Vincent Munster: Banned, Scrubbed, and Under FBI Investigation
Inside the whistleblower letter that blew open two NIH coverups
In January 2026, Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) was returning from Africa with several deadly pathogens. He was stopped at the US border in Detroit, Michigan. In his luggage were dozens of vials of select agents. His US customs declaration was apparently a lie.
Full Coverup Mode
NIH’s response was not to notify RML staff or alert the tax-paying public. According to an anonymous whistleblower letter obtained by White Coat Waste, senior NIH officials “went into full cover-up mode.” Munster and his postdoc, Claude (Kwe) Yinda, who traveled with him, were quietly banned from the RML campus in Montana. No NIH announcement or transparency.
The anonymous letter was written sometime after the January 25, 2026, incident, but was just published this week. A subsequent report confirmed the whistleblower’s allegations.
Virologists regularly collect viruses from far away countries and bring them back to their own cities to study. And according to emails Paul D. Thacker has 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.
We found out because Munster had been quietly removed from the NIH/HHS staff directory. Whether the monkeypox virus was inactive is irrelevant; Munster didn’t declare it. Neither did the NIH. No press release. Just a whistleblower letter, which continues below.
What was Munster doing in Africa?
Munster makes several trips to Africa each year. He often traveled to the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) to collect bat samples.
Munster usually rode the Congo River to a remote camp along the border of the dangerous Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa). He packed lab diapers, air mattresses, mosquito nets, and bite kits for his bat-hunting trips.
He would pitch a tent and start collecting African bat samples, which Science Magazine once tagged along in 2017.
At 2 a.m., Munster and epidemiologist Sarah Olson start their workday. She’s clad in scrubs and a protective suit and wears a visor, a respirator, and leather gloves on top of two layers of plastic gloves. She unties a bag and carries it to a tent serving as a makeshift laboratory. Munster, similarly clad minus the leather gloves, is waiting. A bare bulb illuminates the tent, an island of light in the dark forest, powered by a loud generator. The back wall is made of banana leaves.
Grasping the bat’s head between her thumb and index finger, Olson exposes its lower body. Munster massages its bladder until urine dribbles into a plastic vial. Then Olson unpacks the whole animal, and Munster examines and measures it while another researcher takes notes. “Hypsignathus monstrosus,” Munster says, though the only thing monstrous about the hammer-headed fruit bat is its scientific name. The huge head with its big, yellow eyes, cleft chin, and curled lower lip evokes pity rather than fear. “Endearingly ugly,” Olson calls it.
The first bat examined tonight is alive and apparently well. “Good body condition,” Munster says. “Head length, 42 millimeters. Body, 97. Lower arm, 95.” He swabs the mouth, nostrils, and anus. Suddenly the animal flinches, and a claw scrapes across Munster’s plastic glove. Even though no tear is visible, he discards his outer gloves and dons a new pair.
Then comes the most dangerous part: While Olson holds the animal, Munster plunges a needle into a vein in the wing and slowly draws blood. “You have to be extremely careful,” he says. “We’re talking about Ebola, after all.”
Before Munster lets the sampled bat go, he injects it with a tiny ID chip. This allows the researchers to identify animals that they have recaptured.
Munster knows how to handle deadly viruses. He was in Monrovia during the 2013–15 Ebola outbreak, testing hundreds of samples. Far too many were positive for the virus. “We underestimated the virus,” he says. He is determined not to make that mistake again. The Republic of the Congo is changing rapidly. The researchers’ tents are perhaps 100 meters from a road that transects the country, stretching 800 kilometers south to Brazzaville. When Munster first came here a few years ago, the road was red dirt. Now, it’s smooth asphalt. If the virus emerges from the forest again, it could be in Brazzaville tomorrow, he says—and in Boston, Bombay, or Berlin the day after.
Munster used to ship the samples back to Montana using liquid nitrogen, but that is a “bureaucratic nightmare” that takes “months.”
One by one, the team examines the 13 animals and releases them. At about 5 a.m., the cries of the hammer-headed fruit bats subside. The last bag is opened, and the researchers swab the last animal. They store the night’s crop of samples in liquid nitrogen. Because shipping material that might contain the Ebola virus is a bureaucratic nightmare, the samples might not arrive in the United States for months.
Once the samples arrive, they will be split, with one part tested for Ebola RNA in Munster’s Montana laboratory. If it proves positive, the researchers will mix another portion of the sample with cultured bat and monkey cells to test for active virus. “You just add a bit from that sample to your cells and wait [to see] whether you get virus replication,” Munster says. If enough samples test positive, his team might be able to build a model of how virus levels fluctuate in the bat population. That kind of monitoring helped scientists understand the factors that trigger flu viruses to jump from animals to humans—and it may one day lead to a similar understanding for Ebola.
This time, he apparently smuggled contraband back but got caught. I’m often asked for an NIH procedure proving that Munster created COVID, but this isn’t a guy who follows scientific rules.
Munster vs Baric
Ralph Baric of UNC never had to smuggle his Chinese pathogens into America, since he could create them in his North Carolina lab. Here, in 2013, Baric and Munster debated the issue of importing select agents.
