Was Dr. Charles Lieber arrested for developing coronavirus? Fact Check

Online messages claim that Dr. Charles Lieber, the Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, was arrested for developing the coronavirus and selling it to China.

FALSE

However such claims are unsupported and have been refuted by the US Department of Justice.

It is true that Dr. Charles Lieber, 60, a professor at Harvard University, was arrested on January 28th 2020, near the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak that began in Wuhan, China.

However, his arrest was not connected to the coronavirus or COVID-19 outbreak. Lieber was arrested for lying to federal authorities about his involvement (and subsequent funding) from a Chinese program that was designed to recruit scientific talent from overseas.

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Because Lieber, the “Principal Investigator” at the Lieber Research Group – a group that specialises in nanoscience – was receiving funding from the United States, he was obligated to disclose any other form of funding from overseas. However, Lieber did not disclose funding from a Chinese program called the “Thousand Talents Plan”, which he was involved in between 2012 and 2017.

Lieber had lied that he had received funding from China and that he was contracted to help establish a research lab at the Wuhan University of Technology. It was this deception that led to his arrest.

No authorities in China nor the United States have claimed that coronavirus was involved, either directly or indirectly.

From the US Department of Justice –

According to court documents, since 2008, Dr. Lieber who has served as the Principal Investigator of the Lieber Research Group at Harvard University, which specialized in the area of nanoscience, has received more than $15,000,000 in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense (DOD). These grants require the disclosure of significant foreign financial conflicts of interest, including financial support from foreign governments or foreign entities. Unbeknownst to Harvard University beginning in 2011, Lieber became a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and was a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from in or about 2012 to 2017.

While in normal times, Lieber’s arrest wouldn’t have likely made many headlines outside of academia circles, because of the timing and the fact that the Wuhan University of Technology was involved, the story made perfect fodder for online conspiracy theorists.

Despite the numerous theories surrounding Lieber, none have provided any evidence that Lieber had “developed” coronavirus, or that his arrest was in any way involved with the pandemic, and simply use the timing and the involvement of Wuhan as their evidence. Additionally, leading infectious disease experts from around the world have concluded that the coronavirus is a zoonotic virus, meaning it has passed from animals to humans, and was not synthetically or artificially created in a laboratory.