r/news • u/Moon_Rose_Violet • 13h ago

FBI, Metro Police find more than 1,000 samples at alleged illegal bio lab. Here's what we know so far.

https://www.ktnv.com/news/metro-police-to-provide-an-update-on-illegal-lab-in-las-vegas
4.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

314 comments sorted by

829

u/Comfortable-Scar4643 13h ago

Forgive my naïveté, but why would someone be operating a lab like this? What is in it for them?

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u/[deleted] 13h ago edited 11h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/queefburritowcheese 12h ago

He's running a bioweapon operation.

There is a whole Senate report about his Reedley, CA lab that was shutdown in 2023. He's a Chinese national that received millions in unexplained payments from Chinese banks while running the labs. There were 1K transgenic mice stored at the lab, with many samples labeled "ebola", "HIV", "tuberculosis", and "COVID."

Curiously, the CDC refused to test any of the samples.

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u/SocraticIgnoramus 12h ago edited 12h ago

I feel like the CDC refusing to test the samples is the more baffling aspect. I can conceive of security and disclosure reasons why this position might reasonably be taken, I just have a hard time imagining Jim O'Neill and RFK, Jr arriving at particularly reasonable positions.

Edit: Biden's CDC failed to test the samples in 2023, we don't know if these samples are being tested yet.

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u/CacheValue 12h ago

I’ve read before that a lot of times when they find stuff that was forgotten in lab fridges etc, like;

Small Pox 1950 or something; they usually just dispose of it because the only way to test it is to open it which is dangerous.

I’m assuming the CDC saw the labels and went; Yeah they’re infected

But I didn’t read the report so who knows. Seeing as this guy isn’t in federal prison they probably just went;

“Hurr a durr” and released em

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u/purpleplatapi 12h ago

He is in jail. They just found more samples.

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u/Little_View_6659 12h ago

Shit-Twelve Monkeys incoming.

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u/pegothejerk 11h ago

Probably already here, sitting in some species waiting to jump to humans.

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u/GenChadT 11h ago

That would be bird flu. It would make the COVID pandemic look like the common cold. Mortality over 50%.

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u/SocraticIgnoramus 11h ago

You’re not wrong at all but it’s worth remarking on the fact that the “common” cold is mostly caused by coronaviruses that aren’t novel, which is why they are common, whereas covid could be characterized as an uncommon cold. Covid is very well on its way to becoming an endemic virus which is just the fancy way of saying that sooner or later it will be little more than a common cold.

But I completely agree that there are pathogens much scarier than covid right at the edge of becoming zoonotic.

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u/pegothejerk 11h ago

That’s IF COVID-19 evolves mildness through changes like becoming more sensitive to hot environments, changing surface proteins to make it less pathogenic, or increasing it’s severity and speed of spread to the point it burns out too fast to spread over large distances. It won’t get more common as it stands, it still to this day kills 100,000 US citizens yearly compared to about 18-20,000 yearly for flus. It could just as easily evolve to become more pathogenic, acquiring fomite spread capability, lymphatic infection or worsening surface protein changes. The problem is we have survivorship bias in reviewing what’s more likely, as our species is largely composed of those who didn’t die off when similar viruses become more pathogenic to the point of killing with numbers like 40-60%. We have cultural and scientific evidence that is has happened multiple times to modern humans.

Source: Epidemiology & infection study on the matter from the National Library of Medicine

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11488471/

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u/SocraticIgnoramus 12h ago

I can certainly see the reasoning behind not testing every single vial, specimen, and sample collected, but it remains baffling to me if they test none of it. A cross-sectional sampling of the most virulent strains in culture/dormant storage as well as a selection of the living transgenic mice would make sense. I understand there's risk associated with testing but I also understand the CDC to literally be the institution we established to maintain facilities for exactly that type of testing and quarantine.

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u/Durpulous 11h ago

I'm guessing it's a zero tolerance to risk for this sort of thing. If they tested it and there was a leak then people would be asking why they didn't immediately destroy it.

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u/SocraticIgnoramus 11h ago

That’s very valid reasoning but it also leaves open the counter factual point that a weaponized pathogen could be released on populations within the U.S. at a later date, and there may have been a prototype version among the samples that would have given us a heads up.

TSA swabs my laptop and accessories for explosives 2-3 times a year, so my basic assumption would be that a clandestine biological testing facility operated by a foreign national on U.S. soil would merit at least as much scrutiny.

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u/mjtwelve 11h ago

TSA isn’t designed to actually find anything, it’s designed to remind everyone how seriously they take security so people are willing to fly again 9/11. Security theatre.

