A 64-year-old Chinese nationalhas been convicted by a federal jury of selling more than a million fraudulent COVID-19 tests nationwide out of a Fresno biolab during the pandemic.
The Department of Justicesaid that Jia Bei Zhu was found guilty of fraudulently selling nearly $4 million worth of the faulty tests out of his Fresno-based company Universal Meditech Inc (UMI) to customers across the US.
He was convicted on nearly a dozen counts including, one for making a false statement to the FDA, eight counts of substantive wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
“This verdict holds the defendant accountable for actions that exploited a public health crisis for his own gain,” US Attorney Eric Grant said about the conviction.
“He flouted the lawful authority of the FDA and deliberately deceived the public by repackaging low-quality, foreign-made test kits at a time when accuracy and reliability were critical.”
Between August 2020 and March 2023, Zhu, his romantic partner Zhaoyan Wang and others at UMI “conspired with each other to import faulty COVID tests from China and then sell them to customers based” on lies.
The DOJ said that Zhu lied that the tests were approved by the FDA, that they were made in the USA, that they came from a certified lab, and that they actually worked.
It was revealed at trial that Zhu and Wang hired employees that wouldn’t ask questions.
Some of those employees testified that they knew what was going down but they were either too afraid of losing their job or too scared of Zhu to stop selling the fraudulent tests and blow the whistle.
Zhu’s scheme was first uncovered in mid-2022 after one of his victims “filed a civil lawsuit against UMI,” the DOJ said. That sparked an investigation of the Fresno lab where authorities discovered the unsanitary facility which lacked the proper medical equipment to make the tests. The inspection also showed “hundreds of boxes of COVID tests from China,” per the DOJ report.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
