His reconstruction shows how Canada's top-security National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg became deeply enmeshed with Chinese military and bioweapons program scientists, culminating in what Molinaro describes as "a biosecurity collaboration of the highest strategic importance to the People's Republic of China."
As in a number of
explosive cases explored in Under Assault, Molinaro offers careful caveats distinguishing what is proven, what is plausible, and what demands further investigation. But in raising the possibility that a Canadian scientist may have directly or indirectly contributed to a man-made virus responsible for millions of deaths, Molinaro breaks new ground — no current or former Canadian national security professional has made such an assertion so plainly before.
"Let's put all this together and consider the implications," Molinaro writes after laying out the sequence of evidence. "Qiu secretly works with the Wuhan lab overseeing a gain-of-function project about bat filoviruses, and months later COVID-19 is unleashed on the world, with this lab being at the centre of the lab-leak theory. Canada then partners for a vaccine with CanSino — a company connected to the PLA, one of the officials of which Qiu had secretly worked with on vaccine research. If the lab-leak theory is ever confirmed, one has to ask: Did a Canadian researcher who was secretly assisting China have a role in the creation and breakout of COVID-19, and then did the Canadian government try to buy a vaccine from a PRC company that the same researcher had assisted and that has connections to China's military?"
Molinaro situates the Qiu affair within a broader continuum of Chinese espionage operations in Canada. "The frequency of China's spying on Canada seemed to be increasing through the turn of the millennium," he writes, describing how Beijing's intelligence activities evolved from traditional political influence and industrial theft into targeted scientific infiltration — often leveraging financial inducements and patriotic sentiment within the overseas Chinese diaspora. He traces this pattern through earlier cases, including aerospace engineer Su Bin's theft of Boeing designs from British Columbia and in Toronto, Klaus Pflugbeil's alleged sale of Tesla battery technology to Chinese interests in New York— both involving illicit technology transfers to the PRC. In each case, Molinaro notes, Canadian authorities failed to act until U.S. agencies intervened.
Citing former FBI agent Justin Vallese, who commented after the Su Bin investigation, "I don't know how many Su Bins there are," Molinaro extends the warning. Canada's open, well-funded research system — long a source of national pride — has become a global magnet for exploitation by the Chinese Communist Party's technology-gathering apparatus.
Against that backdrop, Molinaro lays out the case in Winnipeg. He reconstructs CSIS findings showing that in early 2019, Qiu and several Chinese collaborators were approved by a PRC evaluation committee to conduct a project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — China's first P4-level biosafety laboratory. The project, Molinaro quotes, aimed to "assess cross-species infection through the creation of synthetic virus strains," placing Qiu in charge of "overall planning." It was a classic gain-of-function experiment — the deliberate development of viral strains in a lab before they evolve in nature. Another researcher was assigned "project design," another "animal infection," and one, whose name remains redacted, was known to have worked on bat viruses similar to SARS.
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