by Amanda Head
Two researchers have been charged with conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox and making false statements.
New documents released by Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., reveal that two National Institutes of Health scientists were charged with conspiring to smuggle monkeypox virus samples into the United States after returning from the Congo. The documents released by Congress revealed a decade of warnings and workarounds in the handling of dangerous pathogens.
In January, NIH Rocky Mountain Laboratories virologists Vincent Munster and Claude Kwe arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport from the Republic of the Congo, where a monkeypox outbreak was active.
On arrival, they declared that a large black case contained only “diagnostics and testing equipment.” Federal investigators later discovered 113 microcentrifuge tubes held in Styrofoam coolers inside. FBI testing of 20 tubes found 17 with deactivated monkeypox virus, one with chickenpox virus, and two with human DNA.
As a result, on June 2, Munster and Kwe were charged with conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox and making false statements. Senate investigators described the episode as symptomatic of a deeper culture in which biosafety shipping rules were often treated as flexible. The defendants were released on conditions to appear in Michigan for a hearing on June 24, and were required to surrender their passports, according to The Missoula Current News.
EcoHealth Hand-Carry Proposal (2011)
The documents released by Paul also show that in September 2011, EcoHealth Alliance researcher Jon Epstein emailed Munster and colleagues about shipping bat samples from Congo to Montana. Paul earned his medical degree from Duke University School of Medicine in 1993, and specializes in ophthalmologic surgery.
World Courier could not transport dry ice from Brazzaville, so Epstein suggested shipping sera and swabs in lysis buffer (a solution used to break down cellular membranes) on wet ice while proposing Munster “hand carry” another set in viral transport media on dry ice during a later trip. “I think you can take up to 2kg with you on commercial flights,” he wrote.
The exchange appears to display an early willingness within the network of colleagues to bypass standard cold-chain shipping for high-risk field samples.
MERS Shipment Mislabeling (2013)
In 2013, NIH distributed the Jordan strain of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) to labs including Munster’s at Rocky Mountain Laboratories and Ralph Baric’s at the University of North Carolina (UNC).
The shipment to UNC was labeled “diagnostic, not infectious,” and lacked a proper itemized list or dangerous-goods declaration, and was initially handled as Category B instead of the required Category A infectious substance labeling. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, "A Category A infectious substance is a highly dangerous biological material capable of causing permanent disability, life-threatening disease, or death in otherwise healthy humans or animals."
UNC’s Environmental Health and Safety office flagged the error as “a big problem,” highlighting repeated mislabeling practices that understated the risk of live virus materials.
In December 2021, Munster informed colleagues he planned to arrange an international shipment of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 “without the involvement of NIH shipping.” An NIH official responded in writing that such a move risked “a Washington Post moment or congressional inquiry,” predicting accurately Paul's present investigation.
The warning noted that Rocky Mountain Laboratories had no approved shipping procedures on file, underscoring internal awareness of compliance gaps even for high-profile, time-sensitive variants during the pandemic.
History of incidents of lost shipments of pathogens
Emails from 2022 reference multiple lost shipments. In one exchange, a colleague asked Munster if he had recovered luggage containing Congo Basin monkeypox material.
In another exchange, a collaborator urged Munster to contact DARPA quickly because “numbnuts lost the first shipment” of coronavirus samples en route to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
Munster replied he would follow up. The incidents point to recurring transit failures involving select agents and related materials.
In April 2024, Kwe reported that he and colleagues had returned from the Congo with DNA from monkeypox (MPOX) positive patient samples. An NIH sequencing request logged 35 samples derived from human patients and confirmed they contained or were derived from a regulated “select agent.”
Munster responded that no material had been recovered from a prior lost shipment. The exchange demonstrates that similar returns of monkeypox-related materials from the region had occurred at least once before the recent incident. The Munster-Kwe case is the latest example in a pattern stretching back more than a decade and raises ongoing questions about oversight, training and enforcement of biosafety regulations governing high-consequence pathogens.
Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just The News. You can follow her here.
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/congress/sen-rand-paul-blows-lid-nih-recklessness-endangering-americans
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