Who had private Chinese biolabs in California on your bingo card?

 StrategyPage has a long analysis about what was going on with that Chinese biolab in California that made headlines last year but since then has sort of dropped out of the headlines.

I should note that Strategy Page is not a conspiracy site, and they are more accurate than much of the MSM on what is going on inside countries where I have personal knowledge. (Philippines, Colombia, West Africa, South Africa).

That shoddy lab in California  was discovered 7 months ago, not by the feds, but by a local building inspector, and the local authorities had a lot of problems getting the CDC etc. interested in finding what was being done there. 

At first, the lab was supposed to be about testing for Covid.

but later investigations found a lot more infectious specimens inside.

USAToday story here. the story has sort of disappeared from the news, but a Congressional committee issued a report  last November about what this was about.

The Congressional report includes this complaint:

The CDC’s insisted that there was “no evidence” that Select Agents were within Reedley Biolab or that Zhu and UMI imported infectious agents and “insufficient evidence at this time” of legal violations. It seems to have made this claim without conducting any investigation beyond reading the labels that were in English on a limited number of the pathogenic samples.,,,

WTF? 

conclusion:

At a minimum, the Reedley Biolab shows the profound threat that unlicensed and unknown biolabs pose to our country. At worst, this investigation revealed significant gaps in our nation’s defenses and pathogen-related regulations that present a grave national security risk that could be exploited in the future.

Italics mine...ya think? 

It is therefore incumbent upon Congress and the Executive Branch to address these vulnerabilities now before it is too late.

As I said: The story sort of disappeared from the news since then.

What me worry?

So what was this all about? 

  StrategyPage's summary here analyzes this in light of Chinese history and culture, such as the mandate of heaven, chronic corruption, and a resurgence of the war lord mindset that has plagued China for 2100 years.

So if the regime falls, the local warlords want weapons to retain power.

This tries to explain why small private rich guys might be investing in such labs. 

As SP explains:

A case can be made that the Chinese government has been waging a covert war on America for years. At least a few of the Chinese with biowar labs in China would certainly presume government approval for creation of similar labs in America, plus that would give them far greater bragging rights and status among their peers. China’s government has lost control of its regional leaders, who are now waging private wars against America. With weapons of mass destruction.

italics mine. 

So why does SP think this is done by a rich guy to gain power, not by the imperial Chinese government?

Because Xi isn't that stupid.

Had it been an official Chinese government biowar lab, that would have been an overt act of war. Fortunately, it wasn’t, but it is still a big problem because the California lab is unlikely to be the only one, and we absolutely dare not assume it was.

Hmm.. one wonders if the Chinese have such labs here in the Philippines.

Another note: It is often said that people/countries that are guilty will accuse their victims of doing what they are actually doing. This might explain Russia and China and the leftist Americans pointing fingers to Ukrainian biolabs.

Now, I have no idea what is in those Ukrainian labs, but I do know that local biolabs are needed to monitor diseases in both humans and animals, and to diagnose new outbreaks, and that even these diagnostic/vaccine producing labs can result in local epidemics, such as anthrax in Russia or brucellosis in China.

Yet these labs are needed:  I often cite the local outbreak in 2009 of Ebola Reston virus in local pig farms, that also infected a few local workers non fatally. 

this NatGeo article discusses that outbreak, and the detective work used to identify what was going on 

But there is a huge difference in labs that diagnose the latest outbreaks in animals or humans, and make vaccines to stop them, and labs such as the one in California that just was doing....exactly what is the question.

So one does wonder if there are more private biowar labs out there operating under the radar of the authorities in the USA, or maybe even in third world countries.