An Insecure Lab and Millions of Deaths Worldwide

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the “risky” research was conducted with US funding. AFP via Getty Images

 

"The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world's foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located."

"Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan Institute's Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted."

"Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the [Wuhan] market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory." 

"Investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if COVID-19 emerged from the wildlife trade."

"Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan Institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them."

"Advocates and funders of the Institute's research, including Dr. Fauci, should co-operate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur."

"The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics."

Alina Chan, molecular biologist specializing in gene therapy and cell engineering, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

"Yes, China has the right to set their own policy."

"You believe this was appropriate containment if you want, but don't expect me to believe it."

"Moreover, don't insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS [that it would be sufficiently 'safe' with the work at Wuhan being undertaken by BSL-2 standards]."

U.S. Coronavirus expert Ralph Baric

Dr. Alina Chan concluded in her in-depth analysis of COVID-19’s origin that the deadly virus “most likely” escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. Future Publishing via Getty Images

Dr. Chan's guest essay appeared in the The New York Times' Sunday edition, with the title Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, at the very time that the United States' COVID-period chief epidemiologist is testifying before a Congressional Committee delving into the American response to the global pandemic that took countless lives before it settled in as a permanent, less threatening virus. The emergence of SARS-2 remains a mystery even while among a minority of scientists the belief is that COVID spread in humans contracted from infected animals.

 

Dr. Chan identifies the world's foremost virus research lab in Wuhan, China as the source of the pandemic, pointing out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been researching SARS-like viruses for at least a decade. The lead investigator at the Wuhan lab was Dr. Shi Zhengli, famous for her work with bats as carriers of viruses. Dr. Chan cites Dr. Shi's public speculation whether the outbreak might have emanated from her lab, when the pandemic began.

 

The Wuhan Institute had been collaborating with American partners the year before the outbreak, on creating viruses with defining features like SARS-CoV-2 that produced the COVID-19 virus.  A grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, aiming to create a SARS-like virus with a unique feature called a furin cleavage site enhancing infectiousness in humans was revealed in 2018. That is the very feature that SARS-CoV-2 has, with genetic data suggesting the feature was gained just prior to the pandemic.

What has long been known is that the Wuhan lab though high-security was not capable of containing an airborne virus infectious to the degree of the COVID-19 virus emanating from SARS-CoV-2. There are four recognized biosafety levels for labs working with live viruses; BSL 1 represents the lowest level of protection while BSL-4 is the most stringent. A scientist working at a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan became infected with the COVID virus two years into the pandemic. It seems that as a cost-saving measure the Wuhan lab was permitted to operate at a BSL-02 level.

The claim that the COVID-19 virus arose from contact with an infected animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is rejected by Dr. Chain who stated the claim "is not supported by strong evidence, in part because Chinese investigators assumed initially the market to be the source, so they overlooked potential evidence that would dispute the theory." Moreover, Chinese authorities blocked reporting of early cases that had no link to the market and destroyed some early patient samples.

The report debunks the theory involving the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, pictured here, AP

 

"I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to either possibility [the theory that SARS-2 resulted from laboratory experiments; conversely that the COVID pandemic resulted from the coronavirus naturally leaping from infected animals to humans], and that if definitive evidence becomes available to validate or refute either theory, I will readily accept it."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, American infectious disease official during the COVID pandemic

Dr. Fauci grilled by lawmakers on origins of COVID   The New York Times

 

Science Pulling Together to Avoid Exposing China's Wuhan Responsibility

"These emails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons." 

Viscount Ridley, co-author, Viral: the search for the origin of COVID

"He [Prof.Mike Farzan, Scripps Research] is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time [to] explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely."

"I think this becomes a question of how do  you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the laboratory in Wuhan, how much could be in nature -- accidental release or natural event?"

"I am 70:30 or 60:40."

Jeremy Farrar, director, Wellcome Trust

"[The furin cleavage site] strikes me as unusual."

"I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan."

Professor Andrew Rambaut, University of Edinburgh

"Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular."

Dr.Ron Fouchier, U.S. biosecurity expert

"I share  your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony."

Dr.Francis Collins, U.S. National Institutes of Health

 

Wuhan Institute of Virology: Associated Press

Harmony, now that's a word describing a social condition that Beijing is particularly fond of. Harmony means that suspicions are set aside, along with accusations. And that includes an entire range of human social constructs along with state interventions and initiatives, including the co-opting of sovereign nations into a giant grip as China expands its own sovereignty in control and command. It includes penalties and punishment for doubting Beijing's right to exercise its authority within its sovereign ambit so mass re-education and slave labour is China's internal business and no other countries'.

