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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27148 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Prestige Biotech

TIME reported:

Recently, many California residents were disturbed to learn that a small, privately-operated bio lab in the Central Valley town of Reedley was shut down by Fresno County Department of Public Health officials after they found that it had been improperly managing almost 1,000 laboratory mice and samples of infectious diseases including COVID-19, rubella, malaria, dengue, chlamydia, hepatitis, and HIV. The lab was registered to a company called Prestige Biotech that sold a variety of medical testing kits, including for pregnancy and COVID-19, and it was likely storing disease samples for the purpose of developing and validating its testing kits. Government authorities are still investigating the company’s history, but it appears to have previously operated a lab in Fresno under the name Universal MediTech, where city officials flagged it for investigation regarding improperly stored chemicals.

This, if anything, seems to be an understatement, since the initial federal investigation starts with:

On September 6, 2023, the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (“Select Committee”) issued its first subpoena as part of its ongoing investigation into theillegal facility that local authorities uncovered in Reedley, California.The subpoena, signed by the Chairman with an on-site visit by the Select Committee’s Chief Investigative Counsel and two investigative staffers, uncovered thousands of pages of documents, hundreds of photographs, and hours of video.This evidence, alongside interviews of local officials and other investigative steps, revealed troubling gaps in federal pathogen safeguards. These gaps allowed a wanted fugitive from Canada, who is a PRC national who had previously stolen millions of dollars of American intellectual property, to operate an illegal facility that contained “thousands of vials of potentially infectious agents” in Reedley, California.

and quickly turns to :

Approximately 1,000 mice were kept in inhumane, overcrowded conditions.When local officials asked a worker who “appeared to be in control” of the mice, she replied that they were transgenic mice that simulate the human immune system that were “genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.” In subsequent interviews with individuals who were at the warehouse, local officials learned that workers were tasked with caring and cleaning for the mice and, on numerous occasions, the Reedley Biolab operators had held back their pay.One of the workers who tended to the mice told Officer Harper that he and his children had become sick close in time to when he was tending the mice.The worker stated that he was instructed to discard any dead mice that he found into a dumpster...

The CDC did not note an Ebola label on the freezer in its report. When asked about the freezer labeled Ebola in a subsequent email, the CDC official noted that the CDC “would typically look for the vial to be labeled as Ebola,”that they “didn’t recall seeing a fridge labeled as Ebola,”and asked for a photograph of the freezer. A photograph was not available. The Select Committee has received written statements reporting the presence of the label.

The AP has a... more forgiving description, though that's damning with the extent it bends over backwards. Let's all get the obvious jokes out of our systems first. My personal favorite so far is "I didn't even know there was a wet market in Fresno", but if you have a particularly good one (maybe Black Dynamite?), fire away.

There's a bit of an obvious question, here, and it's "what the fuck".

And there is a plausible, charitable explanation. Looking at the current charges that fugitive from Canada is facing, it's quite possible that this lab was genuinely making lab tests, using these viral agents and lab mice to validate each batch, and just took 'move fast, break things' to an extreme level. Even the Ebola-labeled fridge, if it did have ebola samples, could maybe be about various biosensor demands that even pre-COVID were already being floated around; it's also possible that Zhu just got the thing on discount from a normal lab and didn't wipe off the marker. If that was the case, perhaps the strangest thing is here's that the scuzzy Engrish medical stuff marketed by a fraudster with a couple different IDs with different names on them, was actually trying and moderately-'real', even if it also had tremendous unnecessary risk and iffy environmental awareness. The criminal complaint even has a dedicated note for :

Despite media reports that UMI and PBI may have been manufacturing bioweapons, no evidence supporting those reports has been found to date. Any and all pathogens and toxins that have been found during the government’s investigation appear to be related to the manufacture and distribution of various IVD test kits.

... but that answer is a little complicated by rough questions about who, if anyone, has actually been looking. Beyond the CDC's apparent unwillingness or inability to test any of the samples found at the lab, it's not clear where they came from, or what Prestige would have been doing with them. Prestige mostly sold pregnancy tests, drug tests, so on.

And the charitable story has more than a few holes: none of the public documents show much evidence of Prestige BioTech's ability to manufacture the scale or variety of tests that they published, and the congressional investigation suggests that the company may have simply relabeled non-US-manufactured (and possibly non-US-certified) ones. It's illegal to import many of the found infectious agents without a license that Prestige did not have, and so the CDC may have presumed that they were provided by US companies... but it's a little worrying if some rando can order supplies of dengue or malaria without anyone caring. Compared to what happens if you try to order the wrong chemicals from a supply shop, that'd actually be worse.

