Important Takeaways:
- U.S. members of Congress introduced a proposed law called the BIOSECURE Act that would ban the use of tax dollars for the utilization of genetics companies from China that collaborate with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
- This is a good bill, but one must ask: How in the world have we allowed such a practice to continue to this day? Why does the executive branch of the U.S. government need a law for such a common-sense rule that it could have made policy long ago?
- We should have had an all-of-government, if not all-of-society, effort since at least the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 to end reliance on China, especially companies linked to its military. We should most especially have limited the release of genetic data to Beijing.
- As noted in the House announcement, but not in most of the bill’s mainstream media coverage, the proposed law is in part meant to stop the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from using U.S. genetic data for malign purposes, including genetic targeting of U.S. citizens with bioweapons.
- “Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) collects genetic data of Americans [and] uses it for research with the Chinese military,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) in the bill’s announcement. Mr. Gallagher chairs the House Select Committee on the CCP. He introduced the House version of the bill, along with his Democratic co-chair.
- “The CCP will undoubtedly use the genetic data collected by BGI to further its malign aggression, potentially even to develop a bioweapon used to target the American people,” Mr. Gallagher noted.
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