Rocky Mountain Lab Reportedly “Well-Protected”, According To NPR, But Is It Really? – by Travis Mateer

I took this picture on the afternoon of August 27th, 2026, while floating the Bitterroot river.

What this picture shows is the backside of the Rocky Mountain Laboratory property which, for those who don’t know, is a Bio-Safety Level 4 lab (BSL-4) handling some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens.

So why is there a huge gap in the fencing?

Last year NPR reported on the dumb hicks in Hamilton to shame them for being weary of the super-smart scientists and all the money Hamilton should be appreciative of.

Rocky Mountain Labs has become an economic driver for the town, generating hundreds of millions of dollars for the local economy through spillover to other industries and retail.

Many residents are proud of the internationally recognized research unfolding at the National Institutes of Health facility. But a few locals resent what they consider the elitist scientists at the facility, which has employed about 500 people in recent years. Or they fear the contagious pathogens studied there could escape the labs’ well-protected walls.

That split widened with the COVID-19 pandemic and the divisions that emerged from mask mandates and vaccine development. In 2023, Matt Rosendale, a Republican who was then a U.S. representative from Montana, falsely tied the lab to the origins of COVID in an attempt to cut its funding.

Now, Hamilton is a prime example of how the Trump administration’s mass federal layoffs and cancellation of research grants are being felt in communities far from Washington, D.C.

The impact of budget cuts definitely reduced the amount of super-smart scientists working at Rocky Mountain Labs, but do budget cuts explain not finishing a chainlink fence to secure assets, like these trailers from the National Institutes of Health?

As of early May, 41 Rocky Mountain Labs workers had been let go or told their contracts would end this summer, and nine more had retired early, according to researchers employed by the facility.

KFF Health News spoke with 10 current or former Rocky Mountain Labs workers who requested anonymity to speak about information that has not been publicly released. The federal government has also slashed billions of dollars for research, including at least $29 million in grants to Montana recipients, ranging from university scientists to the state health department. That’s according to HHS data confirmed by KFF Health News.

This NPR reporting happened in May of 2025.

Six months later, a monkey apparently chomped a RML scientist, but the reporting of this incident took about a year to get to the public, where it was was amplified by Laura Loomer.

Huh?

Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana is asking for an inspector general’s review of a renowned federal research lab in his state after a monkey infected with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever bit a worker there.

The employee, whose name was never made public, was treated after the November 2025 incident, did not contract the lethal tick-borne illness and soon returned to work. But a conservative animal welfare group, White Coat Waste, and MAGA influencer Laura Loomer have since urged federal intervention. They say the incident at the lab, a National Institutes of Health facility in a small town in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, as well as their separate suspicions about one of its employees, demand investigation.

All this national attention and demands for an investigation are great and all, but what about the incomplete fencing? What the fuck is up with that? Are we looking at a Potemkin village here?

To better understand the accusations being made against the Rocky Mountain Lab I decided to scrutinize the “White Coat Waste” project, co-founded by a dude named Anthony Bellotti, a guy who likes cats and Republicans who want to stop animal testing.

Ok.

Who is this guy? And is he related to another Anthony Bellotti I found online? Hold that thought because Rob “CHINA LOVER” Chaney wrote an article about ANOTHER Rocky Mountain Lab controversy that emerged recently, and Chaney’s reporting includes highlighting the work of the White Coat Waste project. Hmmm.

From the link:

RML’s latest controversy arose this week when the U.S. Department of Justice arrested and charged two of its researchers with smuggling monkeypox virus samples into the United States and lying to investigators. That came on top of accusations by an animal welfare advocacy group called White Coat Waste Project Inc., which published an “exclusive whistleblower report” alleging that the facility, part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was covering up accidents involving exposure to dangerous pathogens.

The specific accusations have drawn attention from congressional Republicans, including Montana Senator Tim Sheehy. But they have also illuminated a larger debate over animal research during a time of deep political polarization amid an Ebola virus outbreak that has killed hundreds in Africa and following a hantavirus infection that killed several passengers on a cruise ship in early May.

White Coat Waste is a registered nonprofit that raised $5.9 million in 2024. Besides its campaign against RML, White Coat Waste claimed credit for pushing several measures against federal lab testing on animals in the 2026 Farm Bill. It included cuts to funding for animal testing collaborations with China, Russia and other countries. WCW has listed past accomplishments of defunding the Department of Veterans Affairs labs that research dogs and ending a Food and Drug Administration monkey nicotine addiction project.

Further down we get more details on the “12 Monkeys” scenario that included two of those super-smart scientists flying on a crowded plane before getting caught and criminally charged:

“These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo,” Gorgon stated in the press release.

If convicted, the two men face up to five years in prison. The release does not say if the researchers remain in custody or when they may appear in court. It does note that the two are innocent until proven guilty.

“We will remain fiercely vigilant in neutralizing biological threats — or otherwise — and continue to hold accountable those who jeopardize the safety and security of the American people,” Customs and Border Patrol Director of Field Operations Marty Raybon said in the DOJ release.

But the incident also reflects a long-standing suspicion, since the 2020 COVID pandemic, that government researchers are either carelessly or deliberately tinkering with deadly diseases for unknown and possibly evil purposes. That has been a chronic tension for RML workers, who have spent years building community trust that they are handling dangerous pathogens to help the public, not harm it.

