On the menu today: Yes, today’s newsletter is about the Chinese government, a biolab, and reckless handling of dangerous pathogens, but it is not a rerun from 2020. You are going to want to read this one all the way to the end.
The Case of the Covert Biolab
The Las Vegas Police Department issued a statement Monday announcing that its “ARMOR” team had assisted the FBI is collecting more than a thousand pieces of evidence from a residence on Sugar Springs Drive in Northeast Las Vegas. The “ARMOR” team — “All-Hazard Regional Multi-agency Operations and Response” — specializes in the “detection, response, mitigation and investigation of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive incidents.”
The LVPD stated:
Some of that evidence included biological material and liquids that were meticulously collected and sent to FBI labs for testing.
Investigators have identified a suspect in this case as the owner of the residence on Sugar Springs Drive. That individual was already in federal custody on charges related to the investigation of a biolab in Reedley, California in 2023.
A second suspect, 55-year-old Ori Solomon, was arrested in conjunction with this investigation. Solomon is the property manager for the two properties on Sugar Springs Drive and Temple View Drive. He was booked into the Clark County Detention Center for disposing and discharging hazardous waste.
This location was apparently rented out as an AirB&B and made people “deathly ill.”
Kelly [a pseudonym for the witness] said she had been hired by the property manager, Ori Solomon, to clean the home, which was rented out by the room via websites, including Airbnb, according to the report. . . .
Kelly told police that while working at the house in April 2025, she entered the garage, which was usually locked, and found an assortment of “refrigerators/freezers, glass beakers with reddish liquid inside,” a biological safety cabinet and what she believed to be a centrifuge, according to Solomon’s arrest report.
She said the garage smelled “like a hospital (not like a clean hospital but more of a foul stale stagnant air smell),” the report said.
Kelly said she and Solomon’s handyman both got “‘deathly ill’ after going into the garage,” the report said. “Approximately five days after entering the garage, she was left with breathing issues, fatigue, ‘could not get out of bed,’ and muscle aches.” . . .
“Kelly said a lot of people who have lived inside the house have gotten sick. One female ended up in the hospital with severe respiratory issues,” the report said. “Kelly also noted when she was cleaning the house there would be many dead crickets found in the master bedroom,” which was “super uncommon as she had lived in Las Vegas for numerous years and never seen anything like that before.”
The Reedley biolab mentioned in the LVPD police report is the sort of story that deserved a lot more attention than it received at the time; National Review wrote about the case twice, noting that at the biolab “thousands of mice were infected with diseases from HIV and E. Coli to malaria and Covid-19.”
The owner of the North Las Vegas residence, Jia Bei Zhu, is a Chinese citizen who was indicted in November 2023 for selling hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 test kits to companies throughout the U.S. that never received pre-market approval, pre-market clearance, emergency use authorization, or other applicable exemptions from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
If you’re wondering why the U.S. would let Jia Bei Zhu into the country, well . . . we didn’t. According to a comprehensive report into the Reedley biolab published by the House Select Committee on China, he managed to enter the country under a false identity.
Jia Bei Zhu had previously worked as the vice chairman of a Chinese state-controlled enterprise based in Xinxiang, “Henan Pioneer Aide Biological Engineering Company Limited,” as well as running a company with state-controlled investors:
Zhu also served as Chairman of the Board and General Manager of Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited (“Aide Cattle China”), a company whose directors included an executive for a PRC defense firm and a company on the U.S. Entity List. Shareholders in Aide Cattle China include PRC state-controlled entities and individuals who have invested in other PRC state-controlled entities. Through Aide Cattle China, Zhu was the primary shareholder of 11 PRC cattle companies.
It turned out that the Reedley biolab was not the first illegal biolab that Jia Bei Zhu had set up on American soil:
Zhu had previously operated a similar unlicensed facility in the city of Fresno, California. At the Fresno location, it appears that Zhu and his associates had rewired the electrical system in a way that may have caused the fire that forced Zhu to flee. When that location was no longer available, Zhu proceeded to find a second potential laboratory and again go through the elaborate process of retrofitting it for his illicit operation. It appears that Zhu has had to move medical equipment, transgenic mice, and apparent pathogens several times over the years, incurring significant costs in the process.
Zhu and his associates at the Reedley Biolab were purchasing counterfeit test kits from the PRC and reselling them in the United States as “Made in the USA.” The only pathogen test kit that Zhu and his associates were selling were for Covid; the rest were pregnancy tests.
You may be wondering why a facility allegedly smuggling (potentially defective) Covid and pregnancy test kits would need mice infected with E. Coli and malaria. They didn’t:
Moreover, there is little to no market for test kits that would test the majority of the pathogens that the Reedley Biolab appeared to contain, let alone test kits created in an unlicensed laboratory. The Select Committee did find evidence that at least one pathogen may have been tested on the mice at the Biolab, but the purpose and scope of such testing is unclear.
Wait, there’s more:
The Select Committee investigation uncovered documents and other records showing that, while Zhu was selling fraudulent kits and engaging in unknown pathogen-related activity, he was also receiving unexplained payments via wire transfer from PRC banks. In a few years, these payments totaled over $1.3 million. This number may significantly underestimate the total amount he received via suspicious payments, because the Select Committee only has access to partial data and records. These payments do not accord with Zhu’s fraudulent activity, as he should have been paying money to PRC firms for the test kits and receiving payments from American individuals or companies who purchased the counterfeit test kits. These payments may be indicative of money laundering. These payments deserve continued scrutiny.
