Prosecuted, Defunded, Summoned: The U.S. Is Targeting the Virus Researchers It Will Need Next

Vincent Munster was charged in June with bringing biological specimens into the United States without proper documents. The specimens were vials of inactivated mpox virus, the pathogen formerly known as monkeypox, intended for research at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana.

About a dozen scientists interviewed by KFF Health News called the Munster charge a paperwork case with no public-health threat. Inactivated virus samples cannot cause infection, and the scientists said customs paperwork, not biosafety, is what is at issue. The researchers who do this work treat the case as part of a pattern, not an isolated prosecution.

Kim Hasenkrug, an NIH scientist emeritus who worked at Rocky Mountain Labs for 31 years, called the prosecution a gift to people trying to stop valuable research. The case, he said, "sows seeds of distrust" inside a laboratory network the country depends on when pathogens cross borders. Hasenkrug's three-decade tenure is the kind of institutional memory a high-containment facility cannot easily replace.

The Munster charge is one of several federal actions KFF Health News documented against virus researchers. Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, ordered Anthony Fauci to appear before a Senate committee alleging he lied to Congress about COVID-19's origins. The FBI detained a former Fauci aide. Federal officials barred a virus researcher in North Carolina from receiving federal funding. Senior U.S. officials and members of Congress have promoted unproven theories that scientists recklessly experimented with COVID-19 and other viruses, including in China, and conservative groups and social-media influencers have amplified those claims.

The pattern lands while outbreaks are active. According to KFF Health News, the world is fighting one of its worst Ebola epidemics on record. Mpox continues to circulate globally. The federal government is moving against the researchers who track these pathogens at the moment their expertise is most needed.

Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research and a co-author of early work on COVID-19's origins, warned that foreign-aid and research-funding cuts will leave gaps in the Ebola and mpox response. China, he said, is positioned to develop pandemic vaccines first if the United States steps back. The shift Andersen describes is concrete: pandemic vaccine development runs on months-long timelines, and the funding cuts and prosecutions KFF Health News documents affect both the laboratory network and the international coordination an outbreak response requires.

Rocky Mountain Laboratories sits in a blue-collar mountain town historically dependent on logging, and the facility's pandemic work has brought the town both jobs and scrutiny. Each federal action lands as a separate story in the news. The scientists who do this work see them as one. The next pandemic's clock is biological, not political, and the U.S. response will be built from the people and institutions still standing when it does.