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.
In late 2022, a bat infected with MERS-CoV bit a researcher while being put back in its cage. CSU has been a premier research facility for studying bats since the 1980s and is widely regarded as a leading institution in infectious disease and veterinary medicine.
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.
