US firm stops selling DNA collection equipment to China

Massachusetts-based biotech firm Thermo Fisher says it will stop selling equipment to Xinjiang, the province where Chinese authorities have launched a statewide campaign to monitor and track Uighurs. It told The New York Times the new decision was “consistent with Thermo Fisher’s values, ethics code, and policies.”

From 2016 to 2017, China ordered almost 36 million people to get medical checkups, according to numbers reported by state-run Xinhua News. Blood samples, fingerprints, photos of irises, and other identifying data were collected, as Human Rights Watch reported in 2017. Thermo Fisher supplied some of the lab equipment used to collect DNA, patent filings obtained by the NYT revealed. The company’s 2017 annual report stated that…

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