And harmony is best achieved by Beijing's word being taken for what it is not; trustworthy. The pathogen that has proven so deadly to so many millions around the globe is a naturally evolving phenomenon, according to Beijing, a zoonotic pathogen that has roiled the world body like no other such has before it, on a scale to alter human social interaction, take down the world economic order, and re-order the global community on a scale previously unimagined.

Whether or not it is even proven that the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 and ultimately all its mutated nuances plaguing the world was a laboratory escapee from a highly secure lab that was not sufficiently secure is one thing; China's response to the original virus in containment within China with little concern for its escape out of China in maintaining open national borders and accusing other countries of racism for closing theirs, stands as a special example of abandonment of responsibility.

And the world's leading scientists in the field of deadly pathogens in the interests of an open scientific community of trust and cooperation where scientists from all over the world can freely exchange between themselves in communicating their latest discoveries is quite wonderful in theory, but in practise may leave something to be desired; allowing the world's leading human-rights suppressor and oppressor to go on denying any role in the mass destruction the world faces.

Elite British and American scientists appear to have more or less agreed that COVID-19 likely was an accidental release from a secure laboratory's explorations in virus attributes and combinations; science is nothing if not curious and unleashing potentially destructive organisms in the conceited belief they are more than capable of restraining the results to a closed laboratory setting does on occasion result in breakaway accidents; unfortunate occurrences at the mild end, catastrophic in this particular instance.

Information has now come to light of the discussions that took place between scientists of great renown and their opinion of the Wuhan virus that speedily took over the world. "A likely explanation", said an email from Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust focused on health research based in London being that COVID had evolved rapidly from a SARS-type virus within human tissue in a low-security laboratory. This was a communication received by Dr.Anthony Fauci and Dr.Francis Collins of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, that such evolution may have "accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans".

A teleconference between a dozen scientists on February 1, 2020 led to a series of emails, Dr.Farrar's one of them, some refuting the theory of an escaped virus, urging caution, and others more convinced of the likelihood of a virus escape. Members of the U.S. House Oversight committee granted access to the documents led to their becoming publicly available. The emails are indication that scientists were actively attempting to close the debate into a laboratory leak theory.

Of particular concern was a part of COVID-19 called the furin cleavage site, representing a section of the spike protein aiding the virus entry into human cells, creating its huge infectiousness capacity. Scientific institutions in possession of these emails repeatedly spurned outside efforts to publish their content. The University of Edinburgh as an example refused a Freedom of Information request to scrutinize Dr.Rambaut's emails that claimed "disclosure would be likely to endanger the physical or mental health and safety of individuals".

Ilustracija/AFP

Incriminating or Coincidental?

"We have come to the conclusion that based on the data analyzed it suggest the virus was highly likely to be spreading virulently in Wuhan, China, as early as the summer of 2019 and definitely by the autumn." 

"We assess with high confidence that the pandemic began much earlier than China informed the WHO about COVID-19."

Internet 2.0, cybersecurity consultancy

Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli is seen here inside the laboratory in Wuhan   Getty Images

 

Another peg in the holes steadily being filled on various enquiries over the full story of the SARS-CoV-2 virus's origins. An intelligence analysis of the rate of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests  being acquired in China pre-dating the time when the world was being informed of an emerging and fast-spreading new coronavirus points a crooked finger of damage-control detection squarely at the Chinese Communist Party having disguised a mysterious virus outbreak, failing to adequately alert the world to the danger that lurked as the virus continued to spread, refusing to be contained.

In Wuhan as early as the summer of 2019 the unidentified novel cornavirus was already spreading, earlier than given notice of by China, according to PCR testing equipment intelligence analysis of spending. "Notable significant and abnormal" purchases of PCR laboratory equipment was tracked to the second half of 2019, information that has been the subject of a newly-published report where analysts had studied PCR procurement contacts in Hubei province's capital of Wuhan.

 

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which some people allege was the source of a SARS-CoV-2 leak.    Credit: Thomas Peter/Reuters/Alamy

Spending, found the analysis, had just about doubled from that of the previous year. The data and the findings by Internet 2.0, a cybersecurity consultancy specializing in studying data out of China, was shared with U.S. government officials as growing speculation circulates of the coronavirus originating in a laboratory in Wuhan and somehow escaping its environs. An episode that has since created a global calamity of unprecedented proportions.

