From the Canadian Broadcasting Comany:
Canadian scientist sent deadly viruses to Wuhan lab months before RCMP asked to investigate
Newly-released access-to-information documents reveal details about a shipment of deadly pathogens last year from Canada's National Microbiology Lab to China — confirming for the first time who sent them, what exactly was shipped, and where it went.
CBC News had already reported about the shipment of Ebola and Henipah viruses but there's now confirmation one of the scientists escorted from the lab in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation last July was responsible for exporting the pathogens to the Wuhan Institute of Virology four months earlier.
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng and her students from China were removed from Canada's only level-4 lab over what's described as a possible "policy breach." The Public Health Agency of Canada had asked the RCMP to get involved several months earlier.
And a bit more - the reaction:
"It is suspicious. It is alarming. It is potentially life-threatening," said Amir Attaran, a law professor and epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa.
"We have a researcher who was removed by the RCMP from the highest security laboratory that Canada has for reasons that government is unwilling to disclose. The intelligence remains secret. But what we know is that before she was removed, she sent one of the deadliest viruses on Earth, and multiple varieties of it to maximize the genetic diversity and maximize what experimenters in China could do with it, to a laboratory in China that does dangerous gain of function experiments. And that has links to the Chinese military."
Gain of function experiments are when a natural pathogen is taken into the lab, made to mutate, and then assessed to see if it has become more deadly or infectious.
Most countries, including Canada, don't do these kinds of experiments — because they're considered too dangerous, Attaran said.
"The Wuhan lab does them and we have now supplied them with Ebola and Nipah viruses. It does not take a genius to understand that this is an unwise decision," he said.
This is chilling - there is only one reason to do an experiment like this. They are trying to weaponize these materials. They do not have the intelligence or wisdom to do this kind of work - this is why China is continually stealing our intellectual property (here, here, here, here, here for starters). Those labs that do have the brains, simply do not do these kinds of experiments. Period. Too fscking dangerous. End of story.
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