A well-known columnist takes to his bully pulpit on the NML security breach

Or, The Perils of Op Ed worst-case writing and torqued evidence

The release of a large set of records detailing security breaches at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg and a set of investigations that ultimately led to the firing of two scientists at the NML, Drs. Qiu and Cheng, continues to offer irresistible ammunition for media commentators.  One of the most inflammatory was published on March 9 by Andrew Coyne, a regular in-house contributor of opinion pieces for the Globe and Mail and a familiar on CBC’s flagship, The National.  

Coyne’s long article in the Globe was entitled, “Will anyone ever be held to account for China’s infiltration of the Winnipeg Lab?”  ^[1]

This piece, because of some very dubious claims it makes, in my view deserves fact-checking and comment.

It behooves us to be cautious when individuals are held up in public and are pilloried as enemies of the state. We have been down that path before in the early days of the Cold War and have witnessed the extremes that can be generated. Dare I utter the dread word—McCarthyism. (Yes, it happened in Canada).

In his first two paragraphs of his lengthy article, Coyne argues that the Trudeau government was engaged in a cover-up, not of any “ordinary security breach” but a “national security disaster.”   The polarity here is interesting. No one in their right mind would argue that the security breaches discovered at the NML were in any sense “ordinary,” but neither did they amount to anything close to a national security disaster, unless you severely torque the available evidence.

Coyne’s claim about a “national security disaster”  is actually countered by the argument advanced by the ad-hoc committee of Parliamentarians who had access to all the NML records.  In the view of the committee what the government was trying to suppress was not news of a disaster but the embarrassment caused by an alarmingly lax security culture at the NML.  This is what the Parliamentarians wrote:

“The Committee feels the majority of the PHAC material should be lifted. The information appears to be mostly about protecting the organization from embarrassment for failures in policy and implementation, not legitimate national security concerns, and its release is essential to hold the Government to account.”

But that is not all. Coyne himself backtracks from his sensationalized claim later in his Op Ed. Instead, he pivots to a statement that, “if we are lucky, we may find that the potential for damage from this appalling security breach was never realized, or remains limited.” I guess that such a statement at the opening would not have pinned enough eyeballs.

Coyne adds another frightener early in his Op Ed, stating that Drs. Qiu and Cheng “used the NML ‘as a base’ in support of China’s biomedical research efforts, passing confidential information, restricted genetic material and even lethal viruses to China.”

This passage sets the tone for some of the more detailed charges that Coyne lays against Dr. Qiu in particular.  It is important to note that the phrase “used the NML as a base” is actually drawn from a nomination for an “international cooperation award” written by the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) in 2016.  It is not, perhaps I should repeat, not,  an assessment by CSIS or any Canadian institution. The precise wording of that nomination, according to a CSIS record, was as follows:

Ms Qiu “used Canada’s Level 4 Biosecurity Laboratory as a base to assist China to improve its capability to fight highly pathogenic pathogens…and achieved brilliant results.”

I count 17 charges laid by Coyne against the two NML scientists. Some are overlapping and duplicative, but I suppose the greater the number of charges you lay, the greater the weight of guilt appears to be.

 Some of the charges are at least partially true, especially when it comes to Dr. Qiu’s collaboration with Chinese scientists and institutions and her failure to be honest and open about aspects of those collaborations during interviews with CSIS.  That she and her husband, Dr. Cheng,  frequently flouted security protocols at the NML is also clear.

It is certainly true that Dr. Qiu was instrumental in arranging a shipment of Ebola and Henipah virus strains requested by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The idea of such a transfer was first suggested to Dr. Qiu  by the WIV in May 2018. The shipment took place in March 2019 and was fully approved.   Over 220 (mind-numbing) pages of the 623 page document release package to Parliament details the planning and shipment of the Ebola and Henipah virus strains to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Read and be my guest.

 It was uplifting to know that emergency response teams were activated to monitor the shipment  (carefully packed in dry ice) as it left Pearson airport on a commercial Air Canada flight to Beijing.

Where are the charges torqued by Coyne, to the point that they don’t fit the available evidence?

Some involve suggestions that Dr. Qiu took “Chinese gold.” At one point Coyne states that: Dr. Qiu “took money from a Chinese government fund set up to acquire Western technology.”

The reference (it is somewhat unclear) appears to be to an application that Qiu made under the Chinese “Thousand Talents” program that would have seen her work, part time, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Evidence for the application exists. According to a CSIS security screening investigation, Qiu began a process to apply to a Chinese Thousand Talent Program in October 2017; the application was subsequently submitted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in January 2018. Her work term under the program as a visiting researcher was to have taken place between March 2019 and March 2022.   But by early March 2019, a fact-finding investigation report into Qui and Cheng had been submitted to PHAC, which launched a whole series of subsequent investigations. There is no evidence that Qiu took up the visiting appointment at the WIV or received any funds from the Thousand Talents program.

Despite this, Coyne flatly claims that Qiu “was in the employ of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Let me repeat—there is no evidence for that statement. To his statement about Qiu’s alleged employment at the Wuhan Institute, Coyne adds that the WIV is “the lab from which it is widely suspected the coronavirus leaked.” Widely suspected by who? The suspicion was first aired by Donald Trump, noted truth teller. It has never been adopted as an agreed judgement by the US intelligence community and many scientists reject the claim as implausible and deeply politicised. ^[2]   But “widely suspected” easily travels as an eye-catching phrase.

