A laboratory in Wuhan, China to study viruses administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences under control of the CCP Discipline Inspection Commission. The lab is near the site where the Communist Party of China claims the Wuhan virus was first detected in December 2019.
The lab was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory. It has received a total of $7.4 million in grants from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a U.S. agency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci.[1] In 2015, the lab was upgraded to biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) with the help of French engineers. It is first such lab in China. SARS escaped from a Beijing lab twice in 2004 and the upgrade was intended to address this problem.[2] In January 2018 U.S. embassy officials in Beijing warned about safety risks at the Wuhan lab researching infectious diseases, including coronaviruses from bats. One of two “Sensitive but Unclassified” U.S. State Department cables warned about biosecurity and management problems at the lab.[3]
At the time of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, the WIV was run by Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee Changcai HE, a CCP apparatchik. Changcai HE was the chairman of the corporate trade union of Wuhan Branch from January 2004 to September 2013, and the Corporate Secretary of the Party at Wuhan Branch from October 2005 to July 2013. Since August 2013, Changcai HE has been the deputy director general of Wuhan Institute of Virology.[4]
Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who studied Chinese biological warfare, said the Wuhan Institute of Virology is linked to Beijing’s covert bioweapons program. He said the secure Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory at the institute was engaged in research on the Ebola, Nipah and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses.
The Wuhan virology institute is under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but certain laboratories within it “have linkage with the PLA or BW-related elements within the Chinese defense establishment,” he said. Suspicions were raised about the Wuhan Institute of Virology when a group of Chinese virologists working in Canada improperly sent to China samples of what he described as some of the deadliest viruses on earth, including the Ebola virus.[5]
