The Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana is one of a small number of facilities in the United States cleared to work with the world's most dangerous pathogens. Its inventory includes SARS coronavirus, Ebola, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever — diseases with no effective treatments and mortality rates that can run above 50%. For decades, it operated under the direct oversight of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Just recently two of its top researchers have been federally charged with smuggling a pathogen across international borders and lying about it to authorities.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) says enough is enough and wants the facility shut down -- immediately.
Given those two facts, that's not a dramatic request. It's the obvious one.
Vincent Munster, who served as chief of the virus ecology section at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, and associate researcher Claude Kwe are facing federal charges for smuggling deactivated mpox virus into the United States. That the virus was deactivated doesn't make the charges minor. Deactivated means this particular sample was rendered non-replicating — it doesn't mean it was harmless, and it doesn't explain why two scientists at a federally-funded BSL-4 facility felt comfortable smuggling anything across international borders and lying to authorities when confronted. A researcher willing to break federal law with a deactivated sample is a researcher whose judgment you cannot trust with an active one.
That's the problem at the center of this. Rocky Mountain Laboratories doesn't store deactivated samples. It stores Ebola.
Fauci ran NIAID for 38 years — from 1984 until December 2022. During that time, his agency funded EcoHealth Alliance, which channeled money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for coronavirus research that became one of the most scrutinized topics in modern public health history. In Congressional testimony, Fauci was repeatedly questioned about gain-of-function research, lab safety protocols, and the transparency of his agency's grant-making — and was repeatedly less than forthcoming. Rocky Mountain Laboratories operated under his direct oversight through all of it. The institutional culture Gosar describes as a "dangerous pattern of rogue scientists abusing taxpayer dollars" wasn't planted after Fauci left. It was cultivated while he was in charge.
Gosar has been pressing on this facility since January 2026, when he and Sen. Joni Ernst sent an initial letter to NIH after the White Coat Waste Project exposed a monkey bite incident at the lab. By May, WCW had uncovered additional scandals that deepened questions about the facility's oversight. The federal smuggling charges are where that accumulated record landed.
Gosar has now formally requested that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya close the facility permanently. He's asking the right two people. Kennedy has spent decades as a public critic of the public health establishment that built places like Rocky Mountain Laboratories. Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration challenging the COVID consensus that Fauci championed, and now runs the agency that oversees the lab. If any leadership team is positioned to act on a request like this, it's the current one.
A facility doesn't produce two federal defendants by accident. It produces them because the institutional environment made those researchers believe they could smuggle a pathogen, lie about it, and face no consequences. That belief is built over years — in this case, over decades — by leadership that prioritized secrecy over transparency and results over accountability.
The charges are about mpox. But the inventory is Ebola. If the culture that produced two pathogen smugglers is still operating inside the walls of a BSL-4 facility, the question isn't whether something worse can happen. It's whether anyone will notice before it does. That's not an argument for an audit. That's an argument for a padlock.