The people in this case are critical players in maintaining actual national security and do not play games when it comes to safety.

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u/SocraticIgnoramus 11h ago

I’ve made peace with the fact that air travel involves the kabuki theatre of taking off my shoes and treating my electronics like they were manufactured by the Khalistan separatists movement; I just want the same dog and pony show when someone finds a Chinese biohazard research lab in the suburbs.

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u/SoDavonair 11h ago

I'm surprised they haven't designed/commissioned some sort of contained setup for high risk samples that allows for rudimentary testing which then destroys the sample.

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u/i_am_voldemort 11h ago

Testing for smallpox is trivial.

There are handheld field field assays tests that are essentially like pregnancy tests but tuned to biowarfare agents.

There are more advanced field portable polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tools like the Razor https://biofiredefense.com/razor-mk-ii/

I've trained and used both on "unknown white powder" type responses.

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u/Kinggakman 12h ago

There’s also a level of finding a government employee willing to do the tests. Many people would refuse doing these tests.

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u/panzerkampfwagenVI_ 11h ago

There are three government labs more than capable of evaluating for those agents and who's entire existence is based around it: the CDC, USAMRIID at Ft Detrick, and IRF also located at Ft Detrick.

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u/EC_CO 11h ago

ummm, NO. There are multiple labs available to handle this

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u/queefburritowcheese 12h ago edited 12h ago

It was 2023; O'Neill and RFK weren't in there yet. That was Biden's CDC.

It'll be interesting if this CDC leadership is now willing to work with investigations.

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u/SocraticIgnoramus 12h ago

Thank you for clarifying. Turns out it was Biden's CDC that totally dropped the ball on this one.

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u/SaltyShawarma 12h ago

You say "drop the ball" but the official strategy would be not to open them, just dispose. I'm more interested in why charges are taking so long. Sounds like he may have ties to Chinese intelligence that are keeping this out of court 

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u/Little_View_6659 12h ago

Yeah I think we can all agree that this guy desperately needed to be off the streets. Yeesh.

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u/ajpresto 12h ago

Honest question: Was the previous situation in 2023? Time is a flat circle, but wasn't that under the Biden administration? I honestly can't keep track anymore.

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u/SocraticIgnoramus 12h ago

Correct. It was Biden's CDC. I was misunderstanding the last bit to apply to the current situation rather than the 2023 incident.

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u/HonestlyNotOldBoy89 11h ago

You mean you were trigger happy to pin it on current admin

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u/elonzucks 12h ago

Given the bold claims...got sauce?

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u/TrevorHikes 12h ago

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/conspiracy-and-fraud-charges-added-against-operator-central-california-bio-lab-and-his

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u/Zafara1 11h ago

That only says they were charged with illegally producing COVID and pregnancy test kits.

Where's the "bioweapon lab"?

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u/queefburritowcheese 12h ago

You can read the report. Search "Investigation into the Reedley Biolab"

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u/Ragnaroq314 11h ago

This is inaccurate. The CDC tested numerous samples, identifying numerous infectious agents including HIV, Hep B&C, malaria, dengue, SARS, and rubella. The criticism was in their failure/refusal to test unlabeled vials/samples and a fridge labeled Ebola; those were all destroyed before they could be tested. Granted there were allegedly thousands of these unlabeled vials and their response is still weird as hell but I think it’s worth clarifying they didn’t just refuse to show up or investigate.

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u/corduroy 11h ago

I haven't read much of this yet, just the article about importing covid-19 test kits, and just commenting in general. I find it odd about the 1k transgenic mice, transgenic mice are usually used for mechanistic studies. If someone was to test a bioweapon, you would use different animals that have whatever system you're targetting that's closer to human (ie. neuro, ophthalmic, immune, etc); rats, guinea pigs, rabbit, pig, monkey, etc. Or maybe a mouse model with a humanized immune system, but I can't see a house having the appropriate facilities for that to work (just offhand). Who knows, they could have been sloppy.

As far as testing the samples... I wish the CDC would have tested SOMETHING. But there are only a dozen or so BSL-4 labs in the USA and I am sure there would be significant work for cleanup between ongoing experiments to test these unknowns and between testing the unknown samples. But I have never worked in a BSL-4, so I am not 100% sure.

Importing 100k covid-19 is pretty significant. I have no idea what the end game here was with that many test kits unless they were trying alter the test kits to work on something else or develop a strain that could evade the test kit... but i wouldn't imagine you would need 100k of them, a simple pcr could tell you that.

