On Monday, 23andMe shares crashed after the genetic testing startup filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. While the fate of millions of Americans’ DNA data is now subject to a court-supervised sale, a new report suggests much of it may have already been sold—potentially to pharmaceutical firms, including some tied to foreign adversaries.
James O’Keefe of O’Keefe Media Group published a video on Monday featuring an undercover journalist speaking with Nathaniel Johnson, a policy advisor at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, who warned her, “Do not give your information to those people [23andMe]… they sell it to other people.”
The journalist asked Johnson: “Do they sell it [DNA data of customers] to Russia?”
He responded, “They sell it to everybody.”
Johnson explained: “There’s a clause in their contract, that basically says, like, we can give your information to our shareholders. So that they can do stuff. And all of their shareholders are, like pharmaceutical companies. But some of those pharmaceutical companies are based in other countries, and those pharmaceutical companies in other countries are like the property of, like the Ministry of Defense of Russia. Or, like, owned, by China.”