China kills people and grows humans to provide organs for transplant.
It’s Time to Ban Transplant Tourism to China | Rep. Neal Dunn
theepochtimes.com
American Thought Leaders
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Nov-06-2025
[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “We don’t want Americans to participate in any way, shape, or form in this kind of organ harvesting and transplantation scheme. … You can actually sit in America, [and] make an appointment for a heart, lung transplant in China right now,” says Congressman Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), a former Army surgeon who is also founding president of the Advanced Urology Institute in Florida.
“I want to make that illegal.”
As a starting point, Dunn has introduced the Block Organ Transplant Purchases from China Act, also known as the BLOCK Act, which would prohibit federal reimbursement for organ transplants and related medical services if the organ source cannot be verified, as is the case in communist China.
In our wide-ranging interview, we cover China’s illicit organ trade, the biowarfare program, and President Donald Trump’s new trade deal with leader Xi Jinping, as well as how America can accelerate rare earth mineral production, and the strategic significance of Pacific island nations like the Solomon Islands.
As a member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party—often referred to as the House CCP Select Committee—Dunn receives intelligence briefings on the multifaceted threats that Beijing poses to American national security.
The CCP “is gathering biological data on all of us,” he says. “One of the most insidious ways they gather biological DNA sequencing on us is they run a set of blood banks in the United States.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Congressman Neal Dunn, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Congressman Neal Dunn:
Thank you so much for having me on.
Mr. Jekielek:
So President Trump has come back from Asia with the trade deal. There’s a reprieve on the export controls for rare earths for a year. There are soybeans that are going to be sold. What’s your take on what happened with this trade deal?
Congressman Dunn:
He survives, he thrives on making deals, and so he’s made another deal. I think this is a good one. I mean, we actually, we’re always competing with China, and they’re often abusing the trade laws. But the rare earths are something that we’ve found are absolutely critical. And the free world really isn’t ready to source its own rare earths yet. Now, we only got a one-year reprieve, so we need to get out there and hustle in terms of making it. And I think there’s some good news there for us.
Mr. Jekielek:
What’s the good news? I mean, it seems like the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is exerting significant leverage here.
Congressman Dunn:
They are. They actually have significant leverage. The fact that they would enter into a one-year deal kind of says that, number one, they probably won’t go after Taiwan for a year. That’s good news. But two, back home, it gives us time to ramp up and go after our own rare earths. Now, I know what you’re thinking. It takes 30 years to permit a mine.
Yes, but we actually have discovered a way to get about half of all the rare earths and critical minerals out of the tailings of mines that have already been mined. So you can go to the phosphate mines in Florida, and you can pulverize those tailings and then apply very high magnetic fields and separate out things like germanium and a number of other elements—like 30 of the elements—you can just kind of drag them out of the tailings.
Mr. Jekielek:
You know, it strikes me like we need an actual Operation Warp Speed.
Congressman Dunn:
Good point. In fact, I’m going to suggest it. I may give you credit.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, this is a defining issue. And from what I understand, we actually sold our companies, American companies, that were doing all this kind of stuff, building these rare earth magnets and so forth, to the CCP.
Congressman Dunn:
Absolutely true. We invented this stuff, and then we outsourced its supplies for all of it and the refining of it.
Mr. Jekielek:
There are other elements to this deal. We’ve also got soybeans being sold. How serious do you think the Chinese Communist Party will be in terms of actually fulfilling what they said they were going to do?
Congressman Dunn:
Uncharacteristically, for these deals with China, they’ve actually put a hard number on what they’re going to do. The hard numbers were 12 million metric tons of soybeans before the end of the year, and 25 million tons a year for three years. That’s a pretty straightforward number. You can be certain that for those three years, Trump will be reminding them of what their promises were.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, the other piece is a lot softer, which is about fentanyl, trying to affect some sort of limits on the fentanyl. But this is a promise, I think, that was made under Obama, if I recall.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, and honestly, we saw a sort of a dip in the fentanyl, but it was just a dip. And now it’s back with a vengeance. The fentanyl, of course, includes all of the analogs of fentanyl, which are often far worse than fentanyl itself. It’s hard to imagine drugs that have more affinity for the opioid receptor than fentanyl has. But the analogs can be a thousand times stronger.
