THE ENEMY WITHIN: She uncovered a terrifying lab hidden in California, with alleged ties to China.
Inside the sprawling building on I Street in Reedley, code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper found vials filled with liquid — some marked in English or Chinese, others with just a code — that bore frightening labels such as “Malaria,” “COVID-19” and “HIV.” Refrigerators, lined up in columns along a wall, had labels that read “blood” and “Ebola.”
As she walked deeper into the warehouse, passing lab workers filling pregnancy test kits, she located the source of the smell that had brought her there — droppings from 1,000 lab-tested mice, she told The Times during a recent interview. The workers were nice enough, she said, but when she started asking questions she could feel the mood change.
“I realized I’m in trouble, and I need to get out of this building without tipping them off that I’m scared,” Harper said.
Her discovery blew open an elaborate criminal case with ties to California, Las Vegas and China. The investigation in Reedley found that the lab was part of an elaborate scheme to import COVID tests from China and pass them off as American-made.
But there are some who fear the operation was much more complex than that. A congressional committee uncovered payments topping $1 million made to the operator of the Reedley business from banks in the People’s Republic of China.
The defendant in the case, Jia Bei Zhu, a Chinese national, has not been charged with running an illicit biolab and his attorney has denied it. The vials discovered in Reedley were never tested.
Well, why weren’t they tested?
One clue might be that this story broke last week, but has gone largely ignored.
