Defense Department Sued For Records On COVID Gain-Of-Function Research

A top legal watchdog is going to court to uncover if and how the federal government may have weaponized viruses prior to the global outbreak of COVID-19 from a Communist Chinese lab that received U.S. taxpayer funds.

Judicial Watch announced in a statement that it “filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense for records on funding proposals submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office prior to the Covid-19 outbreak (Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Defense (No. 1:26-cv-00433)).”

“Gain-of-function proposals likely were active in the Defense Department’s pipeline prior to the pandemic,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Our lawsuit intends to find out what these proposals entailed.”

Judicial Watch reports it “filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a component of the Defense (War) Department, failed to respond to a November 7, 2025, FOIA request for:”

All biodefense and gain-of-function (GoF) funding proposals submitted to the DARPA Biological Technologies Office (BTO) prior to December 2019.

“The Biological Technologies Office was launched in 2014 with DARPA, claiming the office’s programs ‘push the leading edge of science’ and ‘will sometimes be society’s first encounter with the ethical, legal, or social dilemmas that can be raised by new biological technologies.’”

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in April 2024 announced that it sent letters to several agencies requesting:

[I]nformation on their knowledge and involvement regarding the DEFUSE project, a 2018 grant proposal led by EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The DEFUSE project was submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the PREventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) program and proposed to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus to create a novel chimeric virus that would have been shockingly similar to the COVID-19 virus.

“[A]t least 15 federal agencies knew from the beginning of the pandemic that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were seeking federal funding in 2018 to create a virus genetically very similar if not identical to COVID-19,” wrote Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), then the ranking member of the committee.

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