Mr. Jekielek:
So what’s going on with that? How do you view fentanyl from the vantage point of being a member of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party?
Congressman Dunn:
We absolutely need to do something about fentanyl. Frankly, I’m glad that Trump has jumped in with both feet to stop this strike. It’s killing 100,000 Americans a year. That’s an ungodly number. That’s more than the entire Vietnam War every year. The other thing is, not all of these people are actually sort of the deadhead, dead-end junkies. You could have some kid buy a little marijuana, and it’s laced with fentanyl, and he dies.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, a number of analysts I’ve had on this show who know what they’re talking about tell me that the CCP could cut this fentanyl flow off relatively quickly.
Congressman Dunn:
No question they could do it because they don’t allow it in their country. They know how to stop it. They know where it comes from. And that’s very much of a command and control economy they’ve got there. So this is the truth about the CCP. They use this as a money laundering operation. Send the cartels the precursors. The cartels pay them back in dollars.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, I mean, in addition to wiping out tens of thousands of military-aged males off the map every year.
Congressman Dunn:
I’m a doctor, by the way, in real life, and we used to see these things. And I actually use fentanyl only on terminal patients, frankly, so hospice-type style. And it is an incredibly powerful drug. One little 25 microgram, not milligram, microgram patch is usually very, very potent pain relief.
Mr. Jekielek:
Do you think the CCP is actually going to, after making this promise a number of times, actually enact it?
Congressman Dunn:
The CCP does what they think they have to do to get along in the world, and they don’t really care about getting along too much. But Trump can be pretty persuasive and demanding, and I think that’s what you need. You need somebody who’s going to harangue them. So yes, we’ve got this agreement. You’re not living up to the agreement. I need more. I need to see more.
And of course, Trump at the other end, he’s punishing the cartels in ways that we never did before, which I cheer on. I think we should all be cheering that on. So he’s making it a pretty expensive operation for them.
Mr. Jekielek:
So as we were talking about doing this interview, you said something to me about the purpose of this select committee, which I thought was fascinating and incredibly important. So explain to me, what is this Select Committee on the CCP actually about?
Congressman Dunn:
So when we designed and named the Select Committee, the actual name says it all. It is called the Select Committee on Competition with the Chinese Communist Party. And the point of all that was, number one, the Chinese people are our enemy. It’s the Chinese Communist Party that’s our enemy. And number two, it’s about competition, not war.
Now, we all know that war hangs in the balance, and we spend a lot of time wargaming this thing. But the truth is, we don’t want war. Nobody should want war. Because a war with China looks pretty bad, and we’ve done the numbers on that. It’s pretty grim. So we'd like to keep this in the realm of competition. Now, it’s going to be tough competition. But at the same time, it’s better to compete than it is to make war.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, it’s competition in the context of China undergoing the largest military buildup, perhaps in the history of the world.
Congressman Dunn:
In history, yes. It’s something. By the way, I think we came very close. The given wisdom in Washington was, right after Russia gets control of Ukraine, and we thought that was going to be three or four days after they invaded, then China was going to come into Taiwan. And they were massing troops on the coast and ships on the coast for transport. They looked like they were getting ready for an invasion.
Of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine went sideways. The Ukrainians did a brilliant job protecting themselves. And God bless them. They basically saved Taiwan at the same time they were saving Ukraine.
Mr. Jekielek:
And just explain this a little bit more to me. Why do you think that’s the case?
Congressman Dunn:
Because China was watching Russia, and they were going, oh, these invasions aren’t as easy as they look. Because everybody thought Russia was just going to go through Ukraine like hot water through sugar. But that was wrong. The Ukrainians really put up a great fight. And of course, Taiwan called on their military, and their people have begun to really take their defensive mechanisms seriously.
Mr. Jekielek:
With the Select Committee on the CCP, I mean, I’ve been watching you guys closely for a number of years. I mean, you cover everything from this forced organ harvesting in China, which is something I’ve covered extensively. Thank you for doing that.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, that’s a subject that’s near and dear to my heart. I’m one of the few members of Congress who’ve ever actually done transplant surgery, and so I understand a lot of it is coming near and dear to my heart. And the idea of actually murdering someone to take their organs and give them to somebody else, that is as appalling as anything that anybody’s ever done in the history of the world. That is right up there with the Nazis and the Holocaust. There is nothing any worse than this.
