An illegal medical lab containing bioengineered mice and infectious
diseases, including HIV, herpes, and hepatitis, was discovered in California.
Luckily, authorities have shut it down, and it's currently being investigated
by the California Department of Public Health, the CDC, and the FBI.
And while we don't have all the details about what happened here and
how this lab was able to illegally operate,
I do want to share some of the details as we know them at the moment.
So this illegal lab in California contained 1,000 bioengineered mice.
You're looking at the lab as we speak.
That don't look like a lab to me, okay?
That does not look like the type of place where I want
experiments of infectious diseases to take place.
So the tissue samples were improperly stored, and upon discovery,
they were tested and discovered to contain multiple infectious diseases,
including HIV and hepatitis.
So according to insiders reporting on this,
the makeshift lab contained roughly 30 refrigerators and freezers,
some of which were non-operational, as well as incubators,
medical testing supplies, and hundreds of mice.
Several disease samples tested from the lab included infectious
agents like herpes, coronavirus E Coli, and malaria.
So, if we're worried about a lab leak in China, maybe we should consider
illegal labs and a potential lab leak here in the United States,
particularly from this crazy lab situation in California.
Wang Zhaolin, a representative of the company operating the lab,
Prestige Biotech, which is anything but prestigious at the moment,
told investigators that the mice inside the warehouse had been
genetically engineered to catch and spread the COVID-19 virus.
I'm gonna pause for comment because I don't know what's going on here.
What do you make of this Wos?
>> Speaker 2: Look, man, this is when you don't have stuff tightly regulated,
this is the kind of stuff that emerges.
I know some people get annoyed by government oversight and
regulations and bureaucracy, but at the end of the day,
it's the only way to ensure that people remain safe, right?
Is that we have these checks when people are handling dangerous
material in the form of actual living organisms who could escape and
just start hanging out in the rest of the freaking city.
To me, there's just obviously no regulation.
Or if there are any real regulations,
there's clearly no enforcement because this seems janky as all hell.
>> Right, so there was a bankruptcy involved, and
the creditor ended up taking control of the lab.
And so I want to see more of an investigation and
some more detail into that.
Now, the Assistant Director Joe Prado apparently said that the lab was utilizing
these mice to see if coronavirus testing kits were working as intended,
that they were accurately detecting the virus or testing for the virus, okay?
The warehouse came under investigation back in March of this year after,
luckily, a local code regulations, a local code enforcement officer
discovered a garden hose attached to a back wall of the building.
So certain rooms of the warehouse were found to contain several
vessels of liquid and various apparatus,
NBC reported court documents related to the incident said.
Fresno County Public Health staff also observed blood, tissue and
other bodily fluid samples and serums, and
thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material.
In fact, we have an image from the Superior Court of the State
of California showing what the inside of that building looked like.
And again, nearly 800 of the mice found inside
the warehouse were they were euthanized considering the situation.
An additional 175 mice were already dead when this illegal lab was discovered.
And the county found over 800 biological materials and chemicals on site,
including blood, tissue and
other bodily fluids as well as thousands of unlabeled vials that contained fluids.
And the lab apparently moved to California just last
year after a fire burned down their Las Vegas location.
And Prestige, as I mentioned earlier, is the successor to the initial
company that filed for bankruptcy known as Universal Medtech Inc.
And so that's a former Fresno based medical equipment manufacturer
which went bankrupt.
And then Prestige was Universal's largest creditor when the latter filed for
bankruptcy.
So basically this creditor took control of this lab and
it just seems like they didn't really give a crap about maintaining the lab or
ensuring that things were operating properly through the regulations in place.
But luckily, since someone noticed that garden hose attached to a back wall of
the building and reported it and it was considered a code violation, authorities
were able to discover what was actually transpiring within this illegal lab.
It's just nuts.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, just know that if this was being handled by some individual and
they put a bunch of people's health at risk by maintaining this
lab in such a shoddy fashion, they'd be getting dealt with.
Which goes back to what we were saying on the second hour and about why people
look at big business and think these fools don't operate by the same rules.
