Two government scientists with the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories reentered the country this January with a large black plastic case that worried customs officials. Further inspection revealed 113 undeclared microcentrifuge tubes in Styrofoam coolers—including 17 samples that later tested positive for DNA from mpox (also known as monkeypox) at an FBI lab. Now, federal prosecutors are charging these two NIH scientists, award – winning virologist Vincent Munster and postdoctoral research fellow Claude Kwe, with “conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox into the United States” and lying about it to federal law enforcement. According to the criminal complaint , made public on Tuesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan, Munster materially misled U.S.…