The House panel noted, “The Reedley Biolab was discovered in a warehouse located at 850 I Street in Reedley, California. It was across the street from a residential neighborhood, next to a railway line, and a short walk from the town’s high school, city hall, and water supply.”
Representatives from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “arrived on site on May 2, 2023 and finished their work May 4. Upon reviewing the site, the CDC reported, based on existing labels, that the facility contained ‘at least 20 potentially infectious agents,’ including “HIV, Tuberculosis, and the deadliest known form of Malaria.”
Oh, and then there was the one other unnerving detail: “Local officials and contractors reported that they found a freezer labeled ‘Ebola’ with silver sealed bags found inside consistent with how the Reedley Biolab operators stored sensitive biological and other materials”:
The apparent presence of Ebola samples at the Reedley Biolab is the clearest example of the lack of apparent legitimate (or even profit-motivated criminal) motive in the operation of the illegal facility. The need for Ebola tests is minimal, and the potential market is extremely small. Experimenting with Ebola (even for benign purposes) is very dangerous — case fatality rates for Ebola have ranged between 25-90 percent in past outbreaks. Handling Ebola requires a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility, “the highest level of biological safety.” Only a few laboratories in the world have the equipment, licenses, and safety protocols required. The Reedley Biolab clearly does not. It is unclear how any non-BSL-4 facility, let alone the Reedley Biolab, would potentially be able to acquire this deadly pathogen in the first place.
The government may have indicted Jia Bei Zhu on violating FDA rules because those are the charges that are likely to be easiest to prove. But clearly, he wasn’t just running a scam to repackage and sell Chinese Covid and pregnancy test kits.
But — and this is the part that is really going to blow your mind — our knowledge of what was in the Reedley biolab is based entirely upon what was printed on the labels; the CDC refused to do any testing:
CDC officials confirmed that the CDC made this list of pathogens based solely on the labels that were placed on samples. The CDC did not test these samples to assess whether the listed labels were correct or otherwise in a cipher that the workers used for a more dangerous pathogen. It likewise did not test any of the apparent pathogen samples that were labeled in a code (i.e., a combination of partial Mandarin symbols or English letters with numbers) despite the fact that neither the CDC nor local officials ever found a key to decipher the code. . . .
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.
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.
Glad to see the U.S. government is bringing the best and brightest to this threat, isn’t it? It would be helpful if CDC officials had an accurate idea of what their authorities were, particularly as it relates to dangerous pathogens. (Time for the Bobs: “Just what is it you say you do here?”) I can hear every libertarian groaning, “Oh, sure, now we find a government official who sees his authority as strictly limited.”
Keep in mind, what’s going on at these biolabs is all separate from last June, when the FBI arrested two Chinese nationals for smuggling in a fungus called fusarium graminearum, which is considered an agroterrorism weapon, which they claimed was for research at the University of Michigan, or when the FBI arrested another Chinese doctoral student at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and charged him with smuggling biological materials into the U.S. and making false statements.
Now, we know that the Chinese government exerts an extraordinary level of control over its citizens and keeps a watchful eye on Chinese citizens living in the United States. If the regime in Beijing doesn’t want one of its citizens to do something on U.S. soil, it has extraordinary surveillance capabilities and leverage; it has even operated secret police stations within the United States.
It is very hard to believe that no one in the Chinese government had any idea what Jia Bei Zhu was doing with his biolabs in Fresno, or Reedley, or North Las Vegas. The fact that the People’s Republic of China paid Jia Bei Zhu more than $1.3 million suggests that they knew where he was and that he was doing something they wanted done.
But don’t worry, America. On Wednesday, the president spoke to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, although from the president’s description, the topic of Chinese nationals smuggling in biological materials or running secret biolabs that are making people sick just never come up:
I have just completed an excellent telephone conversation with President Xi, of China. It was a long and thorough call, where many important subjects were discussed, including Trade, Military, the April trip that I will be making to China (which I very much look forward to!), Taiwan, the War between Russia/Ukraine, the current situation with Iran, the purchase of Oil and Gas by China from the United States, the consideration by China of the purchase of additional Agricultural products including lifting the Soybean count to 20 Million Tons for the current season (They have committed to 25 Million Tons for next season!), Airplane engine deliveries, and numerous other subjects, all very positive! The relationship with China, and my personal relationship with President Xi, is an extremely good one, and we both realize how important it is to keep it that way. I believe that there will be many positive results achieved over the next three years of my Presidency having to do with President Xi, and the People’s Republic of China! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
“The relationship with China, and my personal relationship with President Xi, is an extremely good one.” I wonder if Kelly the cleaning lady, who ended up in the hospital with severe respiratory issues after stumbling across the secret biolab, feels the same way.
ADDENDUM: I may have mentioned that the daily podcast I co-host, the Three Martini Lunch, is now on YouTube, adding the, er, exciting visual of Greg’s and my faces while talking. Still, it’s an unparalleled opportunity to peek around my home office and to keep track of when I color my rapidly graying hair. I’ll bet there are some Morning Jolt readers out there who would like to subscribe.