Who's gonna actually get in trouble for this?
This is craziness.
>> Speaker 1: Well, I mean, look, if we lived in a society that actually
punished businesses when they engage in wrongdoing,
executives at Prestige should suffer the consequences.
In fact, the Sun reported that Prestige did not have a license to
even operate in Reedley, that's a town in California.
And court documents also reveal that the company never even contracted with
a licensed medical waste hauler,
meaning Prestige never disposed of any of the lab waste legally.
I mean, I am curious to see what the outcome is gonna be.
Is it just gonna be some stupid fine?
Someone should go to prison for that.
Someone should be prosecuted for that.
That's insane.
Who knows what they did with that waste, that medical waste.
It's crazy, man.
They have no problem putting other people's lives and health in jeopardy.
So I don't know, I'm curious how this plays out.
I really want to find out what the outcome of the investigation will be.
But time and time again we've seen private industry get away
with all sorts of terrible behavior, with breaking all sorts of laws.
I mean, we've been covering more and
more stories where child labor laws have been completely broken and violated.
We covered a story about a Guatemalan
teenager who died on the job at a poultry plant and
he was apparently in an area of this plant that he wasn't
even supposed to be in considering the fact that he was a minor.
And why do the companies keep doing this?
I mean, many of these companies who have been found to break child labor laws do it
over and over again because all they end up doing or
dealing with is like a fine from the government.
But then they do a cost benefit analysis and the profits they
make from breaking the laws significantly outweigh the fines.
So if maximizing profit is all they care about,
of course they're gonna keep doing it.
I mean, the punishment does not fit the crime and
I'm worried that that's gonna be case in this particular story as well.
>> Speaker 2: Well, Ana, we got to keep locking chicks up for getting abortions.
We don't got room in the jails for corporate criminals.
We got to keep doing craziness like that in a lot of these right wing states.
So God forbid people who actually harm the well being
of the masses of people out here actually get dealt with.
That could never be the case.
>> Speaker 1: It is insane where the priorities are, but
it doesn't surprise me.
I mean, yeah, Republicans see abortion as a culture war issue and
culture war issues are the only, by the way,
I think abortion is a little more than a culture war issue, right.
It's also an economic issue for the women who are impacted by it.
But my point in bringing that up is the reason why all we see in
the news tends to focus on culture war issues is because both
parties have leaned in heavily on their brand of the culture wars.
So yeah, their priority is going after women and
abortion providers because right now for the Republican Party,
in their minds, that's the issue that they're championing.
Even while their own constituents are suffering economically in various
ways, right?
Whether it be through unaffordable housing,
not being able to afford their prescription drugs, who cares about that?
Let's distract, distract, distract, distract.
That's all they do.
It's all they care about.
>> Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and again, I tend to have sympathy with the voters,
Ana, because if there's no such thing as a mass politics anymore,
meaning nothing happens no matter who's in charge of the House, who's in the Senate,
who's in the White House, but they can see some changes where it's, look,
man, I'm hearing that they got trans books in my kids kindergarten.
We got that out of there.
That's some political change.
We did it.
People feel like they're affecting some type of change in their lives with
these issues.
Obviously, I think they're wrongheaded in that belief in that assumption,
but I understand the thinking.
It's one of the few places that they feel like they're making a difference.
At these culture war issues.
>> That's true.
No, that's a good point, and
I never really consider the voters perspective on those issues., right?
I see what's happening, and I see how culture wars are specifically used as
a distraction from what both parties have a lot of agreement on,
which tends to be deregulation, which tends to be tax cuts for the rich and for
corporations, which tends to be all the policies that benefit those at the very
top to the detriment of those at the bottom.
But these cultural war issues are also incredibly important for
a lot of voters as well, and so I don't wanna minimize that.
But I would just say when we're talking about book bans in school libraries,
when there's fear mongering happening in regard to kitty litter boxes
in school bathrooms, because Republicans want to have you believe
that furries are urinating in litter boxes instead of the toilets,
ask yourselves, wait, why is this being drummed up as an issue right now?
What's happening?
Yeah, that's all I'm saying.