Emails Show NIH Officials Flagged Chinese Military Doctor Later Linked to Early COVID-19 Vaccine Patent

Weeks before a Chinese military doctor applied for a patent on a COVID-19 vaccine in February 2020, federal bureaucrats in the United States were reviewing taxpayer-funded grants to China and flagged the doctor as a recipient.

Dr. Zhou Yusen, who held the rank of major general, was a researcher working under the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Science, which is associated with the People’s Liberation Army, according to emails obtained by the Oversight Project, a watchdog group. Zhou, who later died under unusual circumstances, was mentioned in emails between bureaucrats with the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

While the institutes awarded grants to China, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the director of the NIAID. Recently, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released newly declassified documents detailing how Fauci and other officials with the NIH and NIAID worked with an intelligence agency to prompt certain political narratives about COVID-19 and its origins.

Ping Chen, an NIH researcher, informed colleagues on Feb. 3, 2020, about Zhou.

“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. The Academy of Military Medical Sciences worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Chen added, “Dr. Zhou’s expertise and resources in China include his skills in developing animal models for viruses, such as Zika, and then successfully applying the models to evaluate therapeutics.”

One of the NIAID grants to Zhou and his team of researchers to study Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was issued in January 2019, according to the NIH. One grant was awarded in 2021. Another appears to date as far back as 2013.

On July 30, 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak, Chen informed her colleagues about a researcher with the People’s Liberation Army who “seems to be a very successful scientist.”

“Worth mentioning was a scientific presentation by a researcher in the Chinese PLA microbiology lab who studied how Zika virus causes microcephaly,” Chen wrote.

During a June 2024 hearing by House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, then-Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, asked Fauci, “Does it concern you that U.S. taxpayer dollars would be going to someone who’s a high-ranking Chinese PLA official?”

After back and forth, Fauci replied, “I don’t even know the person you’re talking about.”

The 145 pages of documents show NIH officials were repeatedly surprised the Chinese government would not share information about the virus, Alex Finnegan, director of digital capabilities at the Oversight Project, noted.

“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,” Finnegan 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.”

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