CSIS investigations did find evidence that Dr. Qiu had applied to other similar Chinese programs, which would have involved substantial funding. One concerned an invitation launched by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Kunming Institute of Zoology (KIZ) to have her apply for a “2019 Annual International Talent Program.”  Dr. Qiu partially completed the application, which would have involved a visit to the KIZ in April 2019.  There is no evidence that this research partnership ever took place or that Dr. Qiu profited from it.

Also in that vein was evidence of a draft employment agreement between Dr. Qiu and Hebei Medical University, which would have involved Dr. Qiu working for two months a year at Hebei, with substantial research funding, between July 2018 and June 2022. The CSIS investigation records that the agreement was “ultimately unfinalized.”

CSIS also uncovered evidence of a Chinese bank account held jointly by Drs. Qiu and Cheng.  Dr. Qui was vague on the details but told her CSIS interrogators that it held only a limited amount of money and that she used it as a convenience when on visits to China. CSIS had no information to the contrary.

Perhaps the most sinister-sounding allegation of all involved Coyne’s claim that

“CSIS found that Dr. Qiu worked with Dr. Shi as head of ‘overall planning’ on an animal infection project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—something about a ‘synthetic bat filovirus—at the WIV between June 2019 and May 2021.”

Here is what the CSIS record (in its second security screening report of June 20, 2020) actually said. It found that the WIV approved a project (“WIV project 2”) that was to take place between June 2019 and May 2021. Dr. Qiu “was listed as being in charge of ‘Overall Planning’.” The study was to involve bat filoviruses. Dr. Qiu’s collaborator at the WIV on this project was identified as “Individual 1” in the CSIS documents. This same individual had collaborated in 2015 with US counterparts to create a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus. The study was reviewed and allowed to be continued by the US National Institutes of Health. Individual 1 is clearly Dr. Zheng-Li Shi.

Although there was evidence of a plan for Dr. Qiu to be involved in this project, there is no evidence that she ever actually worked on it (the anticipated timeframe was June 2019 to May 2021, remember).

There is a big difference between a statement that reads, as Coyne has it, “Dr. Qiu worked with..” and “Dr. Qui had planned to work with…”

It is worthy of note that in May 2021 a group of Chinese researchers including Zheng-Li Shi posted on the internet a copy of a paper entitled: “Identification of a novel lineage bat SARS-related coronaviruses that use bat ACE2 receptor.” ^[3]

The contributors to the research were all Chinese scientists drawn from either the WIV or the Chinese Academy of Sciences in  Beijing.  The conclusion of the research paper was that the “novel lineage” under study was an unlikely source for COVID-19 compared to pangolin (a mammal known as a ”scaly anteater”)  or other strains harboured in nature. Dr. Qiu was not a member of the research team or a contributor to the paper.

Torquing the evidence in such ways is not acceptable.

The question is where does it lead Coyne? Answer--he wants to make a political point about accountability.  Fair enough. Except that he argues that security cultures in departments and agencies are ultimately set by Ministers and the Prime Minister.  These are the heads he is after.

But nope.

Security cultures are, in reality, set by Deputy Ministers and at lower levels of official accountability within departments and agencies. Ultimately security culture is meant to be regulated and overseen by a class of officials called Departmental Security officers (DSO).  The real question is whether DSOs have the power and authority to make security culture stick, including to enforce the new “Standard on Security Screening” laid down in 2014 following the Delisle spy case. In the case of the NML they clearly did not at the time; but the documents reveal that they still did their part in trying to call attention to security threats even if they were a bit of a voice in the wilderness.

Coyne wants answers to what went wrong at the NML.  The answers are in the documents and in the work of the ad hoc committee of parliamentarians and its panel of judges to unveil the record. He should read them more carefully.

CSIS security investigations, unveiled in those documents (with some redactions), came to the conclusion that both Drs. Qiu and Cheng posed security risks (especially future risks) because of their behaviour and outlook, a claim that the available evidence fully supports. As CSIS put it flatly in their security report on Dr. Qiu, “We assess that despite her enormous scientific knowledge and contributions, her behaviour is incompatible with holding a Government of Canada security clearance.”

Both Drs. Qiu and Cheng pledged to change their behaviours and pay more attention to the security environment and security protocols, but that did not sway the powers that be at the Public Health Agency of Canada. At a time of deepening geopolitical tension with China, security risks, even prospective ones, could not be contemplated.

The real question left unanswered is whether the Minister of Health, Mark Holland’s, bald assertion that the security breaches at the NML have all been fixed since 2019 can and will be demonstrated. That would be worthy of a follow-up study by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and/or a performance audit by the Office of the Auditor General.

The principle should be verify, not just trust.  

The same goes for Op Ed writing, even by the likes of Mr. Coyne, especially from a bully pulpit.

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^[1]  Andrew Coyne, The Globe and Mail, March 9, 2024, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-will-anyone-ever-be-held-to-account-for-chinas-infiltration-of-the/

^[2] US, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-Summary-of-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf; for an account of the debate surrounding the question of COVID’s origins, see Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Benjamin Mueller, New York Times, “Lab Leak or not? How Politics shaped the battle over COVID’s origins,” March 19, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/us/politics/covid-origins-lab-leak-politics.html

^[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34263709/