Chinese-owned lab was in Tulare before Fresno, then Reedley. What happened inside?

Nina Salazar was happy to have a job when she worked for three years at a Chinese-owned laboratory in Tulare that made disease and drug test kits – the same lab that was shut down in Reedley after Covid-19 and more than 20 infectious agents were found in refrigerators in the ramshackle facility that was operating without proper permits.

Salazar, who lives in Visalia, told The Fresno Bee that she was a lab tech for Universal Meditech Inc. at its location at 2375 E. Tulare Ave. from 2015 into 2018. During that time, she and about 15 other employees assembled pregnancy, diabetes and drug test kits, she said.

“I was so excited because I had a job,” she said. “It felt important because we got to wear lab coats and stuff.”

But there was something that seemed “odd and shady” about the place, too, she said. There were occasional problems with paychecks, “and when (managers) would come to do visits for investors, they would have to get people from outside to come in and work on the production line” to make the laboratory seem more economically viable, she said.

Then there were the chemicals that Salazar and co-workers handled but were never identified to them. “We had to make this purple liquid for tests; we had to mix the chemicals; we had to cook it,” she said. “They only told us that it had to be a special fluid, perfectly made for the test strips.”

“But they never told us what the chemicals were,” She said. “They spoke Chinese a lot, so we didn’t know what they were saying.” She said not knowing what the chemicals were was concerning.

That was five years ago. Now Universal Meditech and an associated company, Prestige Biotech Inc., are under investigation by local agencies in Reedley and Fresno County, as well as other state and federal agencies, over its presence in Reedley.

A city code-enforcement officer responded to an anonymous tip last December about an unlicensed business operating in an old cold-storage warehouse. That led to the discovery of dozens of freezers and refrigerators full of vials of blood, serum and tissue samples; cartons and containers of various chemicals; stored medical lab equipment; and hundreds of lab mice that were in such distress and neglect that they ultimately had to be euthanized.

Those revelations resulted in the shutdown of the Reedley operation in March and subsequent months of clearing the warehouse of a host of biological agents, chemicals and more – a cleanup and abatement process that is expected to continue into October.

Reedley is but the latest city where Universal Meditech or Prestige Biotech decided to set up operations in the central San Joaquin Valley over the past eight years.

Universal Meditech operated first in Tulare from 2015 into 2018, and then in Fresno from late 2018 until late 2022, when it moved operations to Reedley. There, the company moved into a leased warehouse on I Street, never bothering to get a city business license or obtain permits for electrical wiring and other building modifications, the city has said. Nor did it have the necessary permits from Fresno County for handling and disposing of medical or hazardous waste, officials have confirmed.

A long and winding road

In Tulare, city officials said they never experienced any problems or enforcement issues, city spokesperson Josh McDonnell told The Bee on Tuesday. “They were appropriately licensed, they pulled building permits for a firewall and (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance, and electrical work for a small packaging machine.”

“It was all very standard stuff. Apparently they were doing actual assembly of medical devices,” McDonnell added. “As far as we know, that’s what they did. And then they were gone.”

If the company was dealing with medical waste that might be expected from a medical lab, it was doing so without a permit from the Tulare County Department of Public Health.

Carrie Monteiro, a spokesperson for the county health department, said the Environmental Health Division oversees permitting for medical labs and other facilities that generate medical waste. “Upon review we were not able to find any record of Universal Meditech Inc. or any medical waste generator permits for that company,” she said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any information as we have no record of any health permits being applied for or issued for Universal Meditech Inc. for a lab location in Tulare County.”

By August 2018, by Universal Meditech was approved to move into a building on East Fortune Avenue in south Fresno, according to information provided by the city of Fresno. The company operated its laboratory facility there until moving out in December.

A fire in August 2020 led to the discovery of unpermitted lab walls and unapproved electrical wiring in the Fresno facility. Within days of the fire, an environmental health inspector with the Fresno County Department of Public Health inspected the building along with Fresno city fire and code enforcement officials, and they determined that the lab did not have a required hazardous materials business plan or county permit for storage of hazardous chemicals, said Joe Prado, the county health department’s assistant director.

In a presentation Tuesday to the Fresno County Board of Supervisors, Prado said the company did complete the needed steps to secure its hazardous materials permit on Sept. 1, 2020.

For more than two years, the lab apparently flew under the radar of city and county officials – in part the result of the city of Fresno cutting back on its inspections during the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2022, however, Fresno’s fire and code enforcement inspectors notified the county health department about chemicals being stored at the lab.

Prado said Tuesday that the company was evasive throughout November 2022 in responding to requests from the health department for specific information about the chemicals being used and stored at the lab, until ultimately on Nov. 29 a representative of the property landlord told county officials that they had a court date to evict Universal Meditech from the premises.

By Dec. 27, the company had moved out of the building, according to information provided by the city of Fresno.

A surreptitious move to Reedley

Nicole Zieba, Reedley’s city manager, told Fresno County supervisors on Tuesday that the company slipped into town and set up storage of its laboratory materials without getting a business license.