... but it's not clear what, if any, alternative explanation would make more sense. Assuming for the sake of argument that Zhu is an undercover agent for the Chinese government, they don't exactly need James Bond to get Dengue fever samples. Nor would someone wanting to mix up bioweapons find it particularly useful to save on shipping by doing in-situ development. Perhaps there's something particularly funky about these particular breeds of transgenic mice, and given Zhu's previous modeus operandi of stealing biotech IP that would be in line with other practices, but there's no obvious way to get there from here, and a ton of inexplicable chaff around that. Maybe if the biological samples were meant as literal chaff and contained entirely different materials, in the sense that no sane person would test them for 'normal' corporate espionage?

That's further complicated by the federal investigation's general unwillingness to conduct the sort of testing or investigation necessary to assuage concerns; even were this particular case fully in the 'scuzzy Enrish dropshipper' category, the feds don't seem to have or be interested in getting the information necessary to demonstrate that. The charitable view, I suppose, is that the CDC runs into variations of this problem a lot (!) and doesn't think there's much to be gained from knowing the scale of the issue (!!) rather than simply spooling up the vacuum cleaners. Which... isn't especially good.

It's insane that any GoF research is allowed in the first place. Those jokers aren't even doing it to create new vaccines?

This is the most blackpilling thing about the whole COVID incident.

Modern apocalyptic and post apocalyptic science fiction was wrong. Armageddon will not come because of power hunger of big governments or greed of mega corporations.

Old time pulp fiction was wrong too. Armageddon will not come becaue of brilliant and audacious plans of genius mad scientist, and definitely will not be averted at last minute by slack jawed Action Hero.

Apocalypse will come due to few hundred, thousand at most, rather mediocre people, people with names, faces and adresses out there who are not protected and hiding at all, playing russian roulette with all mankind, openly and brazenly.

For ultimate power? For unlimited wealth? To create paradise on earth? To have revenge on the whole world?

Nope. They do it to publish few articles no one will ever read in prestigious journals to burnish their citation metrics. Nothing personal, just scientific bureaucratic process working as intended.

And mankind as a whole is fine with it.

No big deal.

Nothing to see here.

No hard feelings.

Everything keeps going, everyone is waiting for the next oops.

Only reaction, after three years so far, is ... one country's proposal to stop public funding of this pastime. Better than nothing, but not by very much.

Conclusion: Just stop worrying. Humanity is NGMI, and fully deservedly so.

Disease won’t wipe us out. Even the Black Death only killed, what, 30% of the population? And we have much better medical technology.

And we have much better medical technology.

When the next oops comes, at least half of the population will refuse to follow the expert's orders and use the newly advanced technology (which half will depend whether the new treaments are coded blue or red this time).

This effect will be canceled by the experts' orders being anywhere from useless to counterproductive. (As it was with COVID and the Black Death)

You grossly underestimate the risk of intentional or accidental development of bio-weapons, of which I consider GOF research to be the latter.

We have diseases with properties, which, if combined, would likely be beyond our ability to handle even with concomitant advances in biotech.

Offense outpaces defense very hard here, and the main reason we're not dead is because nobody is trying particularly hard for it to be so. You can GOF an extremely virulent organism to be much more lethal, a lethal organism to be much more virulent, potentially with the ability to lie dormant like HIV for ages till it erupts a few months later after infecting a majority of humanity. Even if it doesn't kill literally everyone, it has the potential to throw a very real wrench in the works, look at what Baby's First Pandemic, Covid, with a CFR of 0.1% before vaccines, managed to cause.

We didn’t have to notice Covid happened, let alone react the way we did, it was a media panic. The Black Death is probably an upper limit as far as plague; myxomatosis in rabbits maxed out at around that threshold IIRC.

Covid certainly was an over-reaction, but trust me doctors would have noticed an OOM or two surge in hospitalizations for respiratory issues regardless of public awareness. A more deadly by an OOM or two disease would cause far more economic damage.

Death usually occurs between days 10 and 12. Highly virulent strains, such as those present in North and South America, have essentially 100% case fatality rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis

You're relying on the observed lethality of natural epidemics to decide on the risks of engineered ones, which is a very bad idea for something that is presumably being aggressively optimized to kill you. Look at the number of eggs laid by a wild junglefowl versus a breed optimized to churn them out for an illustration of what selective pressures can achieve.

