FDA Issues Warning for Pregnancy Tests Linked to Illegal Fresno-Area Bio-Lab
Meanwhile, the mainstream press is downplaying public fears and making the Chinese owners into the potential victims or racism.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall my report on a warehouse in Fresno County, California, that was the site of a massive remediation project and investigation after it was discovered to be an illegal, unlicensed laboratory full of lab mice, infectious agent samples, medical waste, and hazardous materials.
The owners, who appeared connected to China, claimed all the materials were for testing and diagnostic kit production. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned about the lab’s pregnancy test kits.
Thousands of medical tests tied to an illegal Reedley lab are now part of a new warning from the FDA.
The products were manufactured by Universal Meditech, Incorporated.
They include pregnancy and ovulation tests – plus strips to test for alcohol in breast milk.
The FDA says since the company stopped operations, there are concerns the tests may not be safe and effective.
Dr. Amy Autry with UCSF Fresno says having accurate pregnancy tests is important for expecting mothers.
“I have to say this is a horrible situation. But in general, I think being able to have patients feel empowered to find out about their own health conditions in over-the-counter medical tests is just a great advance in medical care,” explained Dr. Autry.
If you are concerned or potentially impacted, check HERE for a complete list of product names.
Meanwhile, the mainstream press is downplaying public fears about the 20 infectious agents found in the illegal laboratory, which clearly had owners linked with China.
The discovery last December launched investigations by federal, state and local authorities who found no criminal activity at the medical lab owned by Prestige Biotech Inc., a company registered in Las Vegas, and no evidence of a threat to public health or national security. Nonetheless, it was just the beginning of a case that this summer fueled fears, rumors and conspiracy theories online about China purportedly trying to engineer biological weapons in rural America.
…[O]n July 25, the Mid Valley Times, a local online news outlet, published a story about the lab that quoted court documents saying a representative of Prestige Biotech, which makes pregnancy and coronavirus tests sold online, told officials in March that the mice had been genetically modified to catch and carry the virus that causes COVID-19.
That was likely a miscommunication by Prestige Biotech representative Wang Zhaolin, whose English is not perfect, [Jesalyn Harper, code enforcement officer for Reedley] said.
The race-base victimization explanations have begun, as exemplified by the AP article reviewing the situation in Reedley:
Lok Siu, a professor of Asian American and Asian diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the fears being fanned online reflect anti-Chinese sentiments that have existed in the United States for centuries and were heightened during the pandemic.
Siu said some people wrongfully assume all ethnic Chinese or Chinese-owned businesses have ties to the Chinese state. “They’re not given the ability to act as responsible or irresponsible individuals,” she added.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy joined other California politicians in sounding alarms about the ties between China and the lab, noting that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration supplied funds for the operation.
The speaker also alleged that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration provided the lab with state funding. “Now we’re finding out that the governor of California provided them with $360,000 in this process,” he said. A spokesperson from the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) told The Bee in an email that Universal Meditech, Inc., the predecessor of Prestige Biotech, received a $360,000 tax credit through the office’s California Competes program in April 2019, but the credit was ultimately revoked.
“(Universal Meditech, Inc.) did not achieve any of its milestones and was not approved to claim any of the tax credits. GO-Biz recaptured the entire credit and voided the Agreement with UMI,” the spokesperson said. The office also said that Prestige Biotech never received any California Competes funding and that it was “never a party” to the agreement.
Newsom’s connection to this laboratory might make an interesting discussion point should he actually begin a presidential campaign.
McCarthy indicates he is going to ask the FBI to investigate the laboratory. That would be a nice change of pace for our federal investigators rather than focus on Catholics and MAGA supporters.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
The customers should have suspected something upon learning that the tests results were provided by an inscrutable riddle inside a fortune cookie.
“Jesalyn Harper, code enforcement officer for Reedley”
Odd isn’t it? Three quotes from persons presented to us as authorities in the field of bioengineering laboratories:
1) Code enforcement officer Harper.
2) a (GO-Biz) bureaucrat.
3) Lok Siu, professor of social studies.
Recall how a man infected with Ebola ended up in a hospital in Houston. I think it was Houston. And the attending nurse that first saw the man – and how she “misdiagnosed” it as ordinary flu? Because that the first thing a nurse working in Houston should suspect is Ebola, not ordinary flu, right?
And what happened? Hospital admin. hung her out to dry, but that wasn’t the end of it, Obama called her out.
This foolish Harper is the fall back patsy.
He told this nurse that he’d just flown in from Liberia. She did not know that this was in Africa. Not only was her general education deficient, but I think that Liberia was on the list of Ebola hot spots that she should have learned for her job. He probably knew he might have been exposed to Ebola, but he was too sick to be assertive.
So he went home to his family. Two or three days later he was back in the emergency room, dying and shedding viruses. It was too late for treatment for Ebola (which is pretty effective in a well-equipped hospital, but only if started soon after the first symptoms appear), but they put him in isolation and cared for him while he died.
Then the panicking began. Who had contact with him on his first visit to the hospital? (IIRC, two hospital personnel that might have been exposed were now on an airliner and a cruise ship – if either one had been infected, there could have been hundreds of new cases.) Who had contact with him when he went home? (In a testimonial to American hygiene, not even his family members caught the virus.) Then a nurse fouled up the decontamination procedure coming out of his isolation unit, so she had to also go into isolation while they waited to see if symptoms appeared.
But in the end, first-world medicine and hygiene worked for everyone except the guy who flew home after being exposed. With Ebola, it was the same across the first world – in most cases the infection did not spread beyond those who flew from Africa sick, and even where the first response was fouled up, the secondary infections were quickly and effectively quarantined and treated. Ebola is a terrible disease in Africa not because of its infectiousness and deadliness, but because conditions are so primitive that whole villages may die without medical treatment, and the few doctors trying to treat it often lack even basic supplies like rubber gloves and disinfectants.
“The FDA says since the company stopped operations, there are concerns the tests may not be safe and effective.”
“Safe and effective” is now just a dogwhistle meaning “paid all the required bribes.”