Exclusive: Why the FBI and the CDC Took So Little Interest in a Dangerous Biolab Hiding in Plain Sight (Part 2)

By Adam Garrie and Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos, staff writers, The Kennedy Beacon

In part 1 of a Kennedy Beacon exclusive series on an illegal biolab in Reedley, California, we spoke with City of Reedley Code Enforcement Officer Jesalyn Harper, who discovered the facility in December 2022, during what she thought was a routine inspection of suspected code violations. In part 2, we explore the lackluster responses of federal agencies to the illegal lab and the wider implications of those responses.

Exclusive: How a California Code Enforcement Officer in a Small California Town Blew the Lid on an Illegal Biolab Teeming with Deadly Viruses (Part 1)

Potential Lab Leak 

Following the discovery of the rogue biolab, local officials were told of a potential lab leak when a lab worker confessed during a March 16, 2023, investigation that both he and his children became sick shortly after he began experimenting with the genetically modified mice that were improperly housed at the biolab. This incident occurred at a time when Officer Harper and her colleagues were unable to have any meaningful conversations with CDC officials, who continued to ignore or hang up on their calls.

After California officials refused to refer the pleas of Reedley officials to the CDC, Harper explained to the Beacon, Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba reached out to her congressman, US Representative Jim Costa (D-CA). Harper recalls Zieba contacting Costa in early spring 2023. According to Harper, once Representative Costa became involved, she and Zieba no longer had to work with unresponsive state officials in order to get the CDC’s attention.

The CDC’s Belated Response

Representative Costa’s intervention resulted in the CDC conducting an investigation at the lab from May 2 to 4, 2023, almost five months after Harper discovered the lab. Harper characterized the CDC’s attitude to the problem as one that exuded “incompetence.” She explained that the flaws in the CDC’s approach to the matter were due largely to systemic failures.

According to Harper, “When you get to the state and federal authorities, one of the disconnects that I found is they don’t have to deal with the residents. They don’t have to deal with the people that are here that were genuinely afraid that their water had been contaminated” (due to the proximity of the lab to the local water supply). Commenting further on the CDC and other federal agencies, Harper said, “The higher up you go in government, there’s more of a disconnect of how this affects the actual people around it.”

A November 2023 report from the Congressional Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party provides an even more scathing assessment of the CDC’s brief period investigating the lab. 

Close Call: The Discovery and Closure of an Illegal BioLab

The Select Committee’s report found that when the CDC cataloged the numerous pathogens stored at the lab, it did so by examining the labels scribbled on vials, rather than by confiscating the substances and conducting tests on the pathogens at a secure facility. The CDC further decided not to translate the non-English labels written on a majority of the vials. 

In spite of the continued concerns raised by local officials, the CDC refused to shut down the illegal facility. In a three-page report, the CDC, largely because it performed no tests that would have produced definitive evidence, found that “there was no evidence of select agents or toxins” at the facility – a shocking claim given the reports from local authorities. 

Calling the CDC’s decision not to conduct tests “baffling,” the Select Committee’s report went on to criticize the agency’s actions, saying bluntly that they “do not make sense.” The report further found it unconscionable that the CDC concluded that the lab’s presence was of little concern without taking the time to determine the nature of the pathogens found there. 

Congress Grills CDC Director

On November 30, 2023, CDC director Mandy Cohen appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. During a lengthy session, Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA) asked Director Cohen why the CDC had refused to answer calls from, and in some cases had hung up on, officials from Reedley seeking guidance and assistance on the best way to deal with the illegal biolab. While not directly addressing Griffith’s question about the phone calls, Cohen defended the CDC’s eventual involvement in the matter, specifically emphasizing the two and a half days that CDC investigators spent in Reedley.

Griffith subsequently asked about the refrigerator prominently marked “Ebola.” Cohen replied that the CDC took many photos and “looked at everything” but could not find any storage devices or specimens labeled “Ebola.”

Harper explained to the Beacon that CDC officials were not present when she and her colleagues discovered the refrigerator clearly labeled “Ebola.” Harper further explained that CDC officials told her they were unable to take action on that refrigerator because the specimens inside it were not labeled “Ebola,” despite being kept at temperatures consistent with Ebola storage, in a refrigerator labeled “Ebola.” As previously reported in the Beacon, the CDC refused to test any of the bioagents present at the Reedley lab.

Returning to Cohen’s congressional testimony, issues surrounding the Reedley biolab were again raised, this time by Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who asked why it “took so long” for the CDC to respond to red flags from local officials. Cohen continued to defend the agency’s response time, which was highly criticized in the Select Committee’s report. 

