What We Caught in Beijing

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What We Caught in Beijing

The Drey Dossier

May 20, 2026

COVID-19 left scars on this country we have never properly named, and it’s getting harder to pretend they’ve gone anywhere. 1.2 million Americans died, more than every war this country has ever fought combined, except the Civil War. People lost mothers and fathers, I lost people I loved, and people I loved lost others, and we all still carry that grief. Somewhere along the way I figured out that the country I’m carrying it in would rather I didn’t.

The official posture hardened around 2022: we cashed the last of our stimulus checks, the economy reopened, the death toll was now endurable, and we were all supposed to forget. There is no memorial, no day on the calendar, no name on a wall. The kids who lost two years of school still talk about it the way veterans talk about a deployment. I still get nervous coughing in public. There is a low hum of distrust in this country that is getting louder every year, and it seems to be at the root of almost every other thing that has broken since.

Every so often somebody walks into a public room and treats the dead with the seriousness they deserve. On May 13, in the Senate Homeland Security Committee, a career CIA officer named Andrew Erdman testified under oath about whether the United States had covered up the origins of COVID. He spoke, in the hedged careful language intelligence officers use when they are trying to be accurate rather than dramatic, about analysts who concluded multiple times between 2021 and 2023 that the virus came from a Wuhan laboratory leak and were retaliated against, about colleagues who reached the opposite conclusion and received bonuses, and about EcoHealth Alliance, the organization that funneled NIH money to the Wuhan lab in the first place, ending up on the WHO investigation team. The people whose money may have funded the research that caused the pandemic were the people investigating whether the pandemic came from a lab. I believed him.

And yet—not a single Democratic senator attended. The press barely covered it. The full hearing on YouTube has somewhere around 70,000 views, which is a low number for a hearing on the deadliest pandemic in a century and a high number for almost nothing else. The networks that spent two years calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory have not run a single retraction, and they are not going to. The docket is full.

The right has used this story just as dishonestly, dismantling institutions that should have been reformed and giving a generation permission to disengage from science altogether, which is the posture every dismantling I am about to describe came out of. The lab leak being likely does not make the way the right has used it honest. But I am the person supposed to be voting for the other side of this, and the party I have been told for years is the adult in the room could not be bothered to occupy a chair for the deadliest pandemic in a century. Disgusts me.

The hearing was about something quieter than a virus. It was the only public room in five years where the dead were being treated as worth a serious conversation, and the country did not notice. We have organized ourselves not to look at what happened to us. That refusal, I want to argue, is what made everything else possible. Let me show you what I mean.

The Plan in Print

While the dying was still happening, somebody was already drafting what would replace what had failed. Read the sequence of dates carefully, because the dates are the argument.

In 2021, with the morgues still backed up and the daily death toll still being read out on the evening news, a former FDA commissioner named Scott Gottlieb sat down and wrote a five-hundred-page book about what the next pandemic response should look like. Gottlieb had been FDA commissioner during Trump’s first term, which means he had spent two years inside the executive branch watching how the public health system was actually supposed to work. He decided, in writing, that it shouldn’t. The book is called Uncontrolled Spread. The argument runs straight through every chapter. The next pandemic, he wrote, should be handled by private companies, private labs, and private data, with the CDC, the WHO, and any other public agency cut out of the response entirely. His name is on the cover.

Then he took the chair of Illumina, the American company that does roughly 80% of the DNA sequencing on the planet. Then, one by one, the public agencies he had written against were dismantled. USAID, which had led American Ebola response since the 1990s and had people on the ground in central Africa when this whole story began, was shuttered. The United States withdrew from the WHO in January, severing the official channel through which CDC scientists used to talk to their international counterparts. The NIH cut $2.4 million from a hantavirus pilot at the West African Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, despite the virologists publicly saying there was no evidence the work was unsafe. And HHS, under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., gutted the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, which had investigated cruise ship outbreaks for forty years at a cost to the federal government of zero dollars, because the program was funded entirely by cruise line fees. The program literally cost taxpayers nothing. They cut it anyway.

