Sure, but also knowing genetic sequence of ebola could be uaed to weaponize it also right? You have to have protocols. You can’t assume everyone has an altruistic vision, and leak data
Sure. My stance is it and she may seem innocen; trying to help China with Ebola, but we don’t know what China might do with it–would they make a bioweapon?
She may have been duped into sharing, or in China’s normal tactic: threaten your family to get cooperation.
Her action of letting non cleared people into a secured lab is justifiable termination on its own.
The document show the service had a more rosy initial assessment of Qiu's motivation, noting in spring of 2020 that she could be "susceptible ... based on the belief in the power of science to help humanity."
But as the investigation went deeper, CSIS's concerns deepened. A few months later, CSIS wrote Qiu was using the level 4 lab in Canada "as a base to assist China to improve its capability to fight highly-pathogenic pathogens" and "achieved brilliant results."
They're the same picture
Like I get it, you want to secure medical research. And she was likely inappropriately sharing unpublished data against lab policy. But the tone shift they're trying to make doesn't connect for me.
There's a whole lot of bullshit going on around this story. People are acting like she violated national security interests, but they can't articulate how. Like she shipped ebola to wuhan, but she wasn't fired for that because cooperation with high level labs is kind of important (and I'm sure wuhan already HAD a sample of ebola before she even shipped it). The findings she shared would've been shared eventually(and the reason it started a kerfluffle is because China shared them and included her in as a co-author in a paper and included her in patents for ebolavirus treatments). You can still say she was working "against Canada" if you really want to twist it, but that's not really what happened. She violated policy and got fired, then said the firing was unjust. The potential damage to Canada comes from intellectual property interests but there's not much money in treating Ebola in the first place.
Researchers working at the National Microbiology Lab on cutting-edge, high-containment research are not allowed to send anything to other countries or labs without the intellectual property office negotiating and having a material transfer agreement in place, in case the material sent leads to a notable discovery.
Let’s say if she shared that information with Turkey or Nicaragua or Zimbabwe, resulting in their improved capabilities to fight pathogens, and had deep ties with their government (including being part of programs training Turkish nationals), would that be a breach of security?
I sure hope people are sharing this research with Zimbabwe. They've got endemic marburg virus to deal with. The frank truth is, for something like Ebola, sequencing it isn't going to change how you weaponize it. You weaponize it by breeding it and then blowing it up at low heat so it spreads over a large area. Any contact with it leads to infection, it's a nasty bug.
This is different, than say, anthrax weaponization. You can go to cattle farms, dig in the dirt, and culture it, and you will eventually isolate anthrax. That strain, however, won't really go into spore form well and won't be super pathogenic. You'll need to infect a bunch of sheep with it and try to get a better strain, like they did in my hometown at Ft. Detrick. Then you use specific drying methods to make it turn into weapons grade spores. That's why specific strains are important with anthrax and you could theoretically use something like CRISPR to make your own that's better than what you can find digging in the dirt.
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