He's wrong @Whitehat.

The DARPA proposal was solicited in a way; they have an active program to try to figure out what we do if someone unleashes a biological weapon during a time of war. It's a very difficult problem and what has kept people from doing in the past is that you're VERY likely to fuck yourself at least in part, and due to entropy you can't control what happens once it gets out.

Nonetheless IF someone is stupid enough to do it what do you do about it? Well, using mRNA you can very rapidly develop something that might produce an antigen and some protection. It's a HELL of a lot faster than ordinary recombinant protein work. The problem is that its dangerous as Hell because you're deliberately introducing the antigen-producing "thing" into the circulation in whole or part and thus deliberately bypassing all of the body's defenses against that sort of event. This isn't some new discovery, its known medical fact that has stood for well over a century!

So yeah, they had both the "gen" and "antigen" that were being worked on. Big shock eh? Not at all in a biowarfare context! But you're out of your fucking MIND to use that on a civilian population absent an active biological attack. First, you have no goddamned idea how dangerous it is but you DO know its dangerous. Second, in THIS specific case what they were TRYING to do was cut off zoonotic evolution. That's a cute idea but as DARPA pointed out it was dangerous as Hell, violated a stricture and as formatted in the proposal took too many liberties even outside of the formal "gain of function" ban to be acceptable as peacetime research for peaceful purposes. That's why they bounced it.

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