Chinese genetic firm BGI raises White House ire with Middle East coronavirus tests while US struggles to provide adequate kits

Shenzhen-based BGI Group built a testing centre in Abu Dhabi in 14 days, capable of tens of thousands of tests a day

Separately, Israel’s government said BGI would help it carry out 20,000 tests per day

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A laboratory technician with the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) simulates the loading of primer onto a VereChip Lab-on-Chip, part of the Covid-19 test kits at the CBRNE Laboratory in Singapore, on Thursday, March 5, 2020. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 4:14pm, 20 May 2020Updated: 4:14pm, 20 May 2020

While the US struggled to come up with enough tests to manage the world’s largest coronavirus outbreak, a Chinese genetics company took less than a month to build testing centres thousands of miles away in the Middle East.

By moving swiftly, Shenzhen-based BGI Group won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with traditional US allies including Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Now the US is warning those countries that they may be giving Beijing access to highly prized personal data that will propel economies of the future.

The push against adoption of Chinese testing technology is part of a wider row between the US and China that’s complicated global efforts to mount a response to the pandemic. President Donald Trump accuses China of hiding information about the origins of the outbreak and has withheld funding from the World Health Organisation, saying it’s too influenced by Beijing. China says the White House is trying to divert attention from its own failings as American deaths soar.

A US official described BGI to Bloomberg as the “Huawei of genomics,” a reference to the Chinese telecommunications firm, Huawei Technologies, that the US has been seeking to block from digital network deals on information-security grounds. Washington has raised its concerns about BGI with Mideast partners, the official said on condition of anonymity, warning them that Beijing could glean information of intelligence value and share it with their adversaries like Iran, one of China’s top trading partners in the region.

A technician works at a genetic testing laboratory of BGI, formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute, in Kunming of Yunnan province on December 26, 2018. Photo: Reuters

That argument doesn’t seem to be holding much sway over US allies, as China turns its experience in managing the crisis into a global opportunity. Nor has the US, with a virus death toll nearly triple any other country’s, been able to offer much of an alternative.