UK ‘Ignoring’ Bio Threat From Beijing, Senior Tory Says

The UK is “ignoring” the threat from China to Britain’s biosecurity, Sir Iain Duncan Smith said. The former Conservative Party leader urged the government to protect Britons’ genomics data from Chinese scientists, who he says “could use it for targeted bioweapons.” The call came after U.S. lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) called on the Biden administration to add seven Chinese biotech firms to a Pentagon list of “Chinese military companies.” In 2021, the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence said in its final report on AI security that Chinese genomics giant BGI may have been “serving, wittingly or unwittingly, as a global collection mechanism for Chinese government genetic databases, providing China with greater raw numbers and diversity of human genome samples as well as access to sensitive personal information about key individuals around the world.”...