Baric update
While Munster was getting pulled aside at customs, his longtime collaborator, Baric, was having his own quiet moment in the spotlight. It was reported by lab leak journalist Paul Thaker (Paul D. Thacker) that Baric was “on leave” from UNC. But Baric brilliantly turned on his out-of-office reply over the weekend to announce he was still there. Thacker also believes Baric didn’t create the SARS2 genome.
Dutch media on Munster
Toine de Graaf, who wrote my first formal book review last year, is on the latest story this year.
The reputation of Vincent Munster, trained at Erasmus MC and working at the Rocky Mountain Lab (RML), which falls under the American National Institutes of Health (NIH), since 2009, has been under pressure for some time. Last month, De Andere Krant (no. 15) reported that Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and American engineer/researcher Jim Haslam believe that American virologist Ralph Baric and Munster together laid the foundation for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that gripped the world from Wuhan, China, in 2020.
Two incidents & two coverups = one institution.
The smuggling incident isn’t the only thing NIH decided the public didn’t need to know about. The same whistleblower apparently tipped off the media.
In January, White Coat Waste first reported that an RML lab staffer had been exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. It’s a deadly foreign virus used at RML on primates. NIH offered no explanation for how the exposure occurred.
The whistleblower letter provides one: a macaque being “infected and sickened with no pain mitigation” bit through the lab worker’s protective suit.
The injured RML technician was quietly “flown out” rather than treated at a dedicated Hamilton hospital. Most RML staff were never told the accident happened. According to the whistleblower, the decision to bury it came directly from NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, Maryland.
New RML documents
Graduate student Tyler Stepke filed a 2024 RML FOIA request for their IBC minutes, covering February 2014 through April 2024. 1,000+ pages uploaded here:
https://ibc-minutes-rml-foia-2014-2024.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/NIHFOIA61911_RMLIBC2014-2024.pdf
By 2014, Feldmann was collecting deer samples. In 2016, Munster and Heinz Feldmann received IBC approval to infect their bats with Baric’s synthetic genomes.
Notice NIH redacted Munster’s name above, and Baric’s name below.
By 2018, RML had IBC approval for aerosolizing agents for live bats.
Rand Paul’s whistleblower?
Senator Paul announced that a whistleblower will testify this Wednesday about the COVID cover-up. I’ll guess it’s Major Joseph Murphy, who leaked the DARPA Defuse proposal. No matter who it is, Paul has openly discussed Murphy’s role.
Part of the problem with the lab leak debate is that no one even knows what COVID is, a contagious bat vaccine aerosolized by Munster. None of us knew that until Murphy’s own letter leaked, calling COVID an “American-created bat vaccine.”
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/whistleblower-testimony-on-the-covid-coverup/
Why the FCS?
In early 2020, TWiV host Vincent Racaniello emailed Munster, saying he had heard that the furin cleavage site “might have been engineered.”
“If true, this is very bad for all of virology research,” Racaniello wrote to Munster, who forwarded it to his DARPA postdoc and Baric collaborator, “And the fun begins.” Baric inserted the furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, and Munster used it for onward transmission.
Hantavirus outbreak
Three people died from a Hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship. TWiV host Racaniello has a good episode on the dirty details.
Hantavirus comes from deer mice, which are also reservoir hosts for SARS2!
Why? Because scientists like Munster and Feldmann used deer mice to develop self-spreading vaccines.
Feldmann and RML also use Baric’s genomes, so it’s not hard to figure out why SARS2 loves deer mice!
Feldmann’s DARPA colleague, Scott Nuismer, once asked, “How do you go out there and vaccinate a bunch of deer mice against Hantavirus by hand?” Nuismer gave a 2018 presentation that gave us a glimpse of what RML was working on: self-spreading vaccines using deer mice.
Morens’s update
Dr. David Morens was offered wine bottles and meals at Michelin-starred restaurants by vendors such as EcoHealth. After appearing in court on Friday, Morens drove off in his BMW 5-Series. The US government bureaucrat supposedly owns 2 homes and is a product of PHS Title 42.
The Public Health Service (PHS) Title 42 hiring authority was established in 1944 during World War II to create a flexible “excepted service” category for recruiting top-tier scientific talent without the constraints of standard civil service rules.
This authority allows agencies such as the NIH, FDA, and CDC to offer lucrative salaries—sometimes exceeding $350,000—to attract “experts” for hard-to-fill research and medical roles. Morens made $242,000 while serving as a senior advisor to Tony Fauci. Title 42 was designed to attract the best minds in a national emergency. Whether it attracted the right ones is now a matter for the courts.
One rogue scientist with a suitcase full of vials; a border incident scrubbed; a monkey bite buried; a staff directory quietly updated. The pattern isn’t incompetence. It’s NIH policy.
The fact that this slap happy, keffiyeh wearing (“it is a symbol of Palestinian identity AND RESISTANCE”) is able to get on a commercial flight carrying lethal pathogens under the pretense of increasing there transmissibility or virulence for some unknown reason and at tax payer expense means we are all living in an insane asylum.
He should be indicted forthwith. Maybe he could plead for a lenient sentence if he were to turn state’s evidence and finger the ringleaders.