A newly discovered email from 2013 reveals that the deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Yuan Zhiming, is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official who was officially responsible for international cooperation and biosafety at the institute in question.
The email is part of a large number of documents uncovered by the transparency group US Right to Know through ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to uncover pandemic-related information held by US institutions.
Although the initial set of documents was released in June, the email belonging to Yuan, which was obtained from the Galveston National Laboratory, was only now discovered by former Senate investigator Paul D. Thacker.
Yuan's academic biography does not mention his role as 'Secretary of the Party Committee' at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the Institute's website does not provide information on the identity of the Secretary of the Party Committee.
Publicly available information confirms that as of July 2021, Yuan was still the director at the institute. Yuan claims to have previously worked at the Pasteur Institute in France, the Royal Danish University of Agriculture and Livestock, the Danish National Institute for Environmental Research, and the University of Illinois. It is not known whether those institutions were aware that Yuan was a Chinese Communist Party official, the report says. The Epoch Times.
Yuan is also affiliated with James Le Duc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory in Texas. The Galveston laboratory was built by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and operates under the auspices of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The ties between the Wuhan lab and Le Duc go back to 1986 when Le Duc spent a year working at the Wuhan lab. Le Duc later trained the Wuhan lab staff at his Galveston lab.
Le Duc also knew about Yuan's true role at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the 2013 email that exposed him was in response to a request from Le Duc's staff to the Wuhan Institute. Le Duc wanted to set up a meeting with the 'director of the biocontrol laboratory.'
Notably, the response, which was sent by a staff member at the Wuhan lab, explained that there were two directors, the nominal director and the ‘Secretary of the Party Committee’. On February 9, 2020, a month before the outbreak of the pandemic in the United States, Le Duc emailed his ‘friend’ Yuan to request an ‘investigation into the possibility that the Covid outbreak was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’.
That email was uncovered by a separate Freedom of Information Act request late last year. Le Duc attached a catalog of questions to Yuan, including asking when the Wuhan lab first began handling coronaviruses and where it had obtained its vast collection of viruses.
More importantly, Le Duc asked Yuan whether the Wuhan lab had conducted gain-of-function experiments that could have resulted in the creation of Covid-19.
Le Duc ended his email with a piece of advice to Yuan: “If there are weaknesses in your program, now is the time to acknowledge and correct them. I trust you will take my suggestions in the spirit of a friend trying to help another in a very difficult time.”
In April 2020, Le Duc contacted EcoHealth advisor David Franz to tell him about his contact with Yuan, as well as the fact that Yuan had not responded.
EcoHealth is the organization through which Fauci funded lucrative coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan lab. It is not known why Le Duc approached Franz, nor what Franz's response was, if any.
Franz was previously the chief of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. Chinese authorities have accused Fort Detrick of being the true origin of the Covid-19 virus.
