Lab-grown meat and lab-grown viruses

The insane connection between FDA-licensed "cultured chicken" and China’s biowarfare program

Parts of this exposé were originally published in the summer of 2023 by The National Pulse. Its findings are a reminder of the stakes involved in who controls the food supply, and why Robert F. Kennedy JR’s Health and Human Services must pay close attention to the licensing of novel foods.

In a shocking twist, the company testing and growing GOOD Meat’s newly approved “cultured chicken”, a.k.a lab-grown meat, has been revealed to be none other than JOINN Biologics, a Chinese-owned company known to have intimate links with the Chinese military’s biowarfare program.

GOOD Meat, the lab-grown-meat division of Eat Just Inc., received approval in June 2023 from the FDA to bring its first alternative meat product to market in the US, and it hopes to be feeding paying customers soon. The company submitted an extensive filing of its own research to the FDA in order to secure recognition of the safety of its product. Most companies seeking “generally recognised as safe” [GRAS] certification from the FDA choose to do the safety testing themselves, which the FDA then evaluates on the basis of a detailed submission.

The filing from GOOD MEAT reveals that JOINN is integral to the production and quality control of the newly licensed cultivated chicken. The Chinese-owned company, which was founded in 2018 as an offshoot of its parent JOINN Laboratories, has a facility not far from Eat Just’s headquarters in San Francisco.

According to the filing, “JOINN Biologics US Inc (CA, USA) currently produces the chicken cells in a dedicated manufacturing suite”, in Richmond, California. The filing then goes on to describe how “the cells harvested at JOINN Biologics are frozen for shipment without cryopreservation agents to locations where the finished meat food products are prepared.” In addition to manufacturing the chicken, JOINN is responsible for ensuring the raw materials it is produced from are of a suitable quality and “food safety risks from potential adventitious agents or other contaminants” are mitigated.

JOINN Biologics made national headlines in 2022 when it bought 1400 acres of land in Morriston, Florida at a cost of $5.5 million, in order to build a new quarantine and breeding facility for primates, to expand the parent company’s existing lab-animal-breeding operations. The purchase was one of the largest single purchases of American real estate by a Chinese company to date. After news of the purchase and intended use of the land were made public, the company’s links to the Chinese military and its biowarfare program were soon revealed.

The revelation of JOINN’s involvement in the testing and production of America’s first commercially available lab-grown meat raises worrying questions about the safety certification process for the product and about Chinese influence over critical aspects of America’s infrastructure, including its food supply.

How sure can we be that the safety testing done by JOINN was and is adequate? Do we really want a company tied to the biowarfare program of America’s most powerful competitor to be involved in the introduction of a totally novel foodstuff to Americans’ diets?

The news is also a major blow to the credibility of a foodstuff that is marketed heavily on its “whiter than white” ethical credentials. Lab-grown meat is touted as the “cruelty-free” food of the future, a win-win for consumers who will be able to enjoy “real” meat without any animal suffering at all to produce it. With regard to GOOD Meat’s cultivated chicken, those credentials were already in serious doubt. Despite CEO Josh Tetrick’s claims it is “real meat without slaughter”, GOOD Meat’s product is and always has been made with fetal bovine serum (FBS), an ingredient the company is careful to avoid mentioning, with good reason. FBS is extracted directly from the hearts of unborn calves in slaughterhouses, often while they are still alive. Now that we know GOOD Meat’s product is made by a firm that breeds thousands of primates for lab experimentation, we can safely dismiss any and all moral grandstanding from Tetrick and his company as the hypocrisy of the most abject kind.

I’ve written at length on the potential safety risks associated with lab-grown meat made using immortalised cell lines, tissue which is functionally indistinguishable from cancer and which humans have no history of consuming. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek exposé revealed that the big makers of lab-grown meat, including Eat Just, know this is a potential PR disaster and are doing everything they can to avoid talking about it.

Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick

Eat Just and its poster-boy CEO also don’t want to talk about the company’s shady history under its previous name “Hampton Creek”. Hampton Creek was dogged by scandal from the day its first product, a vegan “mayonnaise”, hit the shelves in 2014. Lawsuits, serious allegations from former employees – one of whom called the company “a cult of delusion” – product withdrawals from high-profile stockists, and mass resignations of the company’s chief officers left the company with little option but to rebrand in 2017 under the “Just” brand.

Although the company has managed to continue attracting large amounts of investor capital, especially from the Middle and Far East, and to secure important approvals for its cultivated chicken product in both Singapore and the US, it has been unable to stop the flow of damaging negative publicity. This latest shocking disclosure is unlikely to benefit the image of Eat Just or the valuation of its initial public offering, which is rumoured to be taking place soon.

JOINN BIOLOGICS: DISTURBING TIES TO BIOWARFARE RESEARCH

JOINN Biologics US was founded in 2018 as an offshoot of parent company JOINN Laboratories, which was established in 1995, in China. JOINN Laboratories was the first private-contract research organization in China created for the non-clinical evaluation of drugs. Headquartered in Beijing, JOINN has subsidiaries across China, including in Suzhou and Shanghai, as well as subsidiaries in the US. In addition to JOINN Biologics, in California, another US subsidiary is based in Worcester, Massachusetts. With over 2500 staff, the parent company offers a full range of services from non-clinical safety assessments, through clinical trials to pharmacological oversight from drug development to registration, as well as services in veterinary medicine, pesticide evaluation and the development of medical devices. JOINN Laboratories was the first Chinese company to receive FDA “good laboratory practice” (GLP) certification for a facility in China.

