FBI and CDC Slammed for “Dropping the Ball” on Illegal California Biolab Run by Chinese

FBI and CDC Slammed for “Dropping the Ball” on Illegal California Biolab Run by Chinese

Legal Insurrection readers may recall that this summer, I reported on a warehouse in Reedley, California had been 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.

There were over 20 different infectious agents that this company was working with, ostensibly for the development of diagnostic kits. The pathogens included herpes, HIV, chlamydia, coronavirus, and hepatitis.

When that report was given, there were limited details on the entire suite of pathogens, and just how connected that laboratory was to China. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party did its own investigation.

The 40-page report was a chilling account on the revealing serious gaps in monitoring the nature and safety of biological research, which is a serious threat to both national and global security. The Select Committee investigation also concluded the lab had very close ties to China.

The lab contained deadlier pathogens (e.g., Ebola) than the original press accounts suggested.  The lab was run by a Chinese man named Jesse Zhu, and was paid millions of dollars by the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) while experiments were being conducted at the Reedley facility

• The illegal biolab was run by a PRC citizen who is a wanted fugitive from Canada with a $330 million Canadian dollar judgment against him for stealing American intellectual property.
• This PRC citizen was a top official at a PRC-state-controlled company and had links to military-civil fusion entities.
• The illegal biolab received millions of dollars in unexplained payments from PRC banks while running the illegal biolab.
• The illegal biolab contained thousands of samples of labeled, unlabeled, and encoded potential pathogens, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and Covid.
• The illegal biolab also contained a freezer labeled “Ebola,” which contained unlabeled, sealed silver bags consistent with how the lab stored high risk biological materials. Ebola is a Select Agent with a lethality rate between 25-90%.
• The biolab contained nearly a thousand transgenic mice, genetically engineered to mimic the human immune system. Lab workers said that the mice were designed “to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.”
• After local officials who discovered the lab sought help from the CDC and others, the CDC refused to test any of the samples.

One of the members of the select committee, Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA), slammed the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for their lack of interest in this case, saying Select Committee’s final report, “reads like a movie script and a horror movie script, when you detail all of those things that were missed”.

Hinson, like others, is concerned that more could be hidden across the U.S., posing a threat to national security.

“The FBI and the CDC really dropped the ball here in terms of investigating not only this illegal lab, but now we wonder how many more labs like this exist in the country,” she said.

“So clearly, we have some work to do to make sure we’re prepared, because we know China is doing everything they can to constantly undermine us.”

The House Select Committee on the PRC further claimed that both the FBI and the CDC were contacted by local law enforcement, but the agencies declined to investigate.

The report notes that FBI informed the local investigator that it had closed its investigation because the Bureau believed that there were no weapons of mass destruction on the property (despite a vial clearly marked “Ebola”.) However, The Select Committee’s assessment of the CDC is especially damning.

The CDC’s response was inadequate and raises serious questions about its standard practices. It is unacceptable that the CDC, according to accounts of local officials, refused to take a phone call from city and county officials concerned about a biolab found in their region.

…The CDC’s continuing refusal to test pathogens despite reasonable requests and the offer to pay from local officials facing a concerned populace simply does not make sense.

…The CDC’s insisted that there was “no evidence” that Select Agents were within Reedley Biolab or that Zhu and UMI imported infectious agents and “insufficient evidence at this time” of legal violations. It seems to have made this claim without conducting any investigation beyond reading the labels that were in English on a limited number of the pathogenic samples.

The CDC complete disregard for its supposed mission of protecting the nation’s public health as it relates to infectious disease…which is its core mission, is infuriating. One has to wonder what the real priorities of this particular agency have become.

One also has to wonder about the silence of California’s political leaders about the Reedley lab.

Jia Bei Zhu, the PRC citizen who operated the #Reedley #CCP lab, is a fugitive from Canada who'd "stolen millions of $ of IP from U.S. companies and was part of an ongoing transnational criminal enterprise."

And Gavin Newsom still hasn't said s**t about it. pic.twitter.com/Zo7ecKcqac

— Jennifer Van Laar (@jenvanlaar) November 16, 2023

Here is a thread that pairs with the above analysis:

1. Back in December 2022, Code Enforcement Officer Jesalyn Harper noticed a green garden hose sticking out of a hole at facility called Universal Meditech Inc. lab located in Reedley, California.
She notified the owner of the violation.

— Chabria (@ShivenChabria) November 17, 2023

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