The COVID-19 vaccine developed by Chinese company CanSino, with whom Ottawa partnered before the deal fell through, used technology developed in a 2016 paper on Ebola by a now-fired scientist from a government laboratory in Winnipeg and a Chinese major general, an expert says.
The government’s partnership on the clinical development of the CanSino vaccine, first announced on May 12, 2020, fell apart on Aug. 26, 2020, after Beijing blocked shipment of the vaccine to Canada.
CanSino’s vaccine was developed in partnership with China’s People’s Liberation Army, an effort that was led by Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, a military medical scientist. Chen was lauded by Chinese leader Xi Jinping in September 2020 and honoured in a ceremony for her role in developing the vaccine.
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, a scientist at the National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg who has since been fired, has collaborated with Chen and the two have published their research in scientific journals, including one in 2016 on an adenovirus vaccine for Ebola. A 2017 correction to the paper says Qiu and Chen “contributed equally to this paper.”
Qiu and her husband and fellow scientist Keding Cheng along with a group of Chinese students were escorted from the NML in July 2019 amid a police investigation. The couple was formally fired from the lab in January 2021.