New Commons report wisely recommends blacklisting the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its researchers from receiving Canadian funding

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Canadian public health authorities didn’t have to let the Wuhan Institute of Virology infiltrate and co-opt our country’s highest-security biolab. The warning signs had been there for years, and no one to our knowledge was holding a gun to the heads of the rubber-stampers who authorized a security-threat-flagged scientist’s shipment of live Ebola back to the motherland.

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That’s part of why the latest report from the House of Commons committee on China, released Tuesday (conveniently, on the day of the American presidential election), is such a puzzling read. Though a lot of the information contained within has previously trickled into public knowledge, through reporting, committee hearings and released records, the Commons committee’s synthesis shows how Canadian authorities reacted with the haste of a slug — and continue to leave gaping holes in the security of research that can literally be weaponized against human health.

The report sets out a comedy of errors that preceded the 2019 expulsion of scientists Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng, both Canadian citizens from China working at the Winnipeg National Microbiology Lab, who were ousted for “administrative” reasons.

The husband-wife pair was hired back in 2003 and 2006, respectively, but a decade later began showing suspicious links to Chinese research programs. In 2012, wife Qiu began collaborating with a Chinese military virologist specializing in “bio-defence and bio-terrorism.”

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