A brilliant scientist was mysteriously fired from a Winnipeg virus lab. No one knows why.

She was escorted away by the RCMP more than two years ago, sparking international controversy. What really happened to Xiangguo Qiu?Xiangguo Qiu would seem an unlikely character in a tale of international intrigue. A mild-mannered scientist who won accolades for her work fighting the deadly Ebola virus inside Canada’s most secure laboratory, her career was cut short in July 2019, when she and her husband were escorted out of her Winnipeg lab by the RCMP.

With the clock running out, something clicked: Qiu tried introducing three different monoclonal antibodies at the same time, which rapidly flooded the immune system of the lab animal. Monkeys infected with Ebola, on death’s door, staged miraculous recoveries. She called the cocktail of those three antibodies ZMAb.

But it never happened. Instead of investing in two Canadian companies that were well-placed to manufacture the antibodies, which would have set Canada up as a more serious biomanufacturing hub, Ottawa instead tried to outsource the work to an American company. Canada never acquired a significant amount of the Winnipeg-designed therapy.

“This is what I’m the most excited about,” Kobinger told me in 2019, not long after Qiu was removed from the lab. “I think, to just have had a little contribution to this, was my career.”that many felt the Special Pathogens program had discovered a way to save tens of thousands of lives, and could have been a world leader in these versatile therapeutics. Instead, the government squandered the opportunity by taking a short-sighted commercial approach.

Conspiracy theories percolated on disreputable blogs and disinformation portals—after all, they argued, hadn’t COVID leaked out of that very same Wuhan lab Qiu had collaborated with? Other tenuous allegations were advanced by Erin O’Toole, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, who demanded to know how she got clearance to work at the “secret facility” in Winnipeg in the first place.Former colleagues see clues to Qiu and Cheng’s forced exit in the story of ZMAb.

“We were so ahead, so ahead on all fronts, to have lost all this advantage,” Kobinger says, is “unfortunate.” It wasn’t long after ZMAb that Kobinger sat down with Qiu to tell her he was quitting the NML. “I said, ‘Qiu, listen, we will lose all this ground,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘If I want to continue to have a chance to contribute, [I need to] just leave and go into academia.’ ” Kobinger left for the UniversitLaval in 2016.

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