The Winnipeg Incident - One in the list of many

Such are the coincidences of our times

One of my interests regarding synthetic biology and labs lies further from the overly politically charged rhetoric and more on my former side of things. Intelligence. Specifically how Intelligence services recruit, use, and otherwise manipulate scientists as means of secretive weapon development. Colloquially referred to as biowarfare. So my focus here will be distinct from other writers, or at least I hope so.

At the height of the pandemic one specific event took place, one significant event, barely talked about anywhere, a few days of conversation here and there and it was forgotten. The Winnipeg Incident. Two scientists were silently removed from Canada’s most prominent and one of the world’s leading research biological laboratories in the world, later made public they were sending pathogen samples to China, illegally.

Trudeau used the federal government and fought hard for no information to ever be made public (after all China holds an absurd amount of influence and economic leverage via different means in the country, and probably some non-trivial info on many government officials). Yesterday much of the content was made public, if you are interested, you can find the PDF here. You can find an extremely well-written report covering other aspects here.

I went through the entire document, and while there are many “spicy” sections, the ones that caught the social media eye the mode are often more open to interpretation if you are a layperson or… well, no other way to say it, has no experiencing smuggling “the hard stuff”.

Like this section.

Many e-mails in the documents read as them being very frustrated with all the regulations in place to avoid exactly what happened. The exportation of dangerous pathogens to unvetted laboratories or third parties. The section that really got my attention was quite literally, page 1.

So far we had little information or confirmation of what was exactly “shipped”, or even any semblance of message between the scientists working in the lab. Some of the Ebola strains were made using reverse genetics, something not rare in world-leading laboratories. What really got my attention was the second one. Nipah.

It has been known for a few years the WIV and the PLA (China’s army) have a vast interest in Nipah viruses for dual use, both for the prevention of disease, since mortality can get pretty high and of course, weaponization. What is interesting is that Qui insisted on getting Nipah’s cousin, the Henipahvirus.

What is most interesting is the following. In mid-2022, China experienced an outbreak of a novel Henipavirus, named Langya Henipavirus, its most closely related “cousin” would be the Mojiang Henipahvirus. A partial source of some of my next thoughts can be found below.

The mysterious outbreak of Henipavirus

As I said privately to a couple of friends, the Mojiang mine must be one of the world’s wettest dreams for a synthetic biologist, since not only it is a source of coronaviruses, most likely the bearer of the ancestral version of SARS-CoV-2, a novel Henipahvirus, and probably other pathogens I am missing was “found there”.

One of the world’s most gifted molecular geneticists, Daoyu, was the first to find Nipah contamination in the very first few sequences uploaded from SARS-CoV-2, these were not artifacts but actual infectious clones. In certain Chinese (science), and Western (Intelligence) circles it has been whispered China has a massive interest in weaponizing Nipahviruses, with WIV being at the helm of the effort.

You can imagine my surprise when I found one of the pathogens sent to China via very lax methods was exactly this one, the other being many strains of Ebola, which shouldn’t be a surprise, Ebola is the most sought-after “bioweapon class” of pathogens. Both scientists in this incident possess ties to the PLA and China’s shadowy bioweapon program.

Stealing and smuggling pathogens is nothing new, with many of the culprits having China as a destination, that is how espionage and IP theft works. But a highly coincidental timing when the FBI in 2018 and 2019 tracked Chinese individuals smuggling viable samples of both MERS and SARS.

Scientists love becoming spies. The CIA loves recruiting academics.

The physicist Klaus Fuchs made significant contributions to the Manhattan Project while sharing vital information with the Soviets.

The CIA agent tapped softly on the hotel room door. After the keynote speeches, panel discussions and dinner, the conference attendees had retired for the night. Audio and visual surveillance of the room showed that the nuclear scientist’s minders from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were sleeping, but he was still awake. Sure enough, he opened the door, alone.

According to a person familiar with this encounter, which took place about a decade ago, the agency had been preparing it for months. Through a business front, it had funded and staged the conference at an unsuspecting foreign centre of scientific research, invited speakers and guests, and planted operatives among the kitchen workers and other staff, just so it could entice the nuclear expert out of Iran, separate him for a few minutes from his guards, and pitch him one-to-one. A last-minute snag had almost derailed the plans: the target switched hotels because the conference’s preferred hotel cost $75 more than his superiors in Iran were willing to spend.

What is worse is when things just go missing, like when the Pasteur Institute in Paris lost 2.000 vials of SARS and also to the unauthorized import of an inactivated form of the virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) on a flight from Korea to the Pasteur in 2015. (Pasteur helped build the WIV). Some of the scientists involved in these incidents also had PLA ties. My point and question here is how many of these novel viruses are not extremely well-constructed synthetic pathogens that “accidentally” got leaked in the pursuit of bioweapons ? Somewhat conspiratorial and out there ? Absolutely. Yet…

Well since sometimes I share some of my insanity, here is another little nugget of crazy.

After spending what could amount to a considerable amount of time in the last 4 years on these complex subjects, I came to wonder, multiple times and within reason, if both SARS and MERS were not “leaks” from early biological programs. To this day, the origins of both viruses are contested and only the proximal suspects push the narrative it must be from animal origins because >insert boring and not sound arguments here<.

20 years researching a family of viruses is long time to design something quite advanced, elegant wouldn’t you say ?

The following article came from user Maarten De Cock on Twitter.

Infection risk assessment due to contaminant leakage in biological laboratories in different scenarios - the case of COVID-19 virus

Aerosol exposure in laboratory settings is very hard to track, most scientists will be completely unaware of exposure and if they are infectious or not until symptoms arise (therefore transmission took place before). One would say it is quite the timing the Wall Street Journal just published an article titled “Where Did Covid Came From?” in which the author proposes after analyzing the current evidence on the other side of the aisle, SARS-CoV-2 was engineered and there is a high likelihood it leaked somehow.

I don’t think SARS-CoV-2 was released, but accidentally leaked, and over 100 years of evidence points towards it. If even the US suffered an absurd amount of accidents with dangerous pathogens, it would be no surprise China’s lax biosecurity would one day backfire.

And given I am aware I have readers at many different positions in laboratories, government, and other places. Does any reader have any clue what happened to that Sudan biolab, which even the WHO announced high risk of biological hazards when conflict spewed into Sudan’s capital ? I remember clearly the amount of private jets burning fuel fast, extremely fast toward the surroundings of that laboratory, given the quick “whispers” in the grapevine of GRU elements getting inside the lab.

Entirely plausible given Wagner’s role in the region and Sudan’s conflict.

How much tomfoolery is going on under our noses ? I rarely but sometimes do ponder about that. I am fully aware that these are the events we know of and got to see a little bit of the light of day, one must wonder how many we don’t know by sheer chance of fate of the incompetence not ending in large disease outbreaks…

My next article will be an “annotation” amalgamation, it won’t be written anywhere near the same veneer as others, it will be an “info dump”, maybe even some of my actual handwritten notes, I just want to put these out there. Just a For your information of some sort.

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