The Highwire with Del Bigtree - CDC FUMBLES UNSANCTIONED CA BIOLAB INVESTIGATION

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

CDC FUMBLES UNSANCTIONED CA BIOLAB INVESTIGATIONBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

It's almost consensus now. At least there's somewhat of an agreement that this thing may have came from a Wuhan Biolabab. Purposeful, not, we don't know yet, but it may have came from there. So in the U.S., Equal Health Alliance has been one of the key, we reported on them. There's a lot of FOIA requests for the documents. Equal Health Alliance has been the key kind of agency or company, if you want. Middleman, really, between the government and delivering funds to what looks like illegal science being done in labs around the world, including, Wuhan. You can't do this here in America, but hand this company the money from your government agency. It will go pay off the people that are doing gain of function science. And then act like,

until you, we'll put Tony Fauci in front of the television and say, we don't do gain of function. Right. And it's an access between NIH, Wuhan and EcoHealth. So here we look and we see NGO, there's talking about Eco Health Alliance in this article, NGO with ties to Wuhan Lab received over $50 million from federal agencies since pandemic. GOP congressman says. And why is this an issue? Well, we're still funding research by this, by EcoHealth. And one of the research proposals is in Colorado, and listen to this headline,

$12 million taxpayer-funded NIH research facility in Colorado will import bats from Asia and infect them with deadly diseases. So this is a collaboration between the Colorado State University, NIH, and EcoHealth Alliance. Now, this is just a proposal. There has been now funding for it in the tune of millions. as you hear, but they've moved out the completion date to 2025 at this point. So they're really looking to put one of these on American soil. And so we have the National Defense Authorization

Act. Can anything stop this? Well, there's an amendment written into this, and this is re-upped every year. This is 2024 fiscal year, NDAA. And you can see in here the amendment is this, prohibiting federal funding for who? EcoHealth Alliance. None of the funds authorized to be appropriated under this Act may be available for any purposes to EcoHealth Alliance. Any subsidiary of Equal Health Alliance, organization that is directly controlled by Eco Health Alliance, or any sub-grantee or subcontractor. So they're really trying to shut down all funding to this agency, which would be a big, big step. So if this thing gets through with that, now there's still an opportunity to pull this. We've got tons of form of money all over, you know, in every politician's pocket in D.C. right now.

Right. And so the public obviously has been looking at the idea of labs, how safe are these labs. But we're looking at the big ones, the multimillion dollar labs, the Wuhan labs, this potential one in Colorado. But what if they're in our own backyards? What if they're in warehouses that we don't even know about? That's exactly what happened in California over this summer. And this investigation has been ongoing, and it spilled out into a committee hearing. This is Congressman Neil Dunn of Florida. And he was basically laying out the facts of this recently.

Take a listen. All right. The Select Committee recently published a bombshell bipartisan report. You're aware of it. You've said on the illegal bio lab that was discovered in Reedley, California. This warehouse was located in the center of a small town just across the street from an elementary school and a block down from the city hall. The clandest in, they're calling it a bio lab, it's more like a warehouse,

was a disaster waiting to happen. The CDC's response or rather the lack of response, clearly endangered millions of Americans. There were a couple of things that really stood out to me. The first is that the CDC's Select Agent Program completely failed to people of Ridley, California. The CDC literally refused. They did not respond when they were requested.

They responded months later, and only when Congressman Costa made that request to come to the town and assess the situation. The discovery, I remind you, was made by a housing code inspector who was tracing a gardener that went in a window. That's how this was found. It took a phone call from custody to get there finally. Once the CDC arrived months after the first request, the investigation he conducted was completely unprofessional and inadequate. And I say that as a professional in the field.

The CDC didn't test one vial, even the ones that were labeled to be. tuberculosis SARS-CoV-2 and Ebola, an entire refrigerator listed, labeled Ebola. That is a select federal agent, by the way, and HIV was there. This facility is completely unlicensed warehouse, no licensing whatsoever. Over 20 potential pathogens, so 1,000 transgenic nice, humanized. There were zero isolation facilities that would be necessary to either legally safely handle these agents. And perhaps most egregious and simple-minded,

the agency didn't even bother to translate the Chinese labels. There were some files that had only Chinese labels. Didn't even ask for a translation on this. Amazing. When local officials started to dispose of these materials, they asked CDC what to do with the Ebola, again, a federal select agent. And as CDC branch chief, I have these emails I'd like to submit for,

The record? Without objection? Thank you. CDC branch chief belatedly responded saying, we don't see an urgent need to test these samples at the moment. Most of the material we identified was not considered a serious threat to public health. HIV, SARS-CoV-2, hepatitis, malaria, and Ebola, not considered a serious threat to public health.