Now look at what happened next. One year after the NIH killed the hantavirus pilot, hantavirus appeared on a Dutch-flagged cruise ship, killed three people, and triggered the evacuation of sixteen Americans to a quarantine ward at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, some of whom remain in isolation as of this writing. The vessel was exactly the kind of vessel the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program used to investigate, six months after the Vessel Sanitation Program was eliminated. I cannot tell you why a virus a federal pilot had been studying showed up on a vessel the federal program designed to study it could no longer reach. I can tell you that if you wanted to design a national experiment in what happens when you remove the eyes that watch for an outbreak, this is what it would look like. Either that is a coincidence, or it is not.

What was left standing, when the dismantling was finished, was private. The companies are private, the machines are private, the databases are private, and there is no federal agency left to call when an outbreak hits. The architecture in Gottlieb’s book is the only architecture we have.

That architecture has a substrate, and the substrate is sequencing. Sequencing was a niche scientific tool when Gottlieb wrote his book in 2021. It is becoming the substrate underneath cancer treatment, vaccine development, newborn screening, pandemic surveillance, and the medical AI that will eventually do clinical diagnosis. Whoever owns the largest database also owns the predictive layer that insurance pricing, hiring decisions, and surveillance will increasingly run on. Two companies operate at the scale required to compete for that prize. One is Illumina. The other is its Chinese state-affiliated counterpart, BGI. Everywhere else on the planet, the choice is functionally Illumina or nothing.

The fight that matters now is over Africa. Humans originated on the continent, which means African populations carry the most genetic diversity on the planet and remain the most underrepresented in existing databases, which makes African genomes the most valuable dataset in modern science. Everybody in this industry knows it. The question has never been whether to capture it. The question has been how, and on whose terms, and at what cost to the people whose DNA is in the test tube. I went looking at how the genomes are being moved now, and I found the paperwork sitting on the State Department’s own website.

Between December and February, the Trump administration signed nineteen bilateral health cooperation agreements with African nations, including Kenya, Uganda, and the DRC. Each agreement is attached to a separate legally binding document, written in standard State Department prose, called a Specimen Sharing Agreement. Read it cold and it sounds reasonable. The partner country shall provide the United States Government with biological specimens and genetic sequence data of pathogens with epidemic potential. The United States Government may share that material with private companies. And, in a clause that does most of the work, the partner country’s compliance with the agreement is a condition of continued American health funding. Sign and we fund your hospitals. Don’t sign and we don’t. There is no third option. The genomes flow from them to the U.S. Government, from there to whichever American biotech the U.S. picks, and Africa gets to buy back the finished products at full price like everyone else. Kenya signed first. Within a week, a Kenyan court suspended the framework over data security concerns. Everyone else signed anyway.

There is a second name in the room. The British sequencing competitor, Oxford Nanopore, has been quietly accumulating a new major shareholder. Larry Ellison, whose other company, Oracle, owns Cerner and most of the federal medical records of this country, has been buying his way up to over 9% of it. The consumer-facing side of the same architecture is being assembled at home. RFK Jr., who has spent the last year explaining to the country that vaccines are dangerous, announced in the same window that he wants every American in a wearable health device within four years. The Vice President quietly froze new Medicare enrollments for home health and hospice in the same month. The caregivers who used to look after the elderly are being cut out of the system that paid them, and the people they used to look after are being handed a wristwatch and a friendly suggestion to track their own vitals.

The mechanism is going to be cultural. The wearable will be handed to influencers, sold as self-care, blessed by the right podcasts, made socially expensive to refuse, the way ozempic and the cold plunge and the ice bath got handed to influencers. By the time most people notice they have been measured, the measurement will feel like a choice they made themselves. This is how American authoritarianism arrives in 2026. It arrives as a fitness studio push notification, dressed up as a friend asking if you’ve been getting enough sleep.

