(NEW YORK) — Between March 2020 and February 2022, vaccine-maker Emergent BioSolutions was forced to discard or destroy up to 400 million coronavirus vaccine doses due to the contamination of ingredients, according to a congressional report published Tuesday — a figure that reflects more than five times what was previously disclosed by the beleaguered firm.

Congressional investigators probing the Maryland-based biotech company found that Emergent executives had privately raised urgent quality-control concerns even before the company began manufacturing the vaccines’ key ingredient — despite publicly expressing confidence in their ability to deliver on their multimillion-dollar government contract.

Meanwhile, according to the report, Emergent lab workers intentionally sought to mislead government inspectors about issues at its Bayview, Maryland, plant, and repeatedly “rebuffed” efforts by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson to inspect their facilities.

“Despite major red flags at its vaccine manufacturing facility, Emergent’s executives swept these problems under the rug and continued to rake in taxpayer dollars,” House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said of the report, which determined that the company’s “manufacturing failures and deceptive tactics” led to the largescale waste of ingredients that could have helped make millions of vaccine doses.

None of the compromised batches of the ingredient in question made it into finished vaccine doses released from Emergent’s plant, the committees said.

An Emergent spokesperson said the firm learned of the congressional report from news outlets who reached out seeking comment, and did not address a list of detailed questions from ABC News.

“Emergent has been open and forthcoming with the FDA, Congress and our partners about the work at our Bayview site and the challenges that were encountered, including providing thousands of documents, willingly participating in a congressional hearing and inviting them to visit our facilities,” the spokesperson said.

Tuesday’s joint report from the House Oversight Committee and the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis aggregates the findings of their yearlong probe into Emergent’s quality control issues. As part of their efforts, committee investigators secured internal Emergent emails and interviewed several key witnesses, including senior officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Emergent landed a $628 million contract from the Food and Drug Administration in June 2020 to help develop Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines at its Bayview facility as part of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s rapid vaccine development program.

But according to the committees’ report, issues at Bayview arose even before the firm secured its vaccine-development deal. In a flurry of internal emails during the spring of 2020, executives and managers expressed a growing concern with the firm’s response to an April 2020 FDA audit that identified troubling safety deficiencies.

Sean Kirk, at the time an Emergent executive, wrote in a June 2020 email to a quality-control manager that the situation was “deeply concerning” and demanded that he “fix this.” In email correspondence with another colleague that same day, Kirk wrote that “room for improvement” in the Bayview plant’s quality control systems “is a huge understatement.”

Outwardly, however, the firm claimed its longstanding relationship with U.S. government agencies — which included multiple contracts to develop anthrax vaccines — was evidence of its competence. But internally, said the report, alarm bells continued to sound — and anxiety over Bayview’s readiness grew.

“Of all the things we have to deliver on [Operation Warp Speed], the thing that keeps me up at night is overall perception of state of quality systems at bayview [sic],” Kirk wrote to Emergent CEO Robert Kramer in late June 2020.

The drumbeat of concern over quality control at Bayview reached a fever pitch in the fall of 2020, as internal memos ahead of a September 2020 FDA inspection indicated that executives were fully aware of gaps in quality control measures for months after vaccine development began, according to the congressional report.

“We are not in full compliance yet — BUT — we are making [vaccine] batches NOW,” Emergent’s senior director of quality wrote in an internal email, according to the report. “Our risk is high!”

In November 2020, according to an email obtained by the committees, a consultant with an outside firm warned the company that “ultimately Emergent will have to decide what level of risk they are willing to accept, but this is one of those where you really better listen to me and do exactly what I tell you to.”

“I am stating very loudly that this work is NON-compliant,” the consultant said. “And a direct regulatory risk.”

AstraZeneca representatives who visited Bayview in November 2020 complained that “a lack of fundamentals [was] contributing to bioburden issue,” and that “poor cleaning was part of the root cause” of the persistent contaminations, per the report.

Emergent executives acknowledged in internal emails that, in its rush to ramp up production, it hired temporary employees with “little or no pharmaceutical experience,” and described trash “piling up” in its facilities, said the report. FDA leaders told the committees that Emergent “hired a lot of individuals not as familiar with vaccine manufacturing, that did not have adequate training to do so” — a message it conveyed directly to Emergent as early as April 2020.

The committee found that despite these red flags, Emergent “did not remediate the issues, and problems persisted at the [Bayview] facility for months.” And from late 2020 to early 2021, the committee wrote, a series of contaminations at Bayview led to the disposal of enough vaccine drug ingredients to produce 240 million doses.

