FBI seized Chinese military COVID shipment months before Winnipeg lab scandal
The same Wuhan-linked research network now appears in both American and Canadian national security files.
More than a year before COVID-19 emerged, U.S. authorities intercepted coronavirus material allegedly shipped from a Chinese military laboratory to an American university researcher—exposing the same Wuhan research network later implicated in Canada’s explosive Winnipeg lab scandal.
Newly released U.S. Department of Homeland Security records, made public by Sen. Rand Paul, show border officers at Detroit Metropolitan Airport seized three undeclared biological vials in November 2018 after a courier admitted they had been sent by Yusen Zhou of China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences for University of Minnesota virologist Fang Li.
The shipment was considered serious enough to be turned over to the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate because it “may pose a risk to the national security of the United States,” as first reported by The Bureau.
The timing is striking.
Just weeks earlier, on Oct. 12, 2018, security guards at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory stopped a Wuhan Institute of Virology technician attempting to leave Winnipeg’s Level-4 facility carrying 10 unidentified vials from the laboratory of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu.
Canadian intelligence would later conclude Qiu secretly transferred scientific knowledge and materials to Chinese state and military institutions while using Canada’s highest-security lab to strengthen Beijing’s capacity to work with dangerous pathogens.
