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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26714 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Prestige Biotech

TIME reported:

Recently, many California residents were disturbed to learn that a small, privately-operated bio lab in the Central Valley town of Reedley was shut down by Fresno County Department of Public Health officials after they found that it had been improperly managing almost 1,000 laboratory mice and samples of infectious diseases including COVID-19, rubella, malaria, dengue, chlamydia, hepatitis, and HIV. The lab was registered to a company called Prestige Biotech that sold a variety of medical testing kits, including for pregnancy and COVID-19, and it was likely storing disease samples for the purpose of developing and validating its testing kits. Government authorities are still investigating the company’s history, but it appears to have previously operated a lab in Fresno under the name Universal MediTech, where city officials flagged it for investigation regarding improperly stored chemicals.

This, if anything, seems to be an understatement, since the initial federal investigation starts with:

On September 6, 2023, the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (“Select Committee”) issued its first subpoena as part of its ongoing investigation into theillegal facility that local authorities uncovered in Reedley, California.The subpoena, signed by the Chairman with an on-site visit by the Select Committee’s Chief Investigative Counsel and two investigative staffers, uncovered thousands of pages of documents, hundreds of photographs, and hours of video.This evidence, alongside interviews of local officials and other investigative steps, revealed troubling gaps in federal pathogen safeguards. These gaps allowed a wanted fugitive from Canada, who is a PRC national who had previously stolen millions of dollars of American intellectual property, to operate an illegal facility that contained “thousands of vials of potentially infectious agents” in Reedley, California.

and quickly turns to :

Approximately 1,000 mice were kept in inhumane, overcrowded conditions.When local officials asked a worker who “appeared to be in control” of the mice, she replied that they were transgenic mice that simulate the human immune system that were “genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.” In subsequent interviews with individuals who were at the warehouse, local officials learned that workers were tasked with caring and cleaning for the mice and, on numerous occasions, the Reedley Biolab operators had held back their pay.One of the workers who tended to the mice told Officer Harper that he and his children had become sick close in time to when he was tending the mice.The worker stated that he was instructed to discard any dead mice that he found into a dumpster...

The CDC did not note an Ebola label on the freezer in its report. When asked about the freezer labeled Ebola in a subsequent email, the CDC official noted that the CDC “would typically look for the vial to be labeled as Ebola,”that they “didn’t recall seeing a fridge labeled as Ebola,”and asked for a photograph of the freezer. A photograph was not available. The Select Committee has received written statements reporting the presence of the label.

The AP has a... more forgiving description, though that's damning with the extent it bends over backwards. Let's all get the obvious jokes out of our systems first. My personal favorite so far is "I didn't even know there was a wet market in Fresno", but if you have a particularly good one (maybe Black Dynamite?), fire away.

There's a bit of an obvious question, here, and it's "what the fuck".

And there is a plausible, charitable explanation. Looking at the current charges that fugitive from Canada is facing, it's quite possible that this lab was genuinely making lab tests, using these viral agents and lab mice to validate each batch, and just took 'move fast, break things' to an extreme level. Even the Ebola-labeled fridge, if it did have ebola samples, could maybe be about various biosensor demands that even pre-COVID were already being floated around; it's also possible that Zhu just got the thing on discount from a normal lab and didn't wipe off the marker. If that was the case, perhaps the strangest thing is here's that the scuzzy Engrish medical stuff marketed by a fraudster with a couple different IDs with different names on them, was actually trying and moderately-'real', even if it also had tremendous unnecessary risk and iffy environmental awareness. The criminal complaint even has a dedicated note for :

Despite media reports that UMI and PBI may have been manufacturing bioweapons, no evidence supporting those reports has been found to date. Any and all pathogens and toxins that have been found during the government’s investigation appear to be related to the manufacture and distribution of various IVD test kits.

... but that answer is a little complicated by rough questions about who, if anyone, has actually been looking. Beyond the CDC's apparent unwillingness or inability to test any of the samples found at the lab, it's not clear where they came from, or what Prestige would have been doing with them. Prestige mostly sold pregnancy tests, drug tests, so on.

