The release earlier this week of hundreds of documents related to the dismissal of two scientists — Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng — has pulled back the curtain on an explosive national security probe at the Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Lab, part of the Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health (CSCHAH).
The investigation — and the fight to make information about the investigation public — took years.
According to Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) documents, the agency’s National Security Management Division was advised in September 2018 that Qiu had been listed as the inventor on a Chinese patent that might have contained scientific information produced at the CSCHAH in Winnipeg — and that she shared that data without authority.
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Speaking to investigators from Presidia Security Consulting, the outside firm hired by PHAC to conduct a fact-finding mission, Qiu, then head of vaccines and antivirals with the CSCHAH’s zoonotic diseases and special pathogens division, said she didn’t know her name was on the patent.
According to Presidia’s March 2019 report, multiple interview subjects, including PHAC’s chief science officer, told investigators that it was highly unlikely that a researcher’s name would appear on a patent without their knowledge.
By February 2020, PHAC had determined the couple violated multiple policies by, among other things, shipping antibodies outside of the lab without authorization — including to the China National Institute for Food and Drugs — and failing to monitor restricted visitors who were later accused of removing government property without permission.
“We do assess, however, that because of certain features of character — such as an overriding faith in the good intentions of other scientists, and a clear desire to avoid rules or procedures that could slow her down — that Ms. Qiu is susceptible to influence by a foreign state that could result in information or materials leaving the laboratory that could harm national security or the health of individuals.”
In a document drafted that month and released this week, CSIS wrote that Qiu was using the level 4 lab in Canada “as a base to assist China to improve its capability to fight highly-pathogenic pathogens” and “achieved brilliant results.”
But she was later confronted with evidence she had agreed to work for the Wuhan Institute of Virology for at least two months each year, with the aim of boosting China’s “biosecurity platform for new and potent infectious disease research,” said CSIS.
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