If you rent a cheap Airbnb house in Las Vegas, you might not be altogether surprised to find dead crickets in the garage. But a thousand vials of medical samples in several freezers – and a centrifuge? After the cleaner and one guest fell ill at a property in the city’s Sunrise Manor neighborhood last week, federal agents raided it and found a whole laboratory’s worth of scientific kit of the kind more useful to medical scientists than, say, drug dealers. Curious.
Curiouser still, the house belongs to a Chinese national named Jia Bei (Jesse) Zhu. He is currently in prison awaiting trial over a secret laboratory that (it is alleged) he was running in Reedley, California. In December 2022 an alert city official in Reedley noticed a garden hose leading into a supposedly empty building. She went inside and found three women who identified themselves as Chinese nationals, wearing white coats, masks, safety glasses and latex gloves, among the equipment of a busy laboratory with liquid nitrogen bottles and ultra-cold deep freezes.
When federal and city officials obtained a search warrant and gained full access to the building a few months later (though why it took them so long is not clear) they found almost a thousand laboratory mice, some of which were dead and all of which, according to one of the lab workers present, were “genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.” Samples and vials were labelled as containing hepatitis, HIV, malaria and tuberculosis, among other pathogens.
Local officials tried to get help from the federal Centers for Disease Control but for months CDC refused even to take their calls and more than once hung up on them. Only when prodded by the local congressman, Jim Costa, did the CDC wake up. Yet when they did turn up in May 2023, they refused repeated pleas from local officials to test the samples and left the local officials to arrange their destruction. Even when told that the next search had found a refrigerator with the word “Ebola” written on the door, the CDC declined to return to the site. Inside the fridge were “unlabeled, sealed silver bags consistent with how the lab stored high-risk biological materials.”
Eventually, the congressional Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party looked into the case and revealed that Zhu has a hair-raising biography. When he was living in China, he was vice chairman of the Henan Pioneer Aide Biological Engineering Company, a Chinese state-controlled concern with military links, and was on the boards of several other Chinese firms.
When he moved to Canada, Zhu set up dozens of companies there, as well as in America, the British Virgin islands and the Cayman islands. These started to “steal valuable American intellectual property” worth a total of $330 million and “unlawfully transfer” it to China, according to the court that convicted him in Canada. The fraud mostly related to patents on technology for breeding cattle that produce mainly female offspring, a valuable trait in the dairy industry and one that an American company, XY Inc, was planning to profit from in China. Zhu then fled to America under the name David He. He was convicted of contempt of court and deemed to have committed “fraud on an epic scale,” in the words of British Columbia’s Supreme Court. Greed does not appear to have been his only motive: he once wrote that wanted to help “defeat the American aggressor and wild ambitious wolf.”
Zhu’s company running the Reedley lab, Prestige Biotech, had no license to operate in California and had “received millions of dollars in unexplained payments” from Chinese state banks, according to the select committee. Prestige claimed to be making Covid test kits but most of the kits it was selling were counterfeit and unlicensed ones imported from China. No need for all that expensive equipment – or mice.
Certain organizations or governments would be only too pleased to see the west brought to its knees by another pandemic
As soon as a warrant was issued for Zhu’s arrest, his partner, Zhaoyan Wang, fled to China with their child. Their portfolio of properties in Nevada was put in her name but offered as collateral to get Zhu out on bail. The prosecution argued he was a flight risk and bail was refused. To the frustration and bafflement of local officials and politicians, it appears to have taken federal authorities two years to get around to searching these properties.
Now, with another pile of medical kit found in Las Vegas, some are speculating that we could be looking at something more than fraud. Was this an attempt at bioterror or even hybrid biowarfare? Some more speculative observers have pointed out the proximity of both sites to air force bases.
There have been several other suspicious incidents involving biology in recent years, as chronicled by the biosecurity expert Raina Macintyre of the University of New South Wales. In 2019, Canadian authorities caught two Chinese scientists stealing viruses from Canada’s only biosafety-level-4 laboratory. In June last year in two separate incidents, three Chinese nationals were caught at Detroit airport trying to smuggle in a parasitic fungus of wheat called Fusarium and material for growing parasitic roundworms. Both could be a threat to American agriculture. These incidents, says Dr Macintyre, “highlight the broad range of threats that must be considered to prevent agroterrorism or bioterrorism through Trojan Horse methods.”