Clearly, they put no value whatsoever on these human lives. So if you’re a member of the Chinese Communist Party, you’re going to do okay. If you’re a member of the Falun Gong, good luck. You’re just a walking set of kidneys, heart, and lungs that they’re going to harvest at some point.
Mr. Jekielek:
So absolutely, we have to talk more about this because, I mean, again, there aren’t a ton of people who are competent to talk about it and interested in talking about it. The combination is very rare. So we’re going to dig into that. But you also look at, I mean, of course, you look at this whole trade thing. We started out by talking about the trade side, which, of course, is a huge area of competition or unrestricted warfare. And then also, you know, there’s kind of the strategic America’s strategic interests in the Pacific, some of these island chains and CCP subversion, you went to the Solomon Islands. I'd love to talk about that with you a little bit, because unfortunately, we lost, frankly, a heroic leader in the region recently.
Let’s start with the organ issue. And because this is something that’s very close to me, I’m actually working on a book as we speak. Every day I’m looking at it. Explain to me what you’ve managed to do. And you have a bill that you originated called the Block Act. I mean, the short name is the Block Act. So just explain to me the picture of what this is, this forced organ harvesting in China, and then what this Block Act will do.
Congressman Dunn:
We mentioned the practice, which is repugnant beyond belief. But the idea is we don’t want Americans to participate in any way, shape, or form in this kind of organ harvesting and transplantation scheme. Now, they advertise that. And you can actually make an appointment, sit in America, make an appointment for a heart-lung transplant in China right now. But I want to make that illegal. And I mean literally go to prison and pay fines, so criminal and civil penalties on this. And I think it’s a very popular idea to do that.
Having said that, it’s very tough to talk about organ harvesting with anybody, even in Congress. And the reason for it is it’s such an appallingly bad idea. People are shriveled away from it. When you say, let’s talk about organ harvesting, they just look down at the floor, gag, and walk away. It’s just so bad. And it sort of says something that this is happening.
So this act actually does block any organs from Americans from receiving them. They also lose their right to medical care in the United States afterwards. So you come back for a little post-op follow-up in America? No.
And then the other thing that it does is we can’t bring organs over here. And that’s a more subtle problem than we think because it’s possible to actually preserve some organs that are harvested at the time of death; bone grafts, placentals, corneas, these things. I don’t want that stuff coming into our transplant market either. So there’s some, you know, this is just like smuggling fentanyl, they’re smuggling organs. Organ legging or something, is that what they call it?
Mr. Jekielek:
You know, I’m actually going to research that a little bit more because most of the work that I’ve done is looking at transplants that are actually happening there, including things like corneal and so forth.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, that’s what people tend to think of, but you know, you can also ship those things.
Mr. Jekielek:
There’s that subsection, absolutely. And there’s also, you know, there’s new technologies now. Like, for example, when ECMO [extracorporeal membrane oxygenation] came online some years back, right, where you can sort of replace the heart and lungs for a time. Well, I mean, it changed the dimension of the transplants because now from one body, you could actually harvest multiple organs. You had more time before the body would get cold because you had this circulation. But these machines, they actually tend to be manufactured here, actually, and in the West. And there’s all sorts of transplant materials and technologies I’ve been learning, shockingly, that are actually being imported to there, right?
Congressman Dunn:
It’s amazing that they do that. Think about that. They’re literally keeping these bodies alive just so they can kill them and take their order. That’s so un-American. I mean, it’s free nations. We are obviously repelled by this.
Mr. Jekielek:
My contention basically is that this whole industry as a whole is a good way, it’s kind of a lens to understand how the Chinese Communist Party actually operates.
Congressman Dunn:
I think you’re absolutely right. This tells you just exactly how much value they put on human life.
Mr. Jekielek:
Congressman, you’re leaving me speechless here because there’s few people. I’m so used to this. We have this subject come up. People, they go speechless. And they, by the way, don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to work with me on bills. You know, they’re like, ugh. It’s just, it’s so bad.