But, you know, the conclusion made by the experts at CDC that a refrigerator labeled Ebola was unlikely to contain Ebola, and you look at the totality of this situation, it reads like a nightmare, a horror story. In what world is this okay? And, you know, I refer to my colleague, Gary Palmer's remarks on trust. How do you expect the American people to take our public health institutions seriously when this is the, their reaction to a very real situation. All right, so what's the deal here? I mean, that sounds horrifying.

All right, so the overall deal is this is the CDC's first real test. Mandy Cohen comes in as director, takes the ball from Rochelle Walensky. I'm sure some were expecting her to meet. Big shoes to fill there. Big shoes to fill. Agency was at an all-time low in integrity and transparency. Messaging was a disaster. We can't really, I'm sure some people expected her maybe to take a harder stand on the safety or the myocarditis of the COVID vaccine, but kind of just took the ball from Linsky on that.

So this is the first major kind of test for the CDC. How are you going to do under new leadership? So this report, this biolab was found over the summer. So this was the original headline here. It says, investigation on Reedley Building uncovers bio and health hazards. That was in July 23. And you look in this article, it says for Fresno County Department of Public Health Director, David Lucini and assistant director Joe Prado, the amount of biological material and chemicals over 800 found at the lab was a first. And they quote them in here. They say, I've been with the department for 30 years and I don't recall a similar situation, Lucini said. Prado also echoed similar sentiments. He says, 26 years with the county of Fresno and I have never come across this

situation, nor have I heard any of my counterparts deal with a situation like this, Prado said. But just about over a week later, you know, that headline hits. You have eight people. come in here and Associated Press comes in here and tries to pour some water on this, this dumpster fire. And they have this headline here, AP, an illicit Chinese own lab fueled conspiracy theories, but officials say it posed no danger. Those officials... The hipod, like just this, I don't know, hypocrisy, double standard by, you know, when has the AP, like they just, they probably got involved with white lung. I mean, they don't mind terrifying you. When something that really does actually look terrifying and shouldn't be there at all,

I don't even care if it's, you know, testing shampoo samples on mice, you know, that are looking sick and dying there. But we're talking about like refrigerators with what appears to be blood samples and all sorts of like really terrifying things. And their first knee-jerk reactions that come and say, it's a conspiracy theory? Like, what's a conspiracy theory? This lab exists? This is where you just, you have to realize right now in the United States of America,

you don't have news. something else going on. They are not acting naturally. Their natural instinct is to scare the crap out of you and sell more papers. When they're trying to shut a story down, that's where my red flags go through the roof. Absolutely. That's where you start investigating. And of course, in the article you look in there, it's an appeal to authority. They say the CDC, there's no sign the lab was in legal possession of materials, blah, blah, blah. But then you have this report that just came out that Congressman Neal Dunn was basically talking about this. This report was coordinated by the select committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

We actually have an investigation committee looking into that. And before we even get into this port, first point was the location of this warehouse. It's in a sleepy town. And there's a map here we can actually look at. It's across the street from a residential neighborhood. It's next to a railway line. And it says here in the report,

a short walk from the town's high school city hall and water supply. Wow. And this gets even crazier. So now let's go directly into this report. I'm going to read this. A code inspector found this. So it wasn't some massive surveillance system by the CDC. It wasn't some crack detective.

It was a code enforcer that just walked by and went, hey, look at that hose. That's kind of bizarre. It shouldn't be coming out of that warehouse. And there it is right there. So this is her, Officer Harper. We'll go into the report. She says, upon entering, Officer Harper found a vast warehouse

filled with laboratory equipment, manufacturing devices, and would appear to be medical-grade freezers. She observed several individuals who identified, themselves as People's Republic of China 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. Now, we just keep going to this report because this is crazy. Let me just go to this next.

So it goes on to say, Officer Harper continue down the hallways. This is like a choose-your-own-adventure. A hallways of freezers and laboratory equipment to find the source of the green garden hose. What she found was a makeshift storage room emanating foul odor. Inside were approximately 1,000 laboratory mice in a crowded conditions. Officer Harper later learned that these were transgenic mice specifically genetically modified and bred to stimulate the human immune system for the purpose of laboratory experimentation. On future inspections, she also saw that the mice were unwell and abused with fraying hair,

rashes, and distended bellies. Now this is where the CDC gets in here. So it says in this report, based on their initial observation in March of 2023, local officials began to reach out to additional federal agencies for assistance. Local officials spent months repeatedly trying to obtain assistance. from the CDC, both directly and through the California Department of Public Health. According to local officials, the CDC refused to speak with them, and on a number of occasions it was reported by local officials that the CDC hung up on them mid-conversation.

