(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Gov. Tim Walz, D–Minn., has been a longtime vocal supporter of a medical research institute with a long track record of collaborating with a firm labeled by the Pentagon as a “Chinese military company” and with Chinese officials with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Fox News reported that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s running mate has long been aligned with the Hormel Institute, a biomedical research center in Austin, Minn., within the University of Minnesota’s Research and Innovation Office.
As recently as April of this year, a press release from the institute indicated that Walz went to “meet with local leaders and learn of the Institute’s recent progress in groundbreaking biomedical and agricultural research and its expanding education and outreach initiatives.”
“[The Hormel Institute] is no longer a secret, and we don’t want it to be—it’s very un-Minnesotan of us because we’re bragging all the time,” Walz said.
The Hormel Institute has done extensive work with the Beijing Genomics Institute, a group that the Pentagon labeled a “Chinese military company.” Some of this involved research on BGI machines and studies conducted with BGI laboratories in Shenzhen, China, for analysis.
“BGI may be serving, wittingly or unwittingly, as a global collection mechanism for Chinese government gene databases, providing China with greater raw numbers and diversity of human genome samples as well as access to sensitive personal information about key individuals around the world,” The National Security Commission on AI stated in 2022.
The news source reported that concerns about BGI became so prevalent that Congress started considering legislation banning government contracts with the Chinese military subsidiary.
FEC filings also indicated that Dr. Zigang Dong, the former executive director of the Hormel Institute with extensive ties to BGI, has been a longtime and almost exclusive donor to Walz’s political career, including five donations of over $200 to Walz’s congressional campaigns dating back to 2005.