Mr. Jekielek:
Just the thought of it is sick. And this is exactly what I experienced, you know, 20 years ago when I started working on it. I experienced it myself. And even today I experience it. But something I noticed, I feel like in the last three years, something has shifted. There was this survivor of the organ harvesting, which came forth. There was a lot of more media than normal around it. There’s actually these two bills that have already passed the House, the Falun Gong Protection Act, and the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act. I mean, everything you’re saying is absolutely true, but there seems to be an increased interest or awareness or people overcoming that revulsion.
Congressman Dunn:
I think you’re right. That’s what it is. They’re overcoming revulsion, but it takes a willful effort to do it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely. Let’s talk about your visit to the Salmon Islands. And also, for starters, it’s not obvious to people at the outset why we should care about these small island chains in the Pacific in the first place. But you do.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, I know. So anybody who’s ever studied military history, especially in the Pacific, realizes immediately that the distances, number one, are huge. And number two is you can’t get to China or, by the way, World War II, Japan, without going through all those islands. So that was Douglas MacArthur’s famous island hopping campaign. He didn’t do that because he just thought it would be a warm up exercise on the islands. That’s what he needed to do to get to Japan.
China knows that there’s actually a first and second island chain easily identifiable on any world map. And Solomon Islands is a very, very key location. And it’s right in the middle of access to China. And they want to own that. They want to control that. And by the way, controlling means controlling all their communications. They already do all the cell phones. So they got that. The communications, fiber optic cables, they already own all those. And the government.
Now, the people of the Solomon Islands, generally speaking, don’t really like the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party. They don’t want to have anything to do with it. In fact, just about five years ago, they rioted and burned down Chinatown. And nonetheless, the Chinese have kept going in there and bribing, corrupting, as they do. Their Belt and Road Initiative, as I call them, Bribery and Corruption Initiative.
And they have won over a majority of the parliament, so they have the votes now. And that means they control who gets elected prime minister by the parliament. That’s the way they do that. And so they have a completely pro-China prime minister in a country where the majority of people are really opposed to China. Nonetheless, the prime minister is in their pocket. In fact, his personal security details were made up of members of the People’s Liberation Army of China. This is an amazing situation.
And now they have two back-to-back prime ministers who are in the pocket of Red China. And the majority population is actually on a different province, a different island, Malaita, and they were very opposed to China. They’re opposed to lots of things about China. Their provincial parliament has been fighting the national government to keep China out. But I tell you, it’s a tricky battle because most of the power is in the national government.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, and last year when you went to the Solomon Islands, you actually met with the former premier of Malaita Province, Daniel Suidani.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, Daniel Suidani.
Mr. Jekielek:
May he rest in peace.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, that’s right. He just passed away. And that story, by the way, is kind of interesting. He passed away for lack of receiving dialysis. And he was refused dialysis in Honiara, which is on the island of Guadalcanal. It’s the capital of the country. And they only have a single functioning dialysis machine there.
And the one doctor who’s a nephrologist and runs the thing is actually a citizen of the People’s Republic of China. And so he’s in their pocket too. And here we have the prime opposition leader, who’s a very brave, courageous guy, dying of kidney failure because he can’t get dialyzed.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about Premier Suidani a little bit more. I’ve actually had him on this show a couple of years ago, and we’ve talked about him a number of times. province of a tiny island nation which has this mass subversion, mass influence operation, mass bribery campaign affected on the island. What does it take for a person like that to be the hero who will stand up to them?
Congressman Dunn:
Courage comes in handy. That’s the first thing you need, just to face down the opposition and the Chinese, frankly. But he was a very, very selfless, courageous leader. I actually got to know him because it was brought to my attention that he needed a visa to come to the United States for medical treatment. He was denied that by our State Department.
I was so flabbergasted that I called up the Secretary of State. I said, what the heck? This guy is a hero, and he’s our hero. He’s the last bulwark against the Chinese taking over the Solomon Islands. We should be open arms welcoming him, not denying him a visa. They actually changed their ruling and gave him a visa. He dropped by the office to say thank you. I met his family, by the way. I went back to the Solomon Islands when I made that trip and met his wife and daughters. They’re lovely people.
Mr. Jekielek:
I just want to remind everyone watching that these islands are of great strategic interest to the United States.
Congressman Dunn:
They are very strategic. Whatever you think about—whether you’re thinking about Ukraine and Russia, or you’re thinking about the Indo-Pacific and China—you look at the map and you go, my God, there are a lot of island nations out there between here and there. Who controls those things? It turns out China has established a very, very strong control over a whole lot of the Indo-Pacific nations.
