US Geological Survey Wants To Spray Bat Vaccines
A U.S. government bat-vaccine program incorporated into DEFUSE’s plan for aerosol and automated biological delivery is still developing “hands-off, mass delivery” of government-produced vaccines by spraying wild bats, according to a recent U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) disclosure
The August 2026 disclosure extends a documented program from before COVID, through DEFUSE, through a USGS contract to “DEVELOP&TEST SPRAY DEVICES” during COVID, and into an active federal effort to move bat vaccination from individually treated animals toward entire populations.
DEFUSE is the project submitted the year before the COVID-19 pandemic to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that characterized a pandemic response to a future SARS-CoV-2-like outbreak.
USGS’s National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC) says it has already treated more than 7,000 bats in field trials across seven states since 2019 and, this year, shifted to what it calls a “population-focused approach.”
The agency says it is now attempting to vaccinate approximately 70 percent of bats in selected colonies, with more than 2,000 bats vaccinated at six sites in 2026 alone.
But USGS says the next step goes beyond capturing and treating individual bats.
The NWHC is:
“continuing to develop and test methods for hands-off, mass delivery of vaccine to bats.”
One method is explicit:
“topically spray the bats with vaccine”
The USGS announced in August 2026 that it is continuing to develop “hands-off, mass delivery” of bat vaccines, including spraying vaccine directly onto wild bats.
The bats would then ingest the sprayed material while grooming. The significance is difficult to separate from the history of the program itself.
As this website previously reported, the same USGS research network was tied directly to DEFUSE, the pre-COVID pandemic proposal that called for aerosolization, automated spraying, and other methods to distribute biological formulations among wild bats.
And the spray technology DEFUSE sought to exploit was described by project partner Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as potentially applicable to the “large area inoculation of animals/humans with bioengineered formulations.”
The mass-spray program did not disappear with DEFUSE. It continued through COVID. And USGS now says it is still developing mass vaccine delivery by spray.
The Spray Program Predated DEFUSE
The biological mass-delivery infrastructure came first. As this website previously reported, USGS and PARC were already collaborating before DEFUSE on technology intended to deliver vaccines and other treatments to free-ranging bats en masse.
A 2018 federally backed project called “Developing and Testing Delivery Methods for Vaccine Treatments to Reduce White-Nose Syndrome in Bats” totaled $829,466.
Its stated approach included “automatic spray technology” allegedly for applying liquid or gel to bats as they flew into or out of roosts.
The project ultimately reported that it had “developed and tested an automatic spray technology device” for delivering treatments to bats. The physical system therefore existed independently of DEFUSE.
So what?
DEFUSE did not need to invent a hypothetical biological mass-delivery system. A USGS-PARC program was already developing one.
DEFUSE Repurposed the Spray System
DEFUSE then pulled that capability directly into its proposed pandemic-prevention work.
The proposal assigned delivery work to Dr. Tonie Rocke at USGS’s National Wildlife Health Center and called for testing multiple ways of distributing biological formulations to bats.
Those included transdermal nanoparticles, sticky edible gels, aerosolization through sprayers in caves, automated sprays triggered at cave entrances, and sprays delivered by remotely controlled drones.
The most successful approaches were proposed for testing on wild bats at three cave sites in Yunnan Province, China.
DEFUSE’s proposed deliverables included a “Tested and validated delivery mechanism for bat cave usage including vaccines in other bat host-pathogen systems” and a method for reducing biological shedding in wild bat populations.
PARC’s associated PREEMPT material described the technological capability in even broader terms. PARC said it had developed spray technology for “large area and high throughput aerosol delivery” capable of handling “bioactive formulations.”
Its stated potential application included “large area inoculation of animals/humans with bioengineered formulations” and PARC proposed developing a “scalable aerosol delivery method for wide-scale inoculation.”
So what?
The DEFUSE connection is not merely that the same researchers happened to study bats. DEFUSE proposed using the existing USGS/PARC biological-delivery capability to distribute biological formulations through aerosolization, automated spraying, and other mass-delivery methods.
PARC itself identified “animals/humans” as a potential application of the underlying technology.
PARC’s PREEMPT project overview states that its spray technology could aerosolize “bioactive formulations” and had potential application in the “large area inoculation of animals/humans with bioengineered formulations,” while proposing a “scalable aerosol delivery method for wide-scale inoculation.”
The Vaccine Was Already Authorized for Spraying
There was another side to the program, the payload.
As this website reported last week, a July 2019 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) environmental assessment authorized field testing of a USGS experimental product identified as:
“Pseudogymnoascus destructans Vaccine, Live Raccoon Poxvirus Vector (RCN-CAL/SP)”.
USDA said vaccine-laden material could be applied “by hand or by spraying” directly onto bats or bat houses. The material was designed to be consumed through self- or mutual grooming.
The same assessment acknowledged a human-exposure pathway.
It stated that human exposure to vaccine-laden material on bats or objects was considered unlikely, required personnel distributing the vaccine to use gloves and N-95 respirators, and acknowledged that the experimental vaccine’s safety in humans had not been fully evaluated and was therefore “unknown.”
