According to USA Today, the Army’s accountability investigation report found that “top officials” at the facility had “multiple warning signs of scientific and safety problems”, yet failed to take action despite incidents between 2007 and 2011 involving anthrax, VX chemical nerve agent, and poisonous botulinum neurotoxin A.
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Potential actions, he said, “run the full gambit, and that’s why we have a chain of command”.
“At no time were lab technicians nor the American public at risk based on these inadvertent shipments”.
“Colonel King was unwilling to take a deeper look at the operations he commanded, and ultimately perpetuated a complacent atmosphere”, the report states, adding that he “repeatedly deflected blame and minimized the severity of incidents”. “So that production mission will no longer be conducted at Dugway Proving Ground it will be done at other laboratories within the DOD”.
Those oversight and laboratory deficiencies may have been contributing factors, but there is insufficient evidence to establish any single failure as the proximate cause for the inadvertent shipment, the report said. On top of that, the Department of Defense will also be creating a biological safety review panel and a central tracking process to screen and validate all requests for biological products.
King, now commander of the 20th Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosive Command at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, said he remains “concerned about the seriousness of the circumstances surrounding” the Dugway anthrax scandal and “will continue to fully cooperate with and assist the Army in its ongoing investigation”.
The names of the 11 other individuals were blacked out in the publicly released report.
“We have transferred control of the biological laboratory at Dugway Proving Ground, from the Army Test and Evaluation Command to the Research, Development and Engineering Command, and eliminated their mission of producing biological agents for export across our customers”, Spoehr said.
The Army report also noted that Dugway “often had a hard time drawing in new highly educated and experienced scientists because of its remote location” – some 90 miles west of Salt Lake City.
The list of labs that had received live anthrax shipments kept growing as Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work ordered a Pentagon-wide review of the military’s testing of pathogens.
In early 2015, the lab in Utah sent live anthrax – the samples were supposed to be inactive – to 194 labs in 50 states and nine foreign countries.
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The US Army says numerous failures are to blame for the accidental shipping of live anthrax to labs around the world for a decade. “When we tested them, 17 of those lots were able to grow, which shows, again, that the type of procedures that we were using were flawed in some way”, Ostrowski said. “We are lacking in terms of the amount of information” on various aspects of the spore-killing process.