So they’re tiny islands; we just sail between them. But their exclusive economic zones interlock so that you never leave. You’re always in somebody’s exclusive economic zone, which means that they have some control over what’s going on in their area if they control their own government. And, of course, most of them do not control their own government.
Mr. Jekielek:
So what happens now with the Solomon Islands?
Congressman Dunn:
One of the things that I became absolutely focused on was re-establishing diplomatic presence in the Solomon Islands. We have no embassy there; we have a chancery. That’s new, by the way, just in the last two years. It’s staffed by three people. Literally, the commander up at the Indo-Pacific detailed a couple of Marines down to Honiara to help the poor one guy who’s actually the diplomatic presence there. They still don’t have the authority to issue visas in that office, and they need that.
Functionally, it prevents the people of the Solomon Islands, who are our allies and who are grateful to us for World War II, from freeing them, etc. The famous Battle of Guadalcanal. This is, by the way, the Solomon Islands is where John F. Kennedy got sunk in his PT boat. It’s right there, just a little bit north of the Capitol. So, we don’t have any presence really, just a little first step there. We need to get an ambassador back.
In fact, we need an ambassador in a lot of places over in the Indo-Pacific. We need to have a diplomatic presence. We’ve got to be there. You know, if you’re not there, you’re absent. And China’s there. And they’re playing the game pretty much for keeps.
Mr. Jekielek:
And just to finish up on this point, I mean, control of those island chains allows them to project their naval power.
Congressman Dunn:
That’s right. And it also works as kind of a wall against us. You know, we actually will have some difficulty sailing even submarines past all these island chains if China is controlling the surveillance in those island chains. Think about that. They don’t just go there and bribe and corrupt.
They also set up listening posts and sonar posts and all this stuff. So they can track and they know where the deep channels are. They'll watch for submarines there. And, by the way, they can also launch anti-ship missiles from the land. You never have to be out of range of a land-based battery.
Mr. Jekielek:
I have to ask this question. We’re talking about military strategy here. We’re talking about projecting power. But the Select Committee on the CCP, it’s just about competition. It’s about preventing those military encounters. Why are we talking about this?
Congressman Dunn:
Well, so the competition goes from rough and tumble competition to empty the dugouts, have a fight kind of competition pretty easily, pretty quickly. I think we need to be there and see if we can keep control of that. But part of it’s just showing up for the game. We’ve got to have Americans there.
We’re doing a better job now having our American military presence in the Philippines, which we need. And they want it. They understand China is a problem for them. And, of course, in Guam we do it, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, that’s a territorial possession of the United States. So we’re building up our presence there. Samoa.
By the way, these islanders also enlist in our military at a much higher rate than the average American population. So they’re participating in the defense of America, the greater all America, as well as back home. They have no representation at home. Once they get out, they leave there 20 years, they get out, they go home. There’s no VA [Veterans Administration]; there’s no diplomatic presence. They have to go to Papua New Guinea to get a visa to come back to the United States. It’s crazy.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s switch gears a little bit for a moment, let’s go back to trade. One of the areas that the committee has had a number of hearings about—it’s something I’ve talked to Robert Lighthizer, former US Trade Representative about—and he kind of shocked me by explaining how significant the contribution to the trade deficit was, the, what’s this called, the de minimis exemption. So anything under $800, I believe the number was.
Congressman Dunn:
Just not only does it come in without a tariff, if you’re in the de minimis—if you’re under the de minimis level, you’re probably not even going to get your package inspected by customs. So who knows what’s in these packages?
Mr. Jekielek:
Is this somehow insane?
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, it is.
Mr. Jekielek:
And I mean, the Chinese Communist Party exploited this massively.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, they absolutely did. And, I mean, it was institutionalized. They brought in tens of billions of dollars of goods and not-so-goods to our country using this de minimis exception. What they would do is come into a free trade zone in Long Beach, transfer these huge containers to Mexico, and then just wait for whatever order to come to them and they just send it over from Mexico one off at a time.
It might be worth $10,000, but on the stamp it says less than $800. So it shoots right through customs and gets delivered. It was a gaping hole. By the way, the $800 de minimis exception was extremely high by international standards. The more common level of a de minimis exception is $100 to $200.
