American Thought Leaders - It’s Time to Ban Transplant Tourism to China | Rep. Neal Dunn

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

“We don’t want Americans to participate in any way, shape, or form in this kind of organ harvesting and transplantation scheme. … You can actually sit in America, [and] make an appointment for a heart, lung transplant in China right now,” says Congressman Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), a former Army surgeon who is also founding president of the Advanced Urology Institute in Florida.“I want to make that illegal.”As a starting point, Dunn has introduced the Block Organ Transplant Purchases from China Act, also known as the BLOCK Act, which would prohibit federal reimbursement for organ transplants and related medical services if the origins of the organs cannot be verified, as is the case in communist China.In our wide-ranging interview, we cover China’s illicit organ trade, the biowarfare program, and President Donald Trump’s new trade deal with leader Xi Jinping, as well as how America can accelerate rare earth mineral production, and the strategic significance of Pacific island nations like the Solomon Islands.As a member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party—often referred to as the House CCP Select Committee—Dunn receives intelligence briefings on the multifaceted threats that Beijing poses to American national security.The CCP “is gathering biological data on all of us,” he says. “One of the most insidious ways they gather biological DNA sequencing on us is they run a set of blood banks in the United States.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The idea of actually murdering someone to take their organs and give them to somebody else, you can actually make an appointment for a heart-long transplant in China right now. I want to make that illegal. It's very tough to talk about organ harvesting with anybody, even in Congress, and the reason for it is people, they shrivel away from it when you say, let's talk about organ harvesting. They just looked out the floor, gag, and walking. away. Congressman Neil Dunn of Florida is a former U.S. Army surgeon and now a member of the House

Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. There is no doubt that the Chinese People's Liberation Army has a biological warfare effort. They write about it in their own communication. They're gathering biological data on all of us. Remember, SARS-CoV-2 had not yet been fully weaponized. They were just studying and they had just made it more virulent. more contagious. They hadn't gotten around of tailoring it to your DNA so that it would be much more lucky to see, get a Caucasian, and get an Asian. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick.

Congressman Neil Dunn, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much for having me, Jan. So President Trump has come back from Asia with the trade deal. There's a reprieve on the export controls for rare earths for a year. There's soybeans that are going to be sold. What's your take on what happened with this trade deal? He survives. He thrives on making deals. And so he's made another deal.

And I think this is a good one. I mean, we actually, we always competing with China. And they are often abusing the trade laws. But the rare earth is something that we've found are absolutely critical. And the free world really. isn't ready to source its own rare earths yet. Now, we only got a one-year reprieve,

so we need to get out there and hustle in terms of making it. And I think there's some good news there for us. What's the good news? I mean, it seems like the CCP is exerting significant leverage here. That never- They are. They actually have significant leverage. The fact that they would enter into a one-year deal

kind of says that, number one, they probably won't go after Taiwan for a year. That's good news. But two, back home, it gives us time to ramp up and go after our own rarest. Now, I know what you're thinking, it takes 30 years to permit a mine, yes, but we actually have discovered a way to get about half of all the rare earthers and critical minerals out of the tailings of mines that have already been mined. So you can go to like the phosphate mines in Florida, and you can pulverize those tailings.

and then apply very high magnetic fields and separate out things like germanium and a number of other. It's like 30 of the elements. You can just kind of drag them out of the tailings. It strikes me like we need an actual operation warp speed for... Good point. In fact, I'm going to suggest it. I may give you credit.

Well, it's sort of, this is a defining issue. I mean, and we, from what I understand, we actually sold our companies, American companies, that were doing all this kind of stuff, building these rare earth magnets and so forth to the CCP with the, you know, SIPI. Absolutely true. Yeah, we, you know, we invented this stuff, and then we outsourced its supplies for all of it and the refining of it. There's other elements to this deal.

We've also got soybeans being sold. How serious do you think will the Chinese Communist Party be in terms of actually affecting what they said they were going to do? Well, uncharacteristically for these deals with China, they've actually put a hard number on what they're going to do. And the hard numbers were 12 million tons, metric tons, of soybeans before the end of the year. and 25 million tons a year for three years. So that's a pretty straightforward number. And you can be certain that for those three years, Trump will be reminding them of what their promises were.