The Zhu affair has shone a light on just how unregulated biolabs are. You can set up a lab, order a lot of sophisticated equipment and even send for genetically engineered mice without so much as a driver’s license let alone a special permit. The equipment and reagents have become steadily more affordable in recent years. “There currently are no – zero – federal regulations or restrictions with force of law on possession, handling, or transfer of most viruses,” says Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, who has been campaigning against the proliferation of risky virology labs for decades. Three congressmen, Republicans Kevin Kiley and David Valadao, and Democrat Jim Costa, have now introduced a bill to strengthen federal supervision of highly pathogenic agents and high-containment laboratories.
Let your imagination run riot. In a world where semi-hostile governments are cutting underwater cables, tapping phones, spreading misinformation and conducting more or less open cyber warfare, why would they not also be testing ways to spread diseases among their foes? Certain organizations in the world – say, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Al Qaeda or the North Korean government – would be only too pleased to see the West brought to its knees by another pandemic. Biological weapons are cheaper and less traceable than nuclear missiles and, unlike chemical weapons such as Novichok, can spread widely from a single introduction.
It would be child’s play to plant a pathogen in the population in a way that could not be linked back to your government. The Las Vegas find hints at the possibility that the true nightmare we are facing may not be a sophisticated biowarfare team in a top-secret lab, but low-level amateurs, supported in a plausibly deniable way by malign governments, stockpiling stuff in their garages to spill in shops or stadiums at an opportune moment.
The pandemic has made this threat more acute in two ways. First it has demonstrated the power of infectious viruses to cause chaos, even ones with low mortality. But second, bizarrely, it has made the scientific community less willing, not more, to face up to the threat.
How can that be? It is now agreed by every relevant authority except those based in Beijing that Covid could well have started with a lab leak. So now is exactly the time you would expect bad actors to be exploring how to order biological reagents and strains of pathogens to test on mice. You would expect governments to be tightening regulations around such supply chains and closely monitoring those who show interest in these products. But they’re not.
Here’s the really odd thing. The indifference of the CDC to what was found in Reedley is symptomatic of a general lack of interest among state bodies in unlicensed or secret biological laboratories. There appears to be very little attempt to step up the monitoring of who is ordering what reagents and equipment, let alone regulating them.
Academic virologists sometimes sound like the most extreme libertarians as they argue passionately against being constrained by new rules. In response to one proposal, the virologist Angela Rasmussen and 77 colleagues wrote that “the recommendations, if adopted as proposed, would sweep much of virology research into new oversight by unnecessarily expanding oversight to pathogens that pose little risk.”
Since the pandemic, most official bodies have stopped talking about the risks of lab leaks, let alone the threat of deliberate biowarfare. Before the Covid pandemic, the World Health Organization regularly raised such issues. Michael Ryan, director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said in 2015 that “the last three clusters of SARS cases… that nearly started SARS again were two laboratory accidents in which lab workers infected themselves and nearly infected their own communities. So the accidental release of pathogens is probably much more significant.” The EcoHealth Alliance, which funded some of the work on bat viruses in Wuhan, said in 2017: “The threat from lab-enhanced viruses is intensifying.” Since 2020… crickets.
The reason for this silence is clear. If the WHO and the science establishment were to raise the issue now, it would be tantamount to admitting that the pandemic probably started with a lab leak. They want to avoid that for fear of what it might do to the reputation of science as a whole.
For now, these organizations will continue to insist that the origins of the pandemic are not a matter they need to discuss, let alone raise with the Chinese government. But that means that more than 20 million people died – a thousand times more than the worst previous industrial accident in history, the Bhopal chemical leak in 1984 – and the preferred stance charged with stopping such deaths is to shrug and say “we may never know how.” Nobody takes this approach to the crash of an airliner, the explosion of an oil rig or the mysterious deaths of Russian defectors.
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