A high-ranking officer in the People’s Liberation Army, recently lauded by President Xi Jinping for developing a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, collaborated on Ebola research with one of the scientists who was later fired from Canada’s high-security infectious disease laboratory in Winnipeg.
The joint research conducted by Major-General Chen Wei and former Canadian government lab scientist Xiangguo Qiu indicates that co-operation between the Chinese military and scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) went much higher than was previously known. The People’s Liberation Army is the military wing of China’s ruling Communist Party.
Maj.-Gen. Chen Wei and Dr. Qiu, who until recently headed the vaccine development and antiviral therapies section at the Winnipeg lab, collaborated on two scientific papers on Ebola, in 2016 and 2020.
Those papers did not identify Maj.-Gen. Chen as a high-ranking officer and the Chinese military’s top epidemiologist and virologist. Instead, she is identified as Wei Chen, who held a PHD and worked at the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, part of the Academy of Military Science.