Well, the other piece is a lot softer, which is about fentanyl trying to affect some sort of limits on the fentanyl. But this is a promise, I think, that was made under Obama, if I recall. Yes. And it, honestly, we saw a, you know, sort of a dip in the fentanyl, but it was just a dip, you know, and now it's back with a vengeance. And the fentanyl, of course, includes all of the analogs of fentanyl, which are often far worse than fentanyl itself.

It's hard to imagine drugs that have more affinity for the opioid receptor than fentanyl has, but the analogs can be a thousand times stronger. So what's going on with that? How do you view fentanyl? from the vantage point of being a member on the select committee on the Chinese Communist Party. So we absolutely needed to do something about fentanyl. And I'm so, you know, frankly glad that Trump has jumped in with both feet to stop this straight. It's, you know, it's killing 100,000 Americans a year. That's a ungodly number.

That's more than the entire Vietnam War every year. And the other thing is not all of these people. are actually sort of the dead-head, dead-end junkies. I mean, you could have some kid buy a little marijuana, and it's laced with fentanyl, and he dies. Well, a number of analysts I've had on this show who know what they're talking about tell me that the CCP could cut this fentanyl flow off

relatively quickly. No question they could do it because they don't allow it in their country. They know how to stop it. They know where it comes from. And it's very much of a command and control economy they got there. So this is the truth of the CCP. They use this as a money laundering operation, you know, send the cartels, the precursors,

the cartels pay them back in dollars. Well, I mean, in addition to wiping off tens of thousands of military-aged males off the map every year. I mean, you know, I'm a doctor, by the way, in real life. And we used to see these things. And I actually used fentanyl only on terminal patients, frankly. So hospice-type style. And it is an incredibly powerful drug. One little 25 microgram, not milligram, microgram patch, is usually very, very potent of pain relief.

Do you think the CCP is actually going to this time after making this promise a number of times actually going to enact it? Well, you know, the CCP does what they think they have to do to get along in the world. And they don't really care about getting along too much. But Trump can be pretty persuasive and demanding. And I think that's what you need. You need somebody who's going to harang them. So, yes, we've got this agreement.

You're not living up to the agreement. I need more. I need to see more. And of course, Trump at the other end, he's punishing the cartels in ways that we never did before. we never did before, which I cheer on. I think we should all be cheering that on. So he's making it a pretty expensive operation for them. So as we were talking about doing this interview,

you said something to me about the purpose of the select committee, which I thought was fascinating and incredibly important. So explain to me, what is this select committee on the CCP actually about? So when we designed it, when we designed and named the select committee on China. The actual name says it all. This is the select committee on competition

with the Chinese Communist Party. The point of all that was, number one, the Chinese people are our enemy. It's the Chinese Communist Party is our enemy. And number two, it's about competition, not war. Now, we all know that war hangs in the balance, and we spend a lot of time wargaming this thing, But the truth is, we don't want war.

Nobody should want war because a war with China, that's World War III. I mean, it looks pretty bad, and we've done the numbers on that. It's pretty grim. So we'd like to keep this in the realm of competition. Now, it's going to be tough competition, but it's at the same time, it's better to compete than it is to make war. Well, it's competition in the context of China undergoing the most. largest military buildup, perhaps in the history of the world. In history. Yeah. I mean, it's something. And by the way, I think we came very close.

You know, the given wisdom in Washington was right after Russia gets control of Ukraine, and we thought that was going to be three or four days after they invaded, then China was going to come into Taiwan. And they were massing troops on the coast and ships on the coast for transport. They looked like they were getting ready for an invasion. Of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine went sideways. The Ukrainians did a job protecting themselves. And God bless them, they basically saved Taiwan at the same time they were saving Ukraine. And just explain this a little bit more to me. Why do you think that's the case? Well, because I think China was watching Russia and they were going, oh, these invasions aren't as easy

as they look, because everybody thought Russia was just going to go through Ukraine like hot water through sugar. But that was wrong. The Ukrainians really put up a great fight. And of course, the Taiwan, all the people, their military, their people, they've begun to really take seriously their defensive mechanisms. So with the Select Committee on the CCB, I mean, I've been watching, you guys closely for a number of years. I mean, you cover everything from this forced organ harvesting in China, which is something I've covered extensively. Thank you for doing that.

