The International Frontier of the CCP’s Bioweapons Program

Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Pakistan Army’s Defence Science and Technology Organization

Following a period of extensive multi-domain research across Asia, a clear operational link has been identified between the biological weapons programs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Pakistan Army. In addition to the surfacing of this network, this assessment has empirically identified specific research groups and their gain-of-function and synthetic virus creation experiments. This enables visibility of the exact type of high-risk pathogen research that is being done on SARS-CoV-2, MERS, and Zika viruses within this transnational network for the first time.

Current Status of the CCP-Led WIV-DESTO Bioweapons Program in Pakistan

Investigative reporting has surfaced a newly-operational Gain-of-Function (GoF)-capable virology lab facility that is jointly run by China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Defence Science and Technology Organization (DESTO), which is under the direct control of the Pakistan Army.1 In addition to these international developments, within China itself WIV was instrumental in establishing new GoF-capable pathogen research infrastructure. This includes a relatively unknown Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) lab in Kunming that is designed to handle the world’s most dangerous pathogens and conduct high-risk experiments on them.

This BSL4 lab in Kunming falls under the official administration of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS), thereby concretely linking the bioweapons research activities of CAMS with that of WIV (which officially falls under the Chinese Academy of Sciences). This has substantial implications for the joint WIV-DESTO facility in Pakistan in that CAMS has a direct mechanism to ‘plug into’ Pakistani bioweapons research via WIV.