They Found Another One

The same CCP-linked operative. The same illegal biolab. A different city. And the same institutions that failed us the first time.

On Saturday morning, an FBI tactical team and LVMPD SWAT officers rolled up to two residential homes in northeast Las Vegas and executed search warrants. What they found in the locked garages would be unbelievable — if we hadn’t seen it before.

Multiple refrigerators. Vials of unknown liquids. Gallon-size containers. A centrifuge. Lab equipment. More than 1,000 samples — collected, cataloged, and shipped to the National Bio-forensic Analysis Center in Maryland for testing.

The homes belong to Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu, a 62-year-old Chinese citizen who is — and I need you to sit with this — already in federal custody. His property manager, Ori Solomon, 55, was arrested on the spot and charged with felony hazardous waste disposal. Three renters were removed from the home. They apparently had no idea what was in the garage. ABC News reported the investigation began the way these things always seem to begin — with a code violation call.

The Las Vegas property sits less than three miles from Nellis Air Force Base — home of the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center.

If you’re feeling a creeping sense of déjà vu, you should be. Because this is the second time. Same guy. Same network. Same playbook. Different city.

They found another one.

The Reedley Lab — Where This All Started

In December 2022, a code enforcement inspector in Reedley, California — a small city of about 25,000 people near Fresno — noticed something odd about a warehouse across from a residential neighborhood, not far from the local high school. A garden hose was illegally connected to the building.

What the inspector found inside was the stuff of thriller novels.

Chinese nationals in lab coats. Thousands of vials containing blood, tissue, bodily fluid samples, and serums. At least 20 known infectious agents, including HIV, tuberculosis, and what officials described as the “deadliest known form of malaria.” There was a freezer — labeled “Ebola.” Its contents were never tested. Vials throughout the facility were labeled in a code that was never deciphered.

And then there were the mice. One thousand transgenic mice, genetically engineered to catch and carry COVID-19.

This was not a pharmaceutical startup with sloppy paperwork. This was something else entirely. The House Select Committee on the CCP investigated and found a “lack of apparent legitimate (or even profit-motivated criminal) motive” for the operation. The supposed business — buying counterfeit COVID test kits from China and reselling them in the U.S. — didn’t explain the transgenic mice. It didn’t explain the infectious agents. It didn’t explain the unexplained wire transfers Zhu was receiving from Chinese banks.

Nothing explained it. And almost nobody in the federal government wanted to find out.

Who Is Jesse Zhu?

Let’s talk about the man at the center of this.

Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu is a Chinese citizen who previously served as vice chairman of Henan Pioneer Aide Biological Engineering — a PRC state-controlled enterprise. That’s not an inference or a characterization. The corporate ownership chain runs through the China Development Bank, the National Council for Social Security Fund, and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. He was connected to Henan Investment Group, which has been described as being “involved in military-civil fusion” — the CCP’s strategy of erasing the line between civilian industry and military capability.

Zhu fled to Canada, where he set up dozens of corporations to steal American biotech intellectual property. The British Columbia Supreme Court found what it called “fraud on an epic scale” and levied a $330 million judgment against him.

So he fled again — this time to America, where he assumed the alias “David He” and set up shop. Universal Meditech Inc. Prestige Biotech Inc. Shell companies for an operation that stretched from a warehouse in Reedley to residential garages in Las Vegas.

He was indicted in 2023 on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy, false statements, and distributing misbranded COVID test kits. His trial is set for March 10, 2026. His partner, Zhaoyan Wang, is believed to be in China — beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.

And here’s the kicker: Zhu is suing Reedley and Fresno County for destroying his lab materials. The man who was running an illegal biolab with HIV samples and COVID-engineered mice across from a residential neighborhood is claiming he’s the victim.

The CDC Hung Up the Phone

This is where the story goes from alarming to infuriating.

When Reedley officials discovered the lab, they did what any reasonable local government would do — they called the CDC. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency whose entire reason for existence is to protect Americans from biological threats.

The CDC refused to investigate.

Not “declined to prioritize.” Not “referred to another agency.” They hung up on local officials. When U.S. Representative Jim Costa got involved and pressured the CDC to at least send inspectors, they came — and then refused to test any of the samples.

Read that again. A warehouse full of infectious agents, transgenic mice, and a freezer labeled “Ebola” — and the CDC wouldn’t test any of it.

The Select Committee on the CCP called the CDC’s refusal “baffling.” That’s congressional language for something far less polite. And the consequence of that refusal isn’t just bureaucratic embarrassment — it’s legal. Without tested samples, bioterrorism charges against Zhu become functionally impossible to prove. The CDC didn’t just fail to act. It may have made accountability impossible.

The Biden-era FBI wasn’t much better. Their response to Reedley was effectively: “No WMDs detected. This is your case. You guys go do it.” They left a city of 25,000 people — with a $14 million annual budget — to clean up an illegal biolab linked to CCP-affiliated entities. At their own expense.

