Two NIH Scientists Charged With Smuggling Mpox Virus Into the U.S. Through Detroit Airport

Two scientists who work at a U.S. government laboratory have been charged with smuggling vials of deactivated mpox virus into the country and lying about it to federal officers, according to a criminal complaint unsealed this week in federal court in Detroit.

The complaint names Vincent Munster, chief of the virus ecology section at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a National Institutes of Health facility in Hamilton, Montana, and his colleague Claude Kwe. Prosecutors say the two were stopped at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in January after arriving on a flight from Paris, following a nine-day research trip to the Republic of Congo, where mpox has fueled a serious outbreak.

According to the Justice Department, the scientists initially told U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers that a black case they were carrying contained only diagnostic and testing equipment. A subsequent search told a different story: the case held 113 vials packed in Styrofoam coolers, and of the vials later tested, 17 contained inactivated monkeypox virus. Investigators allege the pair failed to declare the biological material or obtain the permits required to import it.

"Munster and Kwe falsely told CBP officers that the black case contained diagnostics and testing equipment," prosecutors wrote in the complaint, which charges the men with conspiracy to smuggle goods and making false statements. The case has drawn outsized attention because the defendants are not fringe actors but established researchers embedded in the federal government's own infectious-disease apparatus.

The charges land at a politically charged moment for U.S. biosecurity policy, amid heightened scrutiny of how dangerous pathogens are transported across borders and renewed debate over the oversight of high-containment laboratories. While the samples were described as inactivated — meaning they were not capable of causing infection — prosecutors emphasized that the rules governing the import of such material exist precisely to ensure federal authorities can verify what is entering the country and under what conditions.

Rocky Mountain Laboratories is among the NIH's premier research centers for studying emerging viruses, and Munster is a widely published virologist whose team has worked on pathogens ranging from Ebola to coronaviruses. Neither scientist had entered a plea as the complaint became public, and it was not immediately clear whether they had retained attorneys. The mpox outbreak in central Africa, driven by a more transmissible strain of the virus, has prompted international research collaborations like the one that brought the two men to Congo — work that, prosecutors allege, ran afoul of the strict legal requirements for moving biological specimens into the United States.