Since the COVID pandemic landed on American shores in early 2020, virologists and allied science writers have engaged in a vociferous propaganda campaign to deny the dangers of virus experiments. When Nature Magazine published a 2021 article minimizing a Wuhan lab accident as the pandemic’s cause, science writer Amy Maxmen quoted Vincent Munster, a virologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Montana.
Munster told Nature’s Maxmen that there was nothing suspicious about a novel coronavirus popping up in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology which was studying coronaviruses. Labs tend to specialize in the specific viruses found around them, Munster explained, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology focuses on coronaviruses because many circulate in China and neighboring countries.
“Nine out of ten times, when there’s a new outbreak, you’ll find a lab that will be working on these kinds of viruses nearby,” Munster told Nature.
Well, kind of. Sort of. But really not.
In fact, virologists regularly collect viruses from far away countries and bring them back to their own cities to study. And according to emails I have seen that are now circulating inside the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), one of those virologists is the NIH’s Vincent Munster.
“We are unable to comment as this is under investigation,” wrote HHS spokesperson, Andrew Nixon in an email. “So we will refer you to the FBI.”
When contacted about their investigation into Munster and his NIH researcher, the FBI press office replied by email, “We decline to comment.”
While on a trip back from the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year, Munster and a scientist in his NIH lab were pulled aside for an airport security inspection. Inside their luggage, one of the two had a hard-shelled protective case used to transport sensitive property such as electronics and firearms. When the protective case was opened, it was found to contain pathogen samples collected from patients.
However, the human pathogens, which included monkeypox virus, may have been inactivated by reagents and rendered no longer infectious.
Hellbound and Down 