Happy Halloween: A Truckload of Large, 'Aggressive,' Disease-Ridden Monkeys from Tulane Crashed and They All Escaped
Lucky for me that I made revisiting 28 Days Later part of my annual October Horror movie viewing. If you're not familiar, this is the very first scene in what has now become a Horror franchise (don't they all now?) with its third installment streaming now. Some Animal Rights zealots break into a research lab in the UK. Find out they're holding chimps in cages. And in the all time Horror movie trope, the scientist tries to warn them but ... they ... just ... won't ... listen! So they open up the cages and all the Rage Virus-fueled apes eat their faces, set off a global extinction-level event, and leave Cillian Murphy roaming around London in hospital scrubs after being in a coma for four weeks.
I don't remember what the consensus was in 2002 when this movie came out. Maybe it seemed highly implausible. After all, it's not like we had any experience with laboratories screwing around with deadly, highly infectious viruses in a way that they could ever be released into the general population and unleash a worldwide catastrophe. That probably sounded like crazy talk.
But in the Year of Our Lord 2025, it just means you're following current events:
Fox News - The search continues after a truck hauling monkeys from Tulane University in New Orleans flipped on a Mississippi interstate Tuesday, freeing several large, "aggressive" monkeys.
After the wreck, which happened north of Heidelberg, multiple rhesus monkeys escaped, according to the Jasper County Sheriff's Office.
"The monkeys are approximately 40lbs, they are aggressive to humans, and they require PPE [personal protective equipment] to handle," the sheriff's office wrote in a Facebook post.
The animals carry hepatitis C, herpes and COVID, deputies said, though the university later said the animals were not exposed to any diseases, the Clarion-Ledger newspaper reported.
On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that three of the 21 monkeys on the truck remained on the loose.
Tulane University told Fox News Digital the Tulane National Biomedical Research Center provides its nonhuman primates to other research organizations to advance scientific discovery.
"The primates in question belong to another entity and are not infectious," the university said."We are actively collaborating with local authorities and will send a team of animal care experts to assist as needed."
School officials did not confirm the number of monkeys that escaped, the number of monkeys killed or the number of monkeys that remain caged.
Nice try, Tulane. But we've heard this "there's nothing to worry about here" song and dance before. In fact, it's always the first thing to come of the mouths of the people in the lab coats once they get caught playing god and their experiments go horribly, horribly wrong.
As with war, the first casualty of a crash that releases infected monkeys into the human population is the truth. Riddle me this, Green Wave nerds. If a bunch of "aggressive" shit-flinging primates carrying Hep-C, Herpes and Covid aren't infectious, then who is? Why give them the Triple Crown of infectious diseases in the first place if it has no affect on them? And if they're not a threat to anyone, why bother sending a team of "animal care experts" to take out 18 of the 21 (so far)? Why not save your money and just send them on their monkey way to go live happy lives in the wild instead of hunting them down like an army of Orcs?
Advertisement
Yeah, you're not fooling anyone with this. When this 3-layer parfait of diseases inevitably spreads to the human population of Mississippi and then to the rest of the world, we won't be wondering where it came from and how it could've happened. And if by some chance humanity survives, next time you're shipping your hairy little bioweapons from New Orleans to wherever, send them in an armored car.
Until then, lets send in this guy to find the last three who are still at large: