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A corporation with close links to the Chinese Communist Party and a history of industrial espionage is producing hardware used for medical research by the National Institutes of Health, an investigation by The Washington Examiner has found.
The Examiner reports on a Shangai-based corporation called United Imaging, which works in close cooperation with the state-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2013, three of its employees based in New York were charged with transferring “nonpublic information” from an NIH-funded lab to the company and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in exchange for money.
“Despite United Imaging’s history and despite evidence that some Chinese hardware has backdoors allowing data to be remotely downloaded,” the Examiner notes, “public records show that the company’s hardware is present at NIH-funded labs and major research installations across the country.”
Scanning equipment manufactured by United Imaging is used by scores of research facilities across the US, such as the Center for Quantitative Cancer Imaging at the University of Utah.
As well as having a presence in many NIH-funded labs, United Imaging has also received funding directly from the agency.
In September 2020, for example, United received $10 million alongside Yale University and UC Davis to develop new PET scanning technology.
The FDA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the American Hospital Association have all expressed deep concern about the growing use of Chinese-made medical equipment in the US.
A common Chinese medical monitor device was shown to have a backdoor “allowing the device to download and execute unverified remote files,” according to a CISA report.
As the Examiner notes, “Clinical trial data, information related to cancer research, and medical device intellectual property are among the most common targets of [Chinese state-sponsored] hackers.”
The Senate recently passed the Biosecure Act, which aims to ban federal contracting with “biotechnology companies of concern” and prevent American health and genetic data from being transferred to the CCP. The House will now vote on this legislation.
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