sense. Bioweapons are weapons of mass destruction that any billionaire can access. If anything, DARPA is a decade behind the curve. In fact, the most ironic thing about this is DARPA’s late but welcome arrival to the party. But since they haven’t seemed concerned about stopping rogue gene editing till now, one wonders, what’s changed?
Jeff Childers is an attorney in Gainsville, FL. He won several breakthrough COVID policy cases involving unlawful employee discharges, mandated COVID shots and masks, where he has developed significant expertise. He has done the Coffee and COVID blog since 2020.
