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.”