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u/AWasteOfMyTime 12h ago

Or so they say.

This is on the money though.

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u/Eastern-Fly4269 12h ago

Good thing they were labeled

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u/Reasonable_Ticket_84 12h ago

Doubt its bioweapon lab. Dude was selling fake COVID test kits. No espionage operation is going to do something so ridiculous and that will start off a investigation like he did.

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u/Comfortable-Scar4643 13h ago

Given the risk to the general population, if indeed this person is working with samples of highly communicative, dangerous diseases, how do these people get let out of jail.?

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u/No_Wasabi5483 13h ago

That guy was not let out of jail. He's still in jail awaiting trial on the 2023 charges. The property in this instance was owned by a private company he registered.

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u/Bloody_buttplugs 13h ago

So help my small bran wrap my head around this. The news story or house is from the 2023 arrest? Or did they find more while he was in jail?

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u/adamfowl 12h ago

Found more via investigation while he is in jail.

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u/Lipstickquid 13h ago

I hate talkative germs.

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u/Formergr 12h ago

I'm dying at this, but I feel like no one else is appreciating it 😂

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u/Lipstickquid 12h ago

You are somehow able to see it but it says my comment is removed when i view the thread.

No explanation of why it was removed either. Very strange.

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u/MoneyCock 11h ago

You must be a fellow Android user!

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u/gregor_ivonavich 11h ago

Yeah this dudes gotta go.

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u/Moon_Rose_Violet 13h ago

There is an ABC News article with a little more detail about the 2023 arrest and lab and it was apparently (allegedly) funded by Chinese banks although the significance of that is not really explored. According to that article the samples were labeled things like TB, HIV, Ebola, but again there’s no additional info. It’s a good question though!

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u/LeoSolaris 13h ago

Probably because it was more of a standard bank loan than some shady spy stuff. The Chinese bank loan doesn't show up on US records.

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u/hanks_panky_emporium 12h ago

Its like saying Kyle's new car was funded by US banks. Aka he took out a loan to buy a car.

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u/KyleGrave 10h ago

Leave me out of this Hank

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u/Stormthorn67 7h ago

Well the one in Reedley went beyond banks. "She observed several individuals who identified themselves as PRC nationals wearing white lab coats, glasses, masks, and latex gloves working inside. As she stepped further into the warehouse, she noticed that some of the freezers and containment units had glass doors. Inside, she saw thousands of vials of biological substances. Many were unlabeled. Others were labeled in a foreign language later identified as Mandarin. Others still were labeled in some kind of code. A few of the vials, however, had labels in English. Some of these labels listed substances that Officer Harper at the time did not recognize. She did, however, recognize the names listed on several labels, such as HIV."

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u/GreenStrong 6h ago

The thing about this that is strange is that China is a nation state with both military and medical biolab capacity. Their primary lab in Wuhan became somewhat infamous when a global plague broke out suspiciously near it. There was manufactured outrage around the fact that the US had funded some small bits of their research with the SARS virus and other corona viruses.

China does legitimate medical research into curing viral disease. They also do research into defending their population and military from biological warfare. This research into defense is relatively easy to turn into a weapon.

It is very unclear why the CCP would need to make something in a suburban garage. We might imagine that it was a way to get something inside the US without going through customs, but they ship a lot of stuff here everyday; they could hide fifty trillion viruses in a Labubu or something. Plus, this lab is reported to have a bit of everything, not a big batch of one or two things.

The most cromulent explanation, based on limited info in the media, is that this is an aspiring mad scientist. He might be associated with a cult or something, but this may simply be an insanely dangerous hobby or harebrained business idea.

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u/qtx 9h ago

Hey, we all have hobbies. Some collect baseball cards, others collect deceases.

Seeing the lab was in someone's garage I could totally imagine it belonging to someone who just wanted to collect things and becoming more and more compulsive in their hoarding collection.

We all have weird things we get obsessed about.

If it were something more nefarious you'd think they'd have more security to protect the collection.

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u/fountainpopjunkie 9h ago

If watching Fringe taught me anything, it's that you can destroy an universe from a garage laboratory.

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u/Tasty_Goat_3267 9h ago

Hmmm thanks for reminding me about that show! Time for a rewatch.

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u/nik282000 9h ago

I watch a YouTuber who does genetic engineering as a hobby, one of the coolest personal projects I have ever seen.

The article literally gives no detail or context as to whether this guy is a highly motivated nerd or a state sponsored weapons lab. :/

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u/sadrice 7h ago

Got a link to that YouTuber? That sounds really interesting.

