A Chinese scientist who was booted out of a Canadian lab after mailing live Ebola to China is thought to have worked with the ‘bat woman’ virologist at the center of the Wuhan leak theory.
Dr Xiangguo Qiu was accused in a 600-page report released last week by the Canadian intelligence services of passing information onto the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) without informing superiors.
Now, further details have emerged of the scientist’s alleged cooperation with actors viewed as central to theories about how Covid-19 may have originated from a Chinese lab experimenting with animal viruses.
Dr Qiu and her husband Dr Keding Cheng were fired from the Canadian National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in January 2021, after they were found to have sent lethal virus samples to China, among other serious violations.
It sparked a lengthy investigation by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which released a heavily redacted report later that year.
Dr Qiu and Dr Zhengli attended a conference held by the Wuhan lab in 2018. British doctor Peter Daszak, whose US charity funded animal virus experiments at the lab, was also present
Chinese scientist Dr Xiangguo Qiu was booted out of a Canadian lab after she was found to have been mailing lethal viruses, including Ebola, back to China to aid research
Dr Qiu has now been linked to Dr Shi Zhengli (pictured), known as ‘bat woman’, who is at the center of claims that the Covid-19 virus leaked from experiments she led at a Wuhan lab
Dr Qiu, Dr Zhengli and British doctor Peter Daszak were pictured together at an October 2018 symposium held by the Wuhan lab. Dr Daszak, pictured here outside his home in New York, has faced questions over his charity’s funding of the lab’s controversial animal virus research
But following cries of a cover up, hundreds of pages from the report were released to the Canadian House of Commons last Wednesday.
The documents, seen by DailyMail.com, revealed that the couple had been able to use the lab as a ‘base to assist China to improve its capability to fight highly-pathogenic pathogens… and achieve brilliant results’.
The CSIS warned: ‘Dr Qiu represents a very serious and credible danger to the government of Canada as a whole.
‘And in particular at facilities considered high-security due to the potential for theft of dangerous materials attractive to terrorist and foreign entities that conduct espionage to infiltrate and damage the economic security of Canada.’
A section titled ‘activities with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’ detail the full extent of Dr Qiu’s involvement in controversial animal virus research.
And a comparison of this chapter with open source records by investigative website The Bureau, suggests Dr Qiu was working directly with Chinese virologist Dr Shi Zhengli, known as ‘bat woman’.
Dr Zhengli led bat research at the WIV and has been accused of conducting ‘dangerous’ ‘gain of function’ experiments, which genetically modify viruses in order to better understand the risks they pose.
She has strongly denied claims that Covid-19 leaked from her work, but last year FBI chief Christopher Wray said the virus most likely originated at a Chinese government lab.
The lax security measures at the Canadian facility exposed by the CSIS now raise fresh questions about the links between virus research being carried out in Chinese labs and western scientists.
Dr Qiu was hired by Wuhan to lead the lab’s ‘animal infection’ project, which was to run from June 2019 to May 2021, the CSIS found.
Project design was being handled by an unnamed Chinese virologist at WIV, who had also been involved in 2015 ‘Gain of Function experiments with US researchers as part of a study that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus; one related to the virus that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which could jump directly from bats to humans’, the documents state.
The CSIS notes that ‘some scientists disapproved of the study’ by the US National Institute of Health, because it was a ‘new, non-natural risk’ and ‘provided little benefit and reveals little about the risk that the wild virus in bats poses to humans’.
Dr Qiu (left) and her husband Dr Kending Cheng (right) were both kicked out of the Canadian National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in January 2021, after they were found to have sent lethal virus samples to China, among other serious violations
Dr Qiu is pictured above working in the lab. Investigators said she had sent the genetic code for Ebola to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)
Dr Zhengli and US scientists including a man named Ralph Baric completed such a study in 2015: A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.
Their experiment used reverse genetics to create synthetic virus strains, the same technique deployed in Wuhan’s 2019 project involving Dr Qiu.
Meanwhile, a photograph of an October 2018 symposium held by WIV appears to show Dr Qiu alongside Dr Zhengli, Baric and British doctor Peter Daszak, whose charity funded WIV research.
Daszak, who runs New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, has faced questions from Congress on the federal funding it sent to the Wuhan lab and the work that was carried out there.
Dr Qiu’s attendance at the symposium is confirmed by the CSIS report.
Although it does not say who Dr Qiu collaborated with, it does reveal that she provided training to others at the conference, without telling her Canadian employers.
The CSIS found Dr Qiu was enlisted by WIV to ‘build a team to start a series of research topics using China’s disease source as advantage’.
It also discovered that, in 2018, the doctor discussed the shipping of the Ebola virus from Canada to Wuhan.
Meanwhile, WIV secretly sponsored Qiu’s applications to work surreptitiously with the People’s Liberation Army in a program called Thousand Talents Plan, which was set up to pay students for participation in research to further Chinese interests.
The CSIS warned: ‘Dr Qiu represents a very serious and credible danger to the government of Canada as a whole.
‘And in particular at facilities considered high-security due to the potential for theft of dangerous materials attractive to terrorist and foreign entities that conduct espionage to infiltrate and damage the economic security of Canada.’
Listing violations by Dr Qiu, officials said she had provided Beijing ‘with the Ebola genetic sequence, which opened a door of convenience for China’.
Dr Qiu and her scientist husband are now nowhere to be seen, although it is thought they have moved back to China.
They have not been reachable for comment and the newly-released CSIS documents did not include a statement from the couple.
But they did reveal that Dr Qiu repeatedly claimed to investigators that she was not aware that she had broken any security rules.
She blamed the health agency for not fully explaining procedures and frequently tried to mislead investigators until confronted by contradictory evidence, according to the report.
The extent of Dr Qiu’s personal contact with Dr Zhengli is unclear.
The Chinese couple had worked at the Canadian National Microbiology Lab (pictured) in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It is the only BSL4 lab in the country and cleared to handle dangerous pathogens including Ebola and Marburg virus
Many scientists have argued that there is no evidence that Covid-19 leaked from a Chinese lab and the origin of the pandemic is still hotly disputed.
In February last year, the US Energy Department joined the FBI in its assessment that the virus most likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laborator.
But four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
Daszak, who lives with his immunologist wife Janet Cottingham in a five-bed, five-bath home in an affluent town in Rockland County, New York, however, has faced accusations that he ‘bullied’ other scientists into signing off on a letter to a prestigious medical journal that removed blame for Covid-19 on the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He declined to comment on the allegations when confronted by DailyMail.com at his home in June 2021.