Jia Bei Zhu, the 64-year-old CCP-linked Chinese national who turned a warehouse in Reedley, California into an illegal biolab stuffed with deadly pathogens, has been found guilty on all 12 felony counts. Justice took her sweet time on this one, but she showed up — and she brought the hammer.
Remember this story? A code enforcement officer stumbled onto a warehouse full of mice in vivariums, dangerous biological agents stored in cranberry juice jugs and iced tea containers, and enough biosecurity nightmares to make a Hollywood screenwriter say “that’s too unrealistic.” In a residential area. In California. And somehow it took until May 2026 to get a conviction. The system works, folks — just very, very slowly.
The story starts back in December 2022, when Reedley Code Enforcement Officer Jessalyn Harper noticed a garden hose protruding from the wall of a supposedly vacant building. What she found inside would make your skin crawl. Pathogens stored in soda bottles. Mice crammed into vivariums right next to the main facility. Medical supplies that had no business being anywhere near a warehouse, let alone a residential neighborhood in the San Joaquin Valley.
But the biolab was just the tip of the iceberg. Zhu’s company, Universal Meditech Inc., had been running a massive COVID test fraud operation. We’re talking over one million faulty COVID tests imported from China, slapped with labels claiming they were “FDA EUA APPROVED” and “MADE IN THE U.S.A.” They were neither. The operation raked in nearly $4 million in revenue selling tests that — and this is the chef’s kiss — sometimes failed to detect COVID entirely. Some kits arrived missing basic components.
He hired former cellphone salespeople, supermarket workers, childcare workers, and stay-at-home parents to run this operation. No experience necessary, apparently. According to RedState, employees testified that some of them knew about the false claims but feared losing their jobs or facing physical retaliation from Zhu. A real charmer, this guy.
And here’s a fun detail that should make every taxpayer’s blood boil: the Fresno County Economic Development Corporation actually provided subsidies to Zhu’s company for hiring employees. Your tax dollars at work, subsidizing a fraudulent biolab operation run by a CCP-linked foreign national. God bless bureaucracy.
The jury convicted Zhu on all 12 felony counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, multiple counts of wire fraud, distributing adulterated and misbranded medical devices, and lying to the FDA. U.S. Attorney Eric Grant didn’t mince words: “This verdict holds the defendant accountable for actions that exploited a public health crisis for his own gain.”
Zhu’s Fresno facility had already suffered a fire due to poor electrical modifications before the Reedley warehouse was discovered. The civil lawsuit against Universal Meditech Inc. filed in mid-2022 first revealed the scope of the scheme, but it took the criminal justice system another four years to catch up.
Sentencing is scheduled for August 24 before U.S. District Judge Dale Drozd. Here’s hoping the judge remembers that this man ran an illegal biolab with deadly pathogens in juice containers next to people’s homes while defrauding the American public during a pandemic.
We spent years being told that questioning anything about COVID was dangerous misinformation. Meanwhile, a CCP-linked national was literally running a black-market biolab in a California warehouse and selling fake tests to Americans. But sure, we were the problem.
