FPI / August 11, 2022
Geostrategy-Direct.com
Communist China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology carried out gain-of-function research on a virus that is much deadlier than Covid-19, according to recent testimony before the U.S. Senate.
Steven Quay, a medical doctor, told the Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee on emerging threats that the Wuhan lab, where the coronavirus is believed by many to have originated, carried out synthetic biology research on the Nipah virus genome in December 2019, around the time the first Covid cases surfaced in Wuhan.
“The Nipah virus was in an infectious clone format,” Quay testified. “Nipah is a BSL-4 level pathogen, and a CDC-designated bioterrorism agent. This is the most dangerous gain-of-function research I have ever encountered. We should assume this research continues to this day at the WIV.”
If confirmed, China’s research on Nipah could violate the Biological Weapon Convention (BWC), which China has signed, that prohibits work on agents that can be used as bioweapons, security correspondent Bill Gertz noted in a Washington Times report.
Nipah is smaller in size than the virus behind Covid, known as SARS-COV-2, and is less transmissible.
“But it is one of the deadliest viruses, with a 60% lethality,” said Dr. Quay, chief executive officer of Atossa Therapeutics, a Seattle-based pharmaceutical company.
“This is 60 times deadlier than SARS2,” he said, using the shortened term for the virus behind Covid-19. “The lab where the human specimens were processed is not the highest level biosafety lab, BSL-4, but was in the BSL-2 or -3 facility.”
Over the past two years, the communist regime in Beijing has canceled meetings with U.S. officials to discuss American BWC compliance concerns.
The State Department, in a fact sheet released in the last days of the Trump administration, said U.S. intelligence has concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in secret military work, Gertz reported.
“Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military,” the report said, noting classified research and laboratory animal experiments for the People’s Liberation Army since at least 2017.
Unlike COVID, Nipah is unable to spread in the air. But if the research involved producing an aerosolized version of the virus, the danger of a deadlier pandemic is possible, Dr. Quay testified.
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