The National Institutes of Health is allegedly scrambling to bury the recent explosive scandals at its high-security Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and a new whistleblower letter obtained by the White Coat Waste Project claims senior NIH officials in Bethesda are in “full coverup mode” to protect one of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s top virologists.
The allegations come just days after it was reported that the FBI has launched a criminal investigation into NIH scientist Vincent Munster for smuggling deadly human pathogen samples, including monkeypox virus, from Africa in his luggage without required permits or paperwork.
According to the whistleblower letter sent to taxpayer watchdog White Coat Waste, Munster, a German-born researcher long funded by Fauci’s NIAID, attempted to smuggle “dozens of vials” of viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) samples back into the United States from Africa in January.
He and two colleagues traveling with him allegedly lied to customs officials about the contents of their baggage.
The whistleblower said that NIH officials kept the entire incident quiet, refusing to inform the broader RML campus and quietly banning Munster and his colleagues from the facility.
The whistleblower states the decisions to downplay the smuggling came directly “from the main NIH campus in Bethesda” and that senior officials are now operating in “full coverup mode.”
That’s not all.
The same letter alleges that a separate lab accident at RML, first exposed by White Coat Waste in January, involved a staffer being bitten by a macaque monkey infected with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF), a deadly foreign virus.
Hellbound and Down 