Oh what a tangled web they weave...

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On July 5 2019, Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng were removed by Canadian police from the Canadian National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Their security clearances were also retracted, allegedly over “administrative issues.” Qiu is an expert in Ebola and was in charge of the NML’s pathogen and vaccine division. Cheng is an expert in proteomics. The NML is Canada’s only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory for the study of pathogens highly hazardous to humans. Starting in 2017, Qiu went at least five times to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Over a five year period she also published papers with the leading members of China’s civilian/military virology establishment who may have had access to the Winnipeg lab. A few months before their suspension, Qiu organized the shipment, which was authorized, of many strains of Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In January, 2021, the couple were finally fired. Canada’s Parliamentary committee on Canada-China relations has been unable to find out why: the government has refused to hand over unredacted documents about that firing, claiming they will cause embarrassment to Canada and compromise national security. In this section, drawn from her new book, On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years, Canadian investigative journalist and prize-winning non-fiction author Elaine Dewar digs into their story and its links to the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

by Elaine Dewar

By the time Qiu started work on Ebola, the mishandling of the SARS epidemic by China’s leadership was well-known worldwide. Officials had been fired for misbehaviour. China had called upon leading scholars in the US, like W. Ian Lipkin, and Chinese scholars with significant success abroad, such as George Gao, to help reorganize its public health system, especially its disease surveillance methods. That year, a group of scientists from Guangdong, the centre of the SARS pandemic, arrived in Winnipeg to tour the Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health, which includes both the NML, now managed by PHAC (Public Health Agency of Canada), and the animal diseases lab managed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. China was negotiating its agreement with France, which led to the construction of the BSL-4 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Natalie Salat, a reporter for Legion, a magazine about Canada’s military history, came to Winnipeg to write about the facility after the visitors from China had come and gone. Their attendance was presented to her as a mark of the NML’s global importance. Salat was told that the NML had partnerships with the Department of National Defence, the University of Manitoba, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Bioterrorism Response Network, etc. Stefan Wagener, whom Salat identified as the centre’s scientific director for biosafety and environment, told her that everyone who worked at the lab for more than ten days had to have a rigorous security clearance. He jokingly said that if he told her anything else about the detailed security measures in place, he’d “have to kill her.”227

Reading the piece, I found myself wondering: How could Qiu have qualified for even a low-level clearance by 2003? She would need secret clearance to work in the BSL-4 by 2005. I’d read somewhere that to get a secret clearance one must have been a citizen for ten years, have no criminal record, and no other obvious exploitable problems of a criminal nature, like an addiction to drugs or gambling, etc. Surely Qiu had not been in the country long enough to qualify when she was first hired at the NML, though she and her husband might have been permanent residents by then. When I checked, I learned those are the requirements for a top-secret security clearance. It is less onerous to get a secret clearance.

I remembered Stefan Wagener’s name from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website. He’d been listed there as a member of the WIV’s Scientific Advisory Committee of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases. I looked him up. The bio on his company’s website said he had worked at the NML from 2001 until 2013, then been appointed to the Grain Commission in Winnipeg, and that he now ran an international bio-risk consultancy. Surely he would know Qiu? We did a Zoom call rather than a phone call because he likes to see the people he’s speaking with. My video died within the first three minutes, but I got a glimpse of him: an older man sitting at a desk with a headset over his ears, waving at me. He said he started at the Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health in 2001 as chief administrative officer. His responsibilities included human resources, but mainly the safety and security of the building and its complex systems. In 1999, before he was hired, there had been a leak: about 2,000 litres of insufficiently sterilized wastewater was released into Winnipeg sewers. Nothing was said about this to the public until the CBC published a story about it a month later. Ebola and Lassa fever had not yet arrived at the lab, so there was no danger, just like there was no danger the next year when there was another wastewater leak. That one never got out of the building.228

Are you still an advisor to the WIV BSL-4 in Wuhan? I asked.

He said he was not. He had visited Wuhan when the BSL-4 lab was in the design stage, but that was some years ago.

Did you meet Shi Zhengli? I asked.

He was pretty sure he had. He remembered her face when he saw the press stories about whether SARS-CoV-2 might have leaked from her lab. But he hadn’t worked with the WIV for quite some time: his advisor role had lapsed a couple of years after his visit.

Do you remember Xiangguo Qiu from the NML? I asked. “I don’t remember her,” he said. He explained that there were about 400 people working there in his day, and that he had been more concerned with the physical plant’s operations. He certainly didn’t know everybody.

Keding Cheng?

“Did I know Cheng? Might have had conversations,” he said. But he had no clear recollection of “these people.”

Yet Wagener’s position at the NML was eliminated in 2013, which is when Keding Cheng apparently started work there. So why did he remember conversations with him, but nothing about the woman who’d been toiling for years in the NML’s special pathogens lab?

“What can you tell me about the security clearance process at the NML?” I asked.

He explained that it was a graded system, requiring different levels of security clearance depending on which labs a person had access to. Canadian citizenship or landed status had nothing to do with those clearances, it was not a requirement to work at the NML. The Level 2 labs required lesser clearance than the Level 4s. People tried to arrange their work so that the bulk of it could be done in the Level 2s. Genetic material or proteins can be worked with in the BSL-2 because they don’t pose a risk to anyone.

How long did it take to get a security clearance?

“It could take a long time to get access to data. It could take six to eight months before a full security request to work in a containment environment,” he said. He explained that the point is to bring the best scientists from all over the world to the lab and to do the best work possible, to be constantly training so that if infectious-disease outbreaks occur everybody is ready to deal with them. He himself was a German citizen when he worked at the NML. Before that, he’d spent 12 years working at the University of Michigan.

So how were people cleared? I asked.

There would be background checks and criminal record checks organized by the RCMP, who would deal with the country of origin, he explained.

You mean the RCMP would ask Chinese police about the status of a Chinese citizen?

He could see where I was going with that question: If China wanted to slip someone into Canada’s only BSL-4, Chinese officials contacted by the RCMP would of course send a glowing but not necessarily complete report.

I told him about Qiu and Cheng collaborating on papers with members of the Chinese military. I told him that the experiments had been done in the BSL-4. How could that have happened?

“I don’t have an answer to [that].” he said. But he wasn’t fussed by it. He asked if I’d have a problem if people in the NML worked with the American military.

The two situations are not comparable, I said. “Canada and the US are allies and we protect the North American continent together. China is not a friend of Canada.” And I am not alone in that view. On February 10, 2021, the director of CSIS, David Vigneault, gave a public talk in which he described China as a “strategic threat.”229