XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Why doesn’t the CDC care about Chinese biolabs in America?

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.

“Hybrid biowarfare would be a lot cheaper and more deniable than cyberwarfare.” — see also, 2020:

The Zhu scandal is gobsmacking: labs in Nevada and California, full of pathogens, run by a well connected Chinese businessman who was a fugitive from justice in Canada.

Hybrid biowarfare would be a lot cheaper and more deniable than cyberwarfare. pic.twitter.com/DLedv4SymI

— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) February 12, 2026