That's a subject that's near and dear to my heart. I'm one of the few members of Congress who've ever actually done transplant surgery, and so I understand a lot of it's coming dear and dear to my heart. And the idea of actually murdering someone to take their organs and give them to somebody else, that is as appalling as anything that anybody's ever done in the history of the world. That is right up there with the Nazis and the Holocaust. There is nothing any worse than this. Clearly, they put no value whatsoever on these human lives.

So if you're a member of the Chinese Communist Party, you're going to do okay. If you're, you know, member of the full, oh, gone, good luck. You know, you're just a walking set of kidneys, heart, lungs that they're going to harvest at some point. So absolutely, we have to talk more about this because, I mean, again, there isn't a ton of people that are, you know, competent to talk about it and interest in talking about it. The combination is very rare. So we're going to dig into that. But you also look at, I mean, of course you look at this whole trade thing. We started out by talking about the trade side.

which, of course, is a huge area of competition or unrestricted warfare. And then also, you know, the kind of the strategic America's strategic interests in the Pacific, some of these island chains and CCP subversion. You went to the Solomon Islands. I'd love to talk about that with you a little bit because, unfortunately, we lost, frankly, a heroic leader in the region recently. Let's start with the Oregon issue. And because this is something that's very close to me,

I'm actually, I'm working on a book as we speak every day I'm looking at. explain to me what you've managed to do. And you have a bill that you originated called the Block Act. I mean, the short name is the Block Act. So just explain to me the picture of what this is, this forced organ harvesting in China, and then what this Block Act will do. Well, we mentioned, of course, the practice, which is repugnant beyond belief. But the idea is we don't want Americans to participate in any way, shape, or form in this kind of organ harvesting and transplantation scheme. Now, they advertise that, and you can actually make an appointment, sit in America, make an

appointment for a heart lung transplant in China right now. But I want to make that illegal. And I mean, literally, go to prison, pay fines type of legal. So criminal and civil penalties on this, and I think it's a very popular idea to do that. Having said that, it's very tough to talk about organ harvesting with anybody, even in Congress. And the reason for it is it's such an appallingly bad idea. People are, they shrivel away from it. When you say, let's talk about organ harvesting, they just looked down at the floor, gag, and walk away.

It's just so bad. And it sort of says something that this is happening. So this act actually does block any organs from Americans from receiving them. They also lose their right to medical care in the United States afterwards. So you come back for a little post-off follow-up in America? Nope. And then the other thing that it does is we can't bring organs over here. And that's a more subtle problem than we think,

because it's possible to actually preserve some organs that are harvested at the time of death, bone grafts, placental, courteous, these things. I don't want that stuff coming into our transplant market either. So there's some, you know, this is just like smuggling fentanyl, they're smuggling organs, organ-legging or something, is that what they call it? You know, I'm actually going to research that a little bit

because most of the work that I've done is looking at transplants that are actually happening there, including things like corneal and so forth. Yeah, that's what people turn to think of, but, you know, you can also ship those things. There's that, there's that subsection, absolutely. And there's also, you know, there's new technologies now. Like, for example, when ECMO came online some years back, right, where you can sort of replace the heart and lungs. You're well read.

Well, I mean, it changed the dimension of the transplants, because now from one body, could actually harvest multiple organs. You had more time before the body would get cold because you had this circulation. But these machines, they actually tend to be manufactured here, actually, and in the West. And there's all sorts of transplant materials and technologies I've been learning, shockingly,

that are actually being imported to there, right? That's amazing that they do that. Think about that. They're literally keeping these bodies alive just so they can kill them and take their organs. That's so un-American, I mean, no, but it's free nations. We are obviously repelled by this. My contention, basically, is that this whole industry as a whole is a good way.

It's kind of a lens to understand how the Chinese Communist Party actually operates. I think you're absolutely right. This tells you just exactly how much value they put on human life. Congressman, you're leaving me speechless here because there's few people. I'm so used to this. We have this subject come up. People, they go speechless.

