Wuhan on the Rockies? Biosafety committee found dozens of accidents at NIH-funded lab in 3 years

Fort Collins, Colorado, could have become the next Wuhan, China, with dozens of lab accidents just this decade involving outbreak-prone pathogens in animals including coronaviruses, Zika and tuberculosis, according to a group that fights taxpayer-funded animal testing.

The "incident reports" from Colorado State University's Institutional Biosafety Committee minutes, obtained by Colorado Open Records Act request, detail 64 lab accidents from 2020 through 2023, the White Coat Waste Project said this week.

The National Institutes of Health chipped in more than $8 million in 2021 and 2023 to build a new CSU bat lab and import bats with Nipah virus and SARS-related coronaviruses via the EcoHealth Alliance, WCW discovered last fall, dubbing the campus "Wuhan West."

I think that what I’m saying here is relevant across our entire society, including scientific labs. I’ve been in the hospital a couple of times last year. Of the dozens of people I came into contact with, there were a literal handful I thought had normal competence. Some of them may have been competent, but they spoke only a few halting words in English, which came damned close to getting me killed. Whenever I had the chance, I asked the competent people about the labor situation. Here’s what they had to say. DEI and ESG were having a negative effect on the staff and the outcomes of patients. The incoming generation of workers is entitled and simply won’t do some jobs which they consider beneath them. The general level of competence in the workplace has decreased. Workers know several different genders but are not great on thinking or figuring things out. There just aren’t enough workers to choose from, so institutions hire whatever if available. (Economists call this “over employment.” That means the people hired are not suitable.)

In the case of biolabs, they get a grant, and then they must staff it. If there aren’t any competent people available, they’ll take what they can get. A lab containing agents that could wipe out a significant number of people if the agents got loose, is not the place for this. But if they don’t staff up with whatever they can get, they lose the grant and probably all future grants. What to do, what to do?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.