Canada’s spy agency urged the removal of security clearances for two scientists who were later dismissed from the country’s top infectious-disease laboratory because of national-security concerns relating to their work with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to two sources.
In January of this year, Xiangguo Qiu, who headed the Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies Section, and her biologist husband, Keding Cheng, were fired from their positions with the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg The couple and an unknown number of Dr. Qiu’s students had their security access revoked in July, 2019, and were escorted from the Winnipeg lab, a Level 4 facility equipped to handle some of the world’s deadliest diseases. Four months earlier, the Winnipeg lab had shipped Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan facility, part of what the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) later described as an effort by this country to “foster global collaboration.”
A federal source – with direct knowledge of the case – said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service began raising alarms after it grew concerned about the nature of information that was being passed to the Wuhan lab. The source said CSIS was focused on the people that Dr. Qiu was talking to in China and intellectual property that may have been given to Chinese authorities.
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