And they, by the way, they don't want to talk about it. They don't want to work with me on bills. You know, they're like, ugh. It's so bad. Just the thought of it is. And this is exactly what I experienced, you know, 20 years ago when I started working on it. Myself, I experienced it.

And even today, I experienced it. But something I noticed, I feel like in the last three years, something has shifted. There was this survivor of the organ harvesting, which came forth. There was a lot of more media than normal around it. There's actually these two bills that have already passed the House, the Falun Gong Protection Act, Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act. I mean, everything you're saying is absolutely true, but there seems to be an increased interest or awareness or, you know,

people overcoming that revulsion. I think you're right. That's what it is. They're overcoming revulsion, but it takes, you know, a willful effort to do it. Absolutely. Let's talk about your visit to the Salman Islands. And also, you know, for starters, it's not obvious to people at the outset why we should care about these small island chains in the Pacific in the first place. But you do. Yeah, no, I think so anybody who's ever studied military history, especially in the Pacific. realizes immediately that the distances, number one, are huge. And number two is, you can't get to China, or, by the way, World War II, Japan without going through all those islands.

So that was Douglas MacArthur's famous island hopping campaign. He didn't do that because, you know, he just thought it would be warm-up exercise on the islands. That's what he needed to do to get to Japan. have. And China knows that there's actually a first and second island chain, easily identifiable on any world map. And, you know, Solomon Islands is very, very key location. And it's, you know, it's right in the middle of access to China. And they want to own that. They want to control that. And by the way, controlling, it means controlling all their communications. They already do all the cell phones.

So they got that. The communications, fiber optic cables, they already own all those. And the government. Now, the people of the Solomon Islands, generally speaking, don't really like the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. They don't want to have anything to do with it. In fact, just about five years ago, they rioted and burned down China town. And nonetheless, the Chinese have...

kept going in there and bribing, corrupting, as they do, their Belt and Road Initiative, as I call them, bribery and corruption initiative. And they have won over a majority of the Parliament, so they have the votes now. And that means they control who gets elected Prime Minister by the Parliament. That's the way they do that. And so they have a completely pro-China Prime Minister, in a country that's majority of people are really opposed to China.

Nonetheless, the prime minister is in their pocket. In fact, his personal security details made up of members of the People's Liberation Army of China. This is an amazing situation. And now they have two back-to-back prime ministers who are in the pocket of red China. And the majority population is actually a different province, a different island, Milita, and they were very opposed to China.

They were opposed to lots of things about China. Their provincial parliament has been fighting the national government to keep China out. But I tell you, it's a tricky battle because most of the powers in the national government. Well, and last year when you went to the Salman Islands, you actually met with a former premier of Malaita province, Daniel Suidani. Yeah. May he rest in peace. Yes, that's right. He just passed away.

And that story, by the way, is kind of interesting. He passed away for lack of receiving dialysis. And he was refused dialysis in the, in Hanyara, which is on the island of Gordalcanal. It's the capital of the country, and they only have a single functioning dialysis machine there. And the one doctor, who's a nephrologist and runs the thing, is actually a citizen of the People's Republic of China. And so he's in their pocket, too. And here we have the prime opposition leader, who's a very brave, courageous guy, dying of kidney failure because he can't get dialysis. Let's talk about Premier Sui Dani a little bit more.

I've actually had him on this show a couple of years ago, and we've talked about a number of times. What does it mean that the premier of a province of a tiny island nation, which has, you know, this, you know, mass, I don't know, mass subversion, mass influence operation, mass bribery campaign affected on the island? What does it take for a person like that to be the hero who will stand up to them? Well, courage comes in handy. That's the first thing you need, just to face down the opposition and the Chinese, frankly. But he was. He was a very, very selfless, courageous leader.

