Golden_Brown
I wrote here recently about the politically fraught state of the relations of biopharma companies with Chinese outsourcing companies, of which WuXi (OTCPK:WUXIF) is probably the most prominent.
There are bills in the works in both the House (the BIOSECURE Act) and the Senate that would (among other things) restrict the ability of US companies to work with these contractors.
If you know the details of the Federal legislative process, you will appreciate that there are a lot of steps to go through before any law takes effect, not least of them a conference committee to work out the differences between the House and Senate proposals.
But at the same time, you’ll also realize that if both chambers are moving such measures along that the chances of such a law are already much better than average, no matter how much further work it might take.
My update to the last blog post mentioned the abrupt about-face of the BIO trade group, which announced that it was severing contact with WuXi. That was in great contrast to the initial reaction to these proposed bills some months ago, and in such cases you have to ask what underlying conditions have changed.
We now have part of that answer: Reuters is reporting that US legislators have had a classified briefing about WuXi from officials at the FBI, the State Department, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (the cabinet-level agency that is supposed to coordinate information from the CIA, FBI, the military intelligence agencies, the NSA, and others).
Reuters’ sources say that the presentation maintained that “WuXi AppTec and other Chinese entities had engaged in activity in the U.S. contrary to U.S. national security interests“, including unauthorized transfer of a US client company’s intellectual property to a Chinese government agency.
The story says that several legislators and staff confirmed off-the-record that they had received “concerning information” about WuXi’s relationship with the Chinese government.
That would do it. I am obviously not in a position to speculate in any detail – I don’t get any intelligence briefings, and I’m glad to keep it that way. And obviously, not everything that the US intelligence community concludes is true actually turns out to be so.
But at the same time, these people have also made many solid calls, and doubtless there are many of these that the rest of us have never found out about at all.
If the State Department along with the DNI and its associated agencies are willing to make this sort of accusation to members of Congress, it absolutely has to be taken seriously.
No one involved is furnishing any further details, and WuXi (naturally enough) says that it’s not aware of anything like what the Reuters story describes. The Chinese embassy (naturally enough) says that “convincing evidence” needs to be brought forward to support any such claims.
But as far as members of the House and Senate are concerned, they seem to have already heard some. It seems certain that we haven’t heard the last of this story.
I would only reiterate that if you really want to start decoupling US biopharma companies from Chinese research partners, then we need to start thinking very quickly about what we’re going to couple them to instead. It’s tempting to say “Well, partner with someone else instead”, but what if there isn’t anyone else, at least on that scale?
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