Not just GoF research. After three years of misery caused by people playing God just to publish marginally more interesting papers than their peers, we now have a bunch of people racing to create a digital God, with who-knows-what outcome.

Not just GoF research. After three years of misery caused by people playing God just to publish marginally more interesting papers than their peers, we now have a bunch of people racing to create a digital God, with who-knows-what outcome.

This is not the same thing. Artificial intelligence promises audacious scientific breakthroughs to Mad Scientist, ultimate surveillance and control to Evil Overlord, unprecedented giga-profits to Corrupt Corporate Executive. Everyone who is someone needs and wants it.

Science fiction authors of golden, silver, bronze and trash ages would understand and approve.

But GoF research, that is really about nothing than few more scientific papers for never-to-be-read pile? Any science fiction author of note would laugh at this plot, any magazine editor would reject this premise even as satire.

Well, anyone except Philip.K.Dick.

And what makes this case more disturbing is it was uncovered by random chance.

Pathogens labeled ‘HIV’ and ‘Ebola’ found inside secret, illegal Chinese-owned biolab in California

dead bird thread

The illegal lab was operated in the city of Reedley, Calif., and the potential public safety risk it posed only came to light in December 2022 when Jesalyn Harper, an observant code enforcement officer, noticed a green garden hose sticking out of a hole in the side of a warehouse that was thought to be vacant for more than a decade.

What else is out there, only completely inauspicious from the outside?

Just one more of "glitches in the matrix", random occurences when you pull up your carpet a little, take a short peek at various things scurrying under it (and then put the carpet back and quickly forget what you saw).

Things like Hunter's laptop, DNC mails (and other famous and less famous leaks) and, on much darker note, things like the Finders cult.

Oh I see what happened - Mandarin doesn't use definite and indefinite articles. It's not supposed to be Prestige Biotech, as in high class, top quality biotech, it's supposed to be The Prestige Biotech, as in the biotech is just an illusion.

Compared to what happens if you try to order the wrong chemicals from a supply shop, that'd actually be worse.

May I remind you that the state of shipping security is an absolute joke. People order clearly labeled radioactive material online. Have it shipped over a weekend through USPS and no one even bats an eye, EVEN WHEN IT'S not packaged safely.

So I'm actually not surprised you can just order some bioweapons online and some clueless numbskull with ship them to you and you'd get your package left at the curb.

I'm honestly shocked we haven't had a tragedy related to shipping iffy stuff and those delivery truck thieves.

This here. I once ordered some (depleted) uranium for shits and giggles; imagine my surprise when it actually turned up and then I had to dispose of it...

Depleted uranium is barely radioactive - to the point where it is used in preference to lead for radiation shielding because of the higher density.

Like almost all heavy metals, uranium is a dangerous chemical poison, but you can order lead in the mail and expect it to arrive with no issues, and nobody has a problem with this.

Yeah, the limited quantity and type A rules seem a little awkwardly designed, either to prevent shipping accidents, shipping theft, or radioactive boyscout incidents. At the same time, the thresholds for serious levels of radioactive material seem more sufficient... if they're obeyed religiously by people who often have little or no ability to verify or validate them. And while most orphan source incidents have occurred outside of the United States, there have been incidents within the US, including relatively recent ones.

That said, the concern here is less someone porch-pirating vials of virulent disease shipped to a legitimate user, and more someone that (given the variety of materials!) probably didn't steal them from a nearby lab. If you go to Sigma-Aldrich as a rando and try to over a ton of uranium, they'll not only say no, they might send your info to the feds. Same for even small amounts of red phosphorus, which was actually a nontrivial problem for the LK99 replication crews.

I'd assumed that was the case for a lot of biologicals, but perhaps not. Unreported mass thefts of infectious agents would be bad, but even if Zhu had ordered them through a cooperative mainstream lab which did have conventional uses and then passed it on to Prestige, it seems like the sort of thing that the feds should be kinda interested in at least tracking down.

I agree that it seems very unlikely it was the CCP. After all, if they wanted to ‘leak’ a bioweapon in the US they could just put it in a shipping container or hide it on a private jet or slip it into a diplomatic pouch and send it in no problem, they don’t need some ghetto effort like this.

The biggest risk with bioweapons is Islamist terrorism or, perhaps, some other millenarian movement not yet prominent.