“The investigation has revealed that the impact of these issues is larger than previously known,” the committee said in its report, “with more incidents of contamination and millions more vaccines [ingredients] destroyed than previously revealed by Emergent.”

In February 2021, under pressure from manufacturers to tighten up quality controls, Emergent apparently “rebuffed multiple requests from Johnson & Johnson’s quality staff to access Bayview,” the committee wrote. Around the same time, the committee found that Bayview lab workers sought to hide the extent of their failures prior to an FDA site visit.

According to an email written by one of Emergent’s external consultants and obtained by the committees, Emergent employees removed quality-assurance “hold tags” from two batches of Johnson & Johnson vaccine drug ingredients just one hour before FDA inspectors began their tour of the facility. The “hold tags” were bright yellow and indicated that those batches may have quality issues.

“Since the tags were deemed necessary before and after the FDA’s visit, it is my understanding, based on the entirety of what I observed and was told, that the purpose of removing the QA [quality assurance] hold tags was to avoid drawing attention to the two subject containers during the tour by the FDA inspectors,” the consultant wrote.

In their report, the committees indicated that senior leaders at Emergent were aware of the removal of the tags, and that the incident amounted to an “apparent attempt to impede oversight.” The FDA inspectors “still identified serious concerns” during their visit to the site in February 2021, but did not halt production at the facility until April 2021, after Emergent alerted the Biden administration to its cross-contamination incidents.

Dr. Peter Marks, director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told the committees in a briefing that FDA leaders and inspectors bore some responsibility for the extent of leniency they granted Emergent.

“Shame on us for thinking that [Emergent’s] experience in manufacturing would mean they would be able to move ahead and make the vaccines in a high-quality manner that we would expect for an experienced vaccine manufacturer,” Marks told committee members, according to the report.

In May 2021, during a hearing before the Congress, Emergent executives said the company hoped to resume production of the vaccines “in the coming days.” According to the committees, that didn’t happen; three months passed before regulators allowed Emergent to resume vaccine manufacturing in August 2021. But even then, the problems persisted.

From August 2021 to February 2022, the committee found that Emergent manufactured 15 new batches of Johnson & Johnson vaccine, six of which — the equivalent of 90 million vaccine doses — “were either aborted or rejected by Johnson & Johnson.”

All told, Emergent was forced to discard or destroy up to 400 million doses’ worth of the ingredient that helps make the coronavirus vaccine. Company executives had previously pegged the number at 75 million.

In November 2021, the Biden administration canceled Emergent’s contract to continue developing vaccines, which at the time would have paid the company an estimated additional $320 million.

But the real victims, according to the committees, are those who would have benefited from the 400 million doses that failed to materialize.

“Emergent’s failures wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and impacted our country’s ability to meet the urgent, global need for coronavirus vaccines,” the report concludes.

The Emergent spokesperson told ABC News that the company “remains committed to being a trusted partner of the U.S. and allied governments … [and] will continue to use our more than 20 years of public health preparedness experience to help inform an all-of-the-above approach to help prepare for the public health challenges to come.”

On Feb. 7 of this year, Emergent told the committees that its Bayview plant was entering a “maintenance shutdown period.” The company said it hopes to resume manufacturing in August 2022.

Emergent still maintains a federal contract to develop anthrax vaccines.

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(NEW YORK) — Florence, Alabama, murder suspect Casey White has been interviewed extensively since he was apprehended in Indiana on Monday, ending an 11-day, multistate manhunt, and is cooperating with the investigation, Vanderburgh County Sheriff Dave Wedding told ABC News.

After escaped inmate Casey White, 38, and Lauderdale County Assistant Director of Corrections Vicky White, 56, were spotted at an Evansville, Indiana, hotel on Monday, they led police on a car chase in a Cadillac, Wedding said.

The crash ended in a wreck and Vicky White was hospitalized for injuries from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said. She died at a hospital Monday night.

“When we were taking Casey White into custody, upon his surrender he said, ‘Help my wife, she just shot herself,'” Commander Deputy U.S. Marshal Chad Hunt told ABC News’ Good Morning America on Tuesday.

An autopsy is set for Tuesday.

The manhunt began on April 29 when Casey White and Vicky White, who are not related, fled the Lauderdale County Jail. Authorities said they believe Vicky White willingly participated in the escape, which took place on her last day before retirement.

The duo left Alabama in a Ford Edge and ditched the car in Williamson County, Tennessee — about a two-hour drive north of Florence — just hours after the jail break.

“When we located the orange Ford Edge our investigators were able to determine that Casey and Vicky purchased another vehicle out of Tennessee,” Hunt said.