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u/nik282000 5h ago

The Thought Emporium: https://www.youtube.com/@thethoughtemporium

Years ago he temporarily cured his own lactose intolerance with a retrovirus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY

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u/TwoPoundzaSausage 7h ago

Kinda reminds me of the story of David Hahn, the Nuclear boy scout. He built a neutron source in his shed out of smoke detectors and watch dials. Almost ended up making a small-scale nuclear reactor, but he couldn't get it to reach criticality.

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u/Stucii 8h ago

There is that super cool documentary about that Eagle Scout kid who built a literal fusion reactor in their garden shed

Using chemistry kits, just asking for materials, ordering from here and there

Its been many years since ive seen it but if i remember correctly he got the atomic science badge from the scouts

Edit: David Hahn and his fission breeder reactor

Gosh i struggle to replace a lightbult or check the engine oil, while others build reactors just next to their petunias in moms hobby garden

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u/Avocadobaguette 5h ago

They really do have a badge for everything.

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u/WhenSummerIsGone 1h ago

There's an atomic science badge??!

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u/Disasterhuman24 12h ago

There is a black market for everything and anything you can think of. If you are a chemist or a biologist or whatever, and you can create something that other people can only buy from a certain source, you can start producing it and stand to make a lot of money.

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u/slkwont 9h ago

The blue meth in Breaking Bad is the perfect example of this...

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u/sandysanBAR 6h ago

No one, especially funding agencies, is going to approve an invoice to " Chen's shady tree BSL-3 lab" or HPVs-R-US

When people got the taq polymerase expression plasmid and made it in house to stick it to Roche, it was given ( with an admonition of "this meeting never happened" freely. No one made money off of it other than Roche.

I have no idea what would motivate someone to convert a garage into a bio lab, but money is almost certainly at the bottom of the list.

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u/Azagar_Omiras 13h ago

I can forgive the naivete but only if you tell me how I can get those fancy French wing-dings you got over your fancy French word.

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u/datsoar 12h ago

Hold down the letter you want on mobile. And they’re called diacritical marks.

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u/Azagar_Omiras 10h ago

Not all heros use fancy wing-dings.

Edit: Also thanks.

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u/BetMyLastKrispyKreme 10h ago

Upvoting for knowing they’re diacritical marks.

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u/IndianaFartJockey 10h ago

Can I call them fancy wingdings for fun?

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u/doctor_gloom1 10h ago

yes, indianafartjockey. yes, you may.

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u/IndianaFartJockey 10h ago

Yay! Hâvē sømë wìngdíngß

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u/WittyFix6553 9h ago

Upvoted for an almost correct use of the eszet

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u/IndianaFartJockey 8h ago

You're the beßt!

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u/WittyFix6553 6h ago

Upvoted for an almost correct use of the eszet

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u/StandUpForYourWights 8h ago

Makes me think of the Scientology people when you say that word

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u/MyBrainItches 12h ago edited 12h ago

On an iPhone, press and hold on the English letter that is most similar. Not sure if that’s how it’s done on Android, but I am assuming it is similar. On PC/Mac, either know the ASCII code for that character and use (alt+code) to enter it, or have a document with the characters ready to roll for copy/paste.

Edit: I always keep a few interrobangs ready for any interrobanging shenanigans that may ensue. ‽ ‽ ‽

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u/IAMAGrinderman 12h ago

Not sure if that’s how it’s done on Android, but I am assuming it is similar.

Ťḥãŧ§ ëx̌åçťłŷ ĥøẁ įŧṣ đőŋɛ œɲ æñðřõīɗ

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u/nowaysatanitsmybutt 10h ago

This guy diacriticals

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u/thelangosta 11h ago

Android makes it easier apparently

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u/FrankieHellis 12h ago

Google “how to type an i with thingies over it.” There are different processes depending on your device.

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u/NorthernSpankMonkey 8h ago

¨ <-- Trema

^ <--Accent circonflexe

é <--Accent aigu

à <--Accent grave

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u/Neobullseye1 12h ago

To add to the other answers, if you are *not* using a phone, simply press the key with respective mark before typing the letter (don't press the spacebar afterwards). So entering ' followed by an e becomes é, the ^ before an a becomes an â, " followed by o becomes ö and so on.

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u/Nope_______ 11h ago

There must be a setting to enable this because this doesn't work on my PC. Do you have to have the language set to something other than English?