“They were bad actors. They did not want us to know they were here,” Zieba said. “That’s why they moved in under cover of night. That’s why they never came to seek a business permit.”

But, she added, the investigation by Reedley’s code enforcement officers and county and state health officials has revealed that the former cold-storage space was being used for little more than storage of equipment, medical devices, biological agents and samples, chemicals and lab mice that apparently had been hastily moved from the Fresno facility.

Since March, several different abatement actions have taken place at the Reedley warehouse:

• On March 16, county, city and state officials conducted an inspection of the building under a warrant issued by a Fresno County Superior Court judge. During that visit, agents from the Food & Drug Branch of the state’s Department of Public Health embargoed cartons of unapproved medical test kits and medical supplies, and Reedley’s code enforcement team declared the building unsafe to occupy.

• On April 12, a state veterinarian contractor and Reedley’s code enforcement officer used a new warrant to euthanize the mice, which after the building closure were being fed and watered by a city worker. A prior inspection of the mice determined that they were not actively being used for experiments, but were severely neglected and in distress.

• From May 2 through May 4, under a county Health Officer Order, county and city inspectors, along with representatives of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the state Department of Public Health and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration conducted another inspection of the site. That inspection led to a determination that the freezers and refrigerators contained more than 20 different bacterial, viral and parasitic biological agents including COVID-19, malaria, Hepatitis B and C, chlamydia, human herpes, E. coli, streptococcus, HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), and rubella, among others.

• From July 5 through July 7, with another court order, county health officials and a licensed contractor went through the dozens of refrigerators and freezers to remove and take away the biological materials for destruction.

• On July 28, the city began its own abatement operation to remove the refrigerators, freezers, furniture, fixtures and laboratory machinery, and Tuesday was the final day of that effort, Zieba told county supervisors. The process continues to find more biological materials but “we are not uncovering infectious diseases and all of that,” she said. “What we’re uncovering … is that we’re opening drawers and finding jars of urine and peed-on pregnancy tests. That’s considered a biological.”

In the coming weeks, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will be moving in to deal with the laboratory chemicals that remain in the warehouse. “These are chemicals that are commonly found in legal labs; nothing unusual has been found,” Zieba said.

After that will come the U.S. FDA and the state health department’s Food & Drug Branch. “What we’ll have remaining in that warehouse are probably a half a million pregnancy test kits and COVID test kits, some of which are unauthorized,” Zieba said.

Battling rumor and misinformation

Fresno City Councilmember Garry Bredefeld, in a July 31 press conference, accused county health officials and the county Board of Supervisors of covering up information about the lab, and complained that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that they had a duty to inform the public as early as March.

In that press event, Bredefeld asserted that the lab was “producing COVID-19” and injecting mice with the virus. He compared the lab to the laboratory in Wuhan, China, that some have blamed for engineering the virus that led to the pandemic.

On Tuesday, several supervisors took issue with Bredefeld’s statements. Supervisor Brian Pacheco criticized Bredefeld for “making a lot of accusations against this board and members of the community that were simply inaccurate.”

“It seems to me that the responsible person would have gotten the facts before holding a press conference with inaccurate information to scare the public and for more self-promotion,” Pacheco added.

Pacheco noted that for more than two years after the 2020 fire revealed code violations at Universal Meditech’s Fresno location, the laboratory operated unabated.

Zieba and Prado said that state and federal agencies had urged them not to go public with the investigations. “They made it very clear to us that their protocols were not to address ongoing investigations,” Prado told the board on Tuesday.

Zieba added that “when the FBI and CDC and everybody else in the alphabet soup of state and federal agencies tells you, ‘We cannot even comment on whether we’re doing an investigation (and) you cannot comment,’ when they tell you that … you’re not going to defy the FBI.”

She told supervisors that there was “no evidence” that workers were manipulating viruses at the lab; Zieba also told The Bee that there was no evidence at the Reedley warehouse of any operations actively dealing with viruses or anything scientific. The city’s code enforcement officer, Jesalyn Harper, previously told The Bee that there was no production of COVID-19 or experimentation on mice, contrary to what Bredefeld had asserted in his July 31 press conference.

Supervisor Steve Brandau, against whom Bredefeld is running for the District 2 seat on the county board, thanked Zieba and Prado for their presentation Tuesday, “yet I don’t believe it will deter for one minute those who are politically motivated and the sycophants that follow them.”

Bredefeld doubled down on his criticism of the county on Tuesday afternoon and his assertions about activities at the warehouse. “Since at least March, the Board of Supervisors hid information from the public that a ‘Wuhan-type’ Chinese biological lab in Reedley was involved in injecting mice to ‘catch and carry COVID-19” and other diseases, Bredefeld said in a statement to The Bee.

“Last week they blamed the FBI for not telling the public. This week they blame (California Gov. Gavin) Newsom’s administration,” he added.

Bredefeld also blasted Brandau for calling “those who support me wanting transparency from the county ‘sycophants,’ which is an attack on his very own constituents who don’t want to be lied to and want information about a dangerous Chinese lab in their own community.”