Same Defendant. Different Response.

Now compare that to what happened in Las Vegas last Saturday.

The FBI showed up with a specialized evidence collection team. Proper chain of custody. Systematic cataloging. More than 1,000 samples carefully packaged and sent to the National Bio-forensic Analysis Center in Maryland — a facility specifically designed for this kind of work. Fox News reported the full federal response, including SWAT.

Same defendant. Same network. Same type of lab. Radically different response.

As Rep. Kevin Kiley noted, the contrast between the two responses is stark — and telling.

Nicole Zieba, Reedley’s city manager, put it best in an interview with GV Wire: “For years now, we have been trying to raise the alarm that we have a big problem in this country... Now you’ve got the small of the small, Reedley, and the big of the big, Vegas, with the same national security problem.”

That’s not a partisan talking point. That’s a city manager who spent years begging the federal government to take a biological threat seriously and watched them shrug.

Mask Theater vs. Actual Biolabs

I want to put something in perspective, because this is where the institutional rot becomes impossible to ignore.

In 2021, we published a piece at Rational Ground on dangerous pathogens found on children’s face masks. Lab analysis found tuberculosis bacteria, pneumonia, meningitis — all on the masks we were strapping to kids’ faces in the name of “following the science.”

The CDC — the same CDC that insisted toddlers wear masks on airplanes, that pushed universal masking in schools for years, that made “layers of protection” its institutional mantra — could not be bothered to test the contents of an illegal biolab operating in a California warehouse.

Let that sink in.

We spent years engaged in mask theater — mandating cloth coverings that trapped pathogens against children’s faces — while an actual CCP-linked biological laboratory sat in a warehouse across from a neighborhood in the San Joaquin Valley. With HIV. With tuberculosis. With COVID-engineered mice. With a freezer labeled Ebola.

And the CDC? The agency that told you to double-mask? That insisted your three-year-old needed a face covering to board a flight?

They wouldn’t test any of it. They hung up the phone.

The same bureaucracy that would hound a restaurant owner for seating capacity violations during lockdowns decided that an illegal biolab with 20 infectious agents was someone else’s problem. The irony isn’t just devastating — it’s disqualifying. These are not serious people protecting public health. These are bureaucrats protecting their budgets and their reputations.

How Many More?

Here’s the question that should keep you up at night.

The Select Committee’s report on Reedley concluded with a line that deserves to be carved into the wall of every federal agency with “health” or “security” in its name: “No one knows whether there are other unknown biolabs because there is no monitoring system in place.”

No monitoring system. None. In the United States of America — a country that spent trillions on COVID response, that shut down the economy, that closed schools, that tracked your vaccination status — there is no system to detect illegal biological laboratories operating on American soil.

Both Reedley and Las Vegas were discovered the same way: a code violation call. A garden hose. A neighbor complaint. That’s it. That’s our national biodefense strategy — hoping someone notices something weird and calls code enforcement.

The Reedley lab operated for over a year before anyone looked. How long was the Las Vegas operation running? We don’t know yet. And how many others are out there right now — in garages, warehouses, and rented homes — that nobody has stumbled across?

Jennifer Van Laar’s reporting at RedState and The Bureau’s deep investigative work have done more to expose this story than the entire federal public health apparatus. That’s not a compliment to the journalists — though they deserve one — it’s an indictment of the system.

Pass the Damn Bill

Representatives Kevin Kiley, Jim Costa, and David Valadao introduced the “Preventing Illegal Laboratories and Protecting Public Health Act” — bipartisan legislation that would create federal standards for detecting and responding to illegal biolabs.

It still hasn’t passed.

We’re now two labs in. Same guy. Same CCP-linked network. Two American cities. One near a high school. One near an Air Force base. A thousand vials of God-knows-what shipped to Maryland for testing. A freezer labeled Ebola that was never tested. Transgenic mice engineered for COVID. Wire transfers from Chinese banks with no explanation. A $330 million fraud judgment from a Canadian court. An alias. A network of shell companies. And a trial date in five weeks.

And Congress still hasn’t passed the law that would create a basic monitoring framework to find the next one.

Because there will be a next one. The Select Committee told us so. The pattern told us so. And the fact that our only detection method is a code enforcement call told us so.

Jesse Zhu’s trial begins March 10. The evidence collected in Las Vegas may reshape that case entirely — assuming the current administration follows through where the last one refused to. The early signs are better. The FBI showed up this time. They brought the right team. They’re testing the samples.

But the structural problem remains. We have no monitoring system. No federal framework. No early warning. We’re relying on garden hoses and nosy neighbors to protect us from CCP-linked biological operations on American soil.

They found another one. The question is how many they haven’t found.

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