Cohen then repeated that CDC officials had found “no evidence of select agents” at the biolab. However, during this line of answers, Cohen neglected to mention that the CDC had declined to test the multiple specimens housed at the lab, in spite of Harper and her colleagues informing the CDC that they found specimens and storage devices with labels clearly indicating the presence of such select agents. 

While Cohen defended the CDC’s inaction, citing unnamed regulations that prohibit the testing of unknown agents, Crenshaw appeared to mock the CDC director’s apparent cavalier attitude to issues that caused grave concerns to Reedley officials. He suggested that if a storage container were marked “Gatorade,” but potentially contained Ebola, it would be absurd for the CDC not to test the suspicious substance. 

Following Crenshaw’s questions, Representative Neal Dunn (R-FL) continued to raise issues surrounding the biolab with Director Cohen. Reading from the Select Committee’s report, Dunn told Cohen that the presence of the lab potentially endangered the safety of “millions of Americans.” Dunn then accused the CDC of “completely failing the people of Reedley” and criticized the agency for not responding to the issue until months after it was first raised by local officials. Dunn further highlighted that the CDC’s response came only after a direct intervention by Representative Costa. 

Dunn described the CDC’s investigation as “unprofessional” and “inadequate.” He then read a list of labeled pathogen vials found at the Reedley biolab while further recounting its hazardous conditions. Dunn said that the most “egregious” CDC failure was the decision not to attempt a translation of the vials labeled in Mandarin Chinese. After criticizing the agency for its unsubstantiated conclusion that the refrigerator labeled “Ebola” likely did not contain Ebola, Dunn compared the CDC response to something out of a “horror story.”

Facing this condemnation, Cohen continued to defend the CDC’s investigation and repeated her assertion that there were “no select agents” at the biolab. After Cohen reiterated that the agency could not find anything they suspected was Ebola, Dunn accused the CDC of “blowing off” the well-founded concerns of Reedley authorities. 

Dunn, a former surgeon and medical doctor with the US Army, concluded his remarks by saying, “In my professional career in biological warfare, I have never seen anything like this. The worst concern I have is that this [biolab] may not be the only one.” 

Cohen became the CDC’s new director on July 10, 2023 – months after CDC officials conducted their investigation in Reedley. Given that Cohen responded in similar fashion to multiple lines of questioning from different members of Congress on the matter, it is not clear whether she was fully familiar with what transpired at Reedley in 2022 and early 2023, when her predecessor Rochelle Walensky was leading the agency. 

While Cohen appeared confident in the prudence of her agency’s apparently lax attitude to the Reedley lab that deeply worried local and state officials, one of her predecessors took a decidedly different view on the dangers of biolabs that conduct controversial experiments with deadly viruses. 

Virologist Robert Redfield, CDC director from 2018 to 2021, has said that experiments that engineer and mutate viruses to make them more virulent have no place in the scientific community. During his March 2023 testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Redfield said that he is unaware of any time in history when such experiments have ever resulted in the discovery of a lifesaving vaccine or treatment. He added that “on the contrary,” such experiments “probably caused the greatest pandemic our world has seen,” a reference to COVID-19.

If a former CDC director believes that even regulated and sanctioned experiments of the kind that occurred at Reedley should be uniformly stopped, it is surprising that current CDC director Cohen seemed to care so little about the presence of an illegal lab illicitly engaged in such experiments without any oversight, let alone basic standards of safety and hygiene. 

Deconstructing the CDC’s Puzzling Response

In exclusive comments to the Beacon, bioweapons expert Dr. Meryl Nass expressed shock at the CDC’s brief investigation at Reedley and its failure to test, take custody of, and destroy the specimens at the lab. Nass explained that it is the CDC’s responsibility to approve and oversee the transfer of select agents, including Ebola and pathogens from the SARS family of viruses (including SARS-CoV-2). She added that even loosely regulated private labs are not allowed to take possession of and store such pathogens without the CDC’s knowledge.

Specifically, any work with Ebola requires a level of security called BSL-4, and this kind of lab must be registered with the CDC. In fact, Nass said that she was shocked, given the potential presence of Ebola, that the CDC investigative team hadn’t shown up at the Reedley lab wearing moonsuits (“[so that] you’re not breathing air from the building, and you’re completely covered head to foot”). Nass said that the CDC’s refusal to express concern for the apparent presence of such dangerous specimens at Reedley “makes no sense.” In characterizing the agency’s response, Nass sarcastically remarked, “I don’t want to use the word coverup, but I just used it.”

