On Feb. 2, FBI and Las Vegas police raided what they described as an "unlicensed" laboratory with shelves and freezers housing over 1,000 vials, jars and flasks with deadly biological substances. Here are some of the killer pathogens police and forensic science techs identified: Ebola virus, tuberculosis and AIDS-inducing HIV. Once contracted, Ebola kills from 25% to 90% of the virus's victims.

A biological warfare mass casualty attack waiting to happen?

Hold that thought — or that future war-shaping sneak attack insight.

This February's outlaw Nevada biolab discovery echoed a 2023 raid on a Reedley, California, biolab that housed another textbook list of biotic and viral killers: E. coli, streptococcus pneumoniae, dengue virus, SARS-CoV-2, measles rubella virus and Hepatitis B and C. The Reedley bio-cache included a malaria strain the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party later described as "the deadliest known form of malaria."

Every year, malaria, in its various viral forms, kills Africans by the hundreds of thousands. Burundi is a particular victim.

Several news services subsequently reported that the Nevada lab property was connected to the California lab, which was owned by (or linked to) a mainland Chinese citizen named Jia Bei Zhu.

Yes, Lab 1 and Lab 2. Same mainland Chinese outlaw owner.

After the 2023 raid, federal investigators reported the Reedley lab received "unexplained payments from (mainland) Chinese banks ..." Other federal and media reports state that labs like the one discovered in Reedley (and I'll wager like the one in Las Vegas) operate without proper regulatory oversight, which is bureaucratese for telling us the labs are primed and positioned to expose Americans to deadly diseases.

American plants are also targets. In 2025, two citizens of the People's Republic of China were charged in a criminal complaint with conspiracy to smuggle into the U.S. a fungus called Fusarium graminearum. Scientists classify that heinous slime as a potential agricultural terror weapon.

Agroterrorism. In July 2004, I wrote a column on the threat posed by terror attacks on food resources. Attacks on crops are as old as war itself: Romans salted Carthaginian fields. The Soviet Union had several bioweapon programs specifically aimed at food crops. Ken Alibek, a Russian scientist who has written extensively about Soviet programs, documented research into bacteria and viruses "designed" to attack wheat, rice and corn.

For the record, the nasty fungus the two 2025 PRC operatives tried to smuggle stateside, "head blight," is a grain disease that annually causes billions of dollars in economic loss. Fusarium graminearum toxins also sicken human beings and cattle. They cause liver damage, nausea and long-term reproductive defects in humans.

Is America being set up for a biowarfare Pearl Harbor?

I recently re-read "American Caesar," William Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur. From pages 170-171, addressing Japan's attack on the Philippines, Manchester writes:

"In 1934 Major General Frank Parker, then the (U.S. military) commander in the Philippines, reported to Washington that Japanese immigration continued to grow at an alarming rate, that they (Japanese infiltrators) were mapping the coasts, and that most of them were men of military age — some, indeed, known to hold reserve commissions in the Nipponese army. The War Department shrugged ... The (Japanese) newcomers were industrious, they were useful bicycle salesmen, sidewalk photographers, and servants; they seemed to contribute to the quality of Filipino life. 'Only later,' Carlos Romulo recalls, 'did I discover that my gardener was a Japanese major and my masseur a Japanese colonel.'"

Romulo was a Filipino adviser to MacArthur, later a Filipino general and ultimately a United Nations diplomat. He was also an honest man who knew he'd been very stupid and realized too late Japan had targeted and prepared his country for invasion at least 10 years before the 1942 assault.

My take: Beijing has found another way to evade American federal, state and local defenses. It is exploiting a gap in medical and health regulation.

An ideal time for the Chinese Communist Party to pull the biowarfare trigger: 48 to 72 hours before the People's Liberation Army invades Taiwan.

To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: CDC at Unsplash