According to the study report, purchases of PCR equipment representing standard protective devices used in laboratories amplifying small amounts of DNA critical in tracking COVID-19, increased from $6.9 million in 2018 -- $5.7 million in 2017 -- to $13.4 million in 2019 in Hubei Province. The number of PCR contracts also increased from 89 in 2018 to 135 the following year, when the outbreak took place.

The spending increase accounted for contracts at four main institutions: the Chinese Centre for Disease Control in Hubei province, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Wuhan University of Science and Technology, and a military hospital based in Wuhan. These institutes' roles in disease control and prevention makes these circumstances all the more notable. The "significant increase in spending" was noticed to have taken place, according to the report, from the summer of 2019.

The prevailing and growing theory that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology appears to be substantiated by contracts the investigators discovered, including one of $60,000 in early November. Two purchases totalling $350,000 of pathogen detection equipment made by the Wuhan CDC in September, used for the Military World Games held a month later in the city also came under study given that athletes who attended fell ill with symptoms aligned with COVID, after returning from the Games.

American military athletes among them. Which gave China the opportunity to spread their version of events, that the U.S. military brought COVID with them while they were in China, and are ultimately responsible for the global pandemic that has wracked the world with medical emergencies, millions of untimely deaths, vast social disruption and economic meltdowns. China appears to be coping extraordinarily well. It's had a head-start in control, and it, after all, produces most of the world's PPE equipment...

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was linked to early cases of the new coronavirus   Gerty Images

Wuhan Institute of Virology Hypothesis 'Politicized'

"Peter Daszak is in many ways typical of the international world of disease prevention. As the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak has spent millions of dollars of grant money from the National Institutes of Health in recent years. His organization's special focus is on preventing the outbreak of emerging diseases, such as coronaviruses. He was deeply involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) because his organization had funded bat coronavirus research that lab was doing when the COVID-19 outbreak occurred in late 2019."

"Daszak has been a good friend to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese Communist government that runs it for years. His role in trying to discredit the lab leak theory has come under scrutiny amid a pronounced shift in media attention towards the theory and amid revelations about Daszak's own ties to the Institute."

"Early in the pandemic, Daszak was behind the creation of an open letter, signed by several scientists, which squarely rejected the suggestion that a lab accident at the WIV may have released the virus into the city of Wuhan. Daszak did not disclose his conflict of interest when signing the letter, which would receive significant coverage in news reports purporting to debunk the lab leak theory."

Peter Schweizer, President, Governmental Accountability Institute, U.S.

Shi Zhengli ('Batwoman' center) and Peter Daszak (far right). (Emerging Viruses Group)

"We will not accept such an origins-tracing plan as it in some aspects, disregards common sense and defies science."

"We hope the WHO would seriously review the considerations and suggestions made by Chinese experts and truly treat the origin tracing of the COVID-19 virus as a scientific matter, and get rid of political interference." 

"[China has always supported] scientific virus tracing [and wants to see the study extended to other countries and regions]. However, we are opposed to politicizing the tracing work."

Zeng Yixin, vice minister, National Health Commission, China

Zeng Yixin, vice minister of the National Health Commission, speaks at a news conference at the State Council Information Office, in Beijing, on July 22   Mark Schiefelbein, The Associated Press

"Without Chinese cooperation, WHO's hands are tied, international hands are tied, and our ability to identify the origins of the virus will be much reduced."

Mara Pillinger, senior associate, global health policy and governance, O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown

"We believe a lab leak is extremely unlikely and it is not necessary to invest more energy and efforts in this regard."

"[More animal studies should be conducted particularly in countries with bat populations]."

"In the next step, I think animal tracing should still be the priority direction. It is the most valuable field for our efforts."

Liang Wannian, Chinese team leader, WHO joint expert team

The World Health Organization's first investigative team arriving in China in February of this year was significantly hampered by the guidance and continual presence of Chinese authorities vetting their every move, informing them what they could and could not do, offering them limited opportunity to visit areas of concern in their investigation of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the global pandemic. Vital data that would have afforded the investigative team important information in their study was held back, so the conclusion reached was fairly predictable; no idea really how, where and why COVID emerged.

