Canada sending China lethal viruses

Tom Blckwell reports in the National Post,

Bio-warfare experts question why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China.

'I think the Chinese activities … are highly suspicious,' one expert said, after it was revealed a Winnipeg lab sent samples of Ebola and henipavirus to China.

In a table-top pandemic exercise at Johns Hopkins University last year, a pathogen based on the emerging Nipah virus was released by fictional extremists, killing 150 million people.

A less apocalyptic scenario mapped out by a blue-ribbon U.S. panel envisioned Nipah being dispersed by terrorists and claiming over 6,000 American lives.

Scientists from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) have also said the highly lethal bug is a potential bio-weapon.

But this March that same lab shipped samples of the henipavirus family and of Ebola to China, which has long been suspected of running a secretive biological warfare (BW) program.

...James Giordano, a neurology professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow in biowarfare at the U.S. Special Operations Command, said it’s worrisome on a few fronts.

China’s growing investment in bio-science, looser ethics around gene-editing and other cutting-edge technology and integration between government and academia raise the spectre of such pathogens being weaponized, he said.

That could mean an offensive agent, or a modified germ let loose by proxies, for which only China has the treatment or vaccine, said Giordano, co-head of Georgetown’s Brain Science and Global Law and Policy Program.

“This is not warfare, per se,” he said. “But what it’s doing is leveraging the capability to act as global saviour, which then creates various levels of macro and micro economic and bio-power dependencies.”

...In a 2015 academic paper, Shoham – of Bar-Ilan’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies – asserts that more than 40 Chinese facilities are involved in bio-weapon production.

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