I’m on vacation, supposedly keeping my mind away from all the troubles in the world, but the Daily Mail offers an eye-popping scoop, relating to the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist who began work on a vaccine for Covid-19 in November 2019, before almost anyone else on the planet had even heard of the virus.
Zhou, who worked for the People’s Liberation Army and was collaborating with Wuhan scientists at the time of the outbreak, died in mysterious circumstances in May 2020, aged 54.
US investigators are said to have been told ‘Zhou fell from the roof of the Institute’, although this has not been confirmed.
Oh, I’m sure he was just checking out the view and leaned over too far. I would say that this Russian habit of important people falling out of windows must be contagious, but as we know, the Chinese government is habitually reluctant to label anything as contagious.
From the full Senate report into Covid’s origin, released in April:
November 2019 also appears to be the timeframe that PLA researchers began development of at least two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Professor Zhou Yusen, Director of the 5th Institute at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), worked with the WIV, and possibly at the WIV, episodically, for several years prior to the pandemic. Zhou or AMMS researchers may have been working at the WIV no later than the Fall of 2019 conducting research for a paper that he coauthored with two WIV researchers, Shi Zhengli and Chen Jing, on a known adverse effect of SARS-related vaccines and antibody treatments. There is reason to believe Zhou was engaged in SARS-related coronavirus animal vaccine research with WIV researchers beginning no later than the Summer or early Fall of 2019. Zhou submitted one of the first COVID-19 vaccine patents on February 24, 2020.
The patent includes mouse-derived serological data from vaccine-related experiments which experts, consulted with during this investigation, assess could not have been completed unless Zhou’s team began work on vaccine development before the known outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late December 2019. The research required both access to the sequence of and the live SARS-CoV-2 virus. Several experts assessed that Zhou likely would have had to start this vaccine development research no later than November 2019 to achieve the February patent submission date. Zhou later published transgenic mouse infection and vaccine challenge studies in mice, including humanized mice and non-human primates. The location(s) where Zhou’s animal vaccine challenge studies were performed was not disclosed. There is reason to believe that these vaccine experiments were performed at the original WIV’s downtown Wuhan campus and possibly at the Wuhan University Institute of Animal Models located approximately a mile from the WIV.
It is extremely likely that Zhou Yusen knew a lot of state secrets about what was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, how the Chinese government learned about Covid-19, and perhaps how the whole pandemic started. The country’s internal security services had an enormous incentive to make sure he never publicly disclosed anything he shouldn’t; dead men tell no tales.
Here’s what that Senate report stated about what was known about Zhou Yusen’s death:
Sometime in late May or early June 2020, Zhou Yusen died under unusual and mysterious circumstances. Zhou was the virologist and vaccinologist at the PLA AMMS Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology who collaborated with the WIV on coronavirus research in 2019, 1390 and who lead a team that became the first in China to submit a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine on February 24, 2020. Zhou was reportedly around 54 years old at the time of death and had no known illnesses. No PRC media reports disclosed the cause of his death. In fact, there was no contemporaneous confirmation of his death at all, which is why the exact date of his death could not be established through publicly available sources.
The state-run and party-run media in China, including military media outlets, simply did not acknowledge Zhou’s death. It is highly unusual for the PRC official press, particularly military outlets such as the PLA Daily, to not mark the passing of a decorated PLA scientist, particularly who one had just led a team that developed a vaccine for COVID-19. Only one Chinese website acknowledged Zhou’s death – a July 31 report on the science website MedSci summarized a study that Zhou and several other PLA researchers published in the English language journal Science on July 30. Only a parenthetical note appeared indicating that Zhou was “deceased” in both the Chinese and English reports; no further information was provided. Members of Zhou’s research team published another study in March 2021 that they dedicated to Zhou: “This article is in memory of Prof. Yusen Zhou for his contributions to the project conception and article design.”
If Yusen Zhou died under normal circumstances – hit by a car, was diagnosed with cancer, etc. — there wouldn’t be much need for such secrecy about his death, now would there?