NIH Monkeypox Smuggling Release — page 1

Chairman Rand Paul, M.D. U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURIT Y AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS NEW DOCUMENTS SHOW YEARS OF WARNINGS AND WORKAROUNDS BEFORE NIH SCIENTISTS WERE CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTING TO SMUGGLE MONKEYPOX INTO U.S. On January 25, 2026, two National Institutes of Health (NIH) Rocky Mountain Laboratories virologists Vincent Munster and Claude Kwe landed at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after a nine-day trip to the Republic of the Congo, where a monkeypox outbreak was underway. They were carrying a large black plastic case that they falsely told Customs officers contained only diagnostics and testing equipment. Inside, investigators found 113 microcentrifuge tubes packed in Styrofoam coolers. Of the 20 the FBI has since tested, 17 contained deactivated monkeypox virus, one contained chickenpox virus, and two contained only human DNA. On June 2, 2026, Munster and Kwe were charged with conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox into the United States and making false statements to federal law enforcement. Today, Chairman Paul is releasing new documents from the Committee's ongoing investigation showing that this was not an isolated lapse, but part of a broader pattern of treating rules for moving dangerous pathogens as negotiable, stretching back at least a decade. WHAT THE DOCUMENTS SHOW EcoHealth Alliance discussed having Munster hand-carry samples on a commercial flight. In a 2011 email about shipping samples from Congo to NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories, an EcoHealth Alliance researcher noted that the courier could not transport dry ice and floated an alternative: "take our chances" shipping some samples in lysis buffer and serum on wet ice, while Munster could "hand carry" another set in viral transport media on dry ice during a later trip. "I think you can take up to 2kg with you on commercial flights," the researcher wrote. "Just diagnostics" had a history within this research network. In 2013, NIH moved to distribute a Jordan strain of MERS coronavirus to a group of investigators that included Munster at Rocky Mountain Laboratories and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. The shipment NIH sent to the Baric Lab was incorrectly labeled as "diagnostic, not infectious," a mistake flagged as "a big problem." The shipment also lacked an itemized list of contents and the dangerous-goods declaration. Officials previously warned Munster that improper shipments could become a national scandal. In December 2021, Munster told colleagues he would arrange an international shipment of the Omicron variant "without the involvement of NIH shipping." An NIH official warned him, in writing, that doing so risked becoming "a Washington Post moment or congressional inquiry," and noted that his facility, Rocky Mountain Laboratories, had no approved shipping procedures on file. Pathogen samples in this network had gone missing in transit before. In a 2022 email exchange with the subject line "inactivation diagnostic lysis buffers MPX," a colleague asked Munster whether he had ever recovered his luggage; Munster replied, "[n]ope, so no Congo basin clade for now," indicating the lost luggage had carried Congo Basin monkeypox material. In a separate 2022 exchange, a collaborator urged Munster to contact DARPA "asap" about sending coronavirus samples to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID); Munster replied that he would, adding that "numbnuts lost the first shipment." Returning from the Congo with monkeypox samples had happened before. In April 2024, Kwe wrote that he and his colleagues had "just returned from the Congo with DNA from MPOX positive samples." A related NIH sequencing request logged 35 monkeypox virus DNA samples derived from human patients and answered "Yes" when asked whether the samples contained or were derived from a regulated "select agent."