This is not the only story about people trying to sneak in a virus or two into our country, undetected, which is against the law. But scientists try to conduct research to bypass legal constraints on moving dangerous material that, if released, could be devastating. Bottom line is that it is a crime.
Not long ago, two Chinese individuals, one a student at Michigan and her boyfriend, tried to sneak in material that could destroy crops. While this student was studying this material, not much was made of it, and everything seemed to fade away.
Now, think about what our government says about terrorism: they (terrorists) only need to be successful one time. So we caught a few folks, maybe all for scientific purposes, but what about those that already succeeded that we don’t know about? This is not a game in today’s world. Terrorism is all around us. All IMO.
“Mpox, also known as monkeypox, can spread to people via close contact with infected animals, but also via sexual transmission between two people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Jan. 25, Dutch national Vincent Munster, 53, the chief of the virology section at the NIH Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana, and Cameroonian national Claude Kwe, 38, a research fellow working under Mr. Munster, traveled to Detroit from the Republic of the Congo, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan said.
At the time, the Republic of the Congo was dealing with an mpox outbreak. Federal prosecutors said the two men told Customs and Border Protection that a black case they had with them contained equipment for diagnostics and testing.
The black case instead contained 113 vials held in coolers made of Styrofoam. Out of the 20 vials tested by the time the complaint was filed against Mr. Munster and Mr. Kwe last Tuesday, 17 contained deactivated mpox, one contained chickenpox and the other two contained human DNA, federal prosecutors said.
“These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo. Let that sink in,” said U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Jerome Gorgon Jr.”