Is the Wuhan Coronavirus a Bio-weapon?
Unravelling the conspiracy
In a now widely circulated 2018 interview with Chinese state TV, military scientist Chen Hu was asked about the capabilities of an engineered bio-weapon. Hu described the effects of such weapons as ‘devastating’ and ‘equaling that of an atomic bomb’. He then went on to appeal the need for creating defensive capabilities against such events.
A year after he gave that interview Dr. Chen was dead at age 57. In his obituary the numerous achievements of the scientist were outlined, among them the fact that despite being a military doctor, he had helped develop groundbreaking research using CRISPR gene editing; specifically the mice embryos that had been given an engineered resistance to HIV in 2017.
The article also lauded Chen for his ‘swift decision making’ and praised him for using treatments that were yet unapproved by regulatory bodies to save the lives of patients.
Something that of course doctors in the West would have been unable to do. One of the reasons is that Chen was no ordinary Chinese doctor, but one recruited directly by the military, a feature of the Chinese medical system. All over the country there are thousands of hospitals run, not by the Chinese government or the health department, but by the military itself.
This rather unusual system differs from most countries where military hospitals are designed to be used by the military and not ordinary civilians like the Chinese ones.
These hospitals are virtually indistinguishable from regular state governed hospitals, and differ only in governance. What this means practically is that medical regulations – which are already at a low national standard – are rather lax.
In 2015, for example, a military hospital was found offering illegal immunotherapy cures to a student in Shanghai for the price of hundreds of dollars a day. The student died a few days after writing about it online. Other Chinese citizens have reported similar illegal or unapproved drugs being sold in military hospitals. They even reported a case of a doctor with fake documents being knowingly employed by the hospital.
The proliferation of such hospitals dates back to the Cultural Revolution where China was effectively turned into a garrison state after Mao called in the army to subdue the red guards whom he had armed a few years earlier. The military in China today is a very opaque structure; not run by a defense department as in most developed countries, and answers directly to the president. This is another legacy from Chairman Mao because of his fears of a military coup.
Before his death, Chen Hu was not alone in trying to draw attention to the perceived dangers of bio-weapons and the necessity of military funding for it. Other articles from 2014 published in Chinese medical journals specifically call for the need to step up defense against “biological weapons”. This was likely driven by the wave of technological successes in engineering artificial viruses a few years earlier.
To understand the development of such thinking in China, it’s important to examine the history of the government’s attitude to biological weapons in the past, and how it informs their strategy today.
Our Manhattan Project
In 1992 the deputy head of the Soviet bio-weapons program (the Biopreparat), a man named Ken Alibek, defected to the United States, where he revealed to US intelligence the full extent of Soviet bio-weapons capabilities during the cold war.
His book Biohazard, details everything he observed during his long career in one of the most secretive government projects on planet earth, and gives a brief history of bio-warfare.
Using pathogens to kill enemy combatants was something routinely used in ancient warfare, and tactics like poisoning wells with corpses, catapulting infected animals and bodies were common place, but not until the 20th Century did sophisticated bio-weaponry become available.
There are many eye opening revelations in the book, among them that the Soviets likely sprayed weaponised tularemia virus on Nazi troops during the battle of Stalingrad in 1942, infecting many of their own troops in the process.
But the most important event in the history of bio warfare was the discovery of the Japanese facility named Unit 731 in Harbin used to conduct experiments on prisoners during the Sino-Japanese war. The facility created bombs filled with plague fleas and used them to kill tens of thousands of Chinese across Manchuria.
The discovery of such a facility, at the time the most advanced institute of its kind, prompted the creation of bio-weapons programs by the Soviet Union, China, and the United States.
China’s early program was – understandably given their recent history – focused for the most part on defense spending which intensified amidst reports that the Americans were using gas that specifically destroyed Chinese wheat yields during the Korean War. In 1952, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) created specialised anti-plague units to mitigate the effects of similar weapons on their own forces.
The Americans in turn were focused mostly on weapons that could disrupt food and manufacturing supplies for enemy troops. As well as the pathogen to target Chinese wheat, their arsenal included the infamous Agent Orange used to clear foliage during the Vietnam War. The controversy over the use of such chemicals led to the closing of the program in 1969.
However, even during the height of the US bio-weapons program, the government never developed any offensive weapon that could not be easily cured by existing vaccines and treatment, so as not to put their own staff at risk. According to Abilek, the Soviet Union instead, took the view that the more dangerous the pathogen, the better.
