July 2019: Chinese Researcher Escorted from Canadian Infectious Disease Lab Amid RCMP Investigation
January 25th, 2020Via: CBC:
A researcher with ties to China was recently escorted out of the National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation into what’s being described as a possible “policy breach.”
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng and an unknown number of her students from China were removed from Canada’s only level-4 lab on July 5, CBC News has learned.
A Level 4 virology facility is a lab equipped to work with the most serious and deadly human and animal diseases. That makes the Arlington Street lab one of only a handful in North America capable of handling pathogens requiring the highest level of containment, such as Ebola.
Security access for the couple and the Chinese students was revoked, according to sources who work at the lab and do not want to be identified because they fear consequences for speaking out.
Sources say this comes several months after IT specialists for the NML entered Qiu’s office after-hours and replaced her computer. Her regular trips to China also started being denied.
At meetings on July 8, NML staff were told the researchers are on leave for an unknown period of time. They were told not to communicate with them.
Qiu is a prominent virologist who helped develop ZMapp, a treatment for the deadly Ebola virus which killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa between 2014-2016.
From https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2001126
“[nCoV] can be propagated in the same cells that are useful for growing SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, but notably, 2019-nCoV grows better in primary human airway epithelial cells than in standard tissue-culture cells, unlike SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV.”
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might think we’re seeing testing in the wild.