Local officials were similarly unable to get any help from other federal agencies that may have concurrent authority to investigate and or remediate the biohazardous substances found at the Reedley Biolab. So this is where we're at right now. This story is crazy. I mean, this is really, first of all, I suppose if you've got some Karen living next door that's calling the CDC and ringing their phone off the hook, like you don't know what you're talking about. These calls are coming from the California Department of Health saying we really think we have an issue here. Like, will you cut it with the calling us? Like, who do you think you are?

Like, bam. Right. I mean, I just think about, like, you were testing our kindergartners to get into school, even when they didn't have the sniffles on a constant basis as there were some disease-carrying. death trap, but you have literally a disease death trap and you won't go anywhere near it or even answer a phone call. It seems like this is exactly the point the agency was created for was something like this. I think it was called the Center for Disease Control, right? Like we're going to control situations that revolve around things labeled like HIV, Ebola,

you know. And so remember that the original AP article I just said, CDC said, you know, there's no legal materials in there. Well, the CDC did get involved eventually a couple months later at the request of a congressman. And this is the list that was created. This is from the report. Now, let's take a look at what they found. So let's see, potentially infectious bacterial agents present.

We have, well, there's mycoplasma pneumonia. There's in there. We have streptococcus, ecoli, chlamydia. And then let's look at the viral agents. We have a little dengue virus. We have HIV. SARS-CoV is in there. RSV, rebella, and then some malaria at the bottom, some potentially infectious parasites, malaria.

Now, this gets even crazier. the heck was running this lab? Well, the person, one of the people... We had some images I think of this lab, though, just for some people who had an idea. Can we just take a look at some of these photos? I mean, this is what they're finding, labeling, I guess, written in Mandarin, is what that is. And you can see in the middle picture there at the bottom, HIV 2. You can see that labeled there. Right. Somewhat alarming. Yep. And those are the vials, the blood vials, the bodily...

Can you imagine seeing this and then call the CDC, they hang up on you? Like, I think you may want to take a look at this. No, we got no interest, none whatsoever. Did some freezers there. Let's see here. Ciotic, total chaotic freezers. Look, where's this hose go? Oh, it goes into a room filled with this. Yeah.

That's just, that's okay. That's just pouring into my yard next door and the medical waste. The school water system. Right, that's the medical waste right there. And this is how we dispose of our waste. This is good. All right. So that's where you're looking at.

So when you're, you're picturing this code enforcement agent, going in there and going, whoa, what the heck is going on? Right. So who's running this thing? Well, this gets even better. The first time we heard of this gentleman running this was in 2016 in British Columbia. So this is the headline here, 2016 Vancouver Sun.

Canadian businessman facing jail over fraud has appeal stayed following no-show. So a British Columbia court ordered somebody named Jesse Zhu, and several other defendants to pay over $8 million of the U.S. company, yep, from profiting from theft of valuable medical technology. So he jumped, basically, it was a no-show at court. The report says he fled the United States, changed his name, started this lab, And now he is caught. So here's the headline recently.

Chinese National behind Reedley Lab indicted by federal grand jury. But here you go again. You have a CDC avoiding going to a building that has a guy that's on the land for having stole medical supplies and God knows what else up in Canada. And all of this. And then you see the photos there. I mean, again, I'm just like, am I living in some of, you know, like a cartoon? What is happening? Right.

Well, fortunately, Mandy Cohen did show up at the select committee. She was questioned and she did answer. So let's hear what she has to say. All right. We were asked and invited by the leaders of that investigation, FBI, FDA, state and local officials. We did deploy. We did look at, we were there for a two-and-a-half-day investigation,

and we did not see any evidence of select agents. Yes, they responded, but they did not respond when they were first requested. They responded months, months later. I mean, that, and we have that on, I mean, we had that examined by the FBI, came to our committee and told us that. That's who we got that information from. If you have better information in the FBI, you need to let us know. I want to address what you were talking about related to Ebola.

When we heard after the fact that someone said something was labeled Ebola, we took 300 pictures. We did not see one. It was on the front of a refrigerator. We didn't see that. We asked folks to say, do you have a picture of that? Can we validate that for someone else? No one could validate that for us?

So we just blow off the California Public Health Department and say, oh, we don't believe you. You know, obviously my time is expired, Mr. Chairman. I have to tell you, though, in my professional career in biological warfare, I have never seen anything like this. By the way, and the worst concern I have, this may not be the only one. It's really amazing. Like her argument, if you think about it, as we waited, was it three months, is it, to finally go into this place? And when we went there, we didn't see anything. I mean, it's sort of like what they did with the Wuhan lab.

By the time you finally send a group, you send a group that's been funding the lab, and you've given China all the time in the world telegraphed, we're coming. Just let you know, in 25 days we'll be there. In 14 days, don't forget, CDC's coming. And then we didn't really see anything anyone was talking about. We spent a blazing two and a half days there.

Two and a half whole days. We took 300 pictures. I mean, that's what people do on their vacations. Like, this is a bio lab. You know,