Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: While China is still battling with fresh outbreaks of Covid-19 and locked down over 230 million people—on Sunday, it reported a 27 percent increase in new infections to number over 5,000—it is simultaneously researching in a Pakistan facility to create pathogens deadlier than Covid-19, a media report has claimed.
In the last three years, the coronavirus—SARS-CoV-2—which caused Covid-19, has mutated to create over 300 variants and sub-variants.
Despite global concerns, the media reported, the two ‘all-weather’ friendly countries are going ahead with this secret project called the “Collaboration for Emerging Infectious Diseases and Studies on Biological Control of Vector Transmitting Diseases.”
According to bioweapon experts, the joint collaboration between the laboratory managed by the Pakistani Army and a series of laboratories and institutions run by China’s people’s Liberation Army (PLA), was not for scientific experiments but to weaponize pathogens.
China’s infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is widely believed to be the epicenter of the pandemic since December 2019, and the Pakistani Army-run, Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), has set up a highly advanced scientific infrastructure to research deadly pathogens at a facility near Rawalpindi, the South Asian country’s defense headquarters.
According to reports, while China is trying to eliminate the pandemic through its Zero Covid strategy, it is also creating Covid-like pathogens in Pakistan that have the potential to cause virus contamination on a scale far higher than Covid.
While this issue had originally surfaced even before Covid-19 spread in 2020, its mystery deepened when Pakistan denied such reports that year. Its Foreign Office claimed, “there is nothing secret about the Bio-Safety Level-3 (BSL-3) Laboratory of Pakistan referred to in the reports.”
The facility was meant for diagnostic and protective system improvement by research and development on emerging health threats, surveillance, and disease outbreak investigation, it stated.
The laboratory in question is a “Biosafety Level 4” facility (BSL-4) where the most dangerous and infective agents are tested and developed. According to a media outlet, Geo-Politik, the DSTO is located in Chaklala cantonment, Rawalpindi, and is headed by a two-star General.
Experts say that BSL-4 labs are used to study infectious agents and toxins that can cause life-threatening diseases for which no vaccine or therapy is available.
Quoting the intelligence and scientific sources, who are watching the developments, the reports warned that by using Pakistan, China had outsourced a highly contagious network of laboratories where antigens a hundred times more infectious than the present Covid-19 could be created or ‘dropped in.’