Ruminations: The Canada-China COVID Connection : No Peeking

"I think the government is grateful to send him back to his sort of place of origin."
"I think the people at the NRC [National Research Council] under Stewart had decided maybe five or six years ago that there should be these kinds of open science relationships with counterparts in China."
"What they didn't seem to understand was that when Xi Jinping took office, and became the sort of supreme leader in China, there are divisions that had previously existed between military research and civilian research, especially in biotechnology, that were basically erased."
Elaine Dewar, journalist, author On The Origins of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 years: An Investigation

Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, seen here in a screengrab from a CBC segment, at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. (CBC)

The official opposition in Canada has fruitlessly taken measures to prod the government to release documentation relating to the firing of two Chinese scientific researchers from Canada's level-4 security facility -- equipped to handle the world's deadliest pathogens -- who were working there, as well as a number of Chinese students. The husband-and-wife team of Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng were escorted out of the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg back in July of 2019. An RCMP investigation was taking place and their security clearances were revoked.

It wasn't until a year and a half later that the two were formally fired. Before that happened, a Chinese scientist with connections to research at the People's Liberation Army military research branch worked for a short time at the National Microbiology Lab. These events aroused suspicion among Parliamentarians wanting to have documents released for their purview, concerned over what appears coincidental with the appearance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the novel coronavirus named COVID-19.

Speculation over the firings being connected to the two Chinese scientists' connections with Chinese researchers including those connected to the Chinese military raised additional concerns over the emergence of what would soon become a global pandemic when the strange, hitherto-unknown virus causing a peculiar type of pneumonia arose in Wuhan, China, ostensibly from a live-animal market, and later arousing suspicions that it was in reality a lab escapee, from the nearby Wuhan microbiology laboratory.

While at the Winnipeg lab, Dr.Qiu was involved in an unauthorized shipment of Ebola and Hepinah virus samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Author/Journalist Elaine Dewar detailed collaboration between the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada and Chinese researchers, co-jointly publishing scientific papers focused mostly on Ebola vaccines. It was at the Winnipeg lab that such a vaccine was initially developed. Open collaboration between different nations' scientists is not unknown in the interests of sharing vital findings and inviting collaboration.

Laboratories operated by the military, however, are not usually part of the open sharing between nations. Dr.Qiu began her work with a Chinese scholar currently head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in 2014, publishing their first paper a year later. Dr.Qiu collaborated with Chen
Wei, a major general in the People's Liberation Army, a leading bioweapons expert in China. Papers on Ebola vaccines, treatments and separate Ebola testing technologies were published.

These collaborations raised questions, among them what it was that Canada foresaw as a strategic interest in working with China on Ebola as well as other areas of research. Another query never answered by the Public Health Agency of Canada is whether Chinese researchers were given physical access to sensitive data or to the Winnipeg laboratory. Chen Wei, the PLA researcher, submitted a paper relating to Ebola testing in 2020, months after Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng were escorted out of the Winnipeg lab.

At the time a former head of the National Research Council, Iain Stewart had been assigned president of the Public Health Agency of Canada which oversees the Winnipeg lab. He adamantly refused, as directed by the Speaker of the House of Commons, to produce the documents members of Parliament had requested. Mr. Stewart defied the authority of the Speaker, and the government upheld his extraordinary denial of a Parliamentary order. He has now returned to his former office as head of the National Research Council.

The matter of producing the sought-after unredacted documents to a special investigative committee remains unresolved.