Two government scientists with the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s 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—including 17 samples that later tested positive for DNA from mpox (also known as monkeypox) at an FBI lab.
Now, federal prosecutors are charging these two NIH scientists, award–winning virologist Vincent Munster and postdoctoral research fellow Claude Kwe, with “conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox into the United States” and lying about it to federal law enforcement. According to the criminal complaint, made public on Tuesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan, Munster materially misled U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) when he “told CBP officers the case contained diagnostics and testing equipment.”
“These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo,” U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr. said in a press statement. “Let that sink in.”
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.
“Inactivated monkeypox viruses routinely are used as a control in diagnostic tests or to develop the assays,” as virologist Angela Rasmussen, who studies host responses to emerging viruses at the University of Saskatchewan, told Science. Munster and his NIH colleagues in Montana, in fact, published research on the technique in 2022.
Outbreak #
Now known internationally as mpox after the World Health Organization renamed it to destigmatize the disease, the virus has become a culture wars football. Trump administration officials have suddenly gone back to calling the disease monkeypox, reviving a name the WHO moved away from.
Out in the real world, the virus is typically known to cause flu-like symptoms—including fever, muscle aches, and swollen lymph nodes—alongside its distinguishing bumpy and painful rash, which can appear anywhere over the body. By the consensus of the U.S. government’s own public health officials, however, mpox “does NOT spread through the air or through casual contact like you’d have during travel.”
While Mpox can kill, it’s rarely a death sentence, with only about 3.1% of cases 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. Kwe told investigators that he and Munster had flown into Detroit Metropolitan Airport “from Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo where the pair was helping study a strain of Mpox that is currently causing an outbreak,” according to the complaint.
‘Zero tolerance’ #
Regardless of Kwe and Munster’s intent, the director of field operations for CBP, Marty C. Raybon, struck an aggressive tone over their prosecution: “We have zero tolerance for anyone who attempts to exploit our research frameworks, circumvent our border enforcement processes, or deceive investigators,” Raybon said. “We will remain fiercely vigilant in neutralizing biological threats.”
The federal government leaned heavily into both researchers’ international ties when announcing the criminal proceedings Tuesday, highlighting Munster’s citizenship in the Netherlands and Kwe’s citizenship in Cameroon.
Following her comments to Science, Rasmussen criticized the case more forcefully on social media: “The government is arresting government scientists for being foreign and for studying infectious disease outbreaks when their own evidence shows they’ve committed no crime,” the Canada-based virologist said on X.
Statements Munster made to officials at the Detroit airport, detailed as “materially false” in the complaint, appear to align with Rasmussen’s assessment that the inactivated mpox were “actual diagnostic samples either used as controls or for assay development.”
Munster had told CBP investigators in Detroit that the microcentrifuge tubes were part of a “fast RADI Mpox kit from KH Medical company,” including an “assay.” These statements will obviously, ultimately, be adjudicated in court. He and Kwe face possible fines up to $250,000 if convicted, alongside the possible prison sentence.