DOJ Charges NIH Virologists for Transporting Inactive Virus

Monkeypox Researchers Charged with Semantics Violation

Trumped Up Charges

The headline of the DOJ press release tells the whole story.

The charge as framed by DOJ.

With a framing apparently designed to feed the anti-immigrant, COVID lab leak narrative of the day, it misrepresents reality with nearly every phrase. The reference to “foreign nationals” conveniently omits the fact that these are NIH researchers, not alien terrorists. The FBI’s own testing found only inactive monkeypox virus incapable of causing disease. The “smuggling” was done in a distinctive, large, black case and the scientists were established virologists carrying material from an outbreak they were studying. The supposed lie was fundamentally a matter of semantics. They told the agents the box contained “diagnostic and testing equipment”. The standard uses of inactivated monkeypox virus are diagnostic controls, treatment testing, equipment calibration, or vaccine research. As Dr. Angela Rasmussen noted in Science, inactivated monkeypox is routinely used as a control in diagnostic tests, and Munster’s own lab has published on exactly that.

Could they have been more forthcoming? Absolutely. Is it plausible that, after a flight from Africa, the two scientists might have wanted to avoid missing a connecting flight while spending hours explaining the workings of a virology lab to a random customs agent? Yes again. Might the Chief of the Virus Ecology Section at a major NIH Laboratory have expected some consideration from the agent? Yes. Did testing find any evidence of active Monkeypox virus? No.

Backstory

Some history is worth noting. The lead researcher, Vincent Munster, has been the target of a years-long campaign by White Coat Waste, an anti-animal-testing group that has run billboards outside his lab and sought to cut him off from all funding. That campaign found new fuel in an anonymous, unsigned, undated letter, amplified by Laura Loomer and a string of friendly outlets, and embraced by an HHS Secretary who declared “I assume he is going to prison” before a single charge was filed.

To paraphrase the letter, which vacillates between rant and purported revelation:

Three America hating foreigners who had previously worked to weaponize and aerosolize COVID virus were caught trying to smuggle viral hemorrhagic fever viruses into the United States.

The DOJ complaint as described in their press release:

Two foreign-born NIH researchers with a long record of studying zoonotic viruses, returning from assisting a monkeypox outbreak response in the Congo, described inactivated monkeypox samples, the kind routinely used as diagnostic controls, as “diagnostic and testing equipment.”

None of this appears to have given pause to United States Attorney, Jerome Gorgon, recently appointed by Pam Bondi, who stated:

“These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo. Let that sink in.”

The smuggling was semantic. Testing found only inactivated pathogens. The risk to passengers was zero. Let that sink in.

Yet when prosecutors with every motive to throw the book finally filed, the best they could do was a complaint about an incomplete answer to a customs agent. The lurid version circulating in the friendly press, the shifting stories, the hemorrhagic fever, the suggestions of bioweapons work, did not survive contact with a charging document. None of this suggests an objective assessment of risk. It looks more like a years-old grudge, dressed up as a whistleblower, in search of a defendant.

I suppose a headline stating, NIH researchers fail to fully describe inactivated viral samples to Detroit customs officials, just doesn’t feed the immigrants out to destroy America narrative.