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.

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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........

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