Breaking: Canadian spy suspect Qiu led WIV's "synthetic bat filovirus" project with Wuhan Institute's Vice-Director: CSIS document investigation
Comparing redacted CSIS document with United States bat coronavirus paper suggests Dr. Qiu was hired in People's Liberation Army program to work with "bat woman" Shi Zhengli in 2019
While working for Canada and surreptitiously transferring lethal virus samples to China, Xiangguo Qiu was enlisted to lead Wuhan Institute of Virology’s synthetic bat filovirus project with the institute’s Vice-Director, a senior Chinese scientist that worked in 2015 on a controversial United States “hybrid version of a bat coronavirus.”
This explosive evidence — yet to be reported from hundreds of redacted documents released this week by Canada’s government — suggests that Xiangguo Qiu was likely working directly with the Chinese virologist at the centre of the Covid-19 Wuhan lab-leak theory, Dr. Shi Zhengli.
Dr. Shi — known as the “bat woman” for her bat vaccine studies in China — is reportedly a deputy-director for the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV.)
While no government has concluded Covid-19 emanated from WIV, last year a number of Western intelligence agencies including the FBI told the public they do believe the most likely cause of the deadly pandemic was that Chinese scientists were working with bat viruses that leaked into Wuhan’s population in 2019.
This controversial assessment is far from unanimous in Western intelligence.
But at least some CSIS investigators with awareness of the Xiangguo Qiu probe agree with the FBI assessment, a confidential intelligence source has informed The Bureau.
And now, the sensitive records disclosed by CSIS — which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried to suppress — potentially place Xiangguo Qiu at the scene of the crime with numerous international scientists involved in bat coronavirus studies.
What is irrefutable — according to the CSIS records — is that WIV secretly hired Qiu to advise the Wuhan lab on bio-security, train its lab workers on safety, and employed Qiu precisely because she was the only “Chinese” scientist in the world with access to a Level 4 lab outside China.
China has fought against investigations into potential WIV involvement in the Covid-19 leak, the FBI says.
In April 2020, another vice-director of WIV, YUAN Zhiming, “told Chinese state broadcaster CGTN, that this was a ‘conspiracy theory’ designed to ‘confuse’ people,” NBC reported.
Redactions of the CSIS documents released this week show that many sensitive facts are still being hidden by Canada’s government.
But hundreds of pages of documents reviewed by The Bureau say that a CSIS investigation in 2021 — believed to be assisted by another Five Eyes intelligence agency — found “Ms. Qiu was listed as being in charge of "Overall Planning" for a WIV “animal infection” project that was to run from June 2019 to May 2021, with a budget of 250,000 Chinese yuan per year.
A Chinese virologist that is only identified as “Individual 1” and a “senior scientist and vice-director” at Wuhan Institute of Virology was handling “Project Design.”
And a WIV scientist only identified as “Individual 2” was performing the “Animal Infection” work.
The CSIS report adds that Individual 2 was hired by Health Canada in February 2018, and this "may have been the first researcher from the PRC to come to Canada that Ms. Qiu directly facilitated.”
A separate Health Canada investigation accused Individual 2 of attempting to steal vials of material from the Winnipeg Lab in 2018, the redacted documents say.
Regarding Individual 1, the redacted CSIS report says:
“In 2015, [WIV’s vice-director] was involved in 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.”
This 2015 study for the U.S. National Institute of Health included “research that increased the virulence, ease of spread or host range of dangerous pathogens,” the CSIS report says.
“Some scientists disapproved of the study, noting that 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,’” it says. “However, this study was allowed to continue, under review, by the US National Institutes of Health.”
A review of open source records by The Bureau shows that Dr. Shi Zhengli and U.S. scientists including a man named Ralph Baric completed such a study in 2015, which was called “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.”
The 2015 study from Baric and WIV’s “bat woman” Dr. Shi says “Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus.”
Cross-referencing this information with the CSIS report disclosed this week, shows CSIS found in Chinese records that WIV’s 2019 bat filovirus project in Wuhan that included Dr. Qiu, was “to use reverse genetics in order to create synthetic virus strains.”
Both “bat woman” Dr. Shi and Baric are connected in U.S. government records with Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, “a longtime WIV collaborator” according to a Covid-19 origins report from U.S. Senator Marco Rubio.
The suspected People’s Liberation Army agent Dr. Qiu, along with Shi Zhengli, Baric and Daszak met together for an October 2018 symposium at WIV, open source records show.
The Canadian government documents reviewed by The Bureau don’t identify who Qiu collaborated at that October 2018 conference, but reveal that Qiu also secretly provided training to numerous people at WIV in October 2018, in a project she hid from Canada’s government.
Furthermore, the bat filovirus plan in Wuhan that included Dr. Qiu, according to Chinese state documents obtained by CSIS, was:
“To assess cross-species infection and pathogenic risks of bat filoviruses for future vaccine development purposes, which suggests that gain-of-function (GOF) studies were possibly to take place,” CSIS’s June 2021 report says. "These studies contain various biosafety and biosecurity risks, and the US government paused funding on GOF research with potential pandemic pathogens in 2014.”
WIV hired Qiu in PLA espionage program
Meanwhile, the CSIS report explains it was WIV that secretly sponsored Qiu’s applications to work surreptitiously with the People’s Liberation Army, in a program targeted by the FBI called the Thousand Talents Plan, which extracts civilian research from Western nations for Chinese military use, by paying foreign scientists under-the-table.
From October 2017 to January 2018 — when Qiu's Thousand Talents application was submitted to WIV's hiring department — she "collaborated on the application with," WIV’s Individual 2, the senior technician that was to work with her on bat filoviruses in 2019, CSIS records say.
The records say that Chinese Communist Party documentation for the planning and approval of two secret projects, including the bat virus project at WIV, said: "We are in the process of applying for the official permit to transfer BSL-4 pathogens from Canada to China."
It continued:
"To avoid confusing the leaders, it's better not to let [Winnipeg's] National Microbiology Laboratory know about this project ... it's not so necessary to have the opinion from National Microbiology Laboratory."
Regarding the plan for Dr. Qiu to work with WIV’s deputy-director on synthetic bat viruses, the CSIS report said “the International scientific community raised concerns as to whether or not it should allow laboratory research that increased the virulence, ease of spread or host range of dangerous pathogens.”
Qiu and her husband, a molecular biologist, along with several of their students from China that included PLA officers, were expelled by Canadian authorities from Canada’s only BSL-4 laboratory, the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, in 2019 after concerns were raised about the behaviour of these students, including some caught removing vials from the lab.
Records show in the subsequent investigation regarding Qiu’s security clearance, a CSIS interrogator pressed Qiu on her connections to senior PLA scientists involved in bio-terror and vaccine research that could include China’s biowarfare programs.
Most prominently, Qiu worked directly with a PLA Major General involved in China’s bioweapon research and Covid-19 vaccine programs, an examination of the redacted CSIS records suggests.
The records show that a CSIS interrogator told Qiu "[redacted] is a Major General in the PLA and ... [redacted] is involved in bioweapons research and this is publicly available knowledge."
"She is?" Qiu told the CSIS interrogator. "I wasn't aware."
The CSIS report adds Qiu was "dismissive" when asked if she thought her collaborations with WIV and other Chinese institutions involved in the Thousand Talents program including CanSino Biologics "have assisted the capabilities of the PLA."
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