Unlikely, however, that it was the result of a laboratory accident where a pathogen under study at the Wuhan Institute of Virology somehow escaped to wreak havoc first in Wuhan then across the great wide world. On the team was a virology expert with direct ties to the Wuhan laboratory, and his influence certainly went far in convincing the other members of the WHO team that a laboratory 'escape' could not possibly have occurred.

Among the world's leading virology scientists much criticism of the report erupted, and by extension criticism of of the World Health Organization itself, leading its head, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to speculate that there might be something to the lab escape theory after all, and that another, more extensive, in-depth scrutiny might be in order. He did, in fact, order such a second investigation, expressing the hope that Beijing would be fully co-operative and open to the venture.

But it was not to be. Mr.Zeng, China's vice minister of its National Health Commission together with Chinese experts urged the WHO, even as they poured cold water on any cooperation on China's part with a second investgation as to the origins of COVID, recommended an expansion of origin-tracing beyond China to encompass other countries. It has always been China's contention that the original infection was sourced elsewhere than China. 

Other countries, suggested Liang Wannian, the Chinese team leader on the joint expert team of the WHO, had another brilliant idea, that further animal studies be undertaken in countries with their own bat populations so that if evidence was unearthed incriminating other countries they needed to explore in depth whether any of them could have experienced a laboratory leak leading to the global pandemic. Back to square zero with Beijing.

Because Beijing claims that the issue has been 'politicized', the WHO's intention to study the origins of the coronavirus where it began, investigating audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, with the express aid of Chinese authorities simply isn't going to occur. The WHO's plan of action having listed the hypothesis of a violation of laboratory protocols in China was a direct assault on the scientific integrity of Chinese science, and therefore 'political'.

 

Strange that, since in 2010, Shi Zhengli director of the Centre of Emerging Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a bat expert, published a paper describing a scenario where infected rodents led to a deadly virus leaked from a Chinese lab. The paper's title was: "Hantavirus outbreak associated with laboratory rats in Yunnan, China," of an outbreak of hantavirus hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome at a college in Kunming as the result of a lab leak in 2003.

 

And Peter Daszak, renowned zoologist and molecular biologist in 2015 co-authored an article in the journal Nature titled, "Spillover and pandemic properties of zoonotic viruses with high host plasticity," where he wrote that zoonotic virus spillover from wildlife was "most frequent" in a number of settings and occupations, including "laboratory workers." He also warned that laboratories are one of the most dangerous settings for major spillover events. 

Peter Daszak (R), Thea Fischer (L) and other members of the World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the Covid-19 coronavirus, arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan  on February 3, 2021.  HECTOR RETAMAL | AFP | Getty Images

Settling Suspicions Once And For All...

"It's not that it was boring, but it was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab. What people are saying is just not how it is."

"If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick -- and I wasn't."

"There was no chatter. Scientists are gossipy and excited. There was nothing strange from my point of view going on at that point that would make you think something is going on here."

"[I] could foresee how things could maybe happen. I'm not naive enough to say I absolutely write this off."

Danielle Anderson, Australian scientist, expert in bat-borne viruses

Anderson in Wuhan in 2019.   Source: Danielle Anderson

The 42-yar-old Australian scientist has had ample experience working out of laboratories all over the world. Her reputation as an expert virologist made her, as a scientist, welcome to work at any international laboratory as an adjunct to any work in her field being studied. And she just happens to be the sole foreign scientist to ever have been privileged to undertake research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at their BSL-4 Lab, a highly secure laboratory, the first in China to come equipped to handle the deadliest pathogens in the world.

She was there until November 2019, when the strange new pneumonia-like virus was just beginning to emerge in the city of 15-million people. By the most peculiar of circumstances the coronavirus emerged in the very same city where scientists in highly protective gear, were studying the very family of viruses that caused a century-pandemic that has killed millions of people around the world. A fierce controversy has arisen, at first unsupported by scientists studying the virus but gaining adherents the more Beijing denies any such possibility.

The speculation persists, however, that the virus could have escaped from the lab, with scenarios as simple as an infected staffer or a contaminated object leaving the lab for the outside world. That Beijing chose to obscure the situation while denying that any suspicion could fall on it and at the same time refusing to permit investigators access to critical documents and the laboratory itself, suspicion simply grew.