Asked why the CDC had no interest in testing the substances found at the Reedley biolab, Nass said that such inaction was “unconscionable.” She compared the agency’s attitude to that of law enforcement officials who, years ago, conducted insufficient investigations into the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, now deceased. She further noted that the CDC has previously been part of international efforts to arrest rogue scientists conducting experiments with drug-resistant tuberculosis. She therefore finds it particularly odd that, within the United States, the CDC decided not to confiscate the specimens found at Reedley, but instead to conclude its investigation by leaving the contents of the lab in the hands of untrained state and local officials.

The Beacon also asked Nass if any benign explanation could be offered for the existence of the Reedley lab. She agreed with Redfield’s assessment that experiments designed to make viruses more transmissible and virulent (which she referred to as gain-of-function research) serve no purpose that is beneficial to humanity. While agreeing with Redfield, Nass referred to current director Cohen as “completely incompetent.” She added that Cohen’s predecessor Walensky “was also incompetent.”

Nass spoke of gain-of-function research “biowarfare” experiments that continued unabated in the US even after the international Biological Weapons Convention came into force in 1975. She explained that domestic enforcement mechanisms for the treaty, which supposedly ended dangerous experimentation with viruses and other biological agents, were always weak. Nass added that following 9/11, the federal government began actively encouraging and funding such experiments under the guise of national security although she appeared doubtful about this rationale. . 

In addition to describing the activity that took place in Reedley as dangerous, Nass noted that many varieties of transgenic mice are very expensive – potentially up to $1,000 apiece. Despite the lack of answers about what was inside this warehouse, the potential value of these creatures could help explain why the owner of the illegal biolab was more concerned with retrieving his maltreated genetically modified mice than he was with public safety when he discussed such matters with Harper and her colleagues.

A Feel-Good Horror Story?

Shortly after discovering the biolab, Harper began researching legislative loopholes that allowed privately owned biolabs to operate with impunity. Harper praised Representative Costa for working on draft legislation that would force private biolabs to adhere to strict safety standards, although it might not have necessarily helped the situation in Reedley since the biolab there was operating outside of any legal framework. 

As of January 2024, Harper has assisted the US Environmental Protection Agency with additional cleanup efforts at the location of the lab. Prior to this step, Harper was part of a team that helped to shut down the lab in July 2023. Doing so involved the safe incineration of the bioagents the CDC had refused to test.

Nevertheless, Nass also expressed horror that the potential pathogens in this lab were allowed to be incinerated by local officials, rather than taken as evidence by the CDC and/or destroyed by the agency in highly secured facilities. Given the CDC’s lack of interest, however, local officials were left with no choice but to dispose of the potentially deadly substances, as they had no safe means to store them. Destroying this evidence also renders any future investigations into it impossible, which the CDC could have done. Doing so was necessary to protect the local population, but again exemplifies the CDC’s puzzling lack of interest in getting to the bottom of what was happening in Reedley.

Harper told the Beacon that she continues to be involved with the matter and will monitor the future of the property where the lab was located. The warehouse is owned by a man from Oakland, California, who Harper said would have to decide whether to make improvements to the buildings in order to bring them up to code. Otherwise, it is possible that the permanent structures will be demolished. 

For her efforts, Harper won Code Enforcement Officer of the Year from the California Association of Code Enforcement Officers. Speaking with her, it becomes instantly clear that she went above and beyond her duties and has a clear sense of purpose when it comes to serving and protecting her community. She remarked that she considers it fortunate that she was able to discover the lab and take appropriate actions to ensure that no members of the public were harmed as a result of the nefarious activities being conducted in Reedley.

Harper also told the Beacon that she remains committed to spreading awareness about the wider problems of unregulated and unsafe biolabs, telling us she believes the Reedley facility was not a unique case of an unlicensed biolab. 

Our investigation reveals that the CDC’s lack of action left the fate of this facility and community in one woman’s hands. The outcome would have been decidedly different had not Harper been the type of person to resist bureaucratic red tape, trust her instincts and follow through with responsible actions aimed at protecting the public.

While the CDC and other federal agencies have seemingly washed their hands of the issue, for Reedley, California, Code Enforcement Officer Jesalyn Harper the issue is still very much on the front burner. 

In part 3 of this series on the Reedley biolab, will we provide readers the full interview we conducted with Jesalyn Harper.

Adam Garrie is a writer, speaker, and consultant on a wide range of current affairs as well as political risk. He is also the cofounder of HiCyrus, a data-driven tech startup that aims to fully democratize information access. 

Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos studied government at Georgetown University and interned for several Democratic elected officials and their campaigns, and other affiliated groups. He then earned a master’s degree in urban studies in France, where extremely strict COVID-19 lockdowns led to his political reawakening and inspired him to try to help fix the broken two-party system.