Read the sequence of dates one more time. Book in 2021. Illumina chair in 2022. Public agencies dismantled by 2026. Wearable announcement in the same month as the outbreaks I am about to describe. The whole architecture runs on private custody of what used to be public catastrophe. Either it is a coincidence that every cut and every contract and every appointment lines up with the plan written in a 2021 book by the man who now chairs the company executing it, or it is not.

The First Test

On the morning Andrew Erdman was being sworn in, Donald Trump’s plane was descending toward Beijing. The delegation was the usual gaggle of tech bros: Musk, Huang, Cook, bankers and chip makers and car people, the kinds of names you would expect on a trade trip with China. Seventeenth on the official list, in a section nobody bothered to read closely, was a name I did not recognize. Jacob Thaysen. He runs Illumina.

Thaysen was the only biomedical executive on the trip, and his presence was anomalous on its face. Pharma CEOs love these trips. They get the photo op with the foreign leader. They get to announce an investment, a partnership, a new facility. They get to stand at a podium in a good suit and be the face of American innovation for a news cycle. AstraZeneca’s CEO went on Keir Starmer’s January trip to Beijing and publicly announced a $15 billion investment. Bayer’s CEO did the same on the German Chancellor’s visit. Illumina, alone among them, declined to comment, and clarified separately that Thaysen had not flown on Air Force One but had arrived in Beijing on his own during the summit. Whatever he was doing, the company wanted him not to be photographed doing it next to the president. So I went looking for why he needed to be there at all.

The answer is sitting in plain sight in his own company’s filings. In February of 2025, Beijing had sanctioned Illumina back, banning exports and placing the company on the Unreliable Entities List. Illumina’s China revenue dropped from $502 million in 2021 to $242 million. The export ban lifted in November, but the listing did not, which means every Chinese customer still has to clear government approval to buy. That leverage is what Thaysen flew over to release. The company that runs 80% of global sequencing was on a state-to-state negotiating mission with the Chinese government, conducted off the record, four days before the WHO would declare an emergency over an outbreak in two countries whose genomes Illumina was contractually positioned to receive.

Four days after both planes were back on American ground, the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern over an outbreak of Bundibugyo Ebola in the DRC and Uganda. Eight confirmed cases, 246 suspected, 80 dead, no approved vaccine, no approved treatment. It was the eighth such declaration in twenty years.

Now look at the dates. Uganda signed its Specimen Sharing Agreement on December 22, 2025. The DRC signed on February 26, 2026. The America First Global Health Strategy went live in April. The outbreak hit in May. The genome of a novel Ebola outbreak is flowing, right now, as I am writing this, from two countries that signed under threat of losing their health budgets to the United States Government, and from there to whichever American company is chosen to receive it. Most likely Illumina. Most certainly somebody who is going to make a great deal of money. Either someone planned this, or the timing is one of the strangest coincidences in modern public health.

What I cannot get past is that 1.2 million Americans died from this and we built nothing for them. No memorial, no day on the calendar, no name on a wall. I think that is the point. If a memorial existed, people would stand in front of it and ask why, and there is no version of why that does not end at somebody who would have to take responsibility. That is never going to happen, because the same people who would have had to admit fault are the same people who got to write the rules of what came next.

The grief we did not get to have is what made everything else possible. A country that had grieved would not be cutting deals this week with the country whose lab we appear to have helped fund. A country that had grieved would have noticed when its Ebola agency was shuttered. A country that had grieved would not be handing the genome of the next outbreak to the chairman of a company who wrote a book in 2021 about how the next outbreak should be handled by his company. The architecture cannot exist if we ever fully grasp how the public one failed. So the agencies have to remain discredited, the dead have to remain uncounted, and the mourning has to remain unfinished.

And in the space where the mourning was supposed to live, we built this.