An accidental discovery in rural California raised biosecurity fears
On a December day in 2022, Jesalyn Harper went to a vacant warehouse to check out some suspicious parking. She was the only full-time code-enforcement officer in the town of Reedley, California, and while she was there, she noticed a green garden hose sticking out of a wall—a violation she ought to investigate. To her surprise, when she was let inside, she encountered three women in lab coats saying they were Chinese. As Ms Harper entered the building she discovered “Biohazard” signs; vials labelled in a mix of English, Mandarin and some kind of cipher; and hundreds of caged white mice.
She had found an “invisible” biolab: a privately operated and funded lab that can avoid government oversight. It was run by Jia Bei Zhu, a man with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and who is wanted in Canada, from which he is said to have fled after he was ordered to pay 330m Canadian dollars for stealing American intellectual property on dairy-cattle breeding. Mr Zhu was arrested in October for selling Chinese covid tests rebranded as American in the lab (which he denies), but it was unclear whether anything more sinister had taken place there. Kevin McCarthy, the recently ousted House speaker and a California representative, had already asked the select committee on the CCP to investigate. On November 15th, the committee published its report.
The findings were discombobulating. Inspections by local officials and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found a number of vials, the labels of which suggested they contained pathogens, including malaria, SARS-CoV-2 and HIV. But the report said the CDC refused to test the vials, including those without labels or labelled in code, a decision it called “baffling”. The local authorities consequently destroyed all this without knowing exactly what they had. “Because of this, the select committee—and, more importantly, the…
2023-11-23 10:08:13
Source from www.economist.com
rnrn