U.S. health officials have shut down work at a laboratory in Maryland that works on high-risk infectious diseases.
Health officials halted work at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick, also known as IRF-Frederick, after multiple safety violations, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) official told The Epoch Times in an email on May 5.
The official confirmed that one of the incidents was one researcher poking a hole in another researcher’s personal protective equipment.
The other safety violations are not clear.
An email sent to the National Interagency Confederation for Biomedical Research, a consortium of eight agencies that oversees the IRF and other research facilities at Fort Detrick, was not returned. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the NIH that manages the work at the IRF, did not respond to a request for comment….