China Weaponizing 90 Percent-Fatal Ebola

A lab technician handles samples in the P3, the Pasteur Institute's laboratory dedicated to the Ebola virus, in Bangui, the Central African Republic, on May 31, 2018. Florent Vergnes/AFP via Getty Images

Originally published by Gatestone Institute

Commentary

China’s regime is trying to weaponize Ebola. The disease can have a 90 percent mortality rate.

Code Enforcement Officer Jesalyn Harper in December 2022 noticed a garden hose connected to a supposedly abandoned building in Reedley, California, near Fresno in the Central Valley. She entered the structure and found what appears to have been a secret biological weapons laboratory.

The facility was run by Jiabei Zhu, a Chinese citizen who was a fugitive from Canadian justice. He was also a top official at one of China’s state-controlled companies that had links to the Chinese military.

Inside, Ms. Harper found Chinese nationals working in white coats.

The lab stored nearly a thousand transgenic mice, “genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.”

The lab also contained thousands of samples of labeled, unlabeled, and encoded potential pathogens and a freezer labeled “Ebola.” The freezer held unlabeled sealed bags used to store high-risk biological materials.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears to have great interest in Ebola. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, in a declassified report, revealed that Dr. Qiu Xiangguo, while working at Canada’s only P-4 laboratory in Winnipeg, without authorization sent to China the Ebola genetic sequence.

She was also working for the Wuhan Institute of Virology and sent with authorization samples of different strains of Ebola virus to that facility. She also sent to the lab samples of Nipah virus, another animal-borne, deadly pathogen.

Dr. Qiu, who had worked on a cure for Ebola, was also collaborating with China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the highest-level medical research institution of the People’s Liberation Army.

Dr. Qiu and her husband were escorted out of the Winnipeg lab in July 2019, fired in January 2021, and moved to China, where they work under pseudonyms. In March of last year, a document posted by a Chinese pharmaceutical company revealed that Dr. Qiu was working on Ebola.

Ebola has a high kill rate but is not highly transmissible human to human. “In general, Ebola does not survive well outside hosts and does not support aerosol transmission,” Dr. Sean Lin, a former lab director of the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, told Gatestone.

“It is not easy to turn Ebola into a functional bioweapon.”

Yet as he noted, China can make the disease highly contagious. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is, after all, the gain-of-function capital of the world.

Nipah, Dr. Lin points out, is “highly pathogenic.” “It is,” he says, “alarming that Chinese virology laboratories have collaborated with EcoHealth Alliance to collect Nipah infection samples in Malaysia and India.”

As well as in Canada. “Canada allowed Chinese scientists to handle and transfer to China some of the most deadly pathogens known to humankind,” Charles Burton, senior fellow of Sinopsis and former Canadian diplomat stationed in Beijing, told this author.

“China’s military has spoken openly about weaponizing the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 and conducting gain-of-function research on illnesses as a backdoor to turning them into weapons,” Brandon Weichert, author of “Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life,” told Gatestone. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology weaponized COVID-19, but that was merely a proof of concept. There are nastier diseases, such as Ebola and Nipah, that, through gain-of-function experiments can be made into truly virulent plagues.”

Ebola and Nipah, with some in-lab modifications, can therefore be China’s tools to exterminate the American people.

Exterminate? A quarter-century ago, Gen. Chi Haotian, China’s defense minister and vice chairman of the CCP’s Central Military Commission, reportedly gave a secret speech advocating the extermination of Americans. He talked about using disease to clear out the vast spaces of North America so that the Chinese people could settle in the areas left uninhabited.

“It is indeed brutal to kill 100 million or 200 million Americans,” he said. “But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century, a century in which the Communist Party leads the world.”

“The problem with the report of the Chi Haotian speech is that it cannot be verified,” Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center said to Gatestone. “When it was revealed in 2005, it seemed fantastical that China would unleash biological warfare against the United States to massacre its population and pave the way for a Communist Party invasion, occupation, and exploitation.”

Since that time, developments have given the report credibility. Among other things, SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, was almost certainly engineered in the Wuhan Institute, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping then deliberately spread this disease outside China once it had escaped from that lab. Therefore, “the Chi Haotian speech reads more like a real warning.” As Fisher points out, the CCP is apparently capable of unfathomable malevolence.

The items seized in the Reedley lab strongly suggest that China’s regime is preparing to spread disease in America.

“This kamikaze lab—unsecured, poorly contained, makeshift, containing a couple dozen pathogens near a population center—cannot be a one-off,” Mr. Weichert, also national security analyst for The National Interest, said. “It is, I believe, a part of a large Chinese military operation to spread disease throughout the American population.”

The problem with COVID-19 is that it also infected and killed Chinese people. China’s military, however, is almost certainly working on pathogens that target particular groups. China’s National Defense University, in the 2017 edition of the authoritative Science of Military Strategy, mentioned a new kind of biological warfare of “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”

Think of this as Ebola for Americans only.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.