On Saturday (April 24), a British media outlet made public a new clue about the origin of the coronavirus: scientists at the Wuhan lab had previously worked with the Chinese Communist military on a biological project to find the animal virus. Outsiders are concerned that the CCP has long seen biotechnology as an important part of the future of hybrid warfare. The big question is whether its work in these areas is offensive.
The British newspaper The Mail on Sunday reports that the program was launched nine years ago under the direction of a central Chinese Communist Party agency. It aims to “discover pathogens carried by wild animals” and to detect viruses involved in spreading disease. The program involves military officials, although the Communist Party’s military denies any such connection.
As of press time, the Beijing government’s report was still available on the website of the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control. The Chinese title of the project is “Discovery of Pathogens of Animal Origin and Their Pathogenicity to Humans,” which was launched in 2012 and funded by China’s National Natural Science Foundation. The project is led by Academician Xu Jianguo, director of the laboratory of the Institute of Infectious Diseases, who boasted at a conference in 2019 that the scientific project has helped “a huge network for the prevention and control of infectious diseases.
“A report on the website of the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control (Photo credit: screenshot)
The Sunday Post said the five leaders of the program include virologist Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as Cao Wuchun, a senior military officer, member of the Ministry of Health’s Expert Committee on Counter-Terrorism (Biological) Emergency Response and deputy head of the military medical expert group responding to the coronavirus outbreak.
Regarding this claim, the Voice of Hope reporter found a paragraph in an article titled “Research progress of major NSF projects led by Academician Xu Jianguo of the Institute of Infectious Diseases was highly evaluated by the NSF Committee” that reported Cao Wuchun’s collaboration with Shi Zhengli on similar projects.
“Academician Xu Jianguo led a joint research team consisting of researcher Zhang Yongzhen from the Human-Animal Disease Unit of the Institute, researcher Liang Guodong from the Center for Prevention and Control of Viral Diseases, researcher Cao Wuchun from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Medical Sciences, and researcher Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to select the only mammal that can fly, bats, mosquitoes with large numbers and wide distribution, rats that are closely related to human activities, and mice that carry the virus. The team selected the only mammal that can fly, mosquitoes with large numbers and wide distribution, rodents with close relationship with human activities, ticks carrying many types of pathogens, tropical non-human primates with close relationship with virulent pathogens, and highland Himalayan otters as the main research objects, selected ecologically and epidemiologically representative regions to collect a large number of specimens, and applied traditional pathogen isolation techniques and modern high-throughput molecular biology techniques to study the species and distribution of microorganisms carried by wildlife and vector organisms. The project has achieved a series of important results since its implementation. Since the implementation of the project, a series of important results have been achieved.”
Shi Zhengli last month denied U.S. allegations of military involvement in the research program, saying, “I am not aware of any military personnel working at the Wuhan Institute. This information is incorrect.”
Cao Wuchun is the chief expert at the Academy of Military Sciences, according to publicly available information. Born in August 1963, Cao graduated with a doctorate from Erasmus University in the Netherlands in 1996. He has conducted guest research at Cambridge University, Karolinska Institute, Sweden, and Mahidol University, Thailand. He is the director of the State Key Laboratory of Biosafety of Pathogenic Microorganisms and receives a special allowance from the State Council.
Cao is also a member of the advisory board of the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, according to the report. He is second in command of the military team led by Major General Chen Wei, the country’s top biodefense expert, which was sent to Wuhan last year to respond to the virus and to develop a vaccine.
In addition, the Sunday Mail report cited a Chinese report mentioning that Chinese scientist Zhang Yongzhen published the first gene sequence of the Covid-19 coronavirus last January, and that this individual had a major role in the project, in which he and a team of researchers collected a large number of arthropods and rodents in Hubei, Zhejiang, Xinjiang, Beijing and Yunnan during the first three years and discovered 143 new viruses.
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In a 2015 review of the Search for New Viruses project, Chen acknowledged that the “Discovery of Pathogens of Animal Origin and Their Pathogenicity to Humans” project “has discovered a large number of new viruses that have attracted significant attention from the international virology community.”
The report added that if the pathogens spread to humans and livestock, they could cause new infectious diseases that “pose a great threat to human health and life safety, could cause significant economic losses, and even affect social stability.
Xu also led the first team of experts to investigate the emergence of coronavirus in Wuhan. He initially denied human-to-human transmission despite evidence from hospitals, then insisted in mid-January that “there is a limit to this epidemic, and if there are no new cases next week, it will be over.”
A 2018 update from his project reported that the scientific team published numerous findings in international journals – four new pathogens and ten new bacteria were discovered, while ‘more than 1,640 new viruses were identified using metagenomics techniques’. Such research is based on the extraction of genetic material from samples, such as those collected from bat guano and blood in Professor Zhengli Shi’s cave network in southern China.
The Mail on Sunday believes that the extensive sampling led Professor Shi Zhengli to quickly discover RaTG13 last year, the closest known relative to the new strain of coronavirus that caused the pandemic.
The foreign outlet also found that she had changed the name of another virus identified in a previous paper, thereby obscuring its link to three miners who died of a specific respiratory disease contracted while cleaning bat guano.
Zhengli Shi previously acknowledged that her team also collected eight unidentified SARS (Sars) coronaviruses in the bat cave. The institute took its database of virus samples offline in September 2019, just weeks before the outbreak of coronavirus cases in Wuhan.
The virus found by the investigation team was allegedly stored at the Wuhan laboratory, the largest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia.
Last month, the United Kingdom, the United States and 12 other countries criticized Beijing for refusing to share key outbreak data and samples and argued that a joint WHO-China study on the origins of the pandemic, which concluded that a leak of the virus from the Wuhan lab caused the pandemic, was “highly unlikely.
Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, said the latest revelations fit a “pattern of inconsistency” from Beijing.
They are still not transparent with us,” she said. We don’t have hard data on the origin of the pandemic, whether it was caused by natural transmission from animals or some kind of accidental leak related to research, but we can’t get straight answers, and that doesn’t inspire confidence at all.
Han Lianchao, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, said Cao Wuchun’s involvement raises suspicions that military researchers, who are experts on coronaviruses, may also have been involved in biodefense operations.
David Asher, an expert on biological, chemical and nuclear proliferation who led the U.S. State Department’s investigation into the origins of the outbreak, said, “The Chinese have made it clear that they see biotechnology as an important part of the future of hybrid warfare. The big question is whether their work in these areas is offensive or defensive.”
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