Mr. Jekielek:
Right. Well, so now there’s an executive order.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes. It just took effect on August 29th.
Mr. Jekielek:
Right. And so the question is, has it had an effect yet?
Congressman Dunn:
Absolutely is the answer. There are far fewer packages coming over, and you can see that. I believe in your paper, actually, that the number of packages coming into the United States has dramatically decreased. Now, it hasn’t gone to zero. But you have to ask yourself, too, is Customs actually physically capable of examining every package internationally that comes in? Do we have the wherewithal, the manpower? I kind of doubt it, frankly.
Before August 29, we still had an $800 exemption. And now we’ve got a zero-dollar exemption. That’s kind of amazing. So maybe there’s a happy middle ground, a hundred bucks or something, I don’t know. But I'd love to sit down and look over that kind of thing and see what the actual mechanism is for customs inspection coming in with these shipped-in goods. I think that would be a good trip for us.
Mr. Jekielek:
Are there any plans to actually codify this into law somehow?
Congressman Dunn:
Thank you for that question. It needs to be a statute. I mean, the president’s using sort of loopholes here to make these executive orders. It really ought to be put in statute. And in Trump’s defense, I’m going to say he looks at Congress and says, well, put it in statute. And we go, we’re shut down. So, you know, he gets impatient with the Hill sometimes. And God bless him, I do too.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, so what do you think’s going to happen with the shutdown?
Congressman Dunn:
So, you know, the thought is, the rumor on the street this week is that after election day, the Democratic senators are going to bring forward a willingness to take the CR [continuing resolution]. I don’t know if they’re going to want something in return up front, but what they had been asking for, what Schumer and Jeffries had been asking for, was $1.5 trillion in gimme goodies. And that’s just to come to the table and negotiate for a couple of weeks. That’s how it'll work.
By the way, the other part of this rumor is that the continuing resolution will have to be made longer. Because right now it only goes to November 21. We couldn’t possibly get—what do we need? Nine appropriations bills done in order to get them into the president by the end of the CR. We can’t possibly do that by the 21st.
Mr. Jekielek:
A number of people have mentioned to me—I don’t know how you'll respond to this—but a number of people, people who watch American Thought Leaders, people who read The Epoch Times, have said, you know, frankly, this last month, I haven’t really noticed much change. Now, obviously, there has been a big change. The government has been shut down. It’s had an impact. But there are some people, at least, who are telling me they’re not particularly impacted, and they’re wondering about where all this money is going.
Congressman Dunn:
Once again, I'll give a little credit to Trump here. He found a way to pay the military this past month. That’s a good thing. He found a way to do a number of other things to keep the government nominally open. But if you poke around the course, you find there’s a lot of people who are not at work. And by the way, my staff on the Hill, they’re not getting paid. And you know, how long can they coast? So what we’re seeing right now is sort of the evolution of a shutdown, how bad it gets. What we haven’t seen yet is how much it costs to open the government back up. And it’s going to be expensive.
Here’s something you can take to the bank. A shutdown is never the right thing to do. It’s always the most expensive option. It’s going to be a loss to the economy. It’s going to be plussed-up money to restart everything. And when I say lost economy, we’re looking at just the state of Florida losing a billion dollars a week with a government shutdown. The state of Florida alone is a billion dollars. I’ve been trying to find a figure for the whole country.
Mr. Jekielek:
Is that in transfers from the federal government? Or where does that come from?
Congressman Dunn:
It’s mostly lost economic opportunity. People aren’t buying, people aren’t being paid, they are buying, they aren’t spending. By the way, they’re not driving down to Florida and going to the beach either.
Mr. Jekielek:
Fascinating. Let’s jump back to the Select Committee on the CCP. You know, another area that you’re interested in, you even have a bit of a background in, is this biowarfare realm. It’s something a lot of people don’t like talking about.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, I get all the really bad things.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, they’re also very serious things. And we know as a fact that a central piece of Chinese military strategy is to develop very powerful biowarfare capability.
Congressman Dunn:
It really is, by the way. I’m forced to read more about this than anybody would choose to read, except we need to know this stuff. So the truth is they have a very advanced bioweapons program. It’s not particularly safe. So they do the research in laboratories that are not well isolated, aren’t well protected, hence the lab leak, SARS-CoV-2.