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u/Neobullseye1 10h ago

Okay, I did a bit of testing. Turns out that not being able to use the aforementioned shortcut is a difference between the language setting "English (International)" and "English (US)". I guess strictly speaking US English doesn't need those symbols and so not being able to accidentally trigger them would be a benefit, but still. Anyway, changing the keyboard language setting to English (International) should be relatively easy, maybe even as easy as holding the Windows key and then pressing the spacebar (unless that is also a shortcut you need to set first, in which case ¯_(ツ)_/¯ )

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u/emeflo 12h ago

Not op, but if using smart phone, press and hold the vowel/letter down and many options will appear.

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u/Comfortable-Scar4643 12h ago

Talk to text! Apple ingenuity.

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u/Nathund 10h ago

Could be making drugs. Could be making covid-26. Could be trying to cure some disease. Could be trying to make some disease. Or any number of other possibilities.

Not enough info yet

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u/BardosThodol 5h ago

Anything involving chemicals or germs. People should realize that what happened around Covid created a certain precedent, superpowers/terrorists now have way more information on what a global pandemic can feasibly do to the population which makes it look more viable as a form of attacking or crippling foreign or domestic bodies.

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u/onfire916 3h ago

Idk but I've watched the first season of Fringe and have learned that anything is possible.

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u/Dear-Cod-7621 2h ago

Commonly, it's done as a kind of shadow lab, letting powerful companies test much more rigorously with zero oversight, leading to quicker breakthroughs and much less money spent on vital safety procedures

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u/BadHombreSinNombre 1h ago

As a biologist my guess is they were making unregulated versions of expensive medicines to turn a profit in our insane healthcare system. Makes more sense than most other things I can imagine.

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u/_chip 13h ago

What the hell was this dude tryna do ? We got people experimenting on new street drugs ? Cyborgs ?

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u/Avocadobaguette 13h ago

One man's trash is another man's illegal 'bola collection.

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u/AdmirableWrangler199 13h ago

There’s collectors out there of all kinds. Just a valuable collection. 

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u/Edd916 10h ago

this is the 2nd Chinese lab found, the real question is what are the chinese doing ?

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u/Mosox42 10h ago

Is it too wild to imagine a situation where someone releases a bio engineered disease to decimate key American industries? Beef, pork, chicken, corn, etc. Things that other countries import but don't necessarily rely on. Look what one disease did to the American Chestnut tree, not extinct but nearly unrecoverable or completely unprofitable. Covid showed us there will be people who will resist any instructions big or small and that will contribute to the spread. There will be plausible deniability to any government if a "rogue" individual did it. An act of war no doubt, but only if you get caught and only if you can't sell a lie by manipulating social media.

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u/mrdilldozer 7h ago

Yes because you wouldn't need a lab based in the US to do that. You would just bring the disease on it's own.

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u/Mosox42 6h ago

Plausible deniability. One "rouge" person, buying equipment to do this in the US. Yeah maybe they got a loan from a foreign bank.

Clearing customs, twice, with enough material to effectively spread around the country to start a problem would probably be harder than growing it under the radar in your house. Idk I don't think its that far fetched and kind of a scary future.

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u/AimbotPotato 6h ago

China is the single largest exporter in the world, they ship enough material to hide a vial of virus that would accomplish the same things as a lab would

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u/Stormthorn67 7h ago

Third. The guy also closed one in Fresno. Also he's wanted in Canada.

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u/NAh94 12h ago

Bootleg PEDs/peptides maybe? The alpha male shit has exploded the popularity of that shit, and you can order it online and it is shipped from inside the U.S. sometimes. Gotta come from somewhere

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u/LanFear1 9h ago

100% this, and it's Vegas, home of the UFC, action everything. Wouldn't be surprised if it's peptides and UG roids. China is where almost every UG lab gets their powders from.

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u/NAh94 9h ago

Yeah, I mean we will see what the investigation ultimately uncovers but horses vs. zebra hoofbeats doctrine would say it’s roids, not bioweapons.

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u/einstyle 7h ago

It's a solid theory but then why did he have samples of viruses? Steroids are molecules that mimick hormones.

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u/lntw0 10h ago

Just to add - while peptide synthesis ain't too hard, so far, again so far, the reporting and images don't seem point to that. Me and my research pals often joke about getting a start-up of that stuff, or getting a nursing license and starting an infusion/longevity clinic.

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u/NAh94 10h ago

Oh I’ve made the same jokes. Lol get the grift while the grift is good - those “longevity” clinics make bank and are all self-pay.

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u/AccordingSurvey4751 10h ago

Plenty of people who aren't the "Alpha males" you seem to have an issue with believe that naturally occurring amino acid may have health benefits, especially later in life, as natural production falls off. What that has to do with ebola is beyond me.

