Guest post by Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D.
Is Johns Hopkins University conducting its own biowarfare foreign policy with the Chinese Communist Party?
The Gateway Pundit has documented numerous instances where U.S. universities have trained or collaborated with scientists of China’s People’s Liberation Army using U.S. taxpayer dollars, see here, here, here, here and here.
It is now a well-known fact that U.S. taxpayer money was provided by Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, which was then quietly funneled to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of the Chinese military-connected institutions responsible for the laboratory origin of the COVID-19 virus.
Over the years, Johns Hopkins University has been the recipient of billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer support.
Like many other institutions in the United States, there is no doubt that Johns Hopkins University trained scientists of China’s People’s Liberation Army, like Kun Yang and Zhuwei Xu, perhaps many others.
It appears, however, that Johns Hopkins University may have gone far beyond scientific collaboration, which is bad enough, but also contributing to the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy agenda and assisting its propaganda efforts both inside the United States and worldwide.
On February 1, 2018, Deputy Director Anita Cicero and Senior Scholar Caitlin Rivers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security attended a meeting at China’s Tianjin University with Chinese scientists and legal experts, who discussed the topic “How to Prevent the Safety Risks That Synthetic Biotechnology May Cause.”
The meeting was led by Professor Zhang Weiwen, Director of the Biosafety Strategy Research Center of Tianjin University and attended by Vice President and Professor Yuan Yingjin, a long-time research collaborator with Johns Hopkins University and believed to be a sponsor for the training of Chinese scientists at Johns Hopkins.
Zhang Weiwen is a “poster boy” for how the Chinese Communist Party exploits scientific cooperation with the United States to help China achieve global scientific dominance.
In 1996, Zhang Weiwen received a Ph.D. in microbial molecular biology from the Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology.
Between 2001 and 2012, Zhang Weiwen was employed by Paradigm Genetics in North Carolina, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Northwest National Laboratory and was a faculty member at the Institute of Biodesign at Arizona State University.
Zhang Weiwen, a member of the Chinese Communist Party, returned to China as a specially-appointed professor of the “Thousand Talents Program” and a specially-appointed expert of the Tianjin Municipal People’s Government.
Zhang Weiwen is a major proponent of synthetic biology, designated as a national focus area by the Chinese Communist Party to achieve biotechnology dominance. He is also an expert on biosafety and biosecurity, a Chinese military synonym for biowarfare.
Synthetic biology is a key element of China’s military doctrine embraced by Major General Chen Wei, who is Director of the Institute of Biotechnology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences and presumed head of China’s biological warfare program.
A second meeting at Tianjin University was held on June 28, 2018, in which Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Senior Scholar Gigi Gronvall also participated.
One attendee at both meetings, who would be the author of the main product of those meetings, was Yang Xue, a Chinese Communist Party legal expert with reported connections to China’s intelligence service.
That main product was the “Tianjin Biosecurity Guidelines for Codes of Conduct for Scientists,” which claims to “focus on the prevention of intentional misuse of bioscience research.”
Several of its ten guidelines appear to support the use of scientific censorship.
On December 3, 2018, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted an international conference in Geneva, Switzerland, no doubt paid for by U.S. taxpayer dollars, entitled “Global Forum on Scientific Advances Important to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention: Held in Conjunction with the 2018 Meeting of State Parties to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention,” for which Gigi Gronvall was the point of contact.
In the photo below, taken during the 2018 Geneva conference, Gigi Gronvall and Zhang Weiwen are shown chairing a session that seems to support the Chinese Communist Party’s and People’s Liberation Army’s program of synthetic biology.
On July 26, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Tianjin University Center for Biosafety Research and Strategy co-hosted the conference “Biosafety and Biosecurity in the Era of Synthetic Biology: Meeting the Challenges in China and the United States.”
Attending that conference was Major General Yi-Gang Tong of the People’s Liberation Army, a key leader in China’s biowarfare program.
The July 26, 2019 Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security conference claimed that it “brought together leading experts and emerging leaders from China and the US to discuss the ways, both positive and negative, that synthetic biology may alter the social and economic frameworks of modern humanity.”
A few months later, synthetic biology changed the world forever in the form of the laboratory-constructed COVID-19 virus.
On July 14, 2021, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security endorsed the “Tianjin Biosecurity Guidelines for Codes of Conduct for Scientists.”
On September 3, 2021, China and Pakistan submitted the “Tianjin Biosecurity Guidelines for Codes of Conduct for Scientists” to the United Nations, requesting that it be included in revisions of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
Finally, it is important to note, that Tom Inglesby, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Gigi Gronvall, one of its Senior Scholars, from the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, were deeply involved in the cover-up of the laboratory origin of COVID-19. The cover-up was done together with Anthony Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, as well as scientists like Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who was working with and funding the “Bat Woman,” Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That U.S. cover-up was very much in line with the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda campaign to convince the world that COVID-19 was a natural disease outbreak, not the actual product of a bioweapons program.
Hat tip to @dezying
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He had a civilian career in international business and medical research. His email address is [email protected].