On the menu today: On the other side of the world, a government-run lab with past ties to bioweapons research has an accident and records the sudden death of a researcher, and an authoritarian state that I loathe begins an extensive response, including quarantines, while insisting everything is fine and there’s nothing for the public to worry about. If you’ve been reading this newsletter since, oh, April 2020, you know that’s my personal Bat-Signal. Read on.
Tracking the Irkutsk Infection
Late last night, Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stated reports of a death from plague in the Russian city of Irkutsk:
Rospotrebnadzor reported that the sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Irkutsk region and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is stable.
“The sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Irkutsk region and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is stable. A special set of measures has been organized and implemented in response to the case of an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East who has been diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown etiology,” the Rospotrebnadzor press service said in a statement on Sunday.
Based on the results of extensive testing, no microorganisms associated with the patient’s professional activities were detected in the patient’s sample, the department noted.
Rospotrebnadzor reported that no infectious disease cases have been reported among the institute’s employees over the past 10 days.
As you might guess, Russian authorities don’t issue a “don’t worry, no plague here” statement unless people are worried that there is a risk of plague.
The Moscow Times is an independent media entity that covers Russia from Amsterdam after media censorship laws made continuing their work from within Russia impossible. The Moscow Times reported Friday, October 2:
Health authorities in Siberia’s Irkutsk region have placed nearly 200 people under medical observation after a laboratory worker died from plague, according to media reports and a statement by a regional leader Friday.
Alexei Tsydenov, head of the neighboring republic of Buryatia, confirmed that the woman had died from an unspecified form of plague. Irkutsk officials had previously described the illness only as a “particularly dangerous infection.”
Citing information from Russia’s consumer safety watchdog Rospotrebnadzor and Buryatia’s government, Tsydenov said the woman had not visited his republic and that her infection was unrelated to the region.
“There are no plague outbreaks in the republic, including in areas bordering Mongolia,” he wrote on social media.
Tsydenov’s post was later edited to read “the woman who may have died of plague.” Similarly, “on October 3, the city administration in Baikalsk, in the Irkutsk region, urged people not to travel to Shelekhov “because of unofficial reports that a person in Shelekhov had been diagnosed with plague.” It later deleted the post. The national television channel REN TV also deleted five social media posts about the spread of plague in Shelekhov.”
When posts warning about a contagious disease just disappear with no correction, that’s just so reassuring, isn’t it?
Irkutsk, the city, is the capital of Irkutsk Oblast, a state in south-central Russia, part of the Siberian Federal District, not too far from the Mongolian border. The “Republic of Buryatia” is an adjacent federal subject that is also part of the Russian Federation; a stretch of Buryatia is between Irkutsk and Mongolia.
The city of Irkutsk is home to the Irkutsk Antiplague Research Institute of Siberia, founded in 1934 and home to research on plague, cholera, brucellosis, tularemia, anthrax, and arbovirus infections.
Once again, we have an authoritarian regime that puts one of its most important facilities for the research of contagious diseases right in the middle of a major city. Irkutsk is the 25th-largest city in Russia, with an estimated population of about 600,000, and an international airport that has daily domestic flights to most major Russian cities and international flights to Beijing, Shanghai and four other cities in China; Bangkok and Phuket, Thailand; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Tashkent and Namangan, Uzbekistan; Nha Trang, Vietnam; and Osh and Fergana, Kyrgyzstan.
Between September 30 and October 4, 260 flights left Irkutsk International Airport.
Doesn’t anybody want to research contagious diseases out in the middle of nowhere? It’s Siberia — you’re telling me they don’t have enough space?
From Pravda.ru, founded and owned by Putin’s friend Vadim Gorshenin – meaning that if this isn’t the Russian government’s line on the situation, it isn’t too far from it:
Authorities in the Irkutsk region have only acknowledged a suspicion of an “especially dangerous infection.” Nevertheless, the official response indicates the seriousness with which the situation is being treated.
