Scientist fired from Winnipeg disease lab intentionally worked to benefit China: CSIS report
Scientist fired from Winnipeg disease lab intentionally worked to benefit China: CSIS report
19 comments
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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called the case "a massive national security failure by Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government."
He really can't help himself.
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Not the first time he's misunderstood how security clearances work. Maybe if he actually had one he'd learn about them.
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He doesn't need to be right.
Cancer doesnt have to be correct to spread, it just has to take hold in enough places to become a real problem.
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I seriously cannot parse these two statements
The document show the service had a more rosy initial assessment of Qiu's motivation, noting in spring of 2020 that she could be "susceptible ... based on the belief in the power of science to help humanity."
But as the investigation went deeper, CSIS's concerns deepened. A few months later, CSIS wrote 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."
They're the same picture
Like I get it, you want to secure medical research. And she was likely inappropriately sharing unpublished data against lab policy. But the tone shift they're trying to make doesn't connect for me.
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Yeah I'm very confused. Was this person working against Canada or merely for the benefit of China?
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There's a whole lot of bullshit going on around this story. People are acting like she violated national security interests, but they can't articulate how. Like she shipped ebola to wuhan, but she wasn't fired for that because cooperation with high level labs is kind of important (and I'm sure wuhan already HAD a sample of ebola before she even shipped it). The findings she shared would've been shared eventually(and the reason it started a kerfluffle is because China shared them and included her in as a co-author in a paper and included her in patents for ebolavirus treatments). You can still say she was working "against Canada" if you really want to twist it, but that's not really what happened. She violated policy and got fired, then said the firing was unjust. The potential damage to Canada comes from intellectual property interests but there's not much money in treating Ebola in the first place.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ebola-henipah-china-1.5232674
Researchers working at the National Microbiology Lab on cutting-edge, high-containment research are not allowed to send anything to other countries or labs without the intellectual property office negotiating and having a material transfer agreement in place, in case the material sent leads to a notable discovery.
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Let's say if she shared that information with Turkey or Nicaragua or Zimbabwe, resulting in their improved capabilities to fight pathogens, and had deep ties with their government (including being part of programs training Turkish nationals), would that be a breach of security?
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I sure hope people are sharing this research with Zimbabwe. They've got endemic marburg virus to deal with. The frank truth is, for something like Ebola, sequencing it isn't going to change how you weaponize it. You weaponize it by breeding it and then blowing it up at low heat so it spreads over a large area. Any contact with it leads to infection, it's a nasty bug.
This is different, than say, anthrax weaponization. You can go to cattle farms, dig in the dirt, and culture it, and you will eventually isolate anthrax. That strain, however, won't really go into spore form well and won't be super pathogenic. You'll need to infect a bunch of sheep with it and try to get a better strain, like they did in my hometown at Ft. Detrick. Then you use specific drying methods to make it turn into weapons grade spores. That's why specific strains are important with anthrax and you could theoretically use something like CRISPR to make your own that's better than what you can find digging in the dirt.
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I agree I need someone who could tell me what a state nation could do with sequenced Ebola from a risk point of view.
I both think it would be a requirement to cure, and a requirement to modify to weaponise.
I think when the scientists lied when interviewed though they would only do that if they knew the trouble was grave.
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Just fired?
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Out of a cannon
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To shreds you say?
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Into the Sun
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They were fired mid 2019, the CSIS report just came out.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
One of the scientists who was fired from Canada's top infectious disease laboratory "intentionally" shared scientific information with China, says an assessment by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
The intelligence assessment was released late Wednesday afternoon by the federal government, along with hundreds of other documents about the mysterious dismissal of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng.
Their dismissals were announced in January 2021, triggering concerns about Chinese espionage and leading to heated demands in Parliament for more information.
The document says the service had a more rosy initial assessment of Qiu's motivation, noting that she could be "susceptible ... based on the belief in the power of science to help humanity."
CSIS said that by January 2021, it was concerned about Qiu's "close and clandestine relationships with a variety of entities of the PRC, which is a known security threat to Canada."
"The service assesses that Ms. Qiu developed deep, cooperative relationships with a variety of People's Republic of China (PRC) institutions and has intentionally transferred scientific knowledge and materials to China in order to benefit the PRC Government, and herself, without regard for the implications to her employer or to Canada's interests," CSIS wrote.
The original article contains 300 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 37%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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Oh no, they're stealing private intellectual data in their selfish pursuit of... er, stopping pandemics...?
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