DEFUSE separately proposed raccoon poxvirus vectors for delivering material to bats and paired that concept with grooming-mediated distribution and the PARC aerosol-delivery system.
So what?
Before COVID, the government had both sides of the system:
- a biological payload authorized for spraying and a program developing automatic mass-spray delivery.
DEFUSE brought those biological-delivery concepts into the same proposed intervention architecture.
The Spray Work Continued During COVID
DEFUSE was not the end of the trail. On May 13, 2020, USGS awarded PARC $198,940 under federal purchase order 140G0220P0134.
The government’s description consisted of four words: “DEVELOP&TEST SPRAY DEVICES”. The contract remained active through December 31, 2021. During the same period, USGS was conducting vaccine field studies.
An October 2021 NWHC update states that additional laboratory and field studies were conducted to optimize treatment medium for application: “by hand, with a spray device” and to determine the vaccine dose required for topical application.
The completed project subsequently reported development and testing of the automatic spray device, development of vaccine-compatible delivery medium, and a field pilot combining treatment-delivery medium with vaccines.
As our previous investigation documented, the public records establish that the infrastructure existed and that development continued through COVID. What they did not provide was a complete accounting of what PARC put through those devices, where every device was operated, and who or what encountered their output.
So what?
The program was not abandoned after DEFUSE. USGS continued paying the DEFUSE-linked spray developer to develop and test spray devices during COVID while USGS simultaneously conducted vaccine research involving material intended for spray-device application.
Now USGS Wants ‘Hands-Off, Mass Delivery’
The new disclosure closes another part of the chronology. On August 23, 2026, USGS announced that its approach had changed. Before this year, the agency says its work primarily compared individually vaccinated bats against placebo-treated bats.
In 2026 “scientists moved to a population-focused approach.” USGS is now attempting to vaccinate approximately 70% of bats in selected maternity colonies. At six vaccination sites, more than 2,000 bats were treated this year, including nearly 900 in a single colony.
USGS says it plans to add more colonies and continue treating bats for several years. Meanwhile, NWHC remains the sole producer of what USGS calls this “specialized vaccine,” and the agency says it is adopting more automated methods to increase production.
Then comes the delivery objective: “hands-off, mass delivery of vaccine to bats.”
And the proposed mechanism: “topically spray the bats with vaccine” so they ingest the material while grooming.
USGS’s 2025–2029 science strategy separately lists developing and testing bat-vaccine delivery methods as an active current effort.
This is therefore not merely the historical description of a terminated research project. Mass vaccine delivery remains an active federal research objective.
So what?
The language has changed remarkably little from the physical objective documented before COVID:
- produce the biological material, distribute it without individually administering it to every animal, and scale the system from individual treatment toward population-level intervention.
The DEFUSE Line Never Disappeared
The chronology now requires very few premises.
- Before DEFUSE, USGS and PARC were developing automatic spray technology for mass delivery of vaccines and other treatments to free-ranging bats.
- DEFUSE proposed using that delivery capability for aerosolization and automated spraying of biological formulations, while PARC described potential application of its technology to large-area inoculation of “animals/humans.”
- Before COVID, USDA authorized field testing of a raccoon-poxvirus-vector bat vaccine that could be delivered “by spraying,” while acknowledging possible human contact and unknown human safety.
- During COVID, USGS paid PARC to “DEVELOP&TEST SPRAY DEVICES,” while USGS conducted laboratory and field studies involving material intended for vaccine application with a spray device.
And now, in 2026, the same USGS National Wildlife Health Center says it has moved toward population-level vaccination and is continuing to develop “hands-off, mass delivery” including spraying vaccine onto bats.
That is continuity. The unresolved question isn’t whether this biological mass-delivery program existed. The government’s own records establish that it did. The question is how far it has gone.
The Bottom Line
The federal biological mass-spray program tied to DEFUSE did not end with the rejected proposal or with COVID. USGS and PARC were developing automatic mass delivery before DEFUSE.
DEFUSE proposed repurposing the capability for aerosol and automated delivery of biological formulations, while PARC identified potential application to large-area inoculation of “animals/humans.”
USDA separately authorized spraying a raccoon-poxvirus-vector bat vaccine before COVID. USGS then paid PARC to “DEVELOP&TEST SPRAY DEVICES” during COVID while conducting vaccine studies involving spray-device application.
Now USGS says it has shifted toward population-level vaccination and is still developing “hands-off, mass delivery” by spraying government-produced vaccine onto wild bats.
- The physical system is documented.
- The continuity is documented.
- The mass-delivery objective is documented.
What remains undisclosed in the public records reviewed for this series is the complete operational history.
- What exactly has been put through the spray devices?
- Where and when were the devices field-operated?
- Which formulations were actually sprayed, rather than merely approved or prepared for spray application?
- How closely does today’s “hands-off, mass delivery” system descend from the automatic spray technology developed with PARC?
- What became of PARC’s stated potential application for “large area inoculation of animals/humans with bioengineered formulations”?
- And where biological material can move beyond individually handled animals into an environment shared with people, who decides who may be exposed, and where is their informed consent?
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