Russia Needs to Tell the Truth About a Plague Death
· The Atlantic
The scenario is right out of a Stephen King novel: At a medical lab stashed away in a remote Siberian city, a pretty young technician was exposed to a deadly pathogen. She died, the lab went into lockdown, and soon rumors emerged that the Russian security services were on the scene. Now the world waits to see whether some monstrous microbe is going to make its way out of Russia’s forests.
What’s going on in Russia is bad, but—at least so far—not that bad. We know that someone working at a research institute that studies various forms of plague has died of pneumonia, which suggests that she mishandled a sample of pneumonic plague. That’s about it. Medical observers are rightly concerned: Pneumonic plague is nasty stuff. But it’s also not some unknown bug; a few hundred cases appear every year, and it is easily cured with antibiotics if diagnosed quickly enough. Counterintuitively, the pathogen’s deadliness limits the disease’s ability to spread: It kills its victims before they can infect too many other people. (ln this case, the remote location of the Russian facility might also help to contain any outbreak.)
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Nevertheless, the situation in Siberia raises unsettling questions, and international experts, along with U.S. diplomats, are asking for more transparency. What kind of experiments are being conducted at this lab—the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East—and are they possibly related to biological warfare? Did the researcher die of a known variant of the pneumonic plague, or some new, deadlier strain? Why are the Russian authorities reportedly quarantining hundreds of people?
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Don’t expect honest answers from the Russians about any of this. The main source of information about this incident has been Russia’s Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare, known by an abbreviation, Rospotrebnadzor (“ras-pah-treb-nah-dzor”). The name is rather anodyne, but the many duties of this organization include supervision of some of Russia’s biological-research institutes. For years it was part of the Russian ministry of health, but in 2012 it was reassigned and now reports directly to the Russian central government, elevating its importance and its broader mandate to act as Russia’s main overseer of epidemiological research.
Not that Rospotrebnadzor has been all that helpful in making sense of the crisis in Irkutsk. Regarding the death of Darya Shipilova, the lab worker, for example, it said: “No micro-organisms associated with the employee’s professional duties were detected in samples taken from the patient,” a careful construction that says almost nothing. What were the employee’s professional duties? What organisms were detected? Shipilova died of something; what was it?
Rospotrebnadzor said in an official statement that the woman died of “pneumonia of unknown cause,” but the region’s governor, Igor Kobzev, might have let the cat out of the bag when he revealed that Anna Popova, the head of Rospotrebnadzor, traveled to Irkutsk last week. CNN reports that Kobzev posted on Telegram that she came to town for an “extraordinary meeting of the regional sanitary and anti-epidemic commission,” in connection with “a suspected case of a regional resident with a particularly dangerous infection.”
A U.S. State Department spokesperson over the weekend encouraged “Russian authorities to share accurate information quickly and openly.” Good luck with that. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov closed the noninformation loop with this helpful advice: “The lead agency with expertise in this area is Rospotrebnadzor. People should rely on its official statements and disregard rumors, speculation, and so on.”
One innocent explanation is that the Irkutsk institute is trying to come up with better ways to prevent plague, and someone mishandled dangerous material—and the Russians, with their mania for secrecy, are making it all seem more ominous than necessary by clamping down on any further information. But maybe something more ominous is, in fact, going on. Dr. Ashish Jha, the former dean of Brown University’s school of public health and a former member of the Biden administration’s COVID-response team, pointed out in a thread on X on Sunday that “Russia is well known to have an active military biological weapons program.” He additionally noted reports (so far unconfirmed) that units of the Russian security services have been escorting vehicles to local hospitals.
Moscow has a long history with biological-weapons research going back to the Cold War. The United States unilaterally renounced research into biological-warfare agents back in 1969; the Soviets signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, but in reality they never abandoned such programs. The Russians claimed in 1992 to have ended those efforts, but they are currently expanding a sizable facility that had once been used for biological-warfare research. (The Russian Ministry of Defense, predictably, has no comment on these construction activities.)
If the Irkutsk incident turns out to be the result of an accident in a Russian biological-warfare lab, it won’t be the first time. Back in 1979, the Soviet Union tried desperately to cover up an outbreak of anthrax in a city near the Ural Mountains, Sverdlovsk (now called Yekaterinburg). They nearly got away with it.
In the fall of 1979 and early 1980, a Russian-language émigré newspaper based in what was then West Germany ran reports about some kind of germ-related disaster in the Urals after an explosion at a lab. Evidence that dribbled in from Sverdlovsk over time, including the fact that the Soviet minister of defense personally visited the city, suggested that something big had indeed gone down. Descriptions of the illness spreading through the area pointed to anthrax, and in the early ’80s, the Americans—this was during the Cold War, after all—loudly accused the Soviets of working on an anthrax weapon.
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The Soviets pretended to be deeply offended at such an accusation, and explained that the deaths and illnesses were the result of people eating tainted meat—it was all just a simple case of food poisoning. (After all, what nation doesn’t blockade roads in a major city and send their military chief to check on some locals eating bad beef?) The Soviet explanation was hooey, of course; a defector who worked in Soviet bioweapons programs, Ken Alibek, later theorized that the lab in Sverdlovsk making the anthrax had neglected to replace a filter and had ended up venting spores into the area.
Thirteen years would pass after the outbreak before anyone in Moscow admitted the truth. In 1992, then–Russian President Boris Yeltsin told the Americans that Soviet biowarfare experts had indeed been doing anthrax research, and that these experts had repeatedly lied to him about the 1979 event. The official death toll from the Sverdlovsk accident stands at 68, but no one will ever know the true numbers: The KGB at the time immediately seized and destroyed important evidence, including medical records. One might think the Soviets were chastened by this experience, but one would be wrong: After the Sverdlovsk facility was closed, the Soviets built another one in Kazakhstan, where they reportedly worked on strains of anthrax even more virulent than the stuff released in Sverdlovsk.
If something terrible has happened in Irkutsk, don’t count on the Russians coming clean about it anytime soon. Russia is led by an aggressive dictator who has been making war in Europe for four years, and Moscow’s incomplete explanations about what’s happening in Siberia cannot be trusted. The possibility that the Russians are working on existentially dangerous biological weapons is one more challenge to American—and global—security.