By the way, people ought to Google the whole term, lab leak of pathogens. There’s a very rich history of leaks from laboratories of virulent pathogens, bacteria, viruses, and molds. So it’s another one of those stories people don’t want to talk about. I was stationed at the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories back in the ‘70s, and did research there as a bench scientist. So I’m familiar with this stuff.
And because of that familiarity, I was given the bill called Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness [PAHPA Act]. The chairman of E&C [House Committee on Energy and Commerce] said, get that renewed by the end of ‘27. That’s when it times out. And so I take that very seriously. We need to do that.
And we need to have a better plan for response to biological threats. We did not respond well to SARS-CoV-2. I think everybody recognizes that now. We can never do that again, and there are some things that we should be doing, and I have some definite ideas on that. I’m open to your ideas.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, you know he mentioned some things we should be doing. One of the things that there’s a large body of voices saying we shouldn’t be doing is gain-of-function research, which is kind of 100 percent of which has military application. I’m talking about when I say gain-of-function, just to be precise, I’m talking about making viruses more virulent.
Congressman Dunn:
I think that that isn’t the only gain-of-function that they can do, but that certainly is the one that, you know, we say virulent, but you know what? Contagious. That’s a word everybody understands. Making these things more contagious. That’s not a good plan, especially when you’re doing it ostensibly. Ostensibly, this research is being done so that they can study the virus and develop some treatment for it in case it ever emerges in nature.
Well, it doesn’t emerge in nature. It leaks from the damn laboratory. And so we’re making our problems with this gain of function research. There is a kind of a split in the science camp about whether it’s a good idea to study gain of function or to just outlaw it. And I’m not going to take sides, but I'll tell you that certainly it needs to be done in a biosafety level 4 laboratory [BSL-4]. That’s the highest level of isolation.
And I worked in a BSL-4 facility. It’s a very expensive, very difficult, time-consuming proposition to work in that environment. And it has to have a lot of protocols. So that’s why I think the Chinese don’t put that effort into it, and why they have a rich history of laboratory leaks.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, bioweapons are kind of a strange thing, because you can’t, it’s not, like, you don’t want to have, like, a mutually assured destruction doctrine, for example. I haven’t thought about this extensively, right? But it doesn’t make sense, if you have really powerful bioweapons, I need to have my very powerful bioweapons, or does that make sense?
Congressman Dunn:
No, it doesn’t make sense, and because we have issued that we no longer make offensive pathogens at all for biological warfare. I won’t go into chemical warfare. We absolutely do not do biological warfare. We do defense.
Mr. Jekielek:
Right. Isn’t just a healthy population the best defense?
Congressman Dunn:
Well, it’s a great defense, but it’s not adequate. I mean, because we know that the Chinese can tailor-make pathogens that can infect just about any population. And I don’t want to take too much of a dive down the rabbit hole with this stuff, but trust me, there are pathogens out there that will kill, I don’t care if you’re Iron Man or, you know, the best athlete in the world. You know, you can be killed with a virus.
Mr. Jekielek:
And so, and you’re aware of these, I’m aware of research, but they’re doing research in these targeted, you know, various types of these, but you’re aware that they have already developed some of these types of technologies.
Congressman Dunn:
So we read the Chinese literature. I don’t personally do it, but it gets read by our intelligence community. We read translations of it. And there is no doubt that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has a biological warfare effort. They write about it in their own communications. So, oh, let’s try this, we can do this, we can weaponize this particular virus, let’s do some research on it. I mean, that’s in their communication. You know, you talk about smoking guns.
By the way, Russia, too. And I can name names, but it gets down the... I mean, we’re immediately in the rabbit hole there. But, I mean, trust me, it’s as bad as you can imagine. And, you know, these infections, once they’re out, they’re out. They go around the world. That’s what happened with SARS-CoV-2.
Mr. Jekielek:
It seems to me like the best defense for SARS-CoV-2 was simply being in the best health possible.