I actually got to know him because it was brought to my attention that he needed a visa to come to the United States for medical treatment. And he was denied that by our State Department. And I was so flabbergasted that I called up the Secretary of State. I said, what the heck? This guy is a hero. And he's our hero. He's the last bulwark against the Chinese taking over the Solomon Islands. We should be open arms welcoming.

me, not denying him a visa. And so they actually changed their ruling, gave him a visa. So he dropped by the office to say thank you. Well, I mean, I met his family, by the way. I went back to the Solomon Island when I made that trip, and I met his wife and daughters. They're the lovely people. You know, I just want to remind everyone watching, right,

these islands of great strategic interest to the United States? They are very strategic. Whatever you think about, whether you're thinking about Ukraine and Russia, you're thinking about the Indo-Pacific in China, you look at the map and you go, my God, there are a lot of island nations out there between here and there. Who controls those things? And it turns out China has established a very, very strong control

of a whole lot of the Indo-Pacific nations. So, you know, you think, well, there are tiny islands which just sail between them, but, you know, they're exclusive economic zones interlock so that you never leave, you're always in somebody's exclusive economic zone, which means that they have some control over what's going on in their area

if they control their own government. And, of course, most of them do not control their own government. So what happens now with the Solomon Islands? One of the things that I became absolutely focused on was reestablishing diplomatic presence in the Solomon Islands. We have no embassy there. We have a chance for you. That's new, by the way, just in the last two years. And it's staffed by three people.

Two of them are army. So literally the commander of up at the Indo-Pacific detail, a couple of Marines, I had said Army, the Marines, down to Honiara to help the poor one guy who's actually the diplomatic presence there. They still don't have the authority to issue visas in that office, and they need that. Functionally, it prevents the people with Solomon Islands, who are our allies, and who are grateful to us for World War II, freeing them, et cetera, the famous Battle of Guadalcanal.

This is, by the way, the Solomon Islands is where Kennedy got sunk in his BT boat. It's right there, just a little bit north of the capital. So, I mean, we have a lot of history out there, but we don't have any presence, really, just a little first step there. We need to get an ambassador back there. And, in fact, we need an ambassador in a lot of places over in the Indo-Pacific. So we need to have a diplomatic presence. We've got to be there. You know, if you're not there, you're absent, and China's there.

And they're playing the game pretty for keeps. And just to, I'm going to finish up on this point, I mean, control of those island chains allows them to project their naval power. That's right. And it also works as kind of a wall against us. You know, we actually will have some difficulty, say, like, even submarines past all these island chains if China's controlling the surveillance in those island chains. Think about that. They don't just go there and bribe and corrupt. They also set up listening posts and sonar posts and all this

stuff. So they can track, you know, they know where the deep channels are. They'll watch for submarines there. And by the way, it could also launch anti-ship missiles from the land. You never have to be out of a range of a land-based battery. I have to ask this question. We're talking about military strategy here. We're talking about projecting power. But the select committee on the CCP, it's about just about competition.

It's about preventing those military encounters. Where are we talking about this? Well, so the competition goes from rough and tumble competition to empty the dugouts have a lot. fight kind of a competition pretty easily pretty quickly and uh you know i think we need to be there and kind of see if we can keep control on that and uh but you know part of it's just showing up for the game again we got to have americans there uh we're doing a better job now having uh our american military presence in the philippines which uh we need it and uh they want it

They understand China is a problem to them. And, of course, in Guam, we do it. And the Commonwealth Marianas, that's a territorial possession of the United States. So we're building up our presence there, Samoa. By the way, these islanders also enlist in our military at a much higher rate than the average American population. So they're participating in the defense of America. America, the greater all America, as well as back home. And they have no representation at home.

Once they get out, they either 20 years, they get out, they go home. There's no VA, you know, there's no diplomatic presence. They have to go to Papua New Guinea to get a visa to come back to the United States. It's crazy. Let's switch gears a little bit. For a moment, let's go back to trade. And one of the areas that the committee has had a number, of hearings about. It's something I've talked to Robert Lighthizer, former U.S. Trade Representative

about. And he kind of shocked me by explaining how significant contribution to the trade deficit was the what's this called the de minimis exemption. So anything under $800, I believe the number was. Just not only does it just come in without a tariff, If you're in the de minimis, under the de minimis level, you're probably already even going to get your package inspected by customs. So who knows what's in these packages? Is this somehow insane? Yeah, it is.

