from The Epoch Times:
Chinese companies related to the biolab have a troubling history in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, and a handful of other countries.
The discovery of a black market Chinese biolab operating in California, and the subsequent investigation into it, has exposed a tangled web of shell companies obscuring ownership and loopholes that caused delays in cleanup and informing the public.
The public found out in March about a secret biolab operating in a warehouse in Reedley, California, about 25 miles southeast of Fresno.
But the warehouse and its biological hazards were discovered months earlier, on Dec. 19, 2022, by Jesalyn Harper, a code enforcement officer with the City of Reedley Fire Department.
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Responding to an anonymous tip about the supposedly vacant warehouse, Ms. Harper discovered thousands of vials of bacterial and viral agents, including coronavirus, chlamydia, E. coli, streptococcus pneumonia, HIV, hepatitis, herpes, rubella, and malaria.
The business, operated by Prestige Biotech Inc., was also packaging and mailing out COVID-19 and pregnancy test kits, as well as housing nearly 1,000 lab mice.
Ms. Harper reported her findings to the City of Reedley, which contacted the FBI on the same day. But there was no single authority that could deal with all of the pathogens, chemicals, and biological hazards.
The Biolab Discovery
The warehouse, located at 850 I Street in Reedley, was built in the 1950s mainly as a food packing plant. Trucks would drive up to the alcove area in front of the roll-up doors to load up.
After Ms. Harper received the anonymous complaint about vehicles parked in the alcove, she went to investigate and also noticed a garden hose going into the building via a door being propped open—a potential plumbing violation.
Ms. Harper told The Epoch Times that she knocked at the door and saw three people boxing up pregnancy tests. One of them spoke no English, while the other two spoke very broken English.
At the beginning, Ms. Harper said the trio were very cooperative, but as she walked to the southern part of the building they became deflective.
“What do you do with the mice?” she recalled asking.
“We use the mice for experiments,” they replied.
“What kind of experiments?”
“Oh, I don’t know, we just give them water.”
“What’s in the refrigerators?”
“Just stuff for making the tests.”
As Ms. Harper asked more specific questions, she said the staff answered less and less, pushing for her to leave. Once she saw labels on the fridges such as “blood,” “HIV,” she realized it was a potentially hazardous environment and left the building.
She reported her discovery to City of Reedley officials, who contacted the FBI immediately and met with them two days later, on Dec. 21, 2022.
The FBI took all of January 2023 to investigate and finally deemed the warehouse safe for city employees in early February.
Who’s in Charge?
For Ms. Harper, the process was just beginning. She began to work with the state and county to determine which organizations needed to be involved.
“We had to look at these labs and break them down component by component and see who had the authority for each component,” Ms. Harper told The Epoch Times.
“For example, the California Department of Public Health would have authority over medical devices like pregnancy tests; DTSC [the Department of Toxic Substance Control] would have oversight over some of the chemicals, possibly how they were being used.”
Experts in medical waste and environmental health were brought in to address the items in the refrigerators, medical waste, human waste, blood, and used pregnancy tests.
The EPA and FDA were also involved, and both agencies retained some of the documentation and paperwork found in the lab.
Each item had to be dealt with separately—each drawer, each box, each container, each refrigerator, and each pallet had to be looked at by various departments depending on what was found.
Meanwhile, Ms. Harper had been feeding and watering the lab mice found onsite while she and other city officials were figuring out who had authority.
They discovered on March 16 that no one in the U.S. government clearly has regulatory authority over lab mice, so Ms. Harper used the California Health and Safety Code that references animal cruelty to obtain a warrant. A veterinarian then recommended to have the mice humanely euthanized, which took place after obtaining the requisite permit on April 12.
An emergency ordinance, No. 2023-008, passed at the Reedley City Council meeting on Sept. 12 temporarily placed a ban on the establishment of warehousing and laboratories with biosafety levels 2 through 4 within the city limits. The City of San Carlos in the Bay Area has a similar ban.