The biggest risk with bioweapons is Islamist terrorism or, perhaps, some other millenarian movement not yet prominent.

I think the question becomes ‘why don’t terrorists try bio weapons more often’- IIRC the biggest bio terror attack ever was still Aum Shinrikyo?

Obligatory classic links:

Terrorism Is Not About Terror

Terrorism Is Not Effective

Perhaps the real Jihad was the friends we made along the way?

Aum Shinrikyo used chemical weapons, not bio. Wikipedia says initial reports that they had bio weapons were "greatly exaggerated", whatever that means.

Well, I'm more convinced that it's probably not a CCP bioweapons lab, to be specific, given the weird combination of weirdly ineffective and highly visible. Playing games with FDA authorization isn't the single fastest way to get annoying investigators, but short of flipping the EPA and the DEA and a local zoning board the finger at the same time, it's pretty close.

Whether Zhu is CCP is... complicated, and not exactly a yes-no question. The congressional investigation claims that :

While living in the PRC in the early 2000s, Zhu served as the Vice Chairman of a PRC state-controlled enterprise based in Xinjiang, Henan Pioneer Aide Biological Engineering Company Limited (“Pioneer Aide China”). PRC government entities exercised a controlling interest in Pioneer Aide China as beneficial owners and shareholders through a series of passthrough joint venture companies, including Henan Investment Group Company Limited, a company involved in military-civil fusion for the PRC.

Zhu also served as Chairman of the Board and General Manager of Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited (“Aide Cattle China”), a company whose directors included an executive for a PRC defense firm and a company on the U.S. Entity List. Shareholders in Aide Cattle China include PRC state-controlled entities and individuals who have invested in other PRC state-controlled entities. Through Aide Cattle China, Zhu was the primary shareholder of 11 PRC cattle companies.

Merely being an employee or upper management of a government-controlled (or military-civil fusion) company isn't the same thing as, say, directly taking orders as a soldier or direct government employee. At the same time, doing these things for a government-controlled company is... what, a deniable asset? A patriot that's just doing things that benefit his country of his own initiative? Those are different things, but they're not exactly no, either.

This is further complicated by the faked IDs, and the CCP's extraterritorial enforcement arms.

Leaving aside literally everything else, I suspect that the fridge labeled "Ebola" didn't actually contain Ebola (anymore) for the simple reason that given their laissez-faire attitude towards handling samples, they'd all be dead and we'd have the CDC and FEMA locking down the entire state. Outbreaks happen even in legitimate BSL-3+ labs semi-regularly.

I bet they got them on the cheap in a yard sale.

I bet they got them on the cheap in a yard sale.

I would bet not, unless it was in the spirit of teens who put "biohazard" stickers around their bedrooms.

One researcher I work with has a story about moving a plate reader into a BSL3 lab to do research on Covid-19 in 2020. The research project has finished and they could use that plate reader elsewhere, but it will probably stay in the negative-pressure zone until the lab itself is decommissioned.

N=1, but this makes me extremely skeptical that one can buy a used fridge from a BSL4 lab, especially one with an "Ebola" label still on it.

That's true, though not the most cheerful a thought. There's a possibility that they were marked this way as 'chaff' -- no sane person is going to sniff these things, or check if they contain some rando more prosaic biomedical IP -- which seems the most plausible answer.

But then you'd hope that the CDC would be willing to prove it, in either case, even as disillusioned as COVID has made me for them.

The report [1] makes it clear that CDC didn't want to test anything. Their official position is that a fridge with an "Ebola" label isn't worth testing for ebola unless the vials in the fridge are themselves labelled "Ebola", and "there is no evidence" [2,3] that this company imported any pathogens. I mean, CDC "[i]ssu[ed] an Import Permit advisement letter to Prestige Biotech to ensure they know the Import Permit Regulations for importing infectious substances into the U.S.” and “[i]ssu[ed] a Federal Select Agent Program advisement letter to Prestige Biotech informing them of the requirements for possession, use, and transfer of select agents and toxins if the entity decides to possess them.” No response, so obviously Prestige Biotech has not imported any infectious substances (/s) [4].

You can't make this shit up. The only reason we are still alive is because nobody has tried any serious bioterrorism, not because the CDC would be able to thwart a motivated and intelligent bioterrorist.

[1] https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/Reedley-Bio-Lab-Report.pdf [2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag [3] https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/Reedley-Bio-Lab-Report.pdf, p. 14 and p. 40. [4] ibid, p. 40.