Abilek himself personally created an extra virulent strain of tularemia that was resistant to vaccinations. He recalls the tests on an island in the Aral Sea, where monkeys tied to wooden posts were exposed to the infected gas, their slow deaths observed by scientists wearing hazmat suits.
One of the largest of such facilities in the USSR was stationed in Sverdlovsk. It manufactured a particularly lethal strain of anthrax. In 1979 one of the venting filters broke from overuse - not an uncommon occurrence, but the night-shift manager on duty forgot to log it in his notes. The next morning the glass sealed lab was used while the staff were non-the-wiser. By the time they realized something was wrong, the anthrax had infected dozens of people at a ceramics factory across the street. The lethal disease an estimated one thousand people, the official story being that the outbreak had come from a local meat market.
Even in the final years of the Soviet Union, the Biopreparat weapons program was larger than ever and the state’s most closely guarded secret. Near Moscow alone they kept hundreds of tonnes of anthrax, several tonnes of plague and several more of small pox, officially eliminated in 1975. As late as 1983 the author was meeting with military officials to discuss how anthrax could be contained within warhead missiles capable of reaching Seattle, Chicago and New York within hours.
‘The Americans had hidden behind a similar veil of secrecy when they launched the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb’, writes Abilek. ‘Biopreparat, we believed, was our Manhattan Project.’
The Highest Safety Level
There is of yet no equivalent of Ken Abilek to tell us the true extent of the Chinese bio-weapons program, but we have enough evidence to know some things about its capabilities.
In the 1950s, Chinese scientists were invited to the Moscow virology labs to learn from the Soviet biopreparat, and since adopted many of its features.
Abilek also relates in the book that as deputy director he was given intelligence that a wave of hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in China killing dozens in the 1980s, were actually leaks from a neighbouring bio-weapons facility. At least some of these fever outbreaks occurred in – of all places – Wuhan, Hubei province.
After the fall of the USSR we know that at least one member of the biopreparat offered his services to China after the program was abandoned in Russia, and it seems likely that others did too. This coincided with the efforts of President Jiang Zemin to modernize the Chinese military, increase its funding, and develop it using specialised technology.
Throughout the 1990s, US military intelligence reported many times that China had violated the agreement against proliferation of chemical weapons by supplying North Korea and Iran with blacklisted chemicals. In 2001 the DoD concluded ‘China possesses the munitions production capabilities necessary to develop, produce and weaponise biological agents; warheads containing bacterial BWA’; eerily similar to what the biopreparat were creating in the 1980s.
While it’s impossible to know the scale of the program, Israeli bio-weapons expert Daniel Shoam has been able to shed some light on it. In a 2015 study he identified 30 facilities that were being used by the PLA to develop offensive bio-weapons capabilities, and 12 that were focused on defensive capabilities, based on the equipment and facilities used in the labs.
The report notes that most of the efforts are managed by the Beijing Institute of Genomics in coordination with the PLA’s intelligence unit, known as the Second Department. The Second Department is different to the CCP’s main intelligence organization – The Ministry of State Security – in that it primarily focuses on acquiring technology from abroad.
Out of the 12 facilities being used to develop defensive capabilities, one of them was in Wuhan, Hubei province and is called ‘The Wuhan Institute of Biological Products’ and boasts on its website capabilities in ‘genetic engineering’ and ‘HIV live vaccine’.
The neighbouring Wuhan Institute of Virology was first built in the 1950s and has been China’s leading microbiology research lab for a long time. In response to the 2003 SARS outbreak the Institute was refitted to become the country’s first and only safety level-4 laboratory, a feat which took over a decade to complete, specifically to study emerging deadly diseases such as SARS and Ebola.
Shoam is careful to note in his study that even if one bio-weapons team works at a lab, then it is designated as a bio-weapons facility. There is no clear distinction between military and non-military use of such research, as much of it may also be used for commercial products.
Spike Proteins
Synthetic virology is an emerging science that is widely practiced by labs in countries around the world. The scientific benefits derived from being able to construct artificial viruses are many, namely that they can be used to study previously deadly viruses and develop vaccines against those that may emerge in the future.
The first synthetic virus was created in 2002 as a proof of concept by scientists from the State University of New York. Subsequent artificial viruses include the recreation of the 1918 Spanish flu that appeared after the First World War and killed an estimated 30 million people.
