The world’s largest genomic company, UW Genetics (BGI Group), promoted virus testing devices worldwide during the Communist Party virus (Wuhan virus, New Crown virus) plague pandemic. Reuters exclusively reported that BGI worked with the Chinese Communist Party military on research ranging from large-scale testing of respiratory pathogens to brain science.
The U.S. intelligence community says the BGI Group has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party military and the ruling Communist Party and poses a threat to U.S. national security.
A Reuters review of more than forty public documents and research papers and patent applications in English and Chinese found that BGI’s ties to the Communist Party’s military (PLA) include collaborative research work with the Communist Party’s top military supercomputing experts, and that such ties have not been previously reported.
Since the outbreak of the CCP virus pandemic, UWM has sold millions of COVID-19 test kits outside of China, with sales destinations including Europe, Australia and the United States. The company’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange-listed subsidiary, Shenzhen BGI Genomics Co, has seen its shares double in the past 12 months to a market value of about $9 billion.
CBS’s “60 Minutes” learned that after the Communist virus began spreading in the U.S., BGI Genomics had made identical offers to at least five U.S. states to set up and run virus testing labs. These states included Washington, New York and California, among others.
Bill Evanina, then director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, made a rare public warning to the states to oppose it. “Foreign countries can collect, store and use biometric information from COVID testing,” he said in a statement.
He argued that the Chinese (Communist Party of China) are working to collect DNA from Americans to win the race to control the world’s biological data. He said the BGI group is closely linked to the Chinese Communist military and the CCP and threatens U.S. national security.
The pattern of cooperation between BGI and the Chinese Communist Party military should be of concern to the U.S.
The documents reviewed by Reuters neither disagree nor support the suspicions of the U.S. intelligence community. But they show closer and deeper ties between the Communist Party’s military and UWM than previously understood, illustrating how the Communist Party has moved to include private technology companies in military-related research.
Reuters found that UW Genetics is involved in a Communist Party Liberation Army project aimed at making Han Chinese less susceptible to altitude sickness, a genetics study that will benefit soldiers in certain border areas of China.
Recently, a panel of experts warned the U.S. government that hostile nations and non-state actors could target genetic vulnerabilities in the U.S. population, and that competitors like the Communist Party of China could use the genetic information to augment their own military personnel.
Elsa Kania, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank, told Reuters that the Chinese (Communist Party) military has explored brain science, gene editing and artificial genome research that could lead to abnormalities in the human genome for application in future in biological weapons. Such weapons are not yet technically feasible, she added.
Kania said that UWM’s model of cooperation with the Chinese (Communist Party) military is “a legitimate concern” for U.S. officials.
In response to questions from Reuters, UWM said it complies with international standards and Chinese laws related to open science, data sharing and genomic research. The company said its collaboration with (Communist Party of China) military researchers was for academic purposes only and denied any allegations of links to the (Communist Party of China) People’s Liberation Army, “particularly in relation to our COVID-19 test kit.”
Examples of collaborative research between UW Genetics and the Chinese Communist military
Reuters reports that a scientific paper co-authored by UW Genetics founders Yang Huanming and Wang Jian, along with the Communist Party’s PLA Key Laboratory of Plateau Medicine and the Third Military Medical University, focused on the brains of monkeys suffering from plateau reactions.
The study, published in January 2020, was noted by the Chinese side as one of the PLA-funded “Military Science and Technology Priority Projects. A decade ago, research at the Third Military Medical University sought to identify genes associated with altitude sickness so that the Chinese Communist military could screen susceptible soldiers. The latest research focuses on how drug-gene interactions can potentially protect people from brain damage.
Yang and Wang could not be reached by Reuters. BGI said its research collaboration with the PLA laboratory and the Third Military Medical University is “for academic purposes only.
Reuters reported that BGI shares more than a dozen patents with the Third Military Medical University, the Military Medical Research Institute of the Academy of Military Sciences and top Chinese military hospitals for screening genomes related to diseases.
In 2015, BGI and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences were awarded a patent for a low-cost test kit for detecting respiratory pathogens, including SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and coronaviruses.
Chen Weijun, the current chief infectious disease scientist at UWM, is listed as an inventor in the patent document. Chen Weijun was one of the first scientists to sequence COVID-19, according to sequence data later shared internationally, and they collected samples from a military hospital in Wuhan.
In three scientific papers reviewed by Reuters, it was stated that Chen had ties to the Chinese Communist Academy of Military Medical Sciences. In response to questions from Reuters, UWM said in a statement that Chen Weijun has not been affiliated with the (Chinese Communist) PLA Academy of Military Medical Sciences since 2012. Chen Weijun did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
BGI’s COVID-19 test suite does not use methods patented in conjunction with PLA, UWM said in the statement.
Published scientific and conference papers reviewed by Reuters show that the four BGI researchers also formed a joint affiliate with another (Communist) military institution, the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT). NUDT, located in Hunan Province, is directly under the leadership of the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission.
NUDT is on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s blacklist as a threat to U.S. national security, and NUDT’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer was used to simulate a nuclear explosion.
Reuters research also found that a researcher, Peng Shaoliang, worked to develop software using supercomputing technology developed by the National Defense University to speed up the sequencing of the human genome by the BGI.
Peng Shaoliang was part of a panel of experts advising the Science and Technology Committee of the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, which was established in 2016 when Xi Jinping began promoting a strategy to combine Chinese civilian and Communist Party military research.
Panel Recommends More Aggressive U.S. Government Approach to BGI
Chinese technology companies are under increasing U.S. scrutiny as former President Donald Trump (R) further tightens exports to Chinese technology companies. The U.S. Department of Commerce proposed a rule in November 2020 to add gene editing software to the U.S. Export Control List because such software is said to be used to create biological weapons.
On Dec. 6, 2020, John Ratcliffe, then director of national intelligence, said intelligence showed that the Chinese Communist Party was using “gene editing” to strengthen its military and attempt to dominate the world. He warned that values such as individual freedom would be at risk if the Chinese Communist Party were allowed to succeed.
“It (the Communist Party) is changing DNA, and that’s one of the things that our intelligence shows that China (the Communist Party) is doing. …… The People’s Republic of China (CCP) has 2 million military personnel, and it’s trying to make its military stronger through gene editing.” Ratcliffe said.
In a December 5, 2020 Fox News talk show, China expert Zhang Jiadun mentioned that the CCP now has the world’s largest DNA database and it is growing.
He said the Chinese Communist Party is now using the rampant Communist virus to expand its DNA database, which requires internationally recognized QR codes from international travelers and access to foreigners’ genes through vaccine diplomacy.
Zhang Jia Dun warned that the CCP is using the vaccine as leverage to get foreign populations to complete relevant tests while collecting sensitive information; “They [the CCP] will say, ‘We will give you this vaccine, but we need to complete our tests, so we will use your population as the test subjects. “
Reuters reported that the panel recommended that the U.S. government “take a more aggressive public approach to BGI,” citing the company’s ties to the Chinese Communist government and its genomic database as a national security risk.
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