[Tapper:] Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper. The National Lead now, germs in ziplock bags, Anthrax in unlocked refrigerators. Now that some labs at the CDC are being accused as operating with the same rules as your employee break rooms, Congress wants answers. They're calling the director of the CDC on the carpet today in Washington, D.C. And our chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta is following all of this for us. Sanjay, these are terrifying lapses at least to a layman like myself. Did he give any answers remotely satisfying?
[Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Cnn Chief Medical Correspondent:] I don't think so, Jake, and to be fair, I don't think anything that he would have said could be satisfying and this is pretty frightening stuff and the CDC is supposed to be the best in the world. He focused on this idea that there was a lax culture with regard to safety because the scientists have been around for so long and they're just more comfortable with the viruses and become more careless with it. And I'll tell you, Jake, that is not what the folks wanted to hear on the Hill. Take a listen to this.
[Representative Tim Murphy , Pennsylvania:] I have to think what in heaven's name would go through the minds of scientists thinking a zip lock bag is enough to protect someone from anthrax.
[Director Tom Frieden, Cdc Director:] Once the laboratory has said he has killed anthrax it was handled by the staff in those lower containment laboratories as if it were not infectious. Our subsequent studies suggest that it is likely that it was not, but the core error there was the failure to
[Murphy:] Dr. Frieden, this is like saying I didn't know the gun was loaded, but somebody got shot, but you should always assume it is.
[Gupta:] The CDC director was grilled by a congressional committee on the mishandling of the deadly pathogen as well as some other recent safety lapses including the improper danger of the strain of bird flu as the smallpox vials on the NIH campus.
[Unidentified Male:] One of the more disturbing findings of the CDC's own report.
[Gupta:] Question after question asking how could this happen at the CDC? The gold standard of biosafety.
[Frieden:] If you work with something even if it's a deadly microbe, day after day and year after year you get a level of familiarity that may lead to doing things that you shouldn't do.
[Gupta:] No one has been hurt by these lapses, but Dr. Frieden says that is no excuse.
[Frieden:] The fact that it appears no one was harmed and that there were no releases does not excuse what happened. What happened was completely unacceptable. It should never have happened.
[Gupta:] It was a narrow miss, Jake. There were some potentially really problematic things that occurred, two labs have been shut down. They reassigned personnel and set up an external advisory committee and that will cause a huge culture change in the CDC Jake.
[Tapper:] It's terrifying. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you. Appreciate it.
[Gupta:] You bet. Thank you.
[Tapper:] Coming up, he's not the sort of guy who takes no for an answer and that's what Fox News owner and media mogul, Rupert Murdoch got when he offered to buy CNN's parent company, but will he give up that easily? Plus, if you've had enough of this I have the latest for you, the latest from parody, singer, songwriter, Weird Al. It's called "Tacky" and Weird Al is here to talk about it in the Pop Culture Lead coming up.