Everybody makes mistakes oh yes they do! Yer sister and yer brother and your bioweapons facility too

“Big people small people, matter of fact, all people, everybody makes mistakes oh yes they doooooo.” (click on lyrics to watch!)

That’s what Big Bird sang on my favorite Sesame Street album. And it came to mind when I read about the bioweapons boo boos that are rife inUniversity biodefense labs nationwide. The Sunshine Project outs some of them - that is from the biosafety level three labs that are forthcoming and open about admitting their mistakes. So, they warn, the incidents they’ve dug up are probably a conservative estimate of how often this happens.

Here’s a laundry list of their mistakes. Errors include researchers jabbing themselves with biological agent infected needles: there’s one anthrax needle, one unidentified pathogen needle, and another that was either plague or anthrax. There are a couple other incidents that include unauthorized research and alarms not sounding when exhaust fans failed.

The Sunshine Project is unflinching in its censure:

What is needed, according to the Sunshine Project, is to reduce the number of facilities and people handing bioweapons agents in the United States and to bring the fragmented and frequently unenforced hodgepodge of federal biolab rules and suggestions together into a unified, mandatory, and enforced system that ensures laboratory safety and public accountability

And this is coming from the same non-profit organization that dug up enough dirt on the University of Texas’ bioweapons lab practices that the CDC had to shut down their work on bioweapons.