And I mean, the Chinese Communist Party exploited this massively. Yeah, they absolutely did. And, I mean, it was institutionalized how much. They probably billions, tens of billions of dollars of goods, and not so goods to our country using this de minimis exception. What they would do is they come into like a free trade zone in Long Beach, transfer these huge containers to Mexico, and then just wait for whatever order to come to them,

and they just send it over from Mexico one off at a time. And it might be worth $10,000, but on the stamp it says less than $800. So shoots right through customs. It gets delivered. It was a gaping hole. By the way, $800 de minimis exception was extremely high by international levels. You know, the more common level of a de minimis exception

is 100 to 200. Right. Well, so now there's an executive order. Yes. Just took effect, August 29th. Right. And so the question is, has it had an effect yet? Well, absolutely.

answer. So there's far fewer packages coming over, and you can see that. I believe in your paper, actually, that the number of packages coming into the United States is dramatically decreased. Now, it hasn't gone to zero. But you have to ask yourself, too, is customs actually physically capable of examining every package internationally that comes in? Do we have the wherewithal, the manpower. And I kind of doubt it, frankly. You mean, before August 29th, we still had an $800 exemption. And now we've got a $0 exemption. That's kind of amazing. So maybe there's a happy middle ground, $100 or something. I don't know. But I'd love to sit down and look over that kind of thing and see what the actual mechanism is for customs inspection coming in with these

shipped in goods. And I think that'd be a good trip for us. Are there any plans to actually codify this into law somehow? Well, thank you for that. It needs to be statute. I mean, the honest, you know, the president's using sort of loopholes here to make these executive orders. And it really ought to be put in statute. And in Trump's defense, I'm going to say, he looks at Congress and says, well, put it in statute. And we go, we're shut down. So, you know, he gets impatient with the Hill sometimes. And God bless him, I do too. Well, so what do you think is going to happen with the shutdown? Ah, so what, you know, the thought is, the rumor on the street this week is that after the election day, the Democratic Senate,

are going to bring forward a willingness to take the CR. I don't know if they're going to want something in return up front, but what they had been asking for, what Schumer and Jeffries had been asking for, was $1.5 trillion with a T, trillion dollars, in kimi goodies and, you know, just, And that's just to come to the table and negotiate for a couple of weeks. That's that it'll work.

So, by the way, the other thing, the other part of this rumor is that the continuing resolution will have to be made longer. Because right now it only goes to 21 November. We couldn't possibly get, what do we need, nine appropriations bills done in order to get them to the president by the end of the CR. I can't possibly do that by the 21st. A number of people have mentioned to me, I don't know how you'll respond to this, but a number of people, people who watch American Thought Leaders,

people who read the Epoch Times have said, you know, frankly, this last month, I haven't really noticed much change. Now, obviously, there has been a big change. Government has been shut down. It had impact, but there's some people, at least, that are telling me they're not particularly impacted and they're wondering about where all this money is going.

Well, so once again, I'll give a little credit to Trump here. He found a way to pay the military this past month. That's a good thing. He found a way to do a number of other things to keep the government nominally open. But if you poke around the course, you find there's a lot of people who are not at work. By the way, my staff on the hill, they're not getting paid. And how long can they coast? So what we're seeing right now is sort of the evolution of a shutdown, how bad it gets.

What we haven't seen yet is how much it costs to open the government back up. And it's going to be expensive. Here's something you can take to the back. A shutdown is never the right thing to do. It's always the most expensive option. It's going to be lost economies. It's going to be plused up money to restart everything. And when I say lost economy, we're looking at just the start.

state of Florida loses a billion dollars a week with the government shut down. The state of Florida alone is a billion dollars. I've been trying to find a figure for the whole country. Is that in transfers from the federal government? Where does that come from? It's mostly lost economic opportunity. People aren't buying. People aren't being paid.

They aren't buying. They aren't spending. By the way, they're not driving down to Florida and going to the beach either. Fascinating. Let's jump back to the Select Committee on China. You know, another area that you're interested in you even have a bit of a background in is this bio-warfare realm. It's something a lot of people don't like talking about. Yeah, I get all the really bad things.

Well, they're also very serious things, and we know as a fact that it's a central piece of Chinese military strategy is to develop very powerful bio-warfare capability. It really is, by the way. And I'm forced to read more about this than anybody would choose to read, except, you know, we need to know this stuff. So the truth is they have a very advanced bio-weapons program. It's not particularly safe. So they do the research in laboratories that are not well isolated, aren't well protected. Hence the lab leak, you know, SARS-CoV-2.

