Comment by fivefifty

There is an interesting (and frankly terrifying) book called biohazard by the former head of the soviet covert bioweapons program during the cold war and it seemed it was not that uncommon to have random screw ups at even high level labs resulting in the deaths of sometimes a lot of unfortunate people. Of course there was also a culture of cover up and not admitting mistakes as well for all sorts of reasons including the fact that they aren't supposed to be working on bioweapons in the first place as well as the usual punishments for screwing something up.