Chinese military shipped coronavirus vials to U.S. more than a year before pandemic
by Bill Gertz · The Washington TimesA Chinese military scientist covertly sent vials of a coronavirus to a Minnesota laboratory in 2018 — highlighting the People’s Liberation Army’s work on viruses similar to the one that caused the COVID-19 pandemic a year later, according to declassified documents released by a Senate committee.
Yusen Zhou, a PLA researcher who died in 2020, used a courier to ship the vials to University of Minnesota professor Li Fang in November 2018 for work that was funded by U.S. taxpayers and linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a declassified Department of Homeland Security report states.
U.S. authorities now believe the Wuhan Institute of Virology is where the pandemic originated.
The report said Mr. Li’s research is funded by grants from the National Institute of Health.
“Some of Li’s research fellows and collaborators have connections to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China and the Thousand Talents Program and have been identified for future targeting purposes,” the redacted June 15, 2020, field information report states. “Foreign nationals with links to suspicious Chinese entities are of special interest and may pose a risk to the national security of the United States.”
The Thousand Talents program was Beijing’s large-scale effort to recruit scientists abroad and pay them to work in China.
Mr. Li did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.
The three vials, wrapped in a paper towel and sealed with wax, were seized from the courier’s carry-on bag at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. The courier told Customs and Border Protection agents that Zhou was the sender. The vials were turned over to the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, the report said.
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FBI forensic scientists later determined that the vials contained “precursor mRNA and a partial porcine epidemic diarrhea virus spike protein.” PEDV is “a coronavirus causing high morbidity and mortality” in pigs, the report said.
Zhou’s involvement in the virus transfer underscores the Chinese military’s role in research on deadly bat coronaviruses. SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is a bat coronavirus.
Until his death under suspicious circumstances in 2020, Zhou worked closely with the Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zhengli, known as “bat woman” by colleagues in China because of her extensive research on emerging bat viruses, the report said.
Zhou, 54, died from a fall from a building in May 2020, according to a Senate report, and worked at the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, part of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the PLA’s main biological weapons organization.
The 2023 Senate report by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, identified Zhou as working closely with Ms. Shi and, together, publishing a 2019 report on joint WIV-PLA gain-of-function research titled “Enhancement of Coronavirus Entry.”
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The State Department’s most recent annual report on arms compliance stated that the Chinese military continued biological and toxin research with potential military applications in 2024 and is using artificial intelligence to enhance its efforts.
China has failed to disclose details about offensive biological arms that include weaponized ricin and botulinum toxins, as well as military agents for spreading anthrax, cholera, plague and tularemia, the report said.
China “probably is capable of using publicly available artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) tools to advance efforts related to [biological weapons] applications,” the report said.
The PLA textbook “The Science of Military Strategy,” includes a section identifying biology as a domain for military struggle and mentions the potential for new types of biological warfare to include “specific ethnic genetic attacks” designed to affect targeted ethnic groups.
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In 2020, Trump administration officials disclosed to The Washington Times that China’s military was working covertly on population-specific germ weapons capable of attacking ethnic minorities.
On COVID-19, the State Department stated in a 2021 report that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted experiments involving RaTG13, a bat coronavirus the institute identified in January 2020 as 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2.
The institute also has a published record of conducting risky “gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses.
The RaTG13 was sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of a SARS-like illness, the report said.
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According to the State Department, based on released intelligence, the Wuhan Institute is not a civilian research center but “has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military.”
“The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017,” the State Department report said.
A 2024 report by the CCP Biothreats Initiative, a U.S. think tank, quoted the president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, He Fuchu, as stating in 2014 that biotechnology would become the new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense, encompassing biomaterials and brain-control weapons.
The Chinese Communist Party and its People’s Liberation Army view biological warfare as a core component of China’s asymmetric warfare strategy against the United States and its allies, the report said. “The PLA is ambitious in developing biological weapons as it is regarded as one core approach under the unrestricted warfare doctrine.”
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The declassified documents reveal that Ms. Shi and Mr. Li conducted research on how bat coronaviruses recognize and enter cells they infect — key elements in the ongoing debate on the origin of the COVID-19 virus.
Emails made public by Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, show that Dr. Shi asked Dr. Li to have a student carry monoclonal antibodies from his laboratory to China. Dr. Li rejected the requests, noting that it was not a good idea “given the current tensions between USA and China.”
The courier with the three vials was stopped again in June 2021, this time carrying 132 vials from the United States to China. The vials were undeclared under U.S. regulations and contained flies used in biological research.
A 2023 Senate report on the origins of COVID-19 stated that Zhou was an accomplished coronavirus vaccinologist who worked closely with WIV scientists on MERS and SARS vaccine research in November 2019.
“Zhou’s team filed the first sub-unit patent for a COVID-19 vaccine with mouse data on February 24, 2020,” the report said.
Ryan Clark, a specialist on Chinese biological research, said researchers at the WIV and the Chinese Communist Party Central Military Commission Joint Logistic Support Force, which oversees the AMMS, published a significant gain-of-function study on the SARS-CoV-2 virus in 2021.
A key finding of that study was that the COVID-19 virus infects humans and other species, including pigs, but does not replicate within bats.
“This finding appears to directly conflict with [the Chinese researchers’] own assertion in the introduction of their own paper that SARS-CoV-2 is natural in origin and entered the human population via bats,” Mr. Clark said.
“This lack of SARS-CoV-2 replication in bat cell lines could also contradict the official position of Beijing that SARS-CoV-2 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic is the result of a zoonotic spillover event,” he said.
Anthony Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led American scientists in asserting that the COVID-19 virus jumped from bats to an animal and then to humans, and was not the result of a laboratory leak.
Mr. Fauci is set to appear Wednesday before Mr. Paul’s committee.
The Wuhan-Minnesota exchanges identified in the documents appear similar to a network of researchers in Canada that was linked by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service to covert virus sharing with civilian and military virus researchers in China.
Qui Xiangguo, a scientist at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, covertly organized a shipment of Ebola and Nipah virus samples in March 2019 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Ms. Qui, who was fired from the laboratory, was later found to have worked with PLA Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, a virus researcher at the PLA military medical academy.
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