The 2003 SARS pandemic that originated in China accelerated the research into the field. In 2008 scientists from the University of Rochester created a completely artificial SARS like virus the first of its kind, and the largest synthetic genome sequenced at the time.
This specific virus was created to reveal exactly where SARS might have come from and how it might have been transmitted from bats to humans. To test this, the scientists modified the virus to give it a number of spike proteins. Spike proteins are specifically shaped proteins on the virus’ RNA that can penetrate the host cell and infect it. In some viruses like the flu, the spikes cover the molecule and give the virus the appearance of a crown, or “corona” in Latin.
This coronavirus was created with the purpose of explaining how SARS specifically could infect cells. The scientists discovered that their virus infected its host using the ACE2 receptor. ACE2 is an enzyme found in the respiratory tract, and this was adopted as the likeliest explanation for how SARS would infect its hosts. To be sure about this, many different versions of the virus were created for the study, ones that could infect mice, rabbits, and bats, to accurately recreate the conditions of the pandemic.
Since then, scientists have acquired the ability to synthesize any number of viruses. Alarm bells were sounded in the United States after one scientist created an extinct cousin of small pox in his home using mail ordered DNA in 2016.
At the same time, similar events seem to have convinced the Chinese state that research into synthetic biology was vital to its national security. Retired general Zhang Shibo warned in 2017 against the threat from ‘specific ethnic genetic attacks’.
Forbes reported that in 2019 China invested $14.4 billion into the biotechnology industry, compared to the US’ $10 billion investment, and graduated 8 to 10 million students in biotechnology a year. This falls in line with Xi Jinping’s policy of making science and technology the driving force of the economy.
Two of the star scientists at the forefront of such research, named Zhengli Shi and Xing Yige, were involved with researching the binding mechanisms of SARS-like coronaviruses. They were both even involved in a 2015 study that synthetically created a coronavirus that binds onto the ACE2 receptor, just like the one from 2008.
What’s remarkable is that both of these scientists ended up working at the Wuhan Institute of virology in 2019, and were busy researching such receptors at just the same the Wuhan Coronavirus appeared.
When the new coronavirus was analysed by scientists in a study for the Lancet, they found – surprisingly – that the virus was almost identical to SARS, except for the fact that it contained a number of spike proteins that bind onto the ACE2 receptor, just like the one artificially created by the two scientists a few years earlier, the same ones working at a deadly virus lab down the road from where the virus happened to break out.
What are the chances of that happening? Astronomical one might think, probably less than one in a million. The likelier explanation is, of course, that a lab accident caused the virus to infect staff members of the facility and has since gone on to infect hundreds of thousands of people.
This same Lancet study found that 14 of the first 40 patients had no contact with the wet market where the virus was supposed to have originated, including patient zero.
SARS also escaped from a single lab in Beijing a grant total of four times in 2004, and given the number of other lab accidents in China, what’s shocking is that a similar accident hasn’t occurred sooner.
There were other warning signs about the risks of such research, not just from the scientists working in the area, but also the illegal genetic engineering projects carried out by Chinese scientists over the last few years.
Until more experts address the likelihood of an escaped virus, or a whistleblower comes forward, the media reports seem likely to dismiss all evidence as a conspiracy theory. The alternative explanation being that a deadly virus outbreak just happened to occur next to a known bio-weapons facility and a lab where an almost identical virus was being studied.
The Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak was also a conspiracy theory, until eight years later when scientists came forward to reveal the truth about it. The USSR’s reaction to the incident; a fabricated story about a meat market, faking the number of deaths, and deflecting blame onto other departments, have many parallels with the Chinese government’s reaction today.
Until new evidence comes to light we also can’t be sure about the role that the PLA and the bio-weapons facility played in the virus outbreak. We know the bio-products facility was also studying similar viruses and that the two labs coordinated, but to what extent we cannot know.
The coronavirus is in all likelihood, not a bio-weapon, but actually a bio-defense project that went wrong. The virus was probably created in an attempt either to study SARS, or to create a vaccine against a similar virus, which is all the more tragic. We can only hope that in the near future, someone from the lab will be brave enough to step forward and tell the world the truth, just like the scientists from the Soviet Union.
Whether the virus is manmade or not, the government’s handling of the outbreak has led to the deaths of many thousands needlessly. More than anything the incident highlights that such research in the hands of a totalitarian state is never neutral, and that in the wrong hands, the best intentions of the scientific community can yield devastating results.