Chinese scientist 'was caught smuggling deadly viruses into the USA'
By Michael Moran - The Daily Star
Rumours continue to swirl that the coronavirus outbreak was deliberately engineered by a hostile government to weaken rival powers.
While that’s improbable, disturbing evidence has emerged that dangerously lax biosecurity around samples of some of the world’s deadliest viruses could have caused countless catastrophic outbreaks.
At the end of 2018, twelve months before the first coronavirus cases were reported in China, a Chinese scientist carrying samples of the SAR and MERS viruses was intercepted by US customs officers.
A recently-released FBI report on the incident stated: “Inspection of the writing on the vials and the stated recipient led inspection personnel to believe the materials contained within the vials may be viable Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) materials.”
A third vial in the case reportedly contained a potentially deadly strain of food poisoning bug E Coli. The undocumented shipment was seen as a serious danger by US scientists.
“The Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate assesses foreign scientific researchers who transport undeclared and undocumented biological materials into the United States in their personal carry-on and/or checked luggage almost certainly present a US biosecurity risk,” reads the report obtained by Yahoo News. “The WMDD makes this assessment with high confidence based on liaison reporting with direct access.”
The FBI has declined to comment in detail on the incident, or to name the Chinese scientist.
Retired Air Force Brigadier Gen. Robert Spalding, who was a China specialist on the US National Security Council for the Trump administration, says that there could be dozen cases like this. Often, he thinks, the courier themselves might not know what they were carrying.
Suspected SARS virus and flu samples were found in luggage, says the FBI report
The shipments could just be probes to test American defences, he speculates: “Some likely could be deliberate, to test our ability to identify and intercept,” he said. “Others could be opportunistic."
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, say that while there’s no evidence that the Covid-19 outbreak was caused deliberately, the possibility of a lab accident cannot be ruled out.
He says that it’s “a possibility that this virus entered the human population through accidental infection of a lab worker carrying out field collection, or an accident by a lab worker characterising the sample in a laboratory.”
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at China’s Council on Foreign Relations, conceded that China’s biosafety regulations were deeply flawed. “That’s why [Chinese President Xi Jinping] in February talked about beefing up the legislation for biosafety and biosecurity,” he said.
He said that biosecurity needed to be an international effort, which it was why it was unfortunate that President Trump, and other US politicians, had chosen to politicise the outbreak, referring to it as “the Chinese Virus.”
“You could argue,” Huang said, “health is borderless, especially when two countries face these common challenges. This would be a time for them to collaborate mostly closely.
“That turned out to not be the case.”
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