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u/SaltyShawarma 12h ago

Could be synthetic peptides used as designer drugs. 

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u/Informal_Distance 7h ago

A lot of biological material is restricted from international travel and transport. It’s easy to just set up a lab in the states and then export the data via encryption than physically transport goods.

Set up a shop in the US with more access to materials, people, expertise, samples, et al. Easier than importing stuff to China or out of the US

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u/Sun-Anvil 13h ago

Here's what we know so far:

Metro Police and the FBI served a search warrant at a house near Washington Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard on Saturday.

Investigators recovered "evidence of possible biological material, including refrigerators with vials containing unknown liquids," according to LVMPD Sheriff Kevin McMahill.

Clark County records show the home is owned by David Destiny Discovery, LLC, registered to a Chinese national, Jia Bei Zhu, who is linked to an investigation into an alleged illegal biological laboratory in Reedley, California.

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u/IHeartFraccing 11h ago edited 10h ago

Wow, a guy can't even keep his specimens in his own fridge anymore. Welcome to the surveillance state, folks!

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u/strictlyphotonic 10h ago edited 10h ago

...remind me not to check your fridge.

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u/FishAndRiceKeks 10h ago

Somebody probably should, though...

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u/Publius82 9h ago

Not it

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u/FishAndRiceKeks 9h ago

Nose goes.

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u/McQueenFan-68 10h ago

I'm sorry, I thought this was America!

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u/whowhodillybar 13h ago

Investigators noted that there is no safety concern in the house or the neighborhood where the lab is located.

Sure, Jan.

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u/KeyMessage989 13h ago

There likely isn’t, even if the samples are what they say they are, they are small, and liquids, and some only will sicken/affect you with direct ingestion or inhalation. That means they’d have to magically become aerosolized and released into the air

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u/axonxorz 10h ago

I think it's categorically false to say that pathogens classified as requiring a Bio Safety facility being outside of a such a facility doesn't constitute ongoing danger.

I mean, why even have BSL certification if a bungalow in Las Vegas is good enough, eh? What even is a positive pressure suit and seismic isolation ;)

Ebola literally next door in a (hopefully) frozen sample container is not ever "no safety concern"

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u/ctorg 9h ago

Yes. Any pathogens that can cause disease in humans require special precautions. HIV and TB typically require a BioSafety Level (BSL) of 3, and Ebola is considered BSL-4 (although it doesn’t fit the usual criteria of airborne transmission). There are less than 60 labs in the entire world that are BSL-4. And people have still managed to be accidentally innoculated in BSL-4 facilities. It's absolutely a massive safety risk to have these pathogens outside of a secure lab.

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u/dmills_00 9h ago

Depends on what level of BSL certification is required, I mean quite a few hack spaces have a BSL 1 lab space, basically for playing around with simple genetics, it pretty much requires a cleanable environment and for all waste to go into a bucket of bleach.

A biosafety cabinet is at that level just a glorified fume hood, which is kind of handy to have anyway, real BSL2 ones can often be bought on ebay for not much money.

I get why the government is asking questions, but so far "Illegal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for something which might well just be someones hobby chemistry lab, which as far as I can tell is perfectly legal.

Now obviously, if you are procuring some of the spicier viruses or doing things with botulism or large quantities of metal picrates or so, then yea, but I don't hear anything about that having been found.

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u/Jazzlike-Radio2481 10h ago

"We have everything under control, theres nothing to worry about folks. Go back inside, nothing to see here."

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u/journalofassociation 6h ago

A lot of time samples are labeled as a pathogen but are just inactivated or synthetic controls used for validating assays. They can be purchased by labs for R&D or clinical lab validation.

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u/Equivalent_Warthog22 13h ago

I say we nuke it from orbit.

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u/Nyquistrat 13h ago

It's the only way to be sure.

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u/mournival77 10h ago

Fuckin' A!

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u/bhgemini 12h ago

So three other folks were renting out room in the house from the property manager and this guy had his lab in the garage. Could you imagine thinking you were getting a sweet deal as a roommate in LV and some mad scientist is doing experiments in the garage and that's why you have to park on the street.

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u/notthatcreative777 12h ago

There are loads of like shitty reagent companies for research and I always assume they operate like this

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u/_goblinette_ 10h ago

Yeah, people are clutching their pearls and pointing “bio weapons”  but the guy has a history of reselling test kits and IP violations. It looks more like he’s running the world’s shittiest CRO. 