And the charitable story has more than a few holes: none of the public documents show much evidence of Prestige BioTech's ability to manufacture the scale or variety of tests that they published, and the congressional investigation suggests that the company may have simply relabeled non-US-manufactured (and possibly non-US-certified) ones. It's illegal to import many of the found infectious agents without a license that Prestige did not have, and so the CDC may have presumed that they were provided by US companies... but it's a little worrying if some rando can order supplies of dengue or malaria without anyone caring. Compared to what happens if you try to order the wrong chemicals from a supply shop, that'd actually be worse.

... but it's not clear what, if any, alternative explanation would make more sense. Assuming for the sake of argument that Zhu is an undercover agent for the Chinese government, they don't exactly need James Bond to get Dengue fever samples. Nor would someone wanting to mix up bioweapons find it particularly useful to save on shipping by doing in-situ development. Perhaps there's something particularly funky about these particular breeds of transgenic mice, and given Zhu's previous modeus operandi of stealing biotech IP that would be in line with other practices, but there's no obvious way to get there from here, and a ton of inexplicable chaff around that. Maybe if the biological samples were meant as literal chaff and contained entirely different materials, in the sense that no sane person would test them for 'normal' corporate espionage?

That's further complicated by the federal investigation's general unwillingness to conduct the sort of testing or investigation necessary to assuage concerns; even were this particular case fully in the 'scuzzy Enrish dropshipper' category, the feds don't seem to have or be interested in getting the information necessary to demonstrate that. The charitable view, I suppose, is that the CDC runs into variations of this problem a lot (!) and doesn't think there's much to be gained from knowing the scale of the issue (!!) rather than simply spooling up the vacuum cleaners. Which... isn't especially good.

Leaving aside literally everything else, I suspect that the fridge labeled "Ebola" didn't actually contain Ebola (anymore) for the simple reason that given their laissez-faire attitude towards handling samples, they'd all be dead and we'd have the CDC and FEMA locking down the entire state. Outbreaks happen even in legitimate BSL-3+ labs semi-regularly.

I bet they got them on the cheap in a yard sale.

That's true, though not the most cheerful a thought. There's a possibility that they were marked this way as 'chaff' -- no sane person is going to sniff these things, or check if they contain some rando more prosaic biomedical IP -- which seems the most plausible answer.

But then you'd hope that the CDC would be willing to prove it, in either case, even as disillusioned as COVID has made me for them.

The CDC probably has a rule about commenting on ongoing investigations.

One would think, but there's a lot of public comments going around, either through things like the AP news report I linked above, or the lengthy messages sent to the town or to its police. Perhaps more seriously, whether for good or ill local officials had applied in early June for destruction of all biological materials on-site, and had completed that destruction by mid-August. While the CDC did show up for two days in the initial search in May, while accompanied by state officials, none of the court documents discuss the CDC even taking samples to test, nevermind actually returning the results of those tests. The congressional investigation summarizes this as :

The CDC’s refusal to test any potential pathogens with the understanding that local officials would otherwise have to destroy the samples through an abatement process makes it impossible for the Select Committee to fully assess the potential risks that this specific facility posed to the community. It is possible that there were other highly dangerous pathogens that were in the coded vials or otherwise unlabeled. Due to government failures, we simply cannot know.

In its refusal to test, the CDC likewise did not offer to connect local officials with any other federal agency or authorized lab that may be able to test the samples. Based on statements from local officials and briefings the Select Committee received from the CDC, the CDC did not contact the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, the government biodefense laboratory located in Fort Dietrich, Maryland that could potentially have provided greater assistance.

According to local official accounts, in a subsequent conversation with the CDC in early September 2023, local officials again pressed the CDC on why they refused to test any potential pathogens. A CDC official informed the local officials that it was illegal for the CDC to test any samples that were not expressly labeled as a Select Agent. City Manager Nicole Zieba expressed shock at this fact. She asked whether, if that were the case, the CDC had any authority to stop a terrorist in the United States who simply removed the label off a vial of a deadly virus. The CDC official said that the CDC had no authority to test the deadly virus in that hypothetical and that it was a noted gap in its authority. This characterization of the CDC’s authority appears to be false.

Which doesn't prove that they're not investigating further, but it does wink and point suggestively that at least they're not investigating usefully.

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