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UPDATE: China Linked to Unlicensed California Bio Lab


What was once considered a warehouse that manufactured COVID-19 and pregnancy tests harbored a more nefarious secret.

An illegal Chinese bio lab was operating out of this warehouse and was performing experiments on dozens of deadly viruses.

The Washington Examiner has more on the story:

The illegal Chinese bio lab in California remains an underdiscussed issue when it should be treated as a national scandal, even as more details continue to emerge about the story.

The lab, which was operating secretly and unpermitted in Reedley, California, was dealing with at least 20 infectious agents, including HIV, hepatitis, and herpes, though lab workers claimed the lab was making only pregnancy tests and COVID-19 tests. Prestige Biotech, the Chinese company that took over Universal Meditech and set up shop at the warehouse in Reedley, had its COVID tests recalled earlier this year.

We know now that the report that the lab had mice bioengineered to “catch and carry the COVID-19 virus” appears to have been a misinterpretation. While that is what is claimed in court documents, it was the result of a conversation with Prestige Biotech representative Wang Zhaolin, who spoke broken English. It appears that the mice were used to grow COVID-19 antibody cells for the test kits that ended up being recalled.

But that detail doesn’t change the series of red flags in this story. The lab was operating illegally, without a permit, in secrecy. It was being run by a Chinese company that is registered in Nevada. According to Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba, Universal Meditech or Prestige Biotech had also been “kicked out” of Canada and Texas before setting up its locations in Fresno, Reedley, and Tulare, another California city in which the company had operated from 2015-2019.

These details are disturbing.

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For one of America’s greatest rivals, we are having a bio lab containing deadly viruses in one of our states.

We know that COVID-19 started in China.

And now it seems that they want to continue spreading diseases to America.

The folks at Fox News have more on the story:

“We don’t have all the answers of what was happening in this lab,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said recently near Fresno. This is very disturbing.”

When municipal code enforcement officers entered the building in March, UMI personnel said they were making COVID-19 and pregnancy tests, according to an affidavit filed by a Reedley city official. No officials with the Fresno County Department of Health nor anyone else contacted by Fox News could explain definitively why the company purportedly making such tests was also in possession of potentially deadly agents.

The inability to get reliable information from UMI, its successor Prestige Biotech or its management – at a time when officials were unsure of what was happening and concerned about public safety – was reflected in the CDC report: “Prestige Biotech or various owners of the materials present in the warehouse have yet to cooperate with document requests from multiple partner agencies fully.”

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UMI didn’t spend much time in Reedley. Last fall, Fresno County health officials made contact with UMI at a warehouse 30 minutes away in Fresno, but the interactions with UMI there would signal the difficulties to come.

“We wanted to know what were you doing, what chemicals did you have on-site, what type of lab operations you had, and even at that time, they were unresponsive to us,” Joe Prado, assistant director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health, told Fox News. Phone calls Fox News made to numbers associated with UMI led to disconnected lines or unreturned messages.

An examination of legal records related to UMI’s affairs in Fresno revealed allegations of a company that flouted federal safety rules, lied to clients about the provenance and efficacy of its COVID-19 test kits, stiffed its own lawyers, and apparently has been ducking attempts to account for another alleged fraud.

One exasperated federal judge said UMI “routinely and intentionally” ignored his rulings, demonstrating “a stubborn resistance to [his] authority and justifies the most severe sanction available.” UMI lost that case because the court entered a default judgment well before it ever went to trial.

The fact that much of the media is sweeping this under the wrong is highly suspicious.

This was discovered a month ago, and it was hardly covered.



 

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