It was a car wreck on Interstate 59 in Mississippi that gave a handful of lab monkeys their first taste of freedom on Tuesday afternoon, but after a chaotic multi-agency response and confusion over whether the animals were carrying several serious viral infections, only a few made it out of the ordeal alive.

The crash was reported at around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday just north of Heidelberg, where a truck hauling 21 rhesus macaques from Tulane University's National Biomedical Research Center on the northshore hit a median and flipped, ejecting eight of the animals from their cages.

Although initial alerts issued by the Jasper County Sheriff's Department claimed the "aggressive" monkeys were infected with herpes, COVID-19 and hepatitis C, Tulane University officials soon clarified that they wer

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