On 29 November 2018, Chinese authorities suspended all of Hes research activities, saying his work was "extremely abominable in nature" and a violation of Chinese law. He was sequestered in a university apartment under some sort of surveillance. On 21 January 2019, He was fired from his job at SUSTech and his teaching and research work at the university was terminated. The same day, the Guangdong Province administration investigated the "gene editing baby incident", which is explicitly prohibited by the state. On 30 December 2019, the Shenzhen Nanshan District Peoples Court sentenced He Jiankui to three years in prison and with a fine of 3 million RMB (about US$ in 2019). 
Among the collaborators, only two were indicted – Zhang Renli of the Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences and Guangdong General Hospital, received a two-year prison sentence and a 1-million RMB (about US$) fine, and Qin Jinzhou of the Southern University of Science and Technology received an 18-month prison sentence and a 500,000 RMB (about US$) fine. The three were found guilty of having "forged ethical review documents and misled doctors into unknowingly implanting gene-edited embryos into two women." Zhang and Qin were officially banned from working in assisted reproductive technology for life. In April 2022, He was released from prison.
On 26 November 2018, The CRISPR Journal published ahead of print an article by He, Ryan Ferrell, Chen Yuanlin, Qin Jinzhou, and Chen Yangran in which the authors justified the ethical use of CRISPR gene editing in humans. As the news of CRISPR babies broke out, the editors reexamined the paper and retracted it on 28 December, announcing:Michael W. Deem, an American bioengineering professor at Rice University and his doctoral advisor was involved in the research, and was present when people involved in the study gave consent. He was the only non-Chinese out of 10 authors listed in the manuscript submitted to Nature'. Deem came under investigation by Rice University after news of the work was made public. As of 2022, the university never issued any information on his conduct. He resigned from the university in 2020, and pursued a business by creating a bioengineering and energy consultant company called Certus LLC.
Stanford University also investigated its faculty of Hes confidants including William Hurlbut, Matthew Porteus, and Stephen Quake, his main mentor in gene editing. The universitys review committee concluded that the accused "were not participants in [He Jiankui’s] research regarding genome editing of human embryos for intended implantation and birth and that they had no research, financial or organizational ties to this research."
In response to He's work, the World Health Organization, formed a committee comprising "a global, multi-disciplinary expert panel" called the Expert Advisory Committee on Developing Global Standards for Governance and Oversight of Human Genome Editing "to examine the scientific, ethical, social and legal challenges associated with human genome editing (both somatic and germline)" in December 2018. In 2019, it issued a call to halt all work on human genome editing, and launched a global registry to track research in the field. It had issued three reports for the recommended guidelines on human genome editing since 2019. As of 2021, the committee stood by the grounds that while somatic gene therapies have become useful in several disease, germline and heritable human genome editing is still with risks, and should be banned.
In May 2019, Chinese government prepared gene-editing regulations stressing that anyone found manipulating the human genome by genome-editing techniques would be held responsible for any related adverse consequences. The Civil Code of the People's Republic of China was amended in 2020 that added Article 1009 which states: "any medical research activity associated with human gene and human embryo must comply with the relevant laws, administrative regulations and national regulation, must not harm individuals and violate ethical morality and public interest." It was enacted on 1 January 2021. A draft of the 11th Amendment to the Chinese Criminal Code in 2020 has incorporated three types of crime: the illegal practice of human gene editing, human embryo cloning and severe endangering of the security of human genetic resources; with penalties of imprisonment of up to 7 years and a fine.
As of December 2021, Vivien Marx reported in the Nature Biotechnology article that both children are healthy.