Canadian Official Reprimanded for Withholding Winnipeg Lab Info

The House of Commons rebuked the president of the Canadian Public Health Agency for not turning over sensitive information pertaining to the dismissal of government scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory.

Written byAnnie Melchor

| 3 min read

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The Canadian House of Commons publicly reprimanded Iain Stewart, the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada, on Monday (June 21) for failing to produce unredacted documents related to the firing of two government scientists. It was the first time since 1913 that someone other than a member of Parliament received this type of formal rebuke, reports the CBC.

“We need these documents,” said MP Michael Chong in a parliamentary committee hearing in May, according to an earlier CBC report. “We need to know what the Government of Canada was doing through the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg with respect to cooperating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.”

Xiangguo Qiu, the head of the Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section in the Special Pathogens Program of the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, and her husband and fellow ...

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Annie Melchor
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Stephanie "Annie" Melchor got her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2020, studying how the immune response to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii leads to muscle wasting and tissue scarring in mice. While she is still an ardent immunology fangirl, she left the bench to become a science writer and received her master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2021. You can check out more of her work here.
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