A Chinese military doctor flagged by U.S. health officials in early 2020 went on to file one of the first COVID-19 vaccine patents just weeks later, raising serious questions about what American bureaucrats knew and when they knew it.
Dr. Zhou Yusen, a major general in the People’s Liberation Army, submitted his patent application on Feb. 24, 2020. That was barely two months after the world learned of the mysterious virus emerging from Wuhan. Developing such a vaccine that quickly “would have required access to both the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 and the live virus itself,” according to a 2024 report from The Heritage Foundation’s Commission on China and COVID-19, chaired by current CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
But here’s what makes this troubling: NIH officials had already identified Zhou as a grant recipient funded by American taxpayers.
Emails obtained by the Oversight Project, a watchdog group, reveal that on Feb. 3, 2020, NIH researcher Ping Chen alerted colleagues about Zhou’s connections to the Chinese military apparatus.
“The grants have the same Chinese collaborator, Dr. Zhou, Yusen, who is a researcher in the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, an institute under the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS),” Chen wrote. That academy worked directly with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Zhou later died under unusual circumstances. The details remain murky.
The 145 pages of documents paint a picture of federal health officials who were repeatedly caught off guard by China’s refusal to share information about the virus, even as U.S. taxpayer money continued flowing to Chinese researchers, The Daily Signal reports.
“They raised no objection when Chinese scientists deferred to government restrictions on information sharing, even though those same scientists were funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars,” Alex Finnegan, director of digital capabilities at the Oversight Project, told the Daily Signal. “And, they naively wondered what it meant that the first Chinese laboratory to share the COVID-19 genome with the world was subsequently ‘closed for rectification.'”
The grants to Zhou’s team included funding to study Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus. One was issued in January 2019. Another was awarded in 2021. A third appears to date back to 2013.
Chen had even flagged PLA researchers months before the pandemic began. On July 30, 2019, she informed colleagues about a scientist from the Chinese military’s microbiology lab, noting he “seems to be a very successful scientist.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during this entire period. When confronted about Zhou during a June 2024 congressional hearing, Fauci claimed ignorance.
“I don’t even know the person you’re talking about,” Fauci told then-Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, after the congressman asked whether it concerned him that taxpayer dollars went to a high-ranking Chinese PLA official.
The timeline continues to trouble investigators. A Senate report suggested Zhou’s early vaccine patent application makes little sense without prior access to the virus. The Heritage Commission report reached similar conclusions.
These revelations come as outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently released declassified documents showing how Fauci and other NIH and NIAID officials worked with an intelligence agency to shape political narratives about COVID-19 and its origins.
For years, Americans who questioned the official story were dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Now the paper trail tells a different story. Federal health officials knew about Chinese military involvement in coronavirus research. They knew American tax dollars were funding it. And when China stopped cooperating, they raised no objections.
