FIRST ON FOX: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been a longtime vocal supporter of a medical research institute in his home state with a long track record of collaborating with a firm labeled by the Pentagon as a “Chinese military company” and with Chinese officials with controversial ties to the CCP.
Walz, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, has long been aligned with the Hormel Institute, a biomedical research center in Austin, Minnesota, within the University of Minnesota’s Research and Innovation Office. As recently as April, a press release from the institute highlighted how 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 a secret — it’s very un-Minnesotan of us because we’re bragging all the time,” Walz said in the press release. “I think it [the vision of MBiC] fits with where we see ourselves as a state [in the future]… a future around… green energy, sustainable agriculture, and the ability to feed a very hungry world… and the ability to be one of the nation’s designated biotech hubs.”
The Hormel Institute has done extensive work with the Beijing Genomics Institute, a group labeled by the Pentagon as a “Chinese military company,” some of which involved research on BGI machines and studies conducted with BGI laboratories in Shenzhen, China, for analysis.
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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, has a long history of promoting a medical research outfit tied to the CCP. (Getty Images)
“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 said in 2022.
Concerns about BGI are so prevalent that Congress has weighed legislation to ban government contracts with the Chinese military subsidiary, Fox News Digital previously reported.
Beyond the extensive ties to BGI, the former executive director of the Hormel Institute, and the timing of his 2019 resignation, has drawn controversy in its own…
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