Two Illegal Biolabs Reveal Gaps in U.S. Biosecurity

Last month, law enforcement officials launched an investigation into a suspected biolab in the Las Vegas home of Chinese national Zhu Jia Bei. Two years prior, Zhu had been arrested and indicted for his involvement with a similarly unauthorized biolab in Reedley, California. He also maintains extensive connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Zhu may not be alone: CCP-linked biolabs on American soil raise serious concerns about foreign surveillance, intellectual property theft, and deliberate threats to public health and national security.

Zhu’s story brings to light an uncomfortable truth: U.S. policymakers seem to have little understanding of how many unauthorized biolabs are operating in the United States. They are unprepared to counter the biological hazards such labs may produce, putting Americans’ safety at risk. Policymakers must take immediate action to protect Americans and strengthen federal oversight of unauthorized biological research activity.

The Las Vegas and Reedley Labs

Local officials discovered the Las Vegas biolab after several visitors to the home reported becoming “deathly ill.” Upon arrival at the scene, investigators found “evidence of possible biological material,” including refrigerators containing vials with unknown liquids and “laboratory-type equipment.” Investigators collected and sent over 1,000 samples to the National Bioforensic Analysis Center for further testing. In March 2026, the FBI announced that many materials had “significantly degraded after being stored improperly,” limiting the ability to “definitively determine” which biological agents were present.

The property was owned by Zhu, who had owned and operated a similar unauthorized biolab in Reedley, California, which local officials discovered by happenstance in December 2022. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) inquiry into the Reedley warehouse identified at least 20 infectious pathogenic agents—including HIV, tuberculosis, and the deadliest form of malaria—as well as a freezer labeled “Ebola” and several vials of suspicious liquid labeled in code. Zhu also used the lab to package counterfeit pregnancy, urine, and COVID-19 tests.

Zhu was arrested in October 2023 and received additional charges in August 2024. He was apparently able to keep the Las Vegas lab running despite being held in federal custody since 2023, raising even further alarm about the integrity of the United States’s biosecurity system.

The China Connection

A House Select Committee on the CCP investigation into the Reedley lab and Zhu revealed his extensive connections to the CCP. While living in China in the early 2000s, Zhu served as chairman of multiple state-controlled enterprises connected to China’s civil-military fusion ecosystem, several of which were included on the U.S. Entity List at the time of the select committee’s investigation. He was also the primary shareholder of 11 Chinese cattle companies at a time when China faced a pressing milk crisis and the CCP was pursuing policies to develop the dairy cattle market.

Zhu later moved to Canada and created additional corporations there and in several other countries that he leveraged to steal American cattle-related intellectual property (IP) and unlawfully transfer it to China. By the time he entered the United States under the false identity of “David He” in 2015, Zhu faced a CAD $330 million judgment for IP theft and an active arrest warrant in Canada.

Zhu established his first unauthorized U.S.-based biolab in Fresno, California, with the help of “Accountant One”—a Chinese national known to the select committee who previously worked for various CCP entities. Zhu soon moved the lab to a “residential neighborhood” in Reedley due to “a fire and threat of eviction.” While selling fraudulent medical kits and engaging in pathogen-related activity at the Reedley lab, Zhu also received unexplained payments totaling over $1.3 million via wire transfer from Chinese banks. Taken together, Zhu’s CCP ties, history of operating unauthorized biolabs, and mysterious receipt of millions of dollars from Chinese banks paint a deeply troubling picture.

Consequences for National Security

Zhu’s story raises significant concerns for U.S. national security. The very existence of the Las Vegas and Reedley biolabs undermines public health and safety. Unauthorized biolabs lack the containment systems, ventilation, waste disposal, and safety protocols that legitimate ones require. This means that dangerous pathogens are more likely to leak into the surrounding environment and contaminate water systems, HVAC systems, or common areas. Affected communities may never even identify the source of their complications if the lab goes unnoticed. Unauthorized labs also pose a grave threat to first responders. Should a fire, medical emergency, or other incident occur at the lab, first responders would have no warning to prepare for biological hazards.

The types of materials found in Zhu’s labs raise even further alarm, given his links to the CCP. The Reedley lab in particular contained “risk group 2 and risk group 3” infectious agents. The select committee concluded that the Reedley lab was thus “inconsistent with the operation” of a CCP-linked bioweapons program because these classes of agents are “unlikely to infect” an entire city or cause a “mass casualty” event. But this conclusion falsely assumes that China would only use bioweapons to achieve mass destruction and that less lethal agents cannot also be weaponized for great harm.

In fact, the CCP could use risk group 2 and 3 agents to achieve political, military, or economic outcomes below the threshold of mass destruction. As the select committee report notes, these infectious agents still pose a “high risk” to individuals and small communities. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI)—which could enable the design of novel biological systems with unprecedented speed and precision—a nefarious actor could conceivably create pathogens like HIV or tuberculosis to infect specific people or groups through “targeted attacks or contamination of a specific area.”

If the CCP sought, for instance, to stealthily target a particular U.S. politician, degrade U.S. workforce productivity over time, strain the U.S. health care system, or foment a domestic health crisis that distracts the United States from foreign affairs, risk group 2 and 3 agents may offer the means to do so—especially when coupled with AI tools that could facilitate the engineering of more precise and durable diseases.