 

Thomas Peter/Reuters

When Dr.Anderson received the invitation to work out of the Wuhan Virology Laboratory she was enormously pleased that she would be working alongside a friend and colleague, Shi Zhengli,, the lab's director. The scientific probe and anxiety to find the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 has a purpose; to inform and enable scientists to fully understand how best to be prepared for future such outbreaks of new and perhaps even deadlier pathogens. China's lack of transparency on the matter does itself no favours and certainly does no favour for science and the scientific community.

The laboratory's work remains shrouded in controversy and mystery with the U.S. administration questioning the lab's safety record, alleging its scientists may have been involved in 'gain of function' research, manipulating viruses in such a manner that could produce more dangerous outcomes. Dr.Anderson began her collaboration in 2015 with the Wuhan researchers as scientific director of the biosafety lab at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.

 

Shi Zhengli in the BSL-4 lab at the Wuhan Institute in 2017. Source: Feature China/Barcroft Media/Getty Images

Dr.Anderson describes strict protocols to contain the studied pathogens in the maximum biocontainment lab, a concrete, bunker-type building holding the highest biosafety designation requiring air, water and waste be filtered and sterilized prior to leaving the facility. To be certified to work independently in the lab, researchers must undergo 45 hours of specialized training. Scientists must demonstrate their knowledge of containment procedures and competency in the use of air-pressured suits: "It's very, very extensive", Anderson said of the induction process.

Now, a growing number of virologists and other related scientists have adopted the belief that something had gone seriously amiss at the institute specializing in virology, viral pathology and virus technology of twenty biological and biomedical research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Despite that from within the SARS-CoV2 genome, no clear evidence exists it had been artificially manipulated, suspicion of the origins of the virus grows.

Beijing prevaricated for a year over permitting investigators from the World Health Organization to gain access to critical sites such as the Wuhan live market where the virus was first presumed to have emerged, and the laboratory itself, and its personnel. Finally, when the WHO investigation report was issued -- a report vetted by Chinese researchers, and written in collaboration with those researchers, guided by Chinese authorities -- it made little of the possibility of a lab leak but stated the virus had likely spread with a bat vector contaminating another animal that passed it to humans.

It was when the Wall Street Journal made the claim that three researchers from the lab had been hospitalized in November 2019 with flu-like symptoms, that attention was drawn back to the lab-escape theory. No one she knew, said Dr.Anderson, was ill toward the end of 2019 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. An earlier coronavirus that had emerged from a lab in 2002 in Asia, killed over 700 people as it made its way out of secure facilities on a handful of occasions, she acknowledged. But the names of such employees as were claimed to have been hospitalized have not been released, nor proof of the contention.

As for knowing everything that was taking place in the great sprawling complex, that just didn't happen. There was published research from the lab involving the testing of viral components for their ability to infect human cells, but Dr.Anderson is convinced that no virus was intentionally created to infect people and then deliberately released; yet another disturbing theory about the origins of the pandemic. She does agree, in the face of the controversy, that a full investigation  is required to finally discover the origin of the virus even as she is appalled by charges against China by some media along with uninformed attacks on the scientists working there.

The BSL-4 lab, center, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in May 2020.

Photographer: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

The Riddle Within a Mystery Encapsulated in a Puzzle

"If her contract permitted it, that would be a scandal. If the contract didn't permit and they ignored the contract, that would be a scandal."

"If the contract didn't even turn its attention to this, that would be a scandal, too."

Mark Warner, trade lawyer, former legal director, Ontario Research and Innovation Ministry

"We cannot comment on this matter."

"The National Microbiology Laboratory has policies and processes that allow for scientific collaboration and these are reviewed periodically as part of the Science Excellence initiative to adapt them as needed."

Mark Johnson, spokesman, Public Health Agency of Canada

Xiangguo Qiu's ouster from the National Microbiology Laboratory remains cloaked in mystery and has been the subject of ongoing debate in Parliament. Photo by MCpl Vincent Carbonneau, Rideau Hall/File

The plot sickens as it thickens. That the Government of Canada is shielding documents from the Parliament of Canada that would shed light on the strange and rather awkward dismissal of two Chinese scientists long employed by Canada's topmost secret biology laboratory, biologists of distinction who had links both with the Wuhan Virology Institute and scientists working directly for the CCP's People's Liberation Army laboratories, defies logic. 

