Two government scientists with the U.S. National Institutes of Health\u2019s Rocky Mountain Laboratories reentered the country this January with a large black plastic case that worried customs officials. Further inspection revealed 113 undeclared microcentrifuge tubes in Styrofoam coolers\u2014including 17 samples that later tested positive for DNA from mpox (also known as monkeypox) at an FBI lab.<\/p>\n
Now, federal prosecutors are charging these two NIH scientists, award<\/a>\u2013winning<\/a> virologist Vincent Munster and postdoctoral research fellow Claude Kwe, with \u201cconspiracy to smuggle monkeypox into the United States\u201d and lying about it to federal law enforcement. According to the criminal complaint<\/a>, made public on Tuesday by the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan, Munster materially misled U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) when he \u201ctold CBP officers the case contained diagnostics and testing equipment.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThese NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo,\u201d U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr. said<\/a> in a press statement. \u201cLet that sink in.\u201d<\/p>\n At least one virologist who spoke with the journal Science, however, pointed out that these mpox strains, which federal investigators acknowledge were inactivated, could have fit the bill for diagnostic use.<\/p>\n \u201cInactivated monkeypox viruses routinely are used as a control in diagnostic tests or to develop the assays,\u201d as virologist Angela Rasmussen, who studies host responses to emerging viruses at the University of Saskatchewan, told<\/a> Science. Munster and his NIH colleagues in Montana, in fact, published research<\/a> on the technique in 2022.<\/p>\n Outbreak <\/p>\n Now known internationally as mpox after the World Health Organization renamed it to destigmatize the disease<\/a>, the virus has become a culture wars football. Trump administration officials have suddenly gone back to calling the disease monkeypox<\/a>, reviving a name the WHO moved away from.<\/p>\n Out in the real world, the virus is typically known to cause flu-like symptoms\u2014including fever, muscle aches, and swollen lymph nodes\u2014alongside its distinguishing bumpy and painful rash, which can appear anywhere over the body. By the consensus<\/a> of the U.S. government\u2019s own public health officials, however, mpox \u201cdoes NOT spread through the air or through casual contact like you\u2019d have during travel.\u201d<\/p>\n While Mpox can kill, it\u2019s rarely a death sentence, with only about 3.1% of cases<\/a> becoming fatal. The highest recorded rates of mpox deaths are among immunocompromised HIV patients in Africa, incidentally the continent where the two accused NIH scientists had just returned before they were detained.<\/p>\n Kwe told investigators that he and Munster had flown into Detroit Metropolitan Airport \u201cfrom Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo where the pair was helping study a strain of Mpox that is currently causing an outbreak,\u201d according to the complaint.<\/p>\n \u2018Zero tolerance\u2019 <\/p>\n Regardless of Kwe and Munster\u2019s intent, the director of field operations for CBP, Marty C. Raybon, struck an aggressive tone over their prosecution: \u201cWe have zero tolerance for anyone who attempts to exploit our research frameworks, circumvent our border enforcement processes, or deceive investigators,\u201d Raybon said. \u201cWe will remain fiercely vigilant in neutralizing biological threats.\u201d<\/p>\n The federal government leaned heavily into both researchers\u2019 international ties when announcing the criminal proceedings Tuesday, highlighting Munster\u2019s citizenship in the Netherlands and Kwe\u2019s citizenship in Cameroon.<\/p>\n Following her comments to Science, Rasmussen criticized the case more forcefully on social media: \u201cThe government is arresting government scientists for being foreign and for studying infectious disease outbreaks when their own evidence shows they\u2019ve committed no crime,\u201d the Canada-based virologist said<\/a> on X.<\/p>\n Statements Munster made to officials at the Detroit airport, detailed as \u201cmaterially false\u201d in the complaint, appear to align with Rasmussen\u2019s assessment<\/a> that the inactivated mpox were \u201cactual diagnostic samples either used as controls or for assay development.\u201d<\/p>\n Munster had told CBP investigators in Detroit that the microcentrifuge tubes were part of a \u201cfast RADI Mpox kit from KH Medical company,\u201d including an \u201cassay.\u201d These statements will obviously, ultimately, be adjudicated in court. He and Kwe face possible fines up to $250,000<\/a>\u00a0if convicted, alongside the possible prison sentence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two government scientists with the U.S. National Institutes of Health\u2019s Rocky Mountain Laboratories reentered the country this January…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":844764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[11],"tags":[210,131474,131475,67476,67,132,68,345512],"class_list":["post-844763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-monkeypox","tag-mpox","tag-nih","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-weird-crime"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116694276388456451","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/844764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}