Thread by @gdemaneuf

1/35 This is a quick thread about NIH Grant R01 A1139092, 'Structure-based design of coronavirus subunit vaccines'

That grant had for principal investigator Lanying Du, alleged wife of Yusen Zhou, the Chinese PLA scientist who apparently died in mysterious circumstances.

2/35 Lanying Du works at the New York Blood Centre and is a well-known coronavirus vaccine expert, as was her husband, Yusen Zhou.

He supposedly fell to his death from the roof of his main workplace, the PLA Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology.

image: @RdeMaistre

3/35 That R01 grant has also a foreign component, which was precisely the PLA Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology (Academy of Military Medical Sciences).

Fang Li e-mails that were FOId by @USRightToKnow have the name in clear.
@JamieMetzl
drive.google.com/file/d/1MrxwU3…

4/35 Also on this grant:
- Fang Li (Uni. Minnesota, vaccine design)
- Stanley Perlman (Uni. Iowa, mouse work)
- Jiang Zhu (Scripps, RBDs design & nanoparticles, under a consortium agreement)

Shibo Jiang (Fudan University) pops up too:

5/35 We don't know yet who the main contact at the Beijing PLA Institute is.

However the application shows that this R01 grant was in full continuity of previous work done with Lanying Du, with 40 previous publications in common.

6/35 If that sounds like Yusen Zhou, it's simply because it's him.

We get confirmation via a very interesting list of Chinese collaborators to NIH grants obtained by @JucicialWatch:
@emilyakopp @RogerMarshallMD
judicialwatch.org/wp-content/upl…

7/35 Note that the list has more entries for Yusen Zhou working with Lanying Du, and also many more for his PLA colleague Wu Chun Cao who is on many grants with various US entities.

8/35 At first, it may not be clear why Shibo Jiang is included in all these emails: Fudan University is not in the grant and he is not designated as a collaborator.

But note that Yusen Zhou is not a recipient of any email in the FOIs, while being part of the project.

9/35 Shibo Jiang is known to be a bridge between US and Chinese scientists. Also, Shibo Jiang, Lanying Du, Yusen Zhou and Fang Li have a long history of collaboration on vaccines.

So Shibo Jiang is likely an advisor and possibly a relay to Yusen Zhou.
patents.justia.com/inventor/yusen…

10/35 The grant objective is to design vaccines for highly pathogenic coronaviruses by focusing on the RBDs and RBMs of a selection of these, creating chimeric coronavirus RBDs, optimising them, and then testing these as nanoparticle-carried RBD vaccines on mice, then on monkeys:

11/35 Incidentally, the importance of doing both monkey and mouse testing in an R01 grant was explained by Lanying Du in an email exchange with Stanley Perlman, Fang Li and Shibo Jiang (possibly for a different grant proposal, not clear):

12/35 Fang Li emails (1,234 pages) have just a few pages about that grant.

In contrast, the NIH emails FOI'd by @JamesCTobias are focused on the grant and are thus redacted aggressively (beyond the mention of China).

For instance:

13/35 Here is what the unedited version should look like, thanks to having the name in clear text in Fang Li emails:

drive.google.com/file/d/12LkbSh…

14/35 There was still one accidental giveaway in the otherwise aggressively redacted NIH emails, in the form of the watermark, which I noticed.

15/35 The excellent @RdeMaistre promptly confirmed it as being the PLA Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology:

PBS: PLA State Key Lab of Pathogen and Biosecurity (at the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology)

16/35 You can also see it at the top of the building from which Yusen Zhou is supposed to have fallen sometime in May 2020:

17/35 The grant justifies the involvement of the PLA Institute in the following terms:👇🏻

Cost effectiveness.
[..] the experimental cost in the U.S. is ~$6,000/monkey for purchase and $20/day for maintenance, but such costs can be reduced by 6 and 4 times, respectively, in China.

18/35 In other words, the NIH was supposed to be happy involving the Beijing PLA institute in DURC research on that grant, because monkeys are cheaper there.

There may be occupational hazards for that price, though, since one may fall off the roof, just like employees at Foxconn

19/35 Now, it gets a bit odd because the letter of acceptance from the PLA Institute mentions that the collaboration would anyway be funded by the Chinese side, through its own grants.

So, actually, the cost to NIH is precisely zero.

20/35 More details about the animal work at the Beijing Institute under that R01 grant:

21/35 Note: At exactly the same time, another R01 grant was taking the same approach to working with countries that may edge towards, or were already, under US restrictions during Trump's presidency.

[Daszak's grant took this to an all new level; more on this another time.]

22/35 The monkeys were supposed to be used to assess the RBD vaccines against live coronavirus challenges, after the initial tests on mice.

Now, we may remember that one strong lab-accident scenario is that SARS-CoV-2 leaked during vaccines challenges in Wuhan.

23/35 Basically, as part of a red team that was used to try to infect animals in order to test these vaccines.

Maybe in Wuhan Uni ABSL lab, or in a WIV P2 or P3.
Or even the WIV P4, since, according to a French Intel note, the P4 was running tests with work on class 3 pathogens.

24/35 That is all open to speculation. But what we know for sure is that China was funding such work.

And one can assume that top PLA vaccine designer Yusen Zhou would know what some colleagues (PLA or civilian) would be doing in Wuhan on a similar project.

25/35 This was also the conclusion of the full Senate report into COVID’s origin, released in April 2023, with the mention of two vaccine development efforts and collaboration with the WIV:
@SenMarcoRubio
rubio.senate.gov/public/_cache/…

26/35 For a good illustration, here is a paper received 27 Nov 2019, with Shi Zhengli, Yusen Zhou, Lanying Du and Fang Li as senior authors, and acknowledgement of funding for some of the work via that R01 grant AI139092 (to L.D. and F.L.):
covid-19.conacyt.mx/jspui/bitstrea…

27/35 As seen earlier, the relation between Lanying Du and Yusen Zhou is an old one.

They may have met in about 2000, at the PLA Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology itself, where Yusen Zhou was a young post doc and Lanying Du was finishing her PhD:

See this 2000 paper:

28/35 Going back to controversy surrounding Yusen Zhou:

The very tight schedule of his COVID-19 vaccine patent has raised a few questions. It was submitted on 24 Feb 2020.

29/35 Also, a paper he published showed that he was in possession of human-adapted mice fairly early (September 2019):

30/35 I was eventually able to show that this human-adapted mouse model was actually developed in early 2018:

31/35 Now let's go back to the R01 grant.

In May 2021 (year 5), the grant was modified to remove the PLA Institute and replace it by Georgia State University Research Foundation, which then took on the monkey work from the Beijing Institute.

32/35 At the same time, Lanying Du was transferred from the NY Blood Centre to Georgia State University, with redirection of the NYBC grant money to Georgia State Uni.

33/35 In doing so, funds were effectively secured for the additional material and animal costs (as the PLA Institute was previously funding the monkey work through its own Chinese grants).

34/35 The mouse work is still done at the University of Iowa (Stanley Perlman).

For some reason, the NIH FOI also removed all references to that University of Iowa, but you have it in clear in the Fang Li emails too.

35/35 That was a quick review of that NHS grant involving the mysteriously disappeared Yusen Zhou, his rumored wife, and their alma mater, the PLA Beijing Institute.

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