Congressman Dunn:
Being young, yes, that would be good. You don’t want to carry extra weight, things like that. It was lipid metabolism, which was the active toxic element there. It was good for SARS-CoV-2, but remember SARS-CoV-2 had not yet been fully weaponized. They were just studying it. They had just made it more virulent, more contagious. They hadn’t gotten around to tailoring it to your DNA so that it would be much more likely to say get a Caucasian and get an Asian. They can do that.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, that’s important actually because they’re specifically working on those kinds of technologies. That we know, absolutely.
Congressman Dunn:
They absolutely are, no question. And by the way, they’re gathering biological data on all of us. One of the most insidious ways they gather biological DNA sequencing on us is they run a set of blood banks in the United States, the People’s Republic of China. Everybody who charitably goes to donate blood to one of these blood banks, they get sequenced, and it goes right to China.
Mr. Jekielek:
It would seem that would be something that we would want to shut down rather quickly. Or kind of repatriate.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes. So think of all the Chinese corporations that are doing business in the United States that we would want to shut down, that we have not shut down. The Beijing Genomics Institute [BGI Group], comes to mind. But that’s just an example. There’s a whole lot of them.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is a good moment just to talk about this reality. Is there such a thing as an independent company in Communist China, a Communist Chinese company?
Congressman Dunn:
No, by law, there is not. That’s their law. You can’t be. If they thought you were independent, they'd come get you. Hard stop. No, no possibility of an independent company or corporation in China.
Mr. Jekielek:
Are you referring to the 2017 National Intelligence Law of China?
Congressman Dunn:
Well, you’re more erudite than I am on the law. I’m a doctor.
Mr. Jekielek:
No, I mean, there are multiple laws I can think of that would lead to that conclusion. But yes, that’s my understanding as well. It’s my conclusion that there’s nothing that’s independent.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, we, by the way, took this up in a hearing in the Select China Committee, and that was our contention as well. By the way, one of the things that’s nice about the China Committee is it’s completely bipartisan. We typically have absolute unanimity, D’s and R’s, on every subject. It’s kind of a nice change of pace.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, just going, as we finish up, back to this organ harvesting issue, this just strikes me as something that transcends politics. It strikes me as a basic humanity issue.
Congressman Dunn:
It absolutely is. This is human rights writ large. And I think we’re finally swallowing twice and getting the courage to take this subject on and do something about it. I intend to meet with the chair of Energy, Commerce, and Health later this week and ask to bring these acts to the floor with all due haste.
The China Committee has already taken this up in a hearing about organ harvesting. Chairman Moolenaar, God bless him, is willing to talk about it. He’s a nice guy, but you realize this is important. How many people do you think they murder a year for organs? I have my estimates. I want to know yours.
Mr. Jekielek:
I tend to go with the 2020 China Tribunal estimate, which is something to the tune of 60,000 to 90,000 transplants. It’s not necessarily bodies because of this ECMO technology that we discussed earlier. But that’s, you know, over the years, that’s a huge number of people we’re talking about.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, I usually just say 100,000. That’s what our intelligence community believes.
Mr. Jekielek:
Our intelligence community?
Congressman Dunn:
100,000 a year.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’m going to be coming to you for that report.
Congressman Dunn:
I'll share everything we get.
Mr. Jekielek:
Wonderful. Okay. I mean, and horrible.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, and horrible. I finally got NATO, by the way, to pay attention to this stuff. You know, they used to be allergic to talking about anything in the Indo-Pacific. You know, they were so proud of being an Atlantic alliance that they just put on the blinders and did not look beyond that. And now the Secretary General has put as his second primary goal that the NATO alliance allies need to be assisting the United States in working more closely in the Indo-Pacific.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, that’s also excellent to hear, frankly.
Congressman Dunn:
NATO is another hat I wear.
Mr. Jekielek:
Okay. Well, I know what we’re, I absolutely am going to have to have you back to talk about some more of these issues that we’ve just kind of scratched the surface on today.
Congressman Dunn:
Yes, there’s plenty there to look at.
Mr. Jekielek:
Congressman Dunn, a final thought as we finish?
Congressman Dunn:
First off, it’s an honor to be here with you, somebody who’s actually willing to talk about some of the things that I do. I can’t exactly go home and talk with my wife and kids about organ harvesting; I get ostracized. It’s good to have people who are willing to face the bad things in life and to take them up. So if I can help you in your quest, please let me do that, because I feel a little bit alone out here sometimes. |
