China’s Biological Warfare Threat to the United States

On June 2, 2026, the Department of Justice charged two NIH researchers, Vincent Munster, 53, a Dutch national and Chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe, 38, a Cameroonian research fellow, with conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox virus into the United States and making false statements to federal law enforcement.

While Munster is Dutch and Kwe Cameroonian, neither is a Chinese national. However, the case’s connection to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) biological threat framework is well documented.

Sen. Rand Paul’s April 2024 letters revealed that Munster was a named partner in the DEFUSE proposal. The EcoHealth Alliance-DARPA grant application proposed engineering chimeric bat coronaviruses and listed the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as a partner. Paul said the disclosure “appears to contradict” Dr. Fauci’s prior testimony that the NIH was unaware of the proposal.

The WIV operates under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a State Council institution. A House Foreign Affairs Committee report found that local CCP leaders, including Director General Wang Yanyi and BSL-4 laboratory manager Yuan Zhiming, directly oversaw the WIV and its highest-containment laboratory.

The State Department further determined that the WIV has conducted classified research for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) since at least 2017. Cables obtained by U.S. Right to Know cited the existence of “PLA shadow labs at WIV.”

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also linked the WIV to the Fifth Institute of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), which is part of China’s acknowledged biological weapons program. The committee concluded that SARS-CoV-2 may have links to that program.

This case is the latest in a documented series of biological-smuggling incidents involving China-linked research networks operating in the United States. Most of these cases have been intercepted at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Several examples are detailed in the section below.

China’s asymmetric warfare toolkit includes numerous vectors designed to pressure the United States, including biological warfare. These components work together as part of a broader strategy.

For example, the cyber component, led by Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, has been confirmed to have penetrated U.S. power grids, water systems, and telecommunications networks.

On the economic and demographic front, Chinese chemical manufacturers supply fentanyl precursors that flow through Mexican cartels into American communities.

The State Department has assessed that China operated an offensive biological warfare program from the early 1950s until at least the late 1980s. During that period, China weaponized ricin, botulinum toxins, and the causative agents of anthrax, cholera, plague, and tularemia.

In 1993, U.S. intelligence assessed that two civilian-run biological research centers, previously known to have produced and stored biological weapons, remained under Chinese military control.

The United States has never been able to confirm that China eliminated its historical program. Every annual State Department compliance report since has registered ongoing concern. The 2024 assessment concluded that the PRC continued to engage in biological activities with potential biological weapons applications, including possible development of toxins for military purposes.

In 2024, the State Department’s annual arms control compliance report disclosed for the first time that China’s military is conducting and directing research into sea-based neurotoxins, among the world’s most potent naturally occurring poisons, attacking the central nervous system and lethal in tiny amounts, and that China’s required disclosures to other Biological Weapons Convention signatories omitted this work entirely.

While civilian Chinese research in this area has focused on preventing marine toxin poisoning from seafood, U.S. intelligence suspects the PLA is exploiting it as cover for weapons development; a March 2014 Chinese government-funded study had already identified anatoxins, saxitoxins, and tetrodotoxin as having military potential.

The lead Chinese military body for this work is the PLA’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), the same institution tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology elsewhere in this article, which the Commerce Department sanctioned, along with ten subordinate institutes, in 2021 over alleged “brain-control weaponry” research. An authoritative PLA textbook, “The Science of Military Strategy,” identifies biology as a domain for military struggle and references the potential for “specific ethnic genetic attacks” targeting particular ethnic groups.

The 2025 compliance report added a further concern: China’s military is reportedly using artificial intelligence to advance its biological weapons research. The DoD’s 2024 China Military Power Report separately documented that PLA medical institutions have emerged as major centers for gene-editing research, and that the PLA is exploring “neurocognitive warfare” capabilities designed to exploit adversaries through neuroscience and psychology.

Underpinning all of this is China’s Military-Civil Fusion policy. The policy legally obligates Chinese universities, research institutions, and commercial enterprises to share their work, including biological research, with the PLA upon demand.

As a result, ostensibly civilian research conducted by Chinese nationals at American universities, hospitals, and government laboratories is potentially accessible to the Chinese military.

The State Department’s 2024 International Security Advisory Board report on biotechnology and China’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy warned explicitly about this risk. The report stated that biological data and genetic datasets generated in the United States represent “the new oil” fueling PRC military biotechnology ambitions.