I guess I could imagine a certain kind of workplace clown writing "Ebola" on the SARS-Cov-II fridge in Magic Marker...

The CDC probably has a rule about commenting on ongoing investigations.

One would think, but there's a lot of public comments going around, either through things like the AP news report I linked above, or the lengthy messages sent to the town or to its police. Perhaps more seriously, whether for good or ill local officials had applied in early June for destruction of all biological materials on-site, and had completed that destruction by mid-August. While the CDC did show up for two days in the initial search in May, while accompanied by state officials, none of the court documents discuss the CDC even taking samples to test, nevermind actually returning the results of those tests. The congressional investigation summarizes this as :

The CDC’s refusal to test any potential pathogens with the understanding that local officials would otherwise have to destroy the samples through an abatement process makes it impossible for the Select Committee to fully assess the potential risks that this specific facility posed to the community. It is possible that there were other highly dangerous pathogens that were in the coded vials or otherwise unlabeled. Due to government failures, we simply cannot know.

In its refusal to test, the CDC likewise did not offer to connect local officials with any other federal agency or authorized lab that may be able to test the samples. Based on statements from local officials and briefings the Select Committee received from the CDC, the CDC did not contact the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, the government biodefense laboratory located in Fort Dietrich, Maryland that could potentially have provided greater assistance.

According to local official accounts, in a subsequent conversation with the CDC in early September 2023, local officials again pressed the CDC on why they refused to test any potential pathogens. A CDC official informed the local officials that it was illegal for the CDC to test any samples that were not expressly labeled as a Select Agent. City Manager Nicole Zieba expressed shock at this fact. She asked whether, if that were the case, the CDC had any authority to stop a terrorist in the United States who simply removed the label off a vial of a deadly virus. The CDC official said that the CDC had no authority to test the deadly virus in that hypothetical and that it was a noted gap in its authority. This characterization of the CDC’s authority appears to be false.

Which doesn't prove that they're not investigating further, but it does wink and point suggestively that at least they're not investigating usefully.

I'm not entirely sure that biotech can be done safely anywhere in the world. Except maybe in a remote research station in Antarctica, where all the scientists are screened by personality before being allowed on base.

Securing complex and dangerous systems can be a hard problem to solve. I'm more familiar with computer security, since it is closer to my area of expertise.

Usually the first, most important, and sometimes only security measure is to just prevent people from having access to the thing you want safe. Passwords, secret access points, encryption, etc.

You can't really do that in biology. The biosphere is too leaky. Things get out. And often you have to give low level employees like Janitors access to areas for cleaning and routine maintenance. This would be like google basically giving access to interns to their most valued databased, just so the interns could do some data entry.

Unless you have a pathogen that is ridiculously virulent, such that it can survive indefinitely in the atmosphere and get to a human, you can mitigate most of the risk by having lengthy quarantine periods for workers with repeated screening.

Unfortunate that's not very tenable, since hardly anyone would agree to work shifts closer to that of a nuclear submarine, but if they're not dead in a few months, and they swab negative, they're probably fine, assuming you know which diseases you're working on. Antarctica might work too, but largely for the reason that you're accidentally isolating people for lengthy periods of time.

The workers themselves are the main problem. They constantly violate the bio sphere containment area, and they themselves are a biological entity.

I think it is difficult sticking to lengthy isolation periods and being good about cleanliness on a long term consistent basis. Hospitals do their best to accomplish this, but I don't think any hospital would ever claim 100% effectiveness. And that is the real problem. A bio testing location working on dangerous pathogens needs to be 100% effective at preventing bio sample escape. A single escape and its all over. All of the "value" of that lab is gone and far into the negative if they cause a Covid level problem. Covid caused trillions in damage, so just for any of these labs to be worth it they need to be safe 99.9999% of the time (expected damage multiplied by likelihood of causing the damage), which measured in days means about a million days without incident, and that is basically 100%.

It's insane that any GoF research is allowed in the first place. Those jokers aren't even doing it to create new vaccines? There's plenty of already extant dangerous pathogens they could be working on creating vaccines against, yet they'd rather have the thrill of creating "the most dangerous virus ever, bro!" There have been leaked emails to that effect. From the group of people who, when COVID started, agreed it very likely came from a lab, and then agreed to state the exact opposite, that it didn't come from the lab, to the public.

I certainly agree, anyone involved in GOF research deserves to catch Ebola in the first place, the risk to reward ratio could serve as a space elevator!

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