Playing Kick the Can: The Chinese Biotech Lab in Reedley

We have paid a fair amount of attention to the illicit Chinese biotech lab in Reedley, California here at AoSHQ. Maybe more attention than most of the national press has paid to it. News continues to trickle out.

But little Reedley, a town of only 25,000 people, "The World's Fruit Basket", has shown up here for a couple of other reasons, as well. First, there has been the weather. The river flooded in Reedley this spring about the time the Chinese biolab was busted, and flooding was expected to continue through the summer. Didn't happen, because spring and early summer temperatures in the Central Valley have been more moderate than expected.

Reedley city officials say Reedley Beach will likely remain closed throughout the summer as flooding is expected to continue. pic.twitter.com/5daIXKBd23

— Ben Morris (@BenMorrisNews) April 7, 2023

On the other hand, the river has not dried up yet, which it would have done if this year had been like recent drought years. So people are playing in the river now. This scene doesn't seem to go very well with the idea of a Chinese biolab with 20 pathogens and unlabeled blood, tissue and serum containers, plus genetically engineered Covid-19 mice which were just thrown in household trash when they died.

The lab that was reportedly taken over by the lab that moved to Reedley (but who knows who owns it?) had an electrical fire in Fresno. Do you think that a former wholesale furniture warehouse had adequate electrical fixtures for (reportedly) 37 freezers? They never got business or building permits. Can you imagine a fire spreading pathogens into the community?

Why the delay in revealing the Chinese lab?

Nice report by a local new source on August 8:

Last week, I wondered why it had taken so long for news about the Chinese lab to come out. The Mid Valley Times reports that "City Manager Nicole Zieba defends decision to not disclose the discovery of a an illegal lab in Reedley right away; situation stirs up a battle of 'protocol' versus 'public's right to know' "

When asked does not the public have the right to know what is happening in its backyard, particularly when that backyard is full of infectious agents, Zieba said that once investigators determined the public was not at any risk, it was paramount that nothing derail the investigations; even if that meant incurring the public's disdain.

"These investigations are still ongoing and are complex and comprehensive," Zieba said. "I believe the public is astute enough to understand that the more information that gets out to the public, the more the bad guys also know what we know. I think the public recognizes that."

She may have a point there. It is still difficult to determine who owns the lab, for example. The $360,000 tax credit Newsom gave to the bankrupt lab they took over was apparently not rescinded until June (even though the company had reportedly not met the milestones for the tax credit).

Zieba said she is upset that politicians are trying to make a name for themselves by criticizing the handling of the investigation. The bigger problem is the federal government and the fact there are no proscriptions preventing companies from doing what Prestige did.

Until Reedley.

"This company was already a bad player," said Zieba. "They got kicked out of Canada. They got kicked out of Texas. They go to California, they get kicked out of Fresno. They get kicked out of Tulare, they go back to Fresno. Get kicked out of Fresno and end up in Reedley."

Zieba continued, "We're the little David city that took down Goliath with a garden hose. We dismantled an entity that everyone else kicked down the road to someone else's town. I don't kick cans down the road."

Plus, she was threatened by the feds.

Also in June, the company applied to start up business again in Fresno. They have a facility picked near the Fresno airport. They apparently don't say exactly what they want to do at the site, though. So far, the application is awaiting clarification from the applicant.

THEY'RE BOLD

Last week's post included a podcast by VDH emphasizing the US deference to Chinese companies.

Also from the Fresno Bee story:

While the company was manufacturing COVID-19 rapid tests during its first stint in Fresno, the company apparently failed to secure required authorization from the FDA to manufacture or distribute the COVID-19 tests. Universal Meditech issued at least two recalls for its rapid antigen test kits for COVID-19 marketed under the brand names Skippack Medical Lab and DiagnosUs, according to information from the FDA - one covering more than 209,000 kits in April 2022, and another in late December for more than 56,000 COVID-19 test kits.

Daily Caller:

The lab's representatives have failed to provide "legally sufficient documentation" to inspectors and the "addresses provided for identified authorized agents were either empty offices or addresses in China that could not be verified," Joe Prado, Fresno County Public Health Department assistant director, wrote in his court declaration.

On June 13, 2023, Prado wrote to PBI and UMI representative David He, claiming he'd been unable to find correlating locations in China with the addresses He had sent to Fresno County on June 10, court documents show.

More on the international intrigues later. It's so confusing.

Blast from the Past

Back in 2012, Maetenloch wrote an ONT mentioning Reedley which gives a little substance to the idea that farmers in farm towns are not JUST farmers in farm towns:

RIP Sir John Keegan, and Gore Vidal Not So Much

Both were writers - John Keegan was the preeminent military historian of the last few decades and Gore Vidal was a well known historical novelist/commentator but probably best known these days for Bill Buckley's threat to sock him at the 1968 Democratic convention.

Victor Davis Hanson actually knew both and confirms what you'd expect - Sir Keegan was a great man and Vidal was a nasty jerk.

The night before the lecture (in an unusual fashion for this lecture) we had driven with Vidal three miles into Selma to my aunt's house (she taught English at Reedley College) for dinner. After the desert, he "shocked" us by declaring that masturbation was the sex act of choice, and then referred nonchalantly to his male friends. I noted one other thing about the evening. Vidal kept trying to namedrop literary tidbits; but my aunt, the JC English teacher, was of the old school (English literature BA, MA Stanford, where she had mastered the canon of Anglo-American classics) and had memorized verbatim many of Shakespeare's plays and much of Chaucer and could quote by memory pages of Milton.

Each time Vidal would say something like "I think it was so-and-so who once said of so-and-so," my aunt would smile and say something polite like "yes, it was" or "perhaps it was not." By the end of dinner, he grew more and more sullen with us rubes who were not playing our unenlightened parts.

And on how Keegan single-handedly changed the path of Hanson's life:

In 1983 a small Italian academic press published my doctoral thesis Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (in elegant but cumbersome folios with the pages uncut) - to zero readership. By that time I had finished graduate school and abandoned a stillborn academic career. I liked farming full-time and had no plans to reenter academia or write again. But when the publisher wrote from Pisa and said I could send 10 free copies to journals, I instead sort of randomly picked the names of ten well-known military historians.
None ever wrote back - except one John Keegan, at the pinnacle of his post-Face of Battle success. A postcard in elegant ink arrived to the farm, with something like "Dear Dr. Hanson. Accept my gratitude for the publisher's copy of your engaging thesis. Are there plans for more of the same?"

In those dark days (raisins had just crashed from $1400 to $400 a ton, and we were trying to figure out how to repay a $150,000 crop loan shortfall accruing at 15% interest), that brief note seemed to make all the difference in the world. At night after tractor driving, I suddenly started to write what would become The Western Way of War, coming in about 6 p.m. from hours on the tractor and littering the floor with Greek texts. In my newfound confidence (remember, authors, what a single act of kindness can do for others), I began applying for jobs at local JCs and California State University, Fresno.

That seems like a long time ago, culturally. What culture are we building today?

There are more topics addressed in Maetenloch's ONT which have current counterparts.

Music

The Object of my Affection

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, August 5, Keep an eye on California (even though there's a lot going on in D.C.)

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.