By the way, people ought to Google the whole, just the term, a lab leak of pathogens. And they see, well, there's a very rich history of leaks from laboratories of virulent pathogens, bacteria, and viruses, and molds. And so it's, you know, it's a kind of, it's another one of those stories people don't want to talk about. I was stationed in the biological warfare headquarters of the Army back in the 70s, did research there on us as a bench scientist. So I'm familiar with this stuff. And because of that familiarity, I was given the bill called Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness, P.HPA Papa Act to get the chairman of E&C said, get that renewed by the end of 27. and that's when it times out. And so I take that very seriously.

We need to do that. And we need, by the way, we need to have a better plan for response to biological threats. We did not respond well to SARS-CoV-2. I think everybody recognizes that. No. We can never do that again. And there are some things that we should be doing. And I have some definite ideas on that.

I'm open to your ideas. Well, you mentioned some things we should be doing. One of the things that there's a large body of voices saying we shouldn't be doing is gain of function research, which is kind of 100% of which has military application. I'm talking about, when I say gain of function, just to be precise, I'm talking about making viruses more virulent. I think that that's a, so that isn't the only gain of function that they can do, but that certainly is the one that, you know, make it, we say virulent, but you know what, contagious.

That's a word everybody understands, making these things more contagious. That's not a good plan, especially when you're doing it ostensibly, ostensibly this research is being done so that they can study the virus and develop some treatment for it in case it ever, you know, emerges in nature. Well, it doesn't emerge in nature. it leaks from the damn laboratory. And, you know, so we're making our problems with this gain of function research. There is a kind of a split in the science camp

about whether it's a good idea to study gain of function or to just outlawed. And I'm not going to take sides, but I'll tell you that certainly it needs to be done in a BSL4 level laboratory. That's the highest level of isolation. And I worked in a BSL4 facility.

It's a very expensive, very difficult time-consuming proposition to work in that environment. And it has to have a lot of protocols. So that's why I think the Chinese don't put that effort into it and why they have a rich history of laboratory leaks. Well, my weapons are kind of a strange thing is you can't it's not like you you don't want to have like a mutually assured destruction doctrine for example I haven't thought about this

extensively right but you did it does it doesn't make sense if you have a really powerful bio weapons I need to have my very powerful bio weapons or does that make sense no it doesn't make sense and because we we have issued that you know we no longer make offensive pathogens at all for biological warfare or I guess they're I won't go into chemical, but we absolutely do not do biological warfare. We do defense. Right.

And that we need. Isn't just a healthy population the best defense? Well, it's a great defense, absolutely, but it's not adequate. I mean, because we know that the Chinese can tailor make pathogens that can infect just about any population. And I don't want to take too much of a dive down the rabbit hole with this stuff. But trust me, there are pathogens out there that will kill, you know, I don't care if you're Iron Man or, you know, the best athlete in the world. You know, you can be killed with the virus. And so, and you're aware of these, I'm aware of research, but they're them

doing research in these targeted, you know, various types of these, but you're aware that they have already developed some of these types of technologies. So we read the Chinese literature as a way. I don't personally do it, but it gets read by our intelligence community. We read translations of it. And there is no doubt that the Chinese People's Liberation Army has a biological warfare effort. They write about it in their own communications. So let's try this.

We can do this. We can weaponize this particular virus. Let's do some research on it. I mean, that's in their communication. You know, you talk about smoking gun. By the way, Russia, too. And I can name names, but it gets down the... I mean, we're immediately in the rabbit hole there,

but, I mean, trust me, it's as bad as you can imagine bad. And even these infections, say, once they're out, They go around the world. That's what happened with SARS-CoV-2, you know? It seems to me like the best defense for SARS-CoV-2 was simply being in the best health possible. Like that's when... Being young, yeah, that would be good.

Yeah. So you don't want to carry your extra weight, things like that. It was a lipid metabolism, was the active toxic element there. So it's, yeah, it was good for SARS-CoV-2. But remember, SARS-CoV-2 had not yet been fully weaponized. They were just studying it. They had just made it more virulent, more contagious. They hadn't gotten around to tailoring it to your DNA so that it would be much more lucky to see, get a Caucasian and get an Asian.