Is the community in Hamilton right to be suspicious? Yes, I think they are, and they should ALSO be suspicious or organizations like the White Coat Waste project, especially if their Tony Bellotti is the son, or some other family relation, of this Tony Bellotti:

The locations Tony Bellotti went to in South America, and when we went to those locations, seems significant in terms of U.S. hegemonic power projection, especially when you factor in the Rockefeller Foundation.

With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, he initiated an in-depth investigation of the pests ravaging the cassava root (also called manioc or yucca). Cassava had been called an “orphan crop” because of how few in the research community paid attention to it.

In 1970, Tony and the Centro International de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT) team discovered that by spraying a purée of virus-infected hornworms (nicknamed “hornworm sherbet”), they could drastically reduce the damage to cassava from hornworm (Erinnyis ello) larvae and similar agricultural pests. The treatment proved both inexpensive and highly effective.

Returning to our present day, the effort by Montana’s Senator, Tim Sheehy, to get accurate, relevant information was NOT helped by psycho-bitch, Laura Loomer, who made VERY concerning claims back in May about an impending Ebola release before shifting her focus to getting Milo deported.

The incident reflects a growing distrust of institutional science. In a May 17 post on X, blogger Laura Loomer claimed that “Fauci holdovers” were “about to unleash Ebola in America in an effort to undermine President Trump’s second term with another pandemic so they can steal more elections.” She continued that the “whistleblower letter” allegations about RML revealed a “cover-up about illegal virus smuggling by Trump-hating, foreign-born NIH animal researchers and a monkey bite incident that exposed a staffer to a deadly virus at an NIH lab in Montana.”

I don’t think the Loomer focus is inconsequential, nor the claim I heard recently on a livestream from the “conspiracist”, George Webb, that his followers have “boots on the ground” in Hamilton. For those unaware of Webb’s claims about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, here’s how one local media outlet framed his accusations back in April of 2020:

Maatje Bensassi and her husband are at the center of the elaborate conspiracy, which has been promoted online by George Webb, a conspiracy theorist who has nearly 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Webb has falsely claimed, without any evidence, that Maatje brough the virus to China when she competed as a cyclist in the Military World Games in Wuhan, China last October. Maatje has denied that she ever tested positive for the virus.

Six months later, comments under Webb’s YouTube videos have involved several threats of violence.

The conspiracy theory has even reached China. Webb has been featured in the country’s state media, which has sought to deflect blame for the COVID-19 pandemic.

If we’re talking conspiracy theories, then allow me to conclude this post with one of my own, which goes something like this.

Let’s say the people at the top know something is coming, like a cyclical cataclysmic event, and in order to freely move to their fall-back positions, like converted missile siloes in Montana, then a false outbreak from the Rocky Mountain Labs could provide the PERFECT excuse to quarantine local populations and keep them inside and ignorant about what’s happening.

Obviously, I hope I’m wrong.

If I am NOT wrong, though, and something happens, then I suspect the public will be thrown into an information blackout that could look something like what Gary, Indiana, went through recently, which hardly anyone outside of Gary, Indiana, knew about until after the power started coming back on two weeks later.

Gary’s problems with infrastructure were clear long before the storm rolled in. Over the past decades, as deindustrialization has shrunk the city’s population and tax base, its infrastructure has crumbled too. NIPSCO has a monopoly on Gary’s electricity, and a 2025 analysis by the Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer-advocacy organization, found that NIPSCO customers were already paying the highest bills of any of Indiana’s five investor-owned electric utilities; last year, NIPSCO was approved for another rate increase to upgrade power lines and technology updates. Even though low-income Black households tend to spend more of their incomes on utilities, they are disproportionately affected by electric-grid failures and face slower restoration times after extreme weather events. (NIPSCO did not respond to questions about its infrastructure investments or its rates.)

Each day that the lights stayed off added to the disruption in people’s lives. David Rucker and his wife, Tiffany, told me that they’d had to drive about an hour every day to Chicago to charge his BiPAP ventilator, which he needs to breathe when he sleeps. The device runs only four hours when it’s battery-powered. Although Gary is only about 30 minutes away from the south side of Chicago, the journey takes twice as long, because their car’s transmission needs to be fixed. “The money we would’ve spent to fix it, we don’t have,” Tiffany said. “Now everything is depleted. The storm has taken a lot—mentally, physically, and monetarily.” Their power was restored on Monday night at 10 p.m.

Another benefit for Big Sky billionaires hiding out behind an iron information curtain is that a false outbreak would keep people AWAY from Montana, especially if information can be hermetically sealed inside a sort of geographic faraday cage.

Is that what the Miami mall incident was a test run for?

The power to control narratives is essentially the power to control minds, so, after studying this meta-topic of narrative control intensely for six years, I think I have a better grip on the capabilities of narrative manipulation than most, and what I’m seeing with the Rocky Mountain Lab is raising several red flags.

If you appreciate a citizen journalist who actually GOES TO PLACES in person to bring original reporting on a topic of national importance, then please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps (special thanks to the deliverer of food who left the surprise dish that satiated my growling stomach!)

Thanks for reading!