The dismissal of scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng in January following their having been escorted out of Winnipeg's National Microbiology Laboratory a year and a half earlier along with Chinese biology students that Dr. Qiu had brought into the NML, is an event of great interest to parliamentarians and to the Canadian public. Particularly at this time of a global pandemic when a viral pathogen erupted in Wuhan, China and there are suspicions whether it was a natural event or whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been involved.

The head of the Winnipeg laboratory was called before Parliament and given instructions to produce documents to clarify the reason behind the scientists' escort from the laboratory and their consequential firing. Public Health Agency of Canada chief Iain Stewart adamantly, despite being reprimanded, continues to refuse to provide unredacted documents to Members of Parliament sitting on the Canada-China relations committee.

It has now been made clear that it is the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau which has instructed Mr. Stewart to refuse to surrender the documents in question. The Liberal government has filed an application to the Federal Court asking it to prohibit disclosure of the requested documents, challenging the principle of the House of Commons' supreme position to demand documents be produced regardless of privacy or national security laws.

Yet the government that has imperilled national security through its continued positions on allowing Beijing access to Canadian academic circles, corporate interests, government infiltration, scientific and technical inventions and production has filed an application requesting an order confirming the documents should remain undisclosed; the disputed material being "information which if disclosed would be injurious to international relations or national defence or national security". 

Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, a prominent virologist at the forefront of an ongoing RCMP investigation, is seen in an undated screengrab at the Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Laboratory. She was fired from her post in January, but officials won't say why.  Photo:  CBC

It would, in the sense that such disclosures have the potential to demonstrate the extent of this government's lax attention to securing its own intelligence, linked to that of its G7 and Five Eyes partnerships. News that Xiangguo Qiu, currently under investigation by the RCMP, is listed as an inventor on two patents filed by official agencies in China is another unsavoury revelation. As a long-time Canadian civil servant her obligation is to Canada, not China.

It is, in fact, illegal for any employee of the Microbiology Laboratory to patent anything discovered at the Lab; it is the property of the Lab and of Canada.While her escort out of the Microbiology Lab continues to shrouded in mystery, the subject of Parliamentary debate, these new revelations serve to deepen the conundrum.

One patent listing her as a co-inventor with others was filed with the Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration by China's National Institutes for Food and Drug Control, describing an 'inhibitor for Ebola virus'. Ms.Qiu had been celebrated in Canada for her work in helping to develop a treatment for Ebola. In the other patent registered by the Inspection and Quarantine Technology Centre of Fujian province a "detection method" for Marburg a hemorrhagic fever, is involved.

Just coincidentally, Dr.Qui had been involved in an unauthorized shipment of NML materials involving those same biological inventions out of the Winnipeg laboratory to the Wuhan Virology Institute. Dr.Qiu, it seems apparent, was either in violation of the inventions law or had received permission from the minister to proceed as she had, which seems unlikely, given its illegality and the strange potential decision to provide such highly classified and protected material and research to a hostile country.

It had been revealed by a journalistic investigation that Professors Qiu and Cheng had failed to pass security screening by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, somewhat after the fact. They had been known to work alongside Chinese scientists as  well as a PLA military researcher who had also been employed by the Winnipeg Laboratory. None of this inspires confidence in the Public Health Agency of Canada, nor the Government of Canada in this hugely unsavoury event.

The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg where scientists Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng worked until they were escorted out in July 2019, and finally fired in January 2021. Photo by Michel Comte/AFP via Getty Images/File

Canada's Prime Minister's Unreciprocated Love Affair With China

"Threats, censorship and intimidation will continue as long as companies, not-for-profits academia, politicians, media and other institutions with vested interests are fearful of angering Beijing."

"Beijing is effectively exporting their authoritarianism overseas."

"Dissidents are not safe. Not at work, not in their homes, not in civil societies, and not in Canada."

"[There is a] persistent lack of knowledge and understanding of these networks of influence within Canadian institutions, politics and society [which permits Chinese infiltration to influence Canada to go under the radar]."

Cherie Wong, executive director, Alliance Canada Hong Kong 

"[China has also expanded its influence through academia, particularly in the area of research and development, often through] ludicrous funding opportunities that trap academics and researchers into long-term coercive relationships [funded by foreign actors]."

"Inadequate federal regulations [have allowed such partnerships to continue]."

"Beijing aims to influence the next generation of technologies to disrupt, dominate, and silence democratic nations, making it clear they do not intend to follow the international order or be a fair and transparent global partner."

