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A secret and illegal Chinese bio lab outside of Fresno, CA. So much fun!
Last December a City of Reedly (close to Fresno, CA) code enforcement inspector was driving in a warehouse district and noticed something that should not be: a water hose going into a supposedly unoccupied warehouse. His followup discovered a pharmaceutical lab housed inside.
The lab had twenty-some infectious agents, including Covid-19 and HIV. It also had genetically-engineered mice, many dead.
From the article: Jesalyn Harper, the city of Reedley’s code enforcement officer, thought the call would be routine - following up on an anonymous complaint about a business operating without a permit in an old warehouse. But when she found a jury-rigged garden hose sticking through a rear wall and a ventilation fan blowing foul-smelling air through an opened back door, things took a turn.
Harper knocked on the front door of the decades-old cold-storage warehouse for an inspection. What she discovered inside on that December day was almost the stuff of science fiction: Dozens of refrigerators filled with vials of blood, viruses and bacteria; containers of chemicals; hundreds of laboratory mice; and an array of stored laboratory equipment – all inside an unpermitted business operating illegally.
“I wasn’t looking for an unpermitted lab,” Harper told The Fresno Bee this week. “I was just looking for an unpermitted business.”
Prestige Biotech Inc., a company whose owners live in China, was using the building near Reedley’s downtown for storing and shipping an array of diagnostic test kits for COVID-19, pregnancy, drugs and more after apparently being booted out of their Fresno location in late 2022. The inventory of biological agents in the refrigerators include coronavirus and other exotic contagions, such as malaria, Hepatitis B and C, chlamydia, human herpes, and rubella, among others, used in the production of various test kits.
It is quite a story. The company had been kicked out of several sites before popping up in Reedly.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article277836263.html
And it gets worse. The FDA has issued a safety alert on several pregnancy test kits from several brands that may have been made from this outfit!
https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/08/dont-use-pregnancy-tests-linked-to-illegal-california-lab-fda-warns/
The lab had twenty-some infectious agents, including Covid-19 and HIV. It also had genetically-engineered mice, many dead.
From the article: Jesalyn Harper, the city of Reedley’s code enforcement officer, thought the call would be routine - following up on an anonymous complaint about a business operating without a permit in an old warehouse. But when she found a jury-rigged garden hose sticking through a rear wall and a ventilation fan blowing foul-smelling air through an opened back door, things took a turn.
Harper knocked on the front door of the decades-old cold-storage warehouse for an inspection. What she discovered inside on that December day was almost the stuff of science fiction: Dozens of refrigerators filled with vials of blood, viruses and bacteria; containers of chemicals; hundreds of laboratory mice; and an array of stored laboratory equipment – all inside an unpermitted business operating illegally.
“I wasn’t looking for an unpermitted lab,” Harper told The Fresno Bee this week. “I was just looking for an unpermitted business.”
Prestige Biotech Inc., a company whose owners live in China, was using the building near Reedley’s downtown for storing and shipping an array of diagnostic test kits for COVID-19, pregnancy, drugs and more after apparently being booted out of their Fresno location in late 2022. The inventory of biological agents in the refrigerators include coronavirus and other exotic contagions, such as malaria, Hepatitis B and C, chlamydia, human herpes, and rubella, among others, used in the production of various test kits.
It is quite a story. The company had been kicked out of several sites before popping up in Reedly.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article277836263.html
And it gets worse. The FDA has issued a safety alert on several pregnancy test kits from several brands that may have been made from this outfit!
https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/08/dont-use-pregnancy-tests-linked-to-illegal-california-lab-fda-warns/
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Yeah. Pretty scary stuff. Heck of a story, the paper really expanded upon it since I first read it.
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Hugs, Jon
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Well done for the code enforcement officer and knowing that this was something where the big guns needed to be called in immediately.