US Official Alleges 23andMe Sold Americans' DNA Data To Pharma Companies Owned By Foreign Adversaries

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."

While Johnson did not provide specifics about the shareholders or foreign entities that potentially purchased 23andMe's vast trove of its American DNA database, a basic public forensics analysis dive into 23andMe reveals some familiar names among the top shareholders of the now-defunct unicorn startup: BlackRock, Vanguard, and Sequoia Capital.

What's concerning is that BlackRock and Vanguard, some of the world's largest investment companies, are large shareholders of 23andMe and have, according to public records data, high exposure to state-owned enterprises overseas. 

Customers of 23andMe must only now be realizing... 

If what Johnson said is even remotely true, then the genetic pool of millions of 23andMe customers potentially being sold to private companies—domestically or abroad—should be considered a national security threat. 

That's because as explained several years ago by Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a member of the House Committee on Armed Services and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: "That's what this is, where you can actually take someone's DNA, you know, their medical profile, and you can target a biological weapon that will kill that person or take them off the battlefield or make them inoperable."