Chen Wei, a leading Chinese epidemiologist and a major-general in China's People's Liberation Army, has created quite a stir on Weibo by her radical approach.
Major General Wei it is reported that injected herself and her six-member team with an untested coronavirus vaccine, which many on the Internet see as a move to prove loyalty to the People's Liberation Army.
The research team led by Major General Chen Wei, who is a veteran in fighting SARS and Ebola achieved a major breakthrough in developing a vaccine to fight the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the Chinese state media reported on Tuesday.
For the last one month, Major Wei along with her team of military medical experts have been working from the infamous Wuhan lab.
The team led by Chen Wei, an academician at the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Academy of Military Medical Sciences, is seizing every minute and second and focusing all efforts on this emergency scientific research, China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Tuesday.
Chen's team has achieved key progress in developing a vaccine to the novel coronavirus, the report said.
"We are doing all we can to put the recombinant vaccine that we are developing into clinical application," Chen said on CCTV.
The fifty-three-year-old major general is known for developing the world's first gene-based vaccine on Ebola in 2014 beside her efforts in combatting the SARS outbreak.
There is, however, more to this story as it now emerged that the PLA's official Weibo channel subsequently shared and later deleted images of Chen having the vaccine injected into her left arm. The pictures also show six other PLA members who were reportedly injected with the vaccine too.
PLA officials later deleted the images from Weibo after it emerged that the vaccine was not even tested on animals but was directly injected on the researchers without a trial.
Besides wanting to prove loyalty to PLA and show to the world how confident China is about the vaccine, there are other theories on why Major General Wei injected the vaccine without trial.
There have been speculations since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak that the COVID 19 was a bioengineered strain or a man-made virus that had escaped out of the Wuhan lab.
And it was in this same lab Major General Wei was dispatched one month back to redeem the country.
