Rep. Kevin Kiley warned that the discovery of an illegal biological laboratory in Las Vegas represents a serious national security threat and highlights major gaps in federal oversight, calling on Congress to pass bipartisan legislation to identify and shut down similar operations across the country.
Kiley said the Las Vegas lab is directly linked to a previously discovered illegal bio lab in Reedley, California, which was uncovered in late 2022 and found to contain dangerous pathogens.
“Serious national security issue that requires the immediate attention and immediate action from the United States Congress,” Kiley said.
“An illegal bio lab was just raided in Las Vegas, and it is directly linked to the secret Chinese Bio Lab found in Reedley, California, in late 2022, that lab was oozing with E coli, HIV, malaria, and other dangerous pathogens.”
According to Kiley, both facilities were operated by the same limited liability company and involved the same Chinese nationals.
He said a House investigation into the Reedley lab revealed alarming details and demonstrated that the federal government lacks a system to monitor or detect similar facilities.
“The lab just raided in Vegas was operated by the same LLC and same Chinese nationals as the one discovered in Reedley,” Kiley said.
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He cited findings from a report produced by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, noting that the committee concluded “no one knows whether there are other unknown Bio Labs, because there is no monitoring system in place.”
Kiley said the Reedley lab was operated by Jesse Zou, an international fugitive from China with a history of intellectual property theft.
He said Zou previously ran state-connected companies in China before moving to Canada, where he established dozens of corporations.
“Sue moved to Canada, where he set up dozens of corporations to quote, steal valuable American intellectual property and unlawfully transfer it to China,” Kiley said.
He noted that the Supreme Court of British Columbia found Zou committed “quote, fraud on an epic scale,” resulting in a $330 million judgment.
Kiley said Zou later fled to the United States, assumed an alias, and established additional companies, including those behind the Reedley and Las Vegas bio labs.
Zou was indicted in 2023 and remains in federal custody, though Kiley said his partners and associates have not been apprehended.
The Reedley lab was discovered after a city code inspector entered a warehouse and found thousands of vials of biological substances, thousands of mice, and multiple Chinese nationals working in lab attire.
“Inside she found many Chinese nationals wearing white lab coats, glasses, masks and latex gloves, along with 1000s of vials of biological substances and 1000 mice,” Kiley said.
He added that the mice were later identified as transgenic mice engineered to carry COVID-19.
Kiley said further inspections uncovered blood, tissue, bodily fluid samples, and thousands of vials labeled as suspected biological material, some marked with infectious agents and others labeled with an undeciphered code.
He criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for initially refusing to investigate.
“Now, at first, the CDC, this was during the Biden administration, refused to investigate, and they even hung up on local officials who asked for help,” Kiley said.
After additional pressure, the CDC inspected the lab and identified at least 20 potentially infectious agents, including HIV, tuberculosis, and a deadly form of malaria.
Kiley said the CDC failed to test samples with unknown contents, which the select committee described as “quote, impossible” to fully assess the risks posed to the community.
Kiley said local officials later found a refrigerator labeled “Ebola” inside the lab.
Despite claims that the facility sold testing kits, he said the operation involved purchasing counterfeit kits from China and reselling them in the United States, while the operator received unexplained wire transfers from Chinese banks.
Kiley said these findings highlight the need for his proposed bipartisan legislation, the Preventing Illegal Laboratories and Protecting Public Health Act.
“The report concluded that we don’t know where there are any other unknown Bio Labs, because there is no such monitoring system,” Kiley said.
“So that is why I am calling upon the house to act quickly to pass the bill that I have introduced.”
He said the legislation would require federally reviewable logbooks for transfers of highly pathogenic agents, strengthen oversight of high-containment labs, protect against foreign threats, create a centralized biosecurity response team, and study the creation of a national database of high-risk labs accessible to state and local officials.
Kiley said the recent discovery in Las Vegas demonstrates the urgency of congressional action.
“So I will be calling for a thorough investigation of what was discovered in Las Vegas,” he said, “and I’m calling upon the house of representatives to move quickly to get this bipartisan bill passed so that can then pass the Senate and be signed into law.”
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