SOME of the world’s deadliest viruses were shipped to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Canada by two rogue scientists with links to the Chinese military, it is reported.
Bombshell documents revealed how a shipment of dangerous Ebola and Nipah viruses were sent in 2019 from Canada’s National Microbiology Lab to the Wuhan facility at the centre of the “lab leak” storm.
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) said it sent the 15 strains of viruses on a commercial flight to China “for the purpose of scientific research” in March, 2019.
The package included a sample of the deadly zoonotic Nipah virus – which causes severe swelling of the brain, difficulty breathing and seizures.
It also included several strains of the Ebola virus, which causes fevers, vomiting, diarrhoea as well as internal and external bleeding. The disease has claimed more than 11,300 lives in West Africa.
But soon after the shipment, Dr Xiangguo Qiu and her biologist husband Keding Cheng were marched out of the Winnipeg-based lab and stripped of their security clearance, CBC News reports.
The couple and their graduate students from China were escorted from the lab in July, 2019 and officially fired in January, 2020.
Several computers were seized, a lab log book was missing and Qiu’s regular trips to Wuhan were suspended, sources told CBC News.
According to The Globe and Mail, PHAC said the firing of the scientists was an “administrative matter” and cited “possible breaches of security protocols”.
But the shipment of the virus samples and the booting of the scientists has been shrouded in mystery for two years, alarming security experts and epidemiologists.
And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are now investigating how two Chinese military scientists managed to secure access to the lab in Canada – a Level-4 facility set up to handle some of the world’s most dangerous viruses.
The Globe and Mail named one of the scientists as Feihu Yan, from the People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, who co-authored a paper with Dr Qiu.
Cops are also examining whether the viruses were shipped to China without a document protecting Canada’s intellectual property rights, a source told the newspaper.
The probe will look at whether key materials – which could have been used to recreate viruses or vaccines – were handed over to the Chinese authorities without the approval of the PHAC.
Leah West, a national security law expert at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, told CBC News: “If China was leveraging these scientists in Canada to gain access to a potentially valuable pathogen or to elements of a virus without having to license the patent… it makes sense with the idea of China trying to gain access to valuable IP without paying for it.”
The theory that the pandemic emerged from a lab in Wuhan has been gaining momentum, stepping up from being dismissed as a “conspiracy” to a genuine concern.
Read the full story in The Sun
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