Slack / Private Message Drop — page 872

Bavari wasn't the only senior figure from USAMRIID to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In October 2018, a senior USAMRIID laboratory director flew to the institute to give a presentation on ebola in the facility's No. 1 conference room. The laboratory director was presented with a commemorative medal on behalf of the institute, according to a write-up of the visit. And at a hotel in central Wuhan in May 2017, a former commander at USAMRIID participated in a workshop with the institute's top scientists. The workshop was called the "Second China-US Workshop on the Challenges of Emerging Infections, Laboratory Safety and Global Health Security". Gain-of-function research, laboratory risks and gene editing were key topics during the conference held from May 17-19. Shi and George F. Gao, the director at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, gave presentations at the conference hosted by China's Academy of Sciences and attended by the director of Wuhan Institute of Virology BSL-4 laboratory, Yuan Zhiming. A meeting report stated that the US commander "discussed the evolution of biosecurity thinking in the US, noting only one accidental death -- and not from a true select agent -- is associated with the US Select Agent program (and three deaths before 1969 when the US offensive biological program was halted)". "He compared that to more than 700,000 hospital-acquired infections and 400,000 deaths due to medical mistakes in recent years," the report said. The commander said there was no single solution to eliminating bio-safety incidents but international collaboration would help. Stanford University professor David Relman, who also attended this conference, said they visited the newly built BSL-4 laboratory but it "was not yet active, and there were no experiments taking place with BL3/BL4 agents". "These discussions were cordial and useful insofar as they provided an opportunity to develop at least some superficial working relationships," Relman said. "I didn't hear about anything in particular that concerned me, but that wasn't surprising since the presentations and comments on both sides were somewhat pre-planned and a bit orchestrated." The virus journal The editorial board of Shi's journal consists of People's Liberation Army members, a virologist who was kicked out of Canada for security breaches, the director of China's Centre for Disease Control, many esteemed international scientists and two employees at USAMRIID. Bavari sits on the editorial board, as does Jens Kuhn, the virology lead at Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a contractor under Fort Detrick's "Integrated Research Facility Leadership and Scientists" program. Gao, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention director, is also on Shi's journal board, along with Yong-Zhen Zhang, the scientist responsible for sharing the gene sequence of Covid-19. Another member is connected to the PLA. Yi-Gang Tong was previously director of the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology of the Academy of Military Medical Science, which sits under the PLA. Pathogens in the mail One concerned member of the editorial board is award-winning virologist Xiangguo Qiu, who was escorted out of a Canadian laboratory in July 2019 after being caught sending deadly virus samples back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Qiu, her husband Kedin Cheng and her students from China were removed from Canada's only BSL-4 laboratory amid an official investigation. Four months earlier, a shipment containing highly virulent viruses -- ebola and nipah -- were sent from her laboratory to China. It was reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had requested the shipment. Chemical and biological warfare specialist Dany Shoham, from the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies, wrote an article claiming Qiu had made at least five trips over the academic year 2017-18 alone to the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Qiu had also done joint research with USAMRIID on ebola, which was received by Nature in October 2018. Bavari denied there was any connection between USAMRIID and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. "US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where I was the chief science officer there, has no connection whatsoever to Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other institute in China," Bavari said. "Being on an editorial board of a journal is not the same as helping a Chinese institute of this and that to do something. They're just two different things." He also played down the visits by other researchers to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. "So at the institute they may have friends there, OK, they're Chinese, so absolutely, that (visits) had happened, I have no doubt," he said. "But officially, to say that USAMRIID itself was actually collaborating, for example, with Chinese Institute of Virology, or Wuhan Institute, that's just not true. We absolutely had no connection to them whatsoever. Not under my watch." In collaboration with Gilead Sciences of Foster City, they had success in 2015 with a treatment that blocked the ebola virus's ability to replicate. The treatment was an antiviral compound called GS-5734 that became known as Remdesivir. Bavari was one of the scientists behind this antiviral treatment. The drug was touted as a potential