The gulf between the two most powerful nations has widened after the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) revealed that Chinese firms have secured access to U.S. healthcare data by collaborating with universities, hospitals, and various other research organizations.
According to the reports of the agency the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has successfully managed to infiltrate the US healthcare data, including genomic data via a variety of sources both legal and illegal. The agency also claimed that by securing access to the U.S. healthcare data, China is expanding the growth of its Artificial Intelligence and precision medicine firms.
NCSC wrote in a fact sheet that “for years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has collected large healthcare data sets from the U.S. and nations around the globe, through both legal and illegal means, for purposes only it can control. The PRC’s collection of healthcare data from America poses equally serious risks, not only to the privacy of Americans but also to the economic and national security of the U.S.”.
According to the agency, China’s access to the US healthcare and genomic data have raised serious concerns regarding the privacy and national security of the United States, there has been an escalation in the efforts of China during the Covid-19 pandemic with Chinese biotech firm offering Covid-19 testing kits to the majority of the nations and setting up 18 test labs in the past six months, allegedly as part of an attempt to secure health data.
The agency wrote, “the PRC understands the collection and analysis of large genomic data sets from diverse populations helps foster new medical discoveries and cures that can have substantial commercial value and advance its precision medicine industries”.
The Chinese government is using health data and DNA as a weapon to suppress and control its own people, in the Xinjiang province of China the Uighur population had been forced to give fingerprints, blood groups, and other private data.