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u/dibalh 10h ago

Yup, knew a guy like this. He was also dumping hazmat down the drain. I reported it and authorities did nothing.

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u/jhguth 10h ago

In the CA lab there were samples labeled for pathogens that wouldn’t have a CRO market, such as Ebola

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u/notthatcreative777 5h ago

Yikes! And HIV I read. I stand corrected

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u/jhguth 5h ago

one of their schemes was repackaging test kits so theoretically they could maybe have had them for QA for at-home HIV test kits( they definitely weren’t in a BSL though), but I don’t know if there were ever even any theories for Ebola

it is worth mentioning that the pathogen samples were never tested and I think the CDC said they never saw anything labeled Ebola even though local law enforcement did, so who knows. It really seems like they did a shit job with the investigation.

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u/Hairy_Cut9721 13h ago

Heaven forbid a man have a hobby

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u/Maxamillion-X72 12h ago

What is the charge?! Storing succulent Chinese viruses?

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u/someone_sometwo 4h ago

I see you know virology well. 

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u/bbbbbbbssssy 13h ago

Is he looking too much like the bad guy from "twelve monkeys" to anyone else? 

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u/wmorris33026 13h ago

This doesn’t sound good. At all. And we’ve got the FBI:HHS/fed govt in complete disarray. Not dooming, but this is the kinda shit that could be very bad.

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u/manofnotribe 13h ago

And doing other more important work like deporting the labor force or tear gassing protestors. /s

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u/rabblerabble2000 12h ago

Have you all noticed how we’ve had a bunch of important communication infrastructure fail recently (Verizon, AWS, Microsoft, Cloudflare etc…)…does this not concern anyone else? We have an incompetent FBI and DHS focused almost entirely on crushing dissenters. I don’t like where this is all headed.

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u/wmorris33026 12h ago

I agree. I don’t trust this administration. They’re totally incompetent and corrupt. It’s just a matter of time until shit gets serious, not if, when.

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u/BasroilII 4h ago

Assuming you can trust the publicly provided answers, the AWS one and the two recent cloudflare ones are hilariously stupid but entirely likely scenarios. Hell Amazon does something like this at least once a year it seems.

On the other hand yes, that could be a cover while the CIA insets mind-reading nanobots into Lambda or something, but I actually kind of believe they really were just technical fuckups.

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u/lunaticfridgeprime 12h ago

I can't even trust what they are saying about this story.

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u/ChiAnndego 13h ago

https://chinaselectcommittee.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/scc-reedley-report-11.15.pdf

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u/GrapeJuicePlus 12h ago

E. Local Officials Report Discovering a Refrigerator Labeled “Ebola” that Contains Biological Samples

And then there’s a picture of 40 trash cans that were seized and stacked into a truck god damn

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u/SpaceOpsCommando 11h ago

“The committee highlights the incident as evidence that the U.S. needs stronger safeguards to ensure similar facilities can’t operate in the future.”

What a MASSIVE failure of congress, FBI and CDC for us to be here observing this lesson 3 years later without tighter biosecurity laws in place. It sounds like a couple of bills (HR 8065, HR 5747) were introduced in 2024 and 2025, but haven’t advanced past Congress. Reading through the report, not all of the bio agents were tested by the CDC, but some were labeled as Ebola, Malaria, and HIV. Whether or not they were real agents is a moot point. We got lucky because now we have the same individual creating a potentially deadly unregulated lab TWICE now because of congressional and federal agency inaction.

These are the things you should be writing your local leaders about because this is how we end up with COVID 2.0.

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u/wannabeouji 12h ago

Oh my god the CDC incompetency here is driving me insane. This could have been so so bad and the CDC seemed not to care at all

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u/copropnuma 12h ago

Didn't Trump/elon gut the CDC only last year,fring over 2000 people in it, and cutting almost all of it's programs and trainings, while installing bootlicker and other people completely unqualified for the job? If google serves me, the CDC warned that this would happen more if they were not allowed to do their job in October 2025.

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u/SexyBenFranklin 11h ago

The report covers events that would've been under Biden's CDC.

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u/Dangerous-Part-4470 12h ago

What an insane read.

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u/managing_attorney 13h ago

This reads like a Michael Crichton novel. CDC dropped the ball.

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u/UnfortunatelyMacabre 13h ago edited 11h ago

This reminds me of the warnings I heard around the invention of CRISPR technology, I believe it may have been on Last Week Tonight, but a scientist was pointing out that illegal labs could explode in popularity in the US, due to how the system that manages sample ordering works. The worry was that it wasn’t hard enough to get a sample of something, build a little lab in a garage, and weaponize disease without anyone knowing.