On Monday, U.S. Marshals said investigators were in Evansville following up on a tip after a 2006 Ford F-150 believed to have been used by Casey White and Vicky White was found abandoned at a car wash on May 3. Police were alerted to the vehicle on Sunday.

“We were able to verify the footage — that that was Casey White in the Ford F-150,” Hunt said.

“We obtained information, after we located the [Ford F-150] vehicle, that they had possibly gotten into a beige 2006 Cadillac. We dispatched our people into the area of the car wash and observed the vehicle at a hotel,” U.S. Marshal Marty Keely told GMA.

No one was injured as a result of the escape, Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton said.

Casey White had been in the Lauderdale County Jail awaiting trial for capital murder after allegedly stabbing a woman to death in 2015, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

He will be brought back to Lauderdale County to be arraigned, Singleton said.

“They were located through just police work, good police work, with all the agencies involved,” Keely said. “We also had some information, tips, that came forward. We certainly want to thank the public.”

Vicky White had served for 17 years as a corrections officer in Lauderdale County. Singleton described her as “an exemplary employee” until the escape.

She withdrew approximately $90,000 in cash from multiple banks before allegedly fleeing, Lauderdale County District Attorney Chris Connolly said. He said the banks were local to the Lauderdale County area, but he could not say when she withdrew the money.

On April 18 — just days before the escape — Vicky White closed on the sale of her home for just over $95,000.

“Based on her experience in the corrections industry and law enforcement, this was definitely a well thought-out escape,” Hunt said. “And obviously her pre-planning and her involvement aided in their evasion.”

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(LAS VEGAS) — As the water level of the nation’s largest man-made reservoir keeps receding due to drought, human bodies keep emerging.

For the second time in seven days, human remains have been discovered in Lake Mead near Las Vegas.

U.S. National Park Service rangers said human skeletal remains were found about 2 p.m. Saturday at Lake Mead near Callville Bay. The Clark County Medical Examiner collected the remains and is working to identify the person and determine a cause of death.

The discovery came a week after the decayed body of a man was found stuffed in a steel barrel near the reservoir’s Hemenway Fishing Pier, more than 20 miles from Callville, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

“We believe this is a homicide as a result of a gunshot wound,” Lt. Ray Spencer, head of the LVMPD’s homicide section, said of the body found on May 1.

Spencer said the Clark County Medical Examiner is attempting to identify the body. He said detectives believe the man was killed in the mid-1970s to early 1980s based on his clothing and footwear.

In regards to the second body found on Saturday, LVMPD officials said Monday they have found no evidence to suggest foul play.

Saturday’s discovery of skeletal remains was made by two sisters, Lindsey and Lynette Melvin, who said they were paddle-boarding on the lake because the water was too shallow to go snorkeling.

The sisters told ABC affiliate station KTNV-TV in Las Vegas that they found the skeletal remains when they stopped to explore a sand bar they said used to be underwater before a prolonged drought dropped the water table to historic record lows.

At first, the sister thought it was the remains of a big horn sheep. Then they discovered a human jawbone with teeth still attached and reported them to National Park Service rangers.

“We just really hope that the family of that person finally gets answers and hope their soul is laid to rest peacefully,” Lynette Melvin said.

The sisters said they grew up in Las Vegas and have heard rumors of Mafia hitmen dumping bodies in the lake.

Geoff Schumacher, a mob historian and vice president of exhibits and programs at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, told ABC News on Monday that the discoveries of the bodies, especially the man found in the barrel, have reignited those rumors.

“Certainly, Las Vegas has a history with the mob and there have been people who have gone missing in this area over the years that may have been the victims of mob violence. But I don’t recall a case where we had anything like this where we found a body in a barrel that popped up in Lake Mead,” Schumacher said.

Schumacher said disposing of a body in a barrel is a classic mob technique dating back to the 1880s.

He said one famous case was that of Chicago gangster John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, who helped the mob control Hollywood and the Las Vegas Strip. Roselli disappeared after testifying in 1975 before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about an alleged conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

Roselli’s decomposing remains were discovered in 1976 stuffed inside a 55-gallon steel barrel a fisherman found floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami. An autopsy determined Roselli died of asphyxiation.

Noting that police suspect the slain man found in a barrel in Lake Mead this month may have been killed in the 1970s or 1980s based on his clothing and shoes, Schumacher said the mob was prominent in Las Vegas during that time frame.

“There was a lot of conflict and I would not at all be surprised to find that was the victim of mob violence,” Schumacher said.

He said that as the reservoir, which is formed by Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, continues to recede, more shocking discoveries are likely to emerge, including the wreckage of a B-29 bomber that crashed in the lake in 1947.

