by Steven Richards at Just the News
On Thursday, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released a long-awaited report on the illegal biological laboratory in California run by a fugitive Chinese national.
Congressional investigators allege that the man who set up the laboratory had significant connections to the Chinese Communist Party apparatus and he ran an illegal laboratory that housed approximately 20 types of infectious disease samples and sold COVID-19 tests without a proper permit.
The same week, President Joe Biden held a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping where the two world leaders discussed the U.S.-China bilateral relationship. During the summit, the the United States and China agreed to resume military to military contacts, partner in countering the fentanyl trade, and inked a new climate statement.
Despite the newfound spirit of cooperation, it appears that neither President Biden nor U.S. representatives brought up the clandestine biolab which operated on American soil unnoticed for years, posing health risks to the community of Reedley, California and taking American COVID-19 relief money to fund its operations.
The Reedley biolab was run first by Universal Meditech Inc (UMI) and later Prestige Biotech Inc, both companies controlled by a man named Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu. The report said that Zhu was “a fugitive from Canada who illegally entered the United States” and had “previously stolen millions of dollars of American intellectual property,” although it did not detail any court records relating to those allegations. A court record from the Supreme Court of Canada shows that Zhu was found liable or deceit and civil conspiracy in a civil case under Canadian law and awarded $8.6 million in damages to the American company that had licensed its technology to his company.
Zhu and his co-conspirators were charged last week with “distributing adulterated and misbranded medical devices in violation of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and for making false statements to the Food and Drug Administration” (FDA), according to a statement from the United States Department of Justice.
“UMI and PBI were based in Fresno and Reedley and did not obtain pre-market approval, pre-market clearance, emergency use authorization, or other applicable exemption from the FDA as was required. UMI and PBI received millions of dollars for the sales of the test kits,” the DOJ continued. If convicted, Zhu faces a maximum statutory penalty of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the adulterated and misbranding of medical devices charges, and five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the false statements charge, prosecutors said.
According to the report,…
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