In short, traditional understanding of bioweapons as purely tools of mass destruction may be outdated. Advancements in AI could soon make biological agents easier to program and control and harder to attribute, meaning that an actor could theoretically employ bioweapons as nonkinetic tools to achieve subtler objectives. The Reedley and Las Vegas labs could very well be testbeds for these types of AI-enabled bioweapon capabilities.

Of course, there is no way to uncover Zhu’s intentions with certainty. It is possible—in light of his history of selling fraudulent medical kits, IP theft, and assuming a false identity—that Zhu is simply an opportunistic criminal rather than a state-sponsored operative interested in bioweapon development. But regardless of his true motivations, Zhu exposes a biosecurity landscape so porous that a serial fraudster with extensive CCP ties was able to acquire dangerous pathogens, go undetected for years, and apparently continue his nefarious operations after arrest. The threat is not just Zhu himself, but what his case reveals about how easily a more sophisticated, deliberately malicious actor could do far worse.

As former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stated in a recent post on X, Zhu’s story illuminates “a national security threat that puts all of us at risk.” Numerous members of Congress—including Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and Reps. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) and Jim Costa (D-Calif.)—have released similar statements calling CCP-linked biolabs like Zhu’s an “enormous problem” and a “real threat to our national security.” The primary concern, as articulated in the select committee’s Reedley report, is that “no one knows whether there are other unauthorized biolabs in the United States because there is no monitoring system in place.”

The Path Ahead

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026 takes several strong steps to patch current vulnerabilities and improve awareness of China’s activity, such as directing the director of national intelligence to enhance intelligence sharing on foreign adversary biotechnology threats and produce a National Intelligence Estimate on China’s biotechnology advancements. But policymakers must do more to ensure that CCP-linked biolabs do not continue to threaten the health and safety of American citizens.

First, U.S. policymakers should expand government oversight of pathogenic research to include privately funded actors. Zhu and other associates of the Reedley and Las Vegas biolabs were able to purchase pathogens from accredited U.S. suppliers because the United States lacks sufficient safeguards to monitor who is acquiring potentially dangerous pathogens or the equipment and materials needed to increase their lethality.

The United States currently has multiple, overlapping biosafety and security oversight policies. The Federal Select Agent Program regulates the handling of the most dangerous agents and toxins such as anthrax and ricin and is the only federal biosafety law with enforceable legal penalties. The 2024 Dual Use Research Policy expanded oversight to cover pathogens with “enhanced pandemic potential,” requiring federal approval of risk mitigation plans. Other documents, like the Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories guidelines and the National Institutes of Health’s Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant or Synthetic Nucleic Acid Molecules, offer general biosafety practices for “protecting workers and preventing exposures” in biolabs but rely on self-governance and are not codified in law. None of these policies capture the full class of potentially hazardous biological materials and generally apply only to federally funded research. This is particularly problematic given that roughly one-quarter of pathogenic research conducted in the United States occurs in the private sector.

Broader U.S. oversight would help illuminate the scope of private biolab research and harmonize biosafety practices, enhancing the ability to recognize nefarious or unauthorized activity. Enhanced oversight may include identification and reporting requirements for acquiring potentially dangerous pathogens (beyond select agents) and strengthening protections for whistleblowers who report biosafety violations or concerning research practices.

The Department of Health and Human Services could theoretically conduct this oversight, given that it houses both the National Institutes of Health and the CDC and already oversees the Federal Select Agent Program (jointly with the U.S. Department of Agriculture). Alternatively, Congress could create a standalone biosafety regulatory agency—analogous to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This approach could help reduce conflicts of interests, overcome gaps in authority, and produce a more streamlined, coordinated regulatory landscape.

Second, Congress should pass the Preventing Illegal Laboratories and Protecting Public Health Act and the STOP Health Threats Act, introduced in response to the Reedley biolab discovery. Although the FBI has some systems in place for this, the former would help detect potentially nefarious labs by requiring regular evaluations of high-containment labs specifically, and creating a Public Health Biosafety and Biosecurity Team to respond when suspicious high-containment labs are identified. The latter would equip local law enforcement officials with the tools and training needed to “recognize and respond to public threats” from illegal and unsafe facilities. These complementary approaches would create a more robust biosecurity framework by combining federal monitoring with enhanced detection and response capabilities.

Finally, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency should invest in research that explores U.S. adversaries’ incentives to develop and employ AI-enabled bioweapons to achieve political, military, or economic objectives below the threshold of mass destruction. Advancements in AI mean that biological agents could become more programmable and controllable than ever before, potentially reducing traditional constraints to bioweapons use. To successfully defend against the next generation of biological threats, U.S. policymakers must understand the range of possible future capabilities, their potential applications, and the strategic implications of their development and use.

A Wake-Up Call

The discovery of CCP-linked biolabs in Las Vegas and Reedley should serve as a wake-up call for U.S. policymakers. These facilities should not be treated as isolated incidents—they expose critical gaps in the U.S. biosafety and security landscape that foreign adversaries, or even malicious domestic actors, can exploit. Absent comprehensive oversight of private biological research, mandatory reporting requirements for pathogen acquisition, and a deeper understanding of how biological agents might be weaponized, the United States remains vulnerable. Policymakers must act decisively to close the gaps before another unauthorized biolab is discovered—or, worse, before American citizens pay the price for one that goes undetected.