'Biological incident' at federal pathogen lab shines light on continuing risks in Trump era

Two days before the Environmental Protection Agency was scheduled to further distinguish the Trump administration from its predecessor by phasing out animal testing over criticisms of pointless cruelty, biosafety risks and obfuscation, an anti-testing watchdog exposed another possible leak from a federal research lab on U.S. soil.

This one happened on the current administration's watch, however, months after local media reported National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya toured the Rocky Mountain Laboratories "to demonstrate NIH executive level commitment to RML" amid community fears it would get hit by Department of Government Efficiency cuts.

The watchdog group White Coat Waste Project (WCW) on Tuesday published the minutes from the NIH Institutional Biosafety Committee's Nov. 20, 2025 meeting at RML in Hamilton, Mont., which has a two-year-old "vivarium" that NIH said would expand study of "exotic species (such as bats)." The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases runs it.

Funded with $125 million in COVID relief money, RML's vivarium drew concern from Sens. Joni Ernst and Eric Schmitt before its completion. 

The Iowa and Missouri Republicans asked then-NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli for more information about RML's "potentially risky research," since then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci added a BSL-4 lab that can study "deadly pathogens with pandemic potential," and how Congress and the public will learn of RML's research with "select agents."

The Nov. 20 meeting minutes show an unassuming notation at the very end of biosafety officer Rececca Anderson's report.

Under "Biological Incidents to Report," the minutes say: "Form 3 reported to Federal Select Agent Program on 11/13/2025." There was no subsequent discussion by the committee, and the meeting adjourned an hour earlier than scheduled.

The Department of Health and Human Services told Just the News Wednesday night what happened: An RML employee was "found to be potentially exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever through an accidental breach of personal protective equipment."

That person was "immediately isolated and monitored under appropriate care at a specialized medical facility before it was confirmed that no actual exposure or transmission had occurred," press secretary Emily Hilliard wrote in an email. "At no time was there any risk to the public or to other staff."

WCW Senior Vice President Justin Goodman responded with four exclamation points when Just the News showed him HHS's explanation.

"CCHF is a foreign virus that causes massive bleeding, multi-organ failure and has a kill rate as high as 40 percent," he wrote in an email, attaching a disturbing photo of a monkey subjected to the virus at RML. 

WCW has spent years campaigning to expose and defund the research at RML, Goodman said. "Recklessly importing CCHF to the US for dangerous animal experiments is [a] recipe for disaster right [out] of Dr Fauci’s cookbook" yet is continuing "under the current NIH leadership."

'It’s like a bad sequel' with a 'bigger budget' after funding Wuhan lab

The FSAP, jointly run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Department of Agriculture, says it "oversees the possession, use and transfer of select agents and toxins, which pose a threat to public, animal or plant health." 

The list includes anthrax, ebolavirus, monkeypox, COVID "chimeric viruses," smallpox, the plague and nipah virus, a high-fatality bat-borne pathogen that inspired the 2011 movie Contagion and was newly confirmed in two nurses in India, which has a recent history of nipah outbreaks, The Telegraph reported Wednesday.

FSAP's 2024 annual report, the most recent, says it received "nine reports of losses" — reported to the FBI for investigation — "273 reports of releases, and no reports of thefts." Zero releases resulted in illness, death or "transmission among workers or to the outside of a laboratory into the surrounding environment or community," the report said.

The "unspecified deadly pathogen" in the Nov. 20 minutes could have been "stolen, lost, or released" from NIH's "most dangerous bioagent lab," WCW's Goodman wrote on X Tuesday, listing a handful of agents including smallpox.

Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright, like Goodman a vocal critic of Fauci for funding Chinese research that may have unleashed COVID, responded that RML doesn't have smallpox.

Goodman said there's "no official list of which labs possess which select agents" but unspecified "public sources" show RML has at least the plague, ebola and anthrax. 

"The new CSU bat lab plans to ship bats there for infection experiments, too," Goodman said, referring to Colorado State University's NIH-funded lab for imported bats with nipah and SARS-related coronaviruses via the since-debarred EcoHealth Alliance. CSU's biosafety committee found dozens of accidents involving outbreak-prone pathogens from 2020-2023.

Sen. Ernst and Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., demanded NIH Director Bhattacharya "stop this batty research" Jan. 12 after the feds authorized another $2.2 million last fall for the "still-under-construction" CSU "live bat facility," which already got $10.7 million from former NIH Director Francis Collins and Fauci. They noted the CDC already has its own bat facility.

"Because some of the funds have not yet been released, today you could save taxpayers over $3 million by cancelling all the remaining project funding," the lawmakers wrote, asking Bhattacharya by Feb. 28 to turn over a "full list" of all projects "with a drop of NIH funding that relates to live bats," funded from 2017-2020, funded now or at least approved.

The lawmakers were following up on WCW investigations of what it calls "Wuhan West" for the past 11 months. 

EcoHealth's debarment was "not an invitation for the NIH to conduct the same shady experiments in our own backyard," Ernst told The Washington Times last fall. "It’s like a bad sequel. Same plot. Same cast of characters, but a bigger budget!"

From ticks to bats, 'essentially bioweapons research'

It's not the administration's only perceived hypocrisy on animal testing, with an earlier WCW investigation finding the Naval Medical Research Unit in Peru spent another $200,000 this summer to buy more Nancy Ma's night monkeys to infect with deadly pathogens, continuing a Biden administration program.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will make a "major announcement regarding the agency’s renewed commitment to reduce animal testing" at a press conference Thursday at 1 p.m., according to an invite Just the News received Wednesday.

The Biden administration crippled the first Trump administration's directive to "prioritize efforts to reduce animal testing and eliminate it completely by 2035 … canceling compliance deadlines, delaying scientific progress on developing alternatives to animal testing," the invite said. Former Administrator Andrew Wheeler will join Zeldin.

WCW first shared the biosafety committee's minutes with InfoWars, and Goodman elaborated on their meaning and context in an interview.

“Rocky Mountain Lab is where ticks were weaponized with NIH and [the Department of Defense] to spread Lyme and other diseases back in the ‘50s and ‘60s," and it then cloned coronaviruses found in bat caves by then-EcoHealth President Peter Daszak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the years before the pandemic, Goodman said.

President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. must get rid of NIH "lunatics" importing viruses that don't exist in the U.S. for "essentially bioweapons research," as evidenced by the $2.2 million infusion to the CSU lab, Goodman said. "It’s not an if, it’s a when" for the next pandemic based on animal testing.