Justin Goodman - Is the NIH hiding another dangerous lab scandal?

New whistleblower allegations involving virus samples, lab safety incidents, and animal testing at a National Institutes of Health facility are raising fresh questions about transparency inside America’s top public health agencies. Could dangerous research practices be putting the public at risk?

Justin Goodman is Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project. He joins the show to discuss allegations of virus smuggling, claims of a possible cover-up involving NIH researchers, and ongoing concerns about high risk laboratory experiments involving dangerous pathogens.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome back to the Lawrence Larson Show. Well, our Federal government and to some extent the State government seem absolutely thrilled to go out and scare Americans half to death about all kinds of things, whether it's Honavirus or Ebola or COVID or whatever new thing they have coming down the pike. And yet when it comes to the actual things they might do, where the government itself is doing it, and they say, what are you doing about that? And they say, oh no, we're kind of ignoring that. For example, a government scientist who allegedly smuggled a deadly virus in vials past customs, and the National Institutes of Health went straight into cover-up mode. Could Fauci's old super lab spark the next pandemic before anybody stops it? I thought we would talk to Justin Goodman, who is Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at what is known as the White Coat La Waste Project. Justin, welcome back to the program.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Thanks for having me, Laura. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Have I exaggerated any of this? Because this sounds so nefarious. A government scientist who's working for the government who smuggles deadly viruses into the United States, avoids customs, and then when NIH finds out about it, they say, oh no, we're not going to tell you anything about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Yeah, that's uh almost exactly correct. So it back in January, January, we exposed a lab accident at the NIH's Rocky Mountain Bioagent Lab in Montana, where someone was exposed to Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever, which is basically a cousin of Ebola, highly deadly, incurable. Following our investigation, NIH confirmed that after our investigation, they confirmed that happened. A whistleblower reached out to us with details saying not only was that caused by a monkey bite in the NIH lab, but the NIH covered it up and they flew the victim of this monkey bite hours away to be treated so that they didn't tip off local public health officials and hospitals. Part of that whistleblower letter said, but wait, the monkey bite is only the beginning because in late January, an NIH virologist, an animal experimenter, went to Africa and was flying back vials full of some unspecified viruses, was stopped at customs in Detroit on the way back into the country, lied about what was in the vials, and when they started to investigate, they discovered there was some kind of deadly virus in those vials. That NIH experimenter has now been suspended and is under FBI investigation. And it took a whistleblower who had knowledge of the situation to come forward with a letter to our organization, White Coat Waste, the FBI, the NIH, no one ever alerted the public or even Congress that this had happened.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

And this is Vincent Munster who's on suspension. I would assume you get fired and maybe even indicted for that kind of thing. Am I assuming too much?

SPEAKER_00 2:59

Uh well, that's absolutely what should be happening. I mean, he should have been fired, and if the FBI investigates him, he could go to jail. Uh Robert Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed that Vincent Munster is the individual who was caught smuggling, and in RFK's words, he thinks he is going to go to prison. So we're going to have to wait and see what happens. But Vincent Munster, you know, is part of Fauci's lab leak cabal. Vincent Munster helped draw up the blueprint to create a back in 2018 to create a novel coronavirus that looks eerily like the one that caused the pandemic in Wuhan. He was part of that original proposal to do gain of function experiments on animals to create a coronavirus with that spike protein that now the virus we all know is COVID-19. So he has a very sordid history of going abroad to foreign countries, exotic places, importing dangerous viruses into the United States and doing experiments with them to make them more deadly to people. And here he got caught.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Okay, so Justin, I mean, one of the few things I've said, I'm not a big fan of Barack Obama, but one of the things he did that I thought was powerful was he said, this gain of function stuff, I don't want this done anymore. Except he didn't he just said he didn't want it done in the United States. Now, I think, I reasonably think he what he meant, and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, even in the case of Obama, he said, don't do this stuff anymore. To which I think Fauci and his and his and his uh cohort uh said, oh, he means don't do it here. Let's go do it in communist China in a lab that's at least accessible by the Chinese military, if not working full on behalf of the Chinese military. And Justin, nobody has ever been able to explain to me. And I'm I'm look, I I think I'm reasonably uh, you know, I I've got an imagination. Why would you want to make a more dangerous virus? And what I've always heard is we have to make the dangerous viruses so we can then find out how to fight the dangerous viruses. And I said, hold on, you have to figure out how to make the more dangerous disease or virus so that you can figure out how to fight something that wouldn't have existed without human beings intervening in it.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Lars, this is essentially bioweapons research, no matter what anyone tells you. They'll call it biodefense, but that's two sides of the same coin. At the end of the day at the end of the day, this is bioweapons research using animal experiments to create deadly viruses that don't exist in nature, and then preempting their release by creating the antidote, the vaccine. So if and when that does get unleashed, either intentionally or accidentally, we have the cure. And that's the history of bioweapons research is going to remote places, bringing back viruses, tinkering with them, and then putting them back out in the world in a way that looks like they spilled over naturally into people, but actually they were created by mad scientists and laboratories. And just to kind of close the loop here, the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana, where Vincent Munster has his animal laboratories, is notorious for back in the 50s and 60s weaponizing Lyme disease and other uh bioweapons by putting them into insects and using insects like ticks as the delivery mechanism for bioweapons. So, this laboratory, you know, the more things change, the more they say the same. 75 years later, this laboratory is still involved in what is essentially bioweapons experimentation to create dangerous viruses that, you know, God forbid get unleashed onto the American public or anywhere in the world. But we saw we've lived through the worst case scenario of this COVID, where the people warned was a recipe disaster for years with Fauci's gain of function experiments. This is another Fauci lab still following the Fauci playbook. And unfortunately, they have not cleaned house at the NIH, and people like Vincent Munster and the Rocky Mountain Lab are still operating. His legacy Fauci's legacy is alive and well at the NIH.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

I'm still I'm talking to Justin Goodman, who's with the White Coat Waste Project. Uh, so isn't this stuff still banned by the same order that that Obama issued? Trump didn't reverse that, did he?

SPEAKER_00 7:05

So the Obama gain of function ban was in effect from 2014 to 2017, and then it was overturned quietly in 2017 at the urging of Dr. Fauci. Um President Trump last year issued an executive order requesting that agencies like the NIH put new rules into place to restrict, if not ban, gain of function. But the NIH has been dragging its feet, HHS has been dragging its feet, and there are no rules currently in place prohibiting gain of function specifically. But there's also a lot of loopholes. If you look at what happened during with COVID, you know, the the the the Fauci funded grant to the Wuhan Laboratory was awarded during the ban that Obama implemented in 2014.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Unbelievable. That is Justin Goodman. Justin will be back on the show. Justin, thanks so much. I appreciate the time. Uh senior vice president of advocacy at the White Coat Waste Project. Be back in a moment. You got the Laris Larson show.