JOINN Biologics describes itself as a “full-service premier Contract Development & Manufacturing Organization which provides you with quality, value and speed to market from DNA to Drug Product.” In terms of manufacturing, it offers a wide array of services including “Master cell banking, Upstream GMP manufacturing, Downstream GMP manufacturing, Fill and Finish, Quality Assurance, Quality Control and Documentation to support IND filing”. It classifies its “cell-cultured meat” capabilities as “biomass production”.

The company is based at the JOINN Innovation Park in Richmond, California, an “emerging biotech campus for life science research and development companies in the San Francisco Bay Area biotech cluster”. The campus has 30 resident biotech companies, offering services from “antibody and protein drug discovery” to “stem cells, cell therapy, and both medical device and preclinical services.” The site was bought by JOINN’s parent company in 2013, for $50 million, and had previously served as a manufacturing site for Berlex Biosciences, a subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer. The acquisition came off the back of a $1.5 billion investment partnership between China and the State of California, which included the creation of a “California-China Office of Trade and Investment” to facilitate investment in China by Californian companies and investment in California by Chinese companies. The creation of the Office had been promised a year earlier by Governor Brown, when Vice-President of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping visited California.

The JOINN Biologics facility in Richmond, California

JOINN biologics first came to public attention in the US in the middle of 2022, when it purchased ten parcels of land, totalling 1400 acres, in Morriston, Florida from L&T Cattle and Timber. The company purchased the land with the aim of building a primate breeding and quarantine facility. Monkeys would have been imported, quarantined and bred at the site, and then sold for medical experimentation. Because the construction of such a facility was prohibited on the land, which was zoned for forestry and residential use, JOINN wished to file a zoning request for change of use with the State of Florida.

The breeding of lab animals is an increasingly lucrative business, and the JOINN group was clearly looking to position itself as a major player. At the time of the Morriston purchase, Chinese research organizations had been facing a shortage of lab monkeys for research, with prices for the animals tripling in a period of just a few years. JOINN had already spent nearly $250 million in China to acquire two dedicated lab-animal breeding companies, which between them owned around 20,000 animals, and $27.3 million to acquire the Boston-area company Biomere, one of the few research organizations in New England that conducts primate trials, with a client base including major pharma players like Shire, Novartis and Abbott.

News of the purchase of the land at Morriston, and the desired change of use, soon received national and international coverage after it became clear that JOINN, like many Chinese companies, has extremely close ties to the Chinese government. Most worryingly of all, it was revealed to be entangled at the highest levels with the Chinese military’s biowarfare program.

In particular, a number of key personnel who work for JOINN Biologics and its parent company studied or worked at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing. In 2021, the Academy was added to the US trade blacklist for supplying biotechnology to the Chinese military. The founder of JOINN and chair of its board of directors is Yuxia Feng, a military physician and a graduate of the Academy. Her co-founder and vice chair of the board of directors, Conglin Zuo, worked at the Academy, in its Institute of Biotechnology. Other key personnel such as Hemei Wang and Shusheng Feng were also employed by the Academy, in the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology. Feng has worked on research with a number of scientists in the People’s Liberation Army who are considered key players in China’s biological weapons research (Cheng-Feng Qin, Yusen Zhou and Shibo Jiang).

Representative Scott Franklin (R-Fla) spelled out the obvious concerns surrounding the purchase in an interview with the Epoch Times.

“The idea that we would permit a… biotech firm with ties to the Chinese military to breed lab monkeys on U.S. soil is baffling, especially after China unleashed the Covid-19 pandemic on the world.

“The Biden administration allowing Chinese Communist Party affiliated companies to buy up American land is unacceptable, especially for these purposes.”

Governor DeSantis described the purchase as precisely the kind of activity his administration was aiming to prevent.

“The governor has been consistently opposed to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s growing influence in Florida, and this proposed facility is a prime example of the type of activity that we are acting to prohibit.”

Chinese purchases of land in strategically sensitive locations in the US have become a matter of growing concern in recent years. In 2021, purchases of land in the US by Chinese companies and individuals totalled $6.1 billion. Since 2015, for example, China Oceanwide holdings has acquired land worth over $500 million on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, just a short distance from the key US naval base at Pearl Harbor. At around the time of the Morriston purchase, another Chinese firm bought 300 acres of land in Grand Forks, North Dakota, a mere 16 miles from the US Air Force’s Air Combat Command base.

A number of states, including Texas and Florida, have sought to counter growing Chinese influence by introducing legislation to prevent such land purchases, as well to protect personal data from apps like TikTok and to provide transparency over foreign donations to higher-education institutions and protect intellectual property.

Animal-rights organization PETA also voiced its opposition to the Morriston purchase and JOINN’s plans for the land, sending a letter signed by 4000 Florida residents to Governor DeSantis. The letter stressed not only the cruelty of the practice of breeding lab animals for experimentation, but also the possibility that the proposed facility could help spread pathogens to humans. Monkeys have escaped from such facilities before, including a recent case in Pennsylvania, when a truck carrying monkeys to a quarantine facility crashed and the animals that escaped had to be shot.

After indications that a change-of-use request would not be received favourably, it appears that JOINN never filed one, and the land at Morriston has been left unused.

LAB-GROWN MEAT: NOT WHAT IT SEEMS