They can do that. Well, that's important, actually, because they're specifically working on those kinds of technologies, that we know, absolutely. They absolutely are. No question. And they, by the way, they're gathering biological data on all of us. One of the most insidious ways they gather biological DNA sequencing on us is they run a set of blood banks in the United States. The People's Republic of China, everybody who charitably goes to donate blood to one of these blood banks, they get sequenced and it goes right to China. It would seem that would be something that we would want to shut down rather quickly.

Or, you know, kind of repatriate or... So, well, do you think of all the Chinese corporations are doing business in the United States that we would want to shut down, that we have not shut down? The Beijing Genomics Institute, BGI, comes to mind. But that's just an example. There's a whole lot of them. This is a good moment just to talk about this reality. Is there such a thing as an independent company and communist China, communist Chinese company?

No. By law, there is not. That's their law. You can't be. If they thought you were independent, they'd come get you. Hard stop. No, no possibility of an independent country, a company, or corporation, in China. Are you referring to the 2017 National Intelligence Law? Well, you're more erudite than I am on the law. I'm doctor no I mean I might I mean there's there's there's multiple laws I can think of that that would lead to that that conclusion but yes I that's my understanding as well it's my conclusion that there's nothing into that's independent yeah I I you by the way took this up in hearing in the China Select China Committee and and that was our contention as well by the way

one of the things that's nice about the China Committee is this completely completely bipartisan. We typically have absolute unanimity, days and ours on every subject. It's kind of nice, so change of pace. Well, just going as we finish up, back to this organ harvesting issue, this just strikes me as something that,

it's not even a, it's something that transcends politics. It strikes me like a basic humanity issue. It absolutely is. Absolutely is. This is human rights, you know, writ large. And I think we're finally, you know, swallowing twice and getting the courage to take this subject on and do something about it. I intend to meet with the chair of energy, commerce, and health later this week. And asked to bring these acts to the floor with, you know, all do haste. And, you know, the China Committee has already taken this up in here. about the organ harvesting. Chairman Mulanar, you know, God bless him, is willing to talk about it. He's a nice guy, but it's, you know,

you realize this is important. How many people do you think that they murder a year for organs? Well, the best estimate. I have my estimates, I want to know what yours. The best, I tend to go with the China Tribunal, 2020 China Tribunal estimate, which is something to the tune of 60 to 90, to 90,000 transplants.

It's not necessarily bodies because of this ECMO technology that we discussed earlier. But that's, you know, over the years, that's a huge number of people we're talking about. Yeah, I usually just say 100,000. That's what our intelligence community believes. Mm-hmm. Our intelligence community.

100,000 a year. I'm going to be coming to you for that report. Yeah, I'll share everything we could. Wonderful, okay. I mean, and horrible. Yeah, and horrible. I finally got NATO, by the way, to pay attention to this stuff. You know, they used to be allergic to talking about anything in the Indo-Pacific.

You know, they were so proud of being an Atlantic alliance that they just put on the blinders and not look beyond that. And now we, the Secretary General, has put as his second primary goal, that the NATO alliance allies need to be assisting the United States and working more closely in the Indo-Pacific. Well, that's also excellent to hear, frankly. NATO's another hat I wear. Okay, well, I absolutely am going to have to have you back to talk about some more of these issues

that we've just kind of scratched the surface on today. Yeah, there's plenty there to look at. Congressman Dunn, a final thought as we finish? Well, first off, it's an honor to be here with you. And somebody who's actually willing to talk about some of the things that I do. I mean, I can't exactly go home and talk with my wife and kids about organ harvesting. I get ostracized. So it's good to have people who are willing to face the bad things in life and to take them up.

take them up. So if I can help you in your quest, please let me do that to you because I feel a little bit alone out here sometimes. Well, you're definitely going to be hearing from me and my people. Thank you so much. Great being with you, John. Well, Congressman Dunn, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much. Thank you all for joining Congressman Neil Dunn and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Yanya Kellogg. Thank you. Thank you.