Reedley biolab operator convicted in Fresno fraud scheme over faulty COVID tests

A Fresno federal jury found Jia Bei Zhu guilty on all 12 counts, concluding that the Reedley biolab operator ran a fraud scheme that sold more than a million COVID tests for nearly $4 million through his Fresno-based company, Universal Meditech Inc.

Prosecutors said the 64-year-old Zhu lied to the Food and Drug Administration about his identity and his role at UMI, then moved low-quality foreign-made tests through the market as if they were FDA-approved. The verdict included one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, eight substantive wire fraud counts, two counts of distributing adulterated and misbranded medical devices and one count of making a false statement to the FDA.

The case adds a criminal finding to one of Fresno County’s most disturbing public-safety failures. The Reedley warehouse probe began in December 2022, when code enforcement noticed non-permitted plumbing at the property. Investigators later found test kits, manufacturing equipment and shipping supplies there, along with unauthorized biological agents, infectious diseases, bodily fluid samples and nearly 1,000 mice in the related lab operation.

Federal records show UMI first registered with the FDA in November 2015 in Tulare before moving to Fresno in 2018. Prosecutors said the fraud ran from August 2020 through March 2023, exploiting the demand and confusion of the pandemic by importing tests from China and falsely representing them as made in the United States.

Zhu’s romantic partner and business associate, Zhaoyan Wang, fled the United States shortly before Zhu’s arrest and remains a fugitive in China. Zhu is set to be sentenced Aug. 24 and faces up to 20 years in prison.

The conviction also sharpens the accountability question that has followed Reedley for more than two years: how a warehouse operation with test kits, biological agents and a stream of shipping supplies remained out of view for so long. Reedley and Fresno County later reached a settlement in January 2024 for more than $260,000 to recover cleanup costs from the property owner, and Rep. Jim Costa introduced the Preventing Illegal Laboratories and Protecting Public Health Act in April 2024 to require sales logs for highly infectious agents, regular reviews of high-containment labs, a single federal point of contact and a study of a database local officials could use.

Costa and Reedley officials said those changes would have helped when local leaders struggled to get federal guidance on what to do with the lab. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party also opened an investigation after Reedley city officials described their experience and said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s lack of response helped spur bipartisan scrutiny.