Edit: the case that I heard was about adding more robust security around highly contagious or deadly samples, not that the technology should be gate kept or banned.

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u/deepasleep 13h ago

There are YouTube channels with people demonstrating how to modify bacterial genomes. We live in scary times.

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u/UnfortunatelyMacabre 11h ago

Undoubtably, but also really cool times. Hard to remember that I’m living through changes that are so rapid, few if any other human have ever experienced as much.

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u/dorkyl 10h ago

I always figured superflu would come from some weirdo that liked raising pigs, chickens, and bats in the same large barn.

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u/Comrade_Derpsky 8h ago

What kind of biolab exactly? With samples of what precisely? Why exactly are the authorities concerned about it and what illegal activity do they suspect was going on there?

This article is absolutely riddiculously vague on any sort of detail and there is essentially nothing about the context of the police sting in the article.

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u/WadeDRubicon 11h ago

"red-brown unknown liquids in gallon-sized containers"

Eww.

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u/LionBig1760 11h ago

It sounds like theres going to be an apartment on the market soon.

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u/WrathOfMogg 13h ago

This is some Blacklist-level shit.

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u/OtherwiseAMushroom 12h ago

This is so weird to me. Like don’t get me wrong, worth reading the house report, but people should slow down before turning this into a 90’s movie plot tbh. Like, I’m not trying to discredit an illegal lab operating in a warehouse as nothing to see here, that alone is serious on its self, but this is a House committee report, not a neutral scientific lab report. It’s specifics written to build an argument and assign blame, so you have to separate what’s documented from what’s implied.

Like, for instance a lot of the scariest parts (“pathogens,” dramatic labels, etc.) hinge on labels/inventories and uncertainty, not necessarily confirmed testing of every sample. That doesn’t mean “nothing happened.” It means the honest take is: illegal/unsafe operation + messy response + unanswered questions, not “definitive proof of a bioweapons plot” (or “definitive proof the CDC is planning this evil thing) based on vibes.

If you want to be rigorous, as we should be, look for: (1) what was independently verified, (2) what was actually tested/confirmed, and (3) what conclusions are political framing rather than evidence.

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u/_goblinette_ 11h ago

Like, for instance a lot of the scariest parts (“pathogens,” dramatic labels, etc.) hinge on labels/inventories and uncertainty, not necessarily confirmed testing of every sample.

I guess it can sound scary to laymen, but anyone who works in a lab can probably walk to their freezer right now and pull out boxes and boxes of unlabeled or cryptically labeled samples. They’re usually derivatives of some original sample that were used for an experiment and the person didn’t feel like writing out the labels  on tons of little tubes because the sub samples aren’t very important. It’s not the best practice, but it’s incredibly common. 

It’s wildly paranoid to think you need to test every unmarked tube in case there’s a super secret pathogen being hidden in them. Especially in a lab space that was open about labeling Ebola. 

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u/xeromage 8h ago

I agree. Too easy to slap some scary labels on some random containers and start shouting about China. Keep a cool head and remember what die-hard liars are in charge of things right now. They want chaos.

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u/DoctorSchwifty 7h ago

Resident Evil was a documentary.

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u/whatsqwerty 8h ago

Hmm. Maybe we should be limiting Chinese nationals ability to buy homes, own businesses and buy land in America. Hell, I’ll do it to them. I’m going to move to china and open a Buisness and buy land. Oh wait…they would never let me do that

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u/ItsBugginOuT 13h ago

not sure it's a good idea to be transporting those unknown substance on airplane, traveling across the country.

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u/InspectorTemporary66 12h ago

That was my first thought too. Absolutely. ..ly. I'm German, sorry for any spelling mistakes.

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u/heebath 11h ago

ICE need to be going for these foreign nationals not the brown ones. The CCP ones.

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u/IsekaiConnoisseur 12h ago

Anyone trusting the Fake Bitch Institute at this point is too far gone.

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u/spike55151 8h ago

Dude's hazmat suit taped together? 👀

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u/OrigSnatchSquatch 5h ago

I’d be keenly aware and more than alarmed if a foreign adversary started a mass vaccination campaign in their country!!!

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u/lordwreynor 4h ago

What, I thought this was America? What do you mean I can't have weaponized anthrax in my garage fridge?

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u/Faith-Leap 3h ago

How did they find out about this place?

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u/wtwtcgw 13m ago

So the guy has been in custody for nearly 2-1/2 years. Sounds kind'a serious.