Reports of Colorado State U. Lab Staff Bitten & Scratched by Animals Infected with Covid and Other Pathogens

Reports of Colorado State U. Lab Staff Bitten & Scratched by Animals Infected with Covid and Other Pathogens

The Daily Mail has an exclusive report on documents revealing over 50 incidents of laboratory staff at Colorado State University being bitten and scratched while working with test animals that were infected with covid and other pathogens.

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.

"The information obtained through FOIA demands from @WhiteCoatWaste is really disturbing, as is the fact that @ColoradoStateU is building a facility to do bat research along with EcoHealth Alliance, likely parent of the COVID-19 virus"

via @DavidStrom https://t.co/Y1qPTyDWdH

— White Coat Waste Project 🥼🗑️ (@WhiteCoatWaste) March 26, 2024

While 50 bites and scratches over a three year period may seem significant, working with live animals is a real challenge. Depending on the nature of the experiment, it may not be possible to euthanize or anesthetize them for procedures. I suspect most animals are are not going to lay passively while being prodded and poked, either. A better way to view this data would be the trends (e.g., are the number of incidents increasing?).

It is also important to note that laboratory animals are bred and free of any pathogens, except for those in the study. Another aspect that is not clear from the report is exactly how many staff members became sick with the pathogen the animal was infected with because of the bites or scratches.

Furthermore, the university may have a robust reporting process for animal incidents. Not every laboratory worker may report an animal-caused injury. So, it may be to the school’s credit their lab workers filed all of these reports.

However, what is troubling is that the institution was fined last May for improper treatment of animals in a vaccine study.

Colorado State University was found to be in violation of regulatory guidance in the negligent treatment of animals in its research program by the United States Department of Agriculture. According to the university, the citations are both associated with a study evaluating a vaccine to prevent hemorrhagic diseases in rabbits. This disease cannot be contracted by humans, but it can by animals found in Colorado.

According to the Colorado Department of Agriculture, this disease is extremely contagious and fatal, oftentimes without visible symptoms in rabbits.

…CSU was cited for violating Section 2.31 Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. The report from the USDA states that 12 rabbits reached temperatures over the humane endpoint of 41 degrees Celsius, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee-approved protocol for rabbits. Six of the rabbits were found dead, and the others were euthanized.

“Failure of the research personnel to adhere to the humane endpoints in the IACUC-approved protocol resulted in these animals experiencing unnecessary unrelieved pain and distress and constitutes a significant change that was not reviewed or approved by the committee,” the report reads.

The report explains CSU also violated Section 2.36 Annual Report for not reporting 26 animals “used in research involving accompanying pain or distress to the animals for which the use of appropriate anesthetics and analgesics were withheld.”

If CSU staff is going to take shortcuts with the pain-relief, what other protocol would lab workers forgo if it is not convenient? This is an important question to get serious answers to, as the university has been chosen as the site for a new taxpayer-funded lab that will import bats from around the world and experiment on dangerous diseases.

And its partner in this project is EcoHealth, which is the research group tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology bat research that appears to have been the source point of the covid pandemic.

The multi-million-dollar project is a collaboration between Dr Anthony Fauci’s old department at the National Institutes of Health, Colorado State University (CSU) and EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), a controversial research group at the center of the Covid lab leak theory.

Proposals seen by this website show how the 14,000sq-ft facility could store and study some of the most transmissible pathogens on the planet – including Ebola, Nipah virus and Covid-19.

A high level of safety must be maintained when studies involve viruses as lethal as Ebola and Nipah (two viruses I have discussed before at Legal Insurrection).

Clearly, a high level of scrutiny is very appropriate for the new facility; its construction is slated to begin in late 2025.

And anything resembling “gain of function work” should be prohibited . . . especially in connection with “EcoHealth” projects.

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