A taxpayer-funded Colorado lab that handles the world’s deadliest viruses has suffered a shocking number of accidents in recent years, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Bombshell documents show there were at least 50 incidents involving safety control lapses at Colorado State University between 2020 and 2023, including workers who were bitten by a Covid-infected hamster, splashed in the face with blood from mice with tuberculosis and scratched by rabies-infected cats.
The reports were never disclosed to the public despite occurring at the height of the Covid pandemic, which many officials, including the FBI, suspect was borne out of a similar lab accident in China.
Experts slammed what they called a ‘disturbing lack of transparency’ from the facility and warned it would only erode public trust in America’s public health institutions.
The documents, which include meeting minutes, emails and internal reports, were obtained by FOIA requests by the campaign group the White Coat Waste Project and shared exclusively with DailyMail.com.
They show a pattern of accidents between May 2020 and July 2023 involving disease-ridden cats, rodents and bats that were never announced publicly and that infected researchers.
Officials blamed the increase in accidents on the stress of the pandemic causing staff to ‘rush’ their work.
On two separate occasions in 2020, researchers working with hamsters infected with SARS-CoV-2 were bitten by the rodents and another contracted Zika virus after experimenting with infected mosquitoes.
An August 2022 report stated a researcher experimenting on a mouse infected with a highly infectious strain of tuberculosis was splashed in the face with contents of a syringe, which contained a solution and possibly the animal’s blood, while wearing only ‘eye protection.’
Multiple reports of bites and scratches by rabies-infected cats were discussed in the incident reports, and in late 2022, it was noted a bat infected with MERS-CoV had bitten a researcher while being put back in its cage.
Experts say the newly revealed documents raise serious safety concerns about the university’s plan to construct a new bat lab later this year.
Hellbound and Down 