Hopefully they're smart enough not to brag about it now that the feds are involved.
Sign of times though - calling law enforcement when you find old pathogen and its vaccine in a freezer in a vaccine development lab. MBA types. In order to mentally train myself for an MBA career i need to start calling law enforcement anytime i find a bug in the 20+ years old code.
It's not just MBA types. Needlessly escalating up the chain as a means to shirk responsibility is a broader societal trend. Post "what do I do" about anything anywhere short of a prepper forum and people will tell you to call some external authority, the police, your landlord, a credentialed professional, etc, etc, and wash your hands of the situation. Worse still, they will deride others for taking the responsibility of doing things themselves.
Odds are there's nothing of note in those vials. It's either a joke or the lab was previously doing something that's Nth order smallpox related so someone wrote smallpox on the vials because what's in them bears some logical relationship to something about smallpox, not because it's literally smallpox. And even if there is smallpox in there this is a facility that already works with similarly nasty things so they should already know how to deal with it.
Had the person cleaning the fridge brought this to their supervisor and they decided to dispose of it however the CDC will (there's published best practices for this stuff) people would be screeching about "why didn't you call the .gov to save you" as if the .gov would do anything other than follow the same best practices for disposal with the added extra step of collecting evidence to leave the door open to prosecuting people should they feel the can do so and stressing the crap out of everybody in the process.
Edit: Why don't any of the people that have decided my comment is wrongthink do me the courtesy of explaining why I'm so wrong?
Maybe the risk is low, but the severity is very high. If there's an outbreak, we may never get it contained again. So, follow the appropriate protocols and hopefully no one gets hurt. If it turns out they were a prank or not viable, no one gets hurt either. This has nothing to do with shirking responsibility. It's quite the opposite. Going all cowboy on the handling of the samples would be incredibly selfish. For what? The ability to tell a story of sticking it to the man?
[1] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...
I teach my kids how to use a knife. I panic when my baby finds a knife, but when the baby gets a few years older I will make them qualified to hold a knife.
If you are reasonably intelligent and able bodied (able bodied differs depending on the task) you can learn to do anything a human can do. However there isn't time to learn everything there is to know. Some things (brain surgery) take years and have a well earned reputation of being hard. Some things are easy.
Part of disposing of this is proper documentation of your process all along the way. The documentation is probably harder than the actual work. Because mistakes are so dangerous we should put you in prison for attempting to destroy a sample and failing. If you destroy a sample you need to prove you did it correctly, the documentation that you did that should be complex.
When you see something that does not seem belong where it is, you cannot pretend that did not see it. In fact, willful blindness is a thing. There is a reason CYA has become a well known acronym.
1) How do you decide if something “belongs where it is”?
2) If a large proportion of a society agreed on a decision function and behaved as you suggest, is there a straightforward way an adversary could take advantage of this situation?
3) Bonus: Is there evidence this is happening today?
Experience and training. I just went through somewhat extensive system testing. Without going into specifics, there were several instances of 'expected behavior' vs 'actual behavior'. But this example may be a little too esoteric.
Lets say I walk around my house and see a book nested in a tree growing next to the fence. Does the book belong there? I would venture it does not. Reasonable person standard probably could apply here.
>> 2) If a large proportion of a society agreed on a decision function and behaved as you suggest, is there a straightforward way an adversary could take advantage of this situation?
Yes. And, in a sense, it is already being exploited in most visible way via social media. But I disagree with the phrasing of your question, because I think US society already behaves this way, which is precisely why it is being exploited.
>> 3) Bonus: Is there evidence this is happening today?
See #2.