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.
The monkey was being subjected to NIH’s notorious “maximum-pain” experiments with no pain mitigation whatsoever.
The bite reportedly penetrated the worker’s protective suit.
Instead of being transparent with RML employees, the incident was allegedly hidden from most of the campus, and the exposed staffer was quietly “flown out” to avoid drawing attention.
White Coat Waste, which has been hammering Munster’s taxpayer-funded animal experiments with billboards near the Montana lab, was the first to report on his sudden removal from the official NIH employee directory and his reported suspension.
.@WhiteCoatWaste is running billboards near NIH's biolab in Montana targeting Fauci-era animal tests by Vincent Munster & other mad scientists.
We just noticed Munster, who was part of the project to create COVID-like viruses in Wuhan, has been removed from the HHS directory🧐… pic.twitter.com/5DADu4a5c4
— Justin Goodman (@JustinRGoodman) May 4, 2026
As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, a subsequent independent report confirmed the FBI’s active criminal probe into the smuggling of undeclared select agents, including monkeypox virus collected from patients in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Neither Munster nor his colleague, NIH lab scientist Claude Kwe Yinda, has confirmed whether the samples were properly inactivated.
Both men were placed on administrative leave and scrubbed from the HHS directory.
Munster has been one of Fauci’s go-to researchers for bat coronavirus work and primate experiments involving Ebola, Nipah, and other high-risk pathogens, often sourced from Fauci’s infamous “Monkey Island” facility.
He played a central role in helping EcoHealth Alliance secure NIAID funding for the controversial “Wuhan West” bat colony project at Colorado State University.
Munster was also a co-author on the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, the rejected blueprint for engineering coronaviruses that eerily mirrored the COVID-19 virus, and the lead author on a 2018 experiment that infected bats purchased from a shady Maryland zoo with a Chinese bat coronavirus strain originally collected by EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak and Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli.
For years, White Coat Waste has documented how Munster’s reckless, cruel experiments on primates and bats waste millions in taxpayer dollars while posing serious biosafety and national security risks.
The group has repeatedly called on Congress and, now, on the Trump administration’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to defund and decommission the Rocky Mountain Laboratory entirely.
The whistleblower’s letter reinforces those concerns, claiming the cover-up culture at NIH continues unchecked even after Fauci’s departure.
“RML needs to be defunded and decommissioned before Munster and his cronies cause another pandemic,” the letter warns.
In a statement provided to The Gateway Pundit, Anthony Bellotti, the president and founder of WCW said:
“White Coat Waste first uncovered, documented, and exposed Dr. Fauci’s reckless funding for gain-of-function animal tests in Wuhan—and we’ve warned that Vincent Munster's dangerous Fauci-backed animal experiments with deadly bioagents at NIH's Rocky Mountain Lab were another disaster waiting to happen on US soil.
Now, explosive whistleblower claims shared with White Coat Waste—alleging NIH cover-ups about Munster’s reported virus smuggling and a monkey bite at RML, two stories we first scooped—highlight exactly what we’ve been saying: these Fauci-era animal labs are out of control and must be stopped.
Our investigations and lawsuits have previously exposed Munster’s maximum-pain animal tests with Ebola, his bat experiments with Chinese coronaviruses prior to the pandemic, and his involvement in a new Fauci-funded bat virus lab in Colorado.
Munster is a mad scientist who has deep ties to EcoHealth Alliance and was involved in early proposals to engineer COVID-like viruses at the Wuhan lab. For years, White Coat Waste has led the fight to defund Munster and his maximum pain animal labs, and we're currently calling out their continued Fauci-era funding with our ‘WTF, RFK?’ billboards near NIH’s Montana lab. The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness!"
Just weeks ago, the Department of Justice indicted Fauci’s longtime senior adviser David Morens on charges including conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting.
Morens, 78, allegedly helped orchestrate a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shortly after his arrest, as The Gateway Pundit reported, White Coat Waste warned that he was "not a lone wolf," and that "Morens’ indictment should be the beginning—not the end—of long-overdue lab leak accountability at NIH."
At this point, it is entirely fair to ask how many other smuggling attempts or lab accidents have been swept under the rug.
