In March a code enforcement officer in Reedley, a city in Fresno County, California found a garden hose running through the back wall and other code violations at a local warehouse. Officials eventually uncovered a Chinese-run storage facility containing around 30 freezers and refrigerators, filled with infectious disease agents.
According to local radio station KVPR, officials tried and failed to contact company officials in November last year and began an investigation of the site in December. The city began requesting warrants in March.
US officials quoted in the media said that the place appeared to be an illegal, unlicensed laboratory. The Centers for Disease Control tested the substances found therein, and detected diseases such as malaria, HIV, coronavirus, Hepatitis B and C, E coli, streptococcus pneumonia, chlamydia, dengue, rubella and herpes. Photos showed boxes and other materials piled haphazardly about, and some of the cold storage machinery was not working. Court documents quoted in the media said that the site held “…blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material.”
Photo: Bloomberg
Officials also found several hundred mice, with over 150 already dead, while nearly 800 were euthanized. A public health official said the mice had been engineered to be susceptible to COVID-19, according to media reports.
It took “76 days and 14 different agencies to inspect and clean up the facility between April to July this year,” KVPR reported.
The items in the warehouse belonged to a defunct company, Universal Meditech Inc (UMI), and had been moved there by a creditor firm identified as its successor firm, Prestige Biotech, after Universal Meditech went belly up. Media reports noted that Prestige Biotech, registered in Nevada, had no license to operate in California, and was not registered as a medical waste generator.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Further, Prestige Biotech has no California address, and addresses for its authorized agents turned out to be empty or in China. According to its Nevada filings, it has a vaccine research center in Osong, South Korea, is listed on the South Korean stock exchange and is headquartered in Singapore.
A UMI official notified county authorities via e-mail that there was another facility in Fresno awaiting licensing, according to KVPR.
Ironically, UMI had received a tax credit from the state of California in 2019. The firm had manufactured pregnancy and COVID-19 test kits. Its COVID-19 test kits were the subjects of a Class 1 recall by the FDA in February as not authorized or approved. Apparently they were still circulating even after the company had become defunct.
Photo: AP
The implications of this illegal Chinese-run laboratory, and the possible presence of others (recall that the bankrupt company was pursuing a license for another facility), are staggering. It is difficult to believe this is the only such facility in the US.
“My concern is to get to the bottom of what happened here,” Speaker of the US House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy said, adding “but also … where’s this happening in other parts of this country?”
And if the US has such gaps, Taiwan, with its heavy penetration by People’s Republic of China (PRC) agents and large numbers of small biomedical and biotech firms, surely plays host to similar firms. In time of war, in an already stressed health system accustomed to tight resource constraints and shortages of key personnel, infectious disease outbreaks could break the health system and terrorize the population.
Though undoubtedly not part of any organized biowarfare program by the PRC, they could easily be repurposed for that in time of war. Imagine if the owner of such a lab, however well-intentioned or ethical, got a call from the Chinese security bureau in his hometown: “your parents are here having tea with us. We know you have a few interesting diseases in storage…”
Doubt that the PRC would sanction wholesale distribution of toxins to Americans? What’s its position on the fentanyl trade, where precursor chemicals come out of PRC-based factories, all of which have Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in oversight? At present US officials are busy rooting PRC malware out of infrastructure and energy networks.
The Biden Administration has been considering including Chinese biotech firms on its technology blacklists for several years. This is a laudable idea, but technology theft is not the only threat from these firms. The Fresno warehouse debacle shows that the US has significant gaps in its oversight systems that shady firms can easily exploit, and that constitute a serious national security threat.
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS