Canadians must know our role in COVID’s origins
One strand of the investigation leads to a Winnipeg laboratory
We are at the bitter end of a whirlwind election campaign in which the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which has killed 27,000 Canadians and counting, has been used as the debate version of a right hook to the prime minister’s jaw — as in, “why did you call this election, sir? We’re in the middle of a pandemic!”
The PM, fumbling for an answer, has insisted Canadians need to weigh in on major decisions about how we will defeat COVID-19 and how we will rebuild after it’s over (if it will ever be). But no serious questions have been raised in this campaign about how we got into this mess, and what our government must do to prevent another like it. In particular, there has been radio silence on the origin question.
Every epidemiologist will explain, if asked, that it is vital to determine the pandemic’s origin if we want to keep it from popping up all over again after we think we’ve stamped it out. If SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from an animal population in China — as some scientists argue, though they have produced no evidence — we have to find that animal population and cull it. Otherwise, it will become a reservoir for the disease.
The United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), spent more than $200 million over 10 years to try to PREDICT (the name of its program) when a virus might spill from an animal host to the human population. It spent some of that in China on the work of Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Though USAID funded labs in viral “hot spots” in more than 30 countries, they all failed to predict any of the viral outbreaks that have occurred since 2009. PREDICT missed the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, Chikungunya in Madagascar, the transformation of Zika in 2017 from an innocuous virus circulating mainly in Uganda to a worldwide scourge that causes babies to be born with microcephaly.
The U.S. last year created a new program that will spend $80 million on many of the same foreign labs surveying animals for signs of viral trouble. And then there’s the Global Virome Project: pharma giant Merck, along with Bill Gates and China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention leader George Gao, hope to catalogue the genomes of every virus on the planet. These programs focus on nature as the culprit; critics of them contend that they spend a bundle but deliver nothing, and that disease surveillance of humans is what we have to improve.
As I believe my new book shows, we do have to focus on humans, but especially on what leading scientists have been doing in laboratories around the world. This virus is likely the product of human hubris and human error, leaked by accident from one of two labs in Wuhan, China, where researchers have been studying coronaviruses since the SARS pandemic of 2003. This wouldn’t be the first time a pandemic began in a lab. However, tracking down a pandemic’s origin in a lab, in an authoritarian country not known for its transparency but well known for its propaganda department, presents a different problem.
How do we regulate what scientists do in countries that won’t co-operate with the international community and fail to regulate their scientists — or worse, cover up their wrongdoing? The capacities of biotechnology leaders have expanded so fast that the founder of the PREDICT program, Dr. Denis Carroll, expects that synthesizing a functional virus from a genome sequence alone will soon be so routine that high school students will be able to do it in the garage. (Lab safety practices in places like Indonesia make his hair stand on end.)
Shi Zhengli of the WIV, also known in China as Bat Woman, for 17 years has sent her students all over China to sample for SARS-like coronaviruses. They take bats and their feces back to their lab in Wuhan, search them for viral sequences, synthesize coronaviruses from those sequences and, since 2013, have done gain-offunction experiments on viruses they’ve found. Gain-of-function experiments entail making the virus more virulent and transmissible, sometimes to humans; the stated goal of this work is to figure out what nature might do before it does it, and prepare vaccines in advance.
So far, no cigar. Hauling samples to a lab in the middle of a city of 11 million and then injecting human cells and test animals with those viruses is like lighting a match in a closed room when you smell gas. Every step along the way presents the possibility of a leak into a human population. Shi Zhengli has explained that she did some of her gain-of-function experiments with SARS-like coronaviruses in labs with lesser containment than would be permitted under U.S. rules; her U.S. funders did not appear to know that. In May, the U.S. confirmed that an allied nation had evidence that three researchers from the WIV were hospitalized in the middle of November 2019, which is when SARSCoV-2 first appeared in the population of Wuhan, already fully adapted to human beings.
But what has this got to do with Canada? Shi Zhengli got
funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and USAID, but her lab also worked with researchers at the highestcontainment facility in the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
The NML is Canada’s only high-containment lab for the study of human pathogens. Its top level-four lab (the sort devoted to the most dangerous microbes) was led by Xiangguo Qiu, recipient in 2018 of a Governor General’s Innovation Award for an antibody cocktail against Ebola. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng were marched out of that lab in 2019 by the RCMP, their security clearances and access to data allegedly withdrawn. Our federal government claimed this was nothing serious, just something to do with “administrative matters.” Yet it occurred just months after Qiu sent 15 strains of Ebola, Nipah and other glycoproteins to the WIV. Those samples helped seed the WIV’s own newly opened level four lab.
That is not the only connection between the NML and China’s military/civilian biotechnology leadership. After Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, the line in China between military and civilian biotech work was erased. The relationship between the Chinese biotech/ military leadership and Qiu and Cheng at the NML started in 2015 and continued even after Qiu and Cheng were fired without explanation in January of this year. The Chinese military/ civilian researchers included George F. Gao and China’s leading bioweapons expert, Maj.Gen. Chen Wei of the People’s Liberation Army.
Qiu and Cheng and other NML staff published papers in leading journals, co-authored with Chen Wei and Gao and their junior colleagues. One paper described the test of an Ebola vaccine created by Chen Wei that was injected into macaques in Winnipeg. Another describes an Ebola treatment using antibodies derived from Chinese subjects, likely soldiers, inoculated with Chen Wei’s vaccine. These studies were of benefit to China’s state industries which have invested billions through the Belt and Road initiative in African countries where Ebola is endemic. In other words, while the two Canadian Michaels, Kovrig and Spavor, languished in prison in China, held hostage there over the Meng Wanzhou extradition case, Canadian government researchers worked with and helped train staff at the WIV lab that I believe leaked the SARSCoV-2 virus.
Canadians need to know why the Public Health Agency of Canada, which oversees the NML, permitted such close relationships between the military/civilian leadership in China, a country over which we have no regulatory oversight or political influence, and researchers in a government facility here. We need to know why the NML sent deadly pathogens to a lab in China where military researchers such as Chen Wei work. The WIV is where Chen Wei created China’s first SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, administering it first to soldiers. As with her Ebola vaccine, she used a Canadian cell line licensed to a Chinese company by a Canadian federal agency.
That vaccine was supposed to be tested and possibly licensed for manufacture in Canada but Chinese officials refused to let it be sent here — more punishment for the Wanzhou affair.
Pinpointing SARS-CoV-2’s origin is vital not just to Canadians but to the world. The World Health Organization-convened joint study on it, which involved China’s researchers and a small team of foreign scientists deemed acceptable to China, did not permit any investigation of the lab-leak hypothesis. China withheld early samples of the virus and information about the earliest patients. What the final WHO study report, published in March, did show was that China had made a truly diligent search for possible animal reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2. Its scientists found no trace in any animal except for a few cats in Wuhan.
Since then, China has refused to allow any more investigation within its borders. What recourse does the world have? Political pressure has been ineffective though millions have died, and millions more will die.
In Canada, we can at least get to the bottom of what our own scientists and bureaucrats did with regard to the conduct of dangerous experiments on behalf of a country that is not our friend.
Elaine Dewar is a journalist and author; her new book “On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation” is on sale now.