“There’s probably a whole bunch of sunken boats out there, too,” Schumacher said. “Who knows what other stuff people have thrown out into the water over the years, physical objects as well as bodies.”

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(BOSTON) — A woman who accused celebrity chef and restauranteur Mario Batali of groping her said Monday she was speaking out “to be able to take control of what happened,” while a defense attorney for Batali called her a liar who is twisting the truth “for money and for fun.”

Natali Tene, 32, alleged Batali, 61, forcibly kissed her and grabbed her breasts, buttocks and groin after meeting him in a Boston bar while having a drink with a friend in March 2017. Batali, she claimed, was “grabbing me in ways I had never been touched before, squeezing between my legs … pulling me closer to him.”

Batali has said he is not guilty of the allegations. At the start of the trial on Monday in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston, Batali told Judge James Stanton he wanted to waive his right to a jury trial, which means Stanton will render the verdict directly.

The alleged assault took place after the accuser asked the chef for a selfie. He smelled of alcohol and appeared intoxicated, she alleged. Tene has also filed a civil complaint for unspecified damages based on the same allegations that will be tried separately from this case.

If found guilty, Batali could face nearly three years in prison and be forced to register as a sex offender.

Under cross-examination from attorney Anthony Fuller, Tene repeatedly said she did not remember text messages she sent friends that described her meeting Batali as “exciting.” In one message, she purportedly suggested to a friend that she could “hopefully” get $10,000 for photos of the encounter.

“I really, honestly thought this is how it all worked. I thought [with] celebrities, when they get in trouble, that’s how it works,” she said. “$10,000 is just an arbitrary number to me.”

Fuller characterized Tene as uncredible and flatly denied that the encounter took place.

“The defense in this case is very simple: It didn’t happen,” he said. The photo evidence “[does] not show any indecent assault and battery.”

In his questioning of Tene, he also referenced her claim that she is clairvoyant, an answer she used to allegedly get out of jury selection in a previous criminal trial.

Four women accused Batali of inappropriate touching in December 2017, which prompted him to leave the ABC daytime cooking show The Chew and remove himself from his restaurant business. In a statement following the accusations, Batali said he was “so very sorry” for disappointing his friends, family, co-workers and fans.

“My behavior was wrong and there are no excuses. I take full responsibility,” he said at the time.

Batali’s company paid a $60,000 settlement following a state investigation that alleged the company promoted a sexualized culture that violated multiple human rights laws.

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(EVANSVILLE, Ind.) — Florence, Alabama, jail employee Vicky White has died Monday after she was apprehended along with murder suspect Casey White in Evansville, Indiana, which ended a 10-day manhunt, according to the Vanderburgh County Coroners Office.

After Inmate Casey White, 38, and Lauderdale County Assistant Director of Corrections Vicky White, 56, were spotted at a hotel, Casey White and Vicky White led police on a car chase that ended with a wreck, Indiana authorities said. Vicky White, who was driving the Cadillac, was hospitalized with “very serious” injuries from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the Vanderburgh County, Indiana, sheriff’s office.

“Can’t clarify how long they have been in Evansville … lucky we stumbled upon them today,” Vanderburgh County Sheriff Dave Wedding said Monday.

He said the pursuit only lasted a few minutes.

“We got a dangerous man off the street today,” Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton said Monday during a press conference.

Casey White and Vicky White, who are not related, fled the Lauderdale County Jail on April 29.

Authorities said they believe Vicky White willingly participated in the escape, which took place on her last day before retirement.

The duo fled Alabama in a Ford Edge and ditched the car in Williamson County, Tennessee — about a two-hour drive north of Florence — just hours after the jail break.

On Monday, U.S. Marshals said investigators were in Evansville, Indiana, following up on a tip after a 2006 Ford F-150 believed to have been used by Casey White and Vicky White was found abandoned at a car wash on May 3. Police were alerted to the vehicle on Sunday.

At the time of his escape, Casey White was facing two counts of capital murder for allegedly stabbing a woman to death in 2015, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

Vicky White has been charged with forgery and identity theft for allegedly using an alias to buy the Ford Edge used to facilitate the escape, according to the Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Office. A warrant was also issued for Vicky White charging her with permitting or facilitating escape.

No one was injured as a result of the escape, Singleton said.

Vicky White died Monday evening at Deaconess Hospital. An autopsy is scheduled for Tuesday.

Casey White will be brought back to Lauderdale County to be arraigned, Singleton said.

“He’s not getting out of this jail again,” Singleton said. “I assure you that.”

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