Report, Alliance Canada Hong Kong

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of COVID-19, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China on Feb. 3, 2021. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

 

The most recent egregious Canada-China interaction has a sinister air of confidence, marked top secret in a country whose prime minister once infamously and naively stated his admiration for the Chinese Communist Party, able to 'turn on a dime'. Justin Trudeau recalls fondly when as a child he accompanied his father, then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to China, opening Canada up to the CCP, just as he had taken the current prime minister Justin Trudeau in those long-ago days to Cuba to meet with 'Uncle Castro' for whom he long retained a fondness.

As prime minister, Justin Trudeau makes decisions that impact the entire country. As he did, when the novel coronavirus escaped China's borders to make deadly inroads globally, by making the decision that Canada would seek a vaccine in collaboration with a Chinese pharmaceutical company, CanSino, whose CEO and founder had attended a Canadian university and worked for a Canadian pharmaceutical enterprise before returning to China.

Prime Minister Trudeau in tandem with the National Research Council underwrote CanSino Biologics by providing it with Canadian intellectual property on which to base its vaccine for Ebola and SARS-CoV-2. Under the agreement reached with CanSino, Canadian technology would be used as a scaffold on which to build a successful COVID vaccine which was meant to be tested at Dalhousie University, with the NRC helping to produce it in Canada if successful. Beijing decided,  however, to block the vaccine from being shipped to Canada.

Leaving Canada in a vacuum of vaccine acquisition, since no contracts had been signed with reliable pharmaceutical companies capable of producing vaccines. Scrambling, in a late start to acquire vaccines, Canada was late in their use since it was back-of-the-line in contracting for doses to inoculate Canadians against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But there is far, far more to the Canada-China 'collaboration'. A connection between Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, both high-security labs involved in research with highly lethal pathogens.

 

The head scientist at Winnipeg's Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section in the Special Pathogens Program lab was Xiangguo Qiu, a Chinese virologist. In July of 2019, she and her husband Keding Cheng, as well as several of her Chinese students were escorted out of the lab by the RCMP. No explanation was given while officials stated only that a procedural investigation was underway. There were rumours in circulation of unauthorized shipment of deadly viruses from the laboratory to China; otherwise known as purloined intellectual property.

The two top scientists were eventually fired when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service called for revocation on national security grounds of their security clearance. Another Chinese scientist, Feihu Yan involved in the Winnipeg lab as a researcher with the Chinese military's Academy of Military Medical Sciences, made heads swivel. Andy Ellis, formerly with CSIS noted it was "madness" for the Public Health Agency of Canada, responsible for the Winnipeg laboratory, to cooperate with the People's Liberation Army.

"It is ill-advised. It is the top lab in Canada. It is just incredible naivete on their part", he emphasized. The Public Health Agency of Canada refuses to disclose anything relating to the firing of the two Chinese scientists much less about the lab research or the relationship of the National Microbiology Laboratory with the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, much less the third skeleton in the closet, the involvement of the Chinese military.

In this 2017 file photo, Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli works with other researchers in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory postulates that researchers may have been studying or even modifying such viruses to better understand them, and that a lab accident allowed the virus to escape. (Associated Press)

New life has lately been breathed into the theory of the Wuhan Laboratory studying bat viruses, its close geographical proximity to the fresh wild animal market in Wuhan where suspicion was that the strange new pneumonia-causing virus that had surfaced in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, later identified as a novel coronavirus that moved swiftly to infect large swaths of people in Wuhan, in China, and gradually but quickly the rest of the world, emerged. And COVID-19 was born. Was it a rare virus that crossed the species barrier from animal to human? Or a lab-escapee?

 

Prominent scientists are now insisting that the theory is no longer in the realm of conspiracy, that it is a feasible explanation for the presence of a new and deadly SARS virus. That the Wuhan Virology Laboratory was insufficiently secure and a virus that had been synthesized in the laboratory had somehow escaped, an escape with horrendous consequences -- and that Beijing was irresponsible in trying to hide its noxious presence and in so doing introduced a global threat to human existence.

 

The problem for Canada now, is its links with the laboratory and its obviously compromised position. While U.S. President Biden has authorized a deep investigation of the matter which Beijing most certainly will not cooperate with, in permitting access to the laboratory, to the market confines, to witnesses, to its scientists, to the records that it refused the WHO investigative team access to, the truth will somehow emerge, and Canada's role in the disaster will also emerge, damning its reputation, thanks to a prime minister with ambitions for a robust trade agreement with Beijing and a lack of common sense.

Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, have promoted the theory that the virus emerged from the Wuhan lab rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal. While initially dismissed by some as a conspiracy theory, now credible scientists are saying a proper investigation needs to be done. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

 

 

Looking for Answers to COVID Derivation in China

"The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high containment laboratory."

U.S. Diplomatic cable

"It's a fabulous piece of virology by the Chinese group and it's very impressive, but they haven't been thinking clearly about what they are doing."

"It's very worrying."

Simon Wain-Hobson, virologist, Paris Pasteur Institute

"[The Chinese government was responsible for the most] ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history."

"The deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat [is beyond praiseworthy]."

World Health Organization report

"So it was apparent [that the investigation was marred by clear political tension]  and there were people from foreign affairs in China attending our meetings and so on."

"It was at times tense, but always very well mannered and good humoured."

"The group [WHO investigators] wasn't designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practise in Wuhan, China]."

Dominic Dwyer, microbiologist, Austrian WHO investigative team

The WHO team investigating the origins of the novel coronavirus arrives at the heavily guarded Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in February. Photograph: Héctor Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

 

Much-needed answers to questions regarding the true provenance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 remain elusive. China's initial identification of a wet market in Wuhan as the source of the novel coronavirus cross-species-infection from animal to human was proven to be untrustworthy. And as the virus flamed out of China to invade the world at large, the peculiar coincidence of a virology laboratory located in sneezing distance of where the first COVID cases were detected raised suspicions that all was not as revealed.

China's first BSL-4 laboratory, a classification representing facilities equipped to deal with dangerous pathogens, was located adjacent the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory had most recently been involved in research on coronaviruses and in particular on bat coronaviruses, the very type believed to be most closely related to the virus causing COVID-19. U.S. diplomats visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018.

What they saw there persuaded them to send a cable to Washington with a warning about the lax standards at the facility and the risk it potentially posed of possibly becoming the future source of a pandemic. In January of 2021 the State Department claimed it had evidence staff at the Chinese institute were revealed to have symptoms now known to be those of  COVID-19, back in the fall of 2019.

This would not have been the first time that a high-security virology laboratory in China posed as a possible source of runaway globe-altering pathogens on the loose. The Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in 2013 had been accused of "appalling irresponsibility" when scientists there mixed avian and human influenza viruses in the creation of a new and potentially deadly hybrid. Dr.Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist in France warned that the lab might have created a virus with the potential to be the cause of between 500,000 and 100 million global deaths.

When a serious security breach took place at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada in July of 2019, Chinese researchers Xiangguo Qiu, her husband and a Chinese student were escorted from the Winnipeg facility by RCMP and questioned regarding a shipment of Ebola and henipavirus samples, both pathogens flown without adequate safeguards out of the laboratory to Wuhan. There has been silence ever since, no explanation for the event, but the suspicion lingers of scientific espionage.

 

The World Health Organization investigation team discussed the conclusions of its investigation at a press conference in Wuhan, China, on 9 February.   Credit: Kyodo News/Getty

Australia boldly insisted the world required a thorough probe into the origins of COVID-19. Beijing has since exacted a number of penalties on Australia, an important trading partner with China. Threats and attempts at forcing Australia to stand down have been numerous. Eventually the World Health Organization agreed to a more neutral version of the Australian proposal and dispatched a team of ten researchers to China for a two-week period. The team was assigned to conduct interviews and review reports, all under strict surveillance by Chines authorities.

The microbiologists at the Wuhan laboratory knew full well that Chinese authorities expect them to say little and certainly nothing incriminating. Beijing made a point of threatening any medical personnel at the beginning of the epidemic in Wuhan that their professional accreditation would be endangered if they failed to behave with proper circumspection. "If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier I think it would have been a lot better", ophthalmologist Li Wenliang stated.

Shortly afterward the young physician who had been interrogated over having alerted his professional peers to the presence of a strange new and deadly pneumonia-like virus that had entered hospitals, was dead himself from the lethal effects of having contracted COVID. Beijing was found to be funding research into COVID's origins and at the same time censoring results through a specialized task force. Scientists working on bat coronaviruses have had samples confiscated and orders were given to avoid speaking to the press.

Peter Daszak of a World Health Organization team rolls up a vendors layout map of Huanan Seafood market after signing on it as he prepares to leave his hotel for the airport at the end of their WHO mission to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)