How the University of Minnesota May Have Contributed to China’s Biowarfare Program

 By Dr. Lawrence Sellin and Anna Chen

The COVID-19 virus was created in a laboratory and it was part of China’s biowarfare program.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has overall responsibility for that program, which is executed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The biowarfare program consists of three levels.

The first level is the core, secret military level.

Layered on top of the core level are China’s universities, civilian research institutions and medical companies.

Everyone needs to understand that, in China, there is no difference between military and civilian research. The fusion of those research and development sectors was mandated by the 2016 CCP Thirteenth Five-Year Plan.

It is the middle layer that has allowed the PLA to access international knowledge and skills, particularly from the U.S., all of which has contributed to the advancement of China’s virus research programs, including bioweapons development.

A potential example of the PLA gaining access to U.S. knowledge, skills and funding is the laboratory of Fang Li, who graduated from Beijing University and received a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Fang Li has been a frequent research collaborator with Zheng-Li Shi, the “bat woman” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Shibo Jiang, a graduate of China’s military medical universities and a long-time and extensive collaborator with China’s People’s Liberation Army.

But Fang Li also appears to have connections with what is believed to be part of China’s core military and secret biowarfare program.

Fang Li obtained a faculty position at the University of Minnesota and has been continuously funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

After establishing himself at the University of Minnesota and as an example of the CCP’s “scientific chain migration,” Fang Li began inviting Chinese researchers into his laboratory, mainly from Wuhan University and Huazhong Agricultural University, also in Wuhan.

From Wuhan University were Yang Yang (now at Iowa State University), Lang Chen, Yushun Wan, and Jian Shang, who also acts as an official recruiter for Fang Li, presumably seeking more CCP researchers.

From Huazhong Agricultural University were Guiqing Peng and Ye Gang.

We emphasized the importance of Chinese veterinary and agricultural research as contributors to a biowarfare program, one element being the Military Veterinary Research Institute in Changchun, led by General Ningyi Jin, shown below giving a lecture at Huazhong Agricultural University in 2018.

For over 20 years, the Huazhong Agricultural University directly collaborated with the Military Veterinary Research Institute on its J-203-1-01 project “Research and Application of Key Technologies for the Prevention and Control of Important Animal Viral Diseases.”

At one time there was a 4th PLA Veterinary School in Wuhan before it merged with the Military Veterinary Research Institute in Changchun.

Little trace of the 4th PLA Veterinary School remains on the internet, but if you search it plus “Wuhan,” the results yield Huazhong Agricultural University and its animal testing facility.

We identified the Wuhan University Animal Biosafety Level Three (ABSL-3) testing facility as a potential origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, a consequence of the non-human primate tests being conducted there.

All the PLA-connected facilities shown on the map were within the epicenter of the early outbreak at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fang Li, together with the “bat woman” Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, conducted detailed collaborative research involving an analysis and artificial manipulation of coronavirus spike proteins, structures regulating human infectivity.

It is yet to be determined how much of Fang Li’s research may have found its way into China’s biological warfare program via his extensive collaboration with Wuhan research institutions and their links to the People’s Liberation Army.

 

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired from an international career in business and medical research with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq.