White Coat Waste Sues NIH to Force Release of ‘Wuhan West’ Virus-Smuggling Records
White Coat Waste has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding that the Department of Health and Human Services turn over records on animal experiments and the virus smuggling scandal at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, the NIAID campus the group has nicknamed “Wuhan West.”
The taxpayer and animal welfare watchdog filed the complaint on September 15 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The lawsuit covers seven FOIA requests sent in 2025 and 2026, some of which have sat unanswered for more than 18 months.
The requests seek IACUC protocols for work at Rocky Mountain Labs on Ebola, other filoviruses, Nipah, Hendra, Lassa, Sudan virus, SARS-CoV-2 variants, Heartland virus, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, avian influenza, and tick colonies, including photos and video of animals used in those studies.
Later requests target records on the undeclared importation of biological materials from Africa by NIH personnel, specifically virologist Vincent Munster, including correspondence with Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, CDC, USDA, DOJ, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the HHS inspector general.
The agencies acknowledged the requests, but sent nothing over, according to White Coat Waste.
White Coat Waste has long worked to expose this lab and scientist.
In May, we reported on a whistleblower letter obtained by White Coat Waste claiming NIH was in “full coverup mode” after a macaque infected with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever bit a worker through protective gear and after Munster allegedly tried to bring “dozens of vials” of viral hemorrhagic fever samples into the United States from Africa in January.
In June, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan charged Munster, 53, a Dutch citizen and chief of the Virus Ecology Section at RML, and research fellow Claude Kwe with conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox and making false statements.
Investigators said a case the men described as “diagnostics and testing equipment” held 113 vials. Of the 20 tested at the time of the complaint, 17 contained deactivated monkeypox, one chickenpox, and two human DNA.
The same lab generated a second accident report this year, which The Gateway Pundit also reported on.
NEW: ANOTHER FAUCI BIOLAB ACCIDENT
We just exposed another recent bioagent accident at one of Fauci’s most dangerous animal labs.
And it’s the second accident we exposed at this NIH lab just this year!
We uncovered documents revealing the NIH quietly admitted that an… pic.twitter.com/aIXVa6JBQs
— White Coat Waste (@WhiteCoatWaste) May 13, 2026
Documents obtained by White Coat Waste showed NIH quietly logged an unspecified deadly pathogen as “released, lost, or stolen” from Rocky Mountain Labs in February.
Senators Tim Sheehy, Joni Ernst, and Rick Scott and Rep. Paul Gosar demanded an investigation.
Munster’s name has been on WCW’s radar for years because he authored a 2018 NIH bat experiment using a Chinese coronavirus strain cloned from material tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance, had a role in early EcoHealth proposals to engineer COVID-like viruses, and was connected to a new bat facility at Colorado State University.
Justin Goodman of White Coat Waste told Gateway Pundit in June that Rocky Mountain Labs was “another disaster waiting to happen on U.S. soil.”
White Coat Waste was the first organization to document NIH money flowing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A later FOIA lawsuit produced smoking-gun emails on EcoHealth gain-of-function animal tests and the experimenter it identifies as COVID’s likely “Patient Zero.”
A 2024 suit forced the release of videos and photos of primate and pig experiments at RML.
In April, the organization put up billboards near the Montana campus reading “WTF RFK? End Fauci’s Labs.”
The new complaint names HHS as the defendant and lists NIH, NIAID, CDC, the Office of Inspector General, and the Office of the Secretary as components that received the requests.
FOIA law treats silence past the statutory deadline as a constructive denial.
White Coat Waste is asking the court to “Declare DHHS’s failure to comply with FOIA to be unlawful,” “Enjoin DHHS from continuing to withhold the public records,” and order the department “to produce the requested public records without further delay.”
Jared Goodman, General Counsel at White Coat Waste, told The Gateway Pundit in a statement:
“White Coat Waste was the very first to expose Dr. Fauci's funding for gain-of-function animal experiments at the Wuhan lab in April 2020 — and now we’re suing RFK’s NIH.
White Coat Waste’s new FOIA lawsuit aims to force RFK’s NIH to turn over the receipts for dangerous, Fauci-era maximum-pain animal experiments at the notorious Rocky Mountain Laboratories, also known as ‘Wuhan West.’ Our investigations have exposed RML’s cruel experiments infecting animals with deadly foreign viruses, dangerous lab accidents, and, most recently, whistleblower allegations of Vincent Munster’s reckless virus smuggling.
Taxpayers have a right to know why RFK’s NIH continues to bankroll wasteful animal experiments that could cause another lab leak, even after he promised to hold Fauci accountable and cut NIH animal testing.
The solution is simple: Stop the Money. Stop the Madness!”