Since October 1, certain departments of the Shelekhov District Hospital have suspended admissions and discharges, placing the facility under quarantine. Anna Popova, head of Rospotrebnadzor (Russia’s Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing), arrived in Irkutsk to attend an emergency meeting of the regional sanitary-epidemiological commission alongside Governor Igor Kobzev. Rospotrebnadzor is implementing a comprehensive set of anti-epidemic measures.
Rospotrebnadzor is headquartered in Moscow; it is a nearly six-hour flight from there to Irkutsk. The director making that trip is an indicator of the seriousness of the situation.
The Pravda.ru report continues:
According to most recent reports, the scientist who is believed to have died from plague in the Irkutsk region accidentally broke a test tube that contained a dangerous bacterium while collecting biological material for a laboratory diagnostic testing. Experts are currently investigating this possibility.
According to her colleagues, the woman told doctors at the hospital about the broken test tube. The deceased scientist had worked with animals infected with plague.
From the news website Above the Norm:
The woman has been identified by Russian regional media as Darya Shipilova, a laboratory specialist at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute. According to reporting by the regional outlet People of Baikal, Shipilova accidentally broke a test tube containing the pathogen responsible for pneumonic plague while working on 25 September. She reportedly began feeling unwell afterwards and was admitted to the district hospital in Shelekhov on 29 September with severe pneumonia.
Her condition deteriorated rapidly. Reports say she was placed on mechanical ventilation before dying during the night of 1–2 October. Several Russian and international outlets have since reported that plague was the cause of death, although Russian federal health authorities have not yet released a detailed public account confirming exactly how she became infected or specifying the clinical form of the disease.
According to the World Health Organization, “People infected with Y. pestis often develop symptoms after an incubation period of one to seven days.”
More from the WHO:
Plague is an infectious disease caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, usually found in small mammals and their fleas. It is transmitted between animals through fleas. Humans can be infected through:
- the bite of infected vector fleas
- unprotected contact with infectious bodily fluids or contaminated materials
- the inhalation of respiratory particles from a patient with pneumonic plague.
Plague is a very severe disease in people, particularly when the bacteria spreads through the bloodstream (septicaemic plague) or infects the lungs (pneumonic plague). It has a case-fatality ratio of 30 percent to 100 percent if left untreated. The pneumonic and septicaemic forms are invariably fatal unless treated early.
Pneumonic plague is especially contagious and can trigger severe epidemics through person-to-person transmission via respiratory particles.
As of this morning, there is nothing on the WHO’s website about anything happening in Irkutsk. There is a September 29 update on global cases of plague. “Between 2019 and 2025, 10 countries reported suspected human plague cases to WHO, six of which reported confirmed cases. Most cases were reported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar, where plague remains endemic in some areas.”
Assuming the local news reports are correct — a big assumption — Shipilova was feeling unwell for four days after the laboratory accident involving pneumonic plague, then went to a hospital. That’s a lot of time to walk around interacting with others and potentially infecting them, and an extremely reckless course of action for someone who would be familiar with the risks of an infection from plague.
Recent history has taught us that when an autocratic regime runs into a contagious disease, the first casualty is the truth, and the government’s instinct is often to claim that the situation is under control when it is not.
While the Russian government is good at covering up mistakes — the Soviet Union claimed that a major anthrax leak from a state-run biological weapons lab that killed 66 people was a case of “contaminated beef” for 15 years — if a lot of people in Irkutsk started dropping dead from plague, that would be really difficult to hide.
Annie Jacobson, who just wrote a heavily researched and terrifying speculative fiction work entitled Biological War, wrote Friday night: “FSB units accompanying ambulances transporting people who had been in contact with [lab tech] Shipilova for medical examination.” The FSB, as you probably know, is Russia’s Federal Security Service and the successor to the KGB.
The Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network (BEACON) is a public health program based at Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. On Saturday, BEACON issued a report stating, “The involvement of Russia’s national-level Rospotrebnadzor leadership, FSB escort of ambulances, and coordination with specialist institutes in Novosibirsk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg reflects the Category A bioterrorism-tier classification of select pathogens in national emergency frameworks and indicates that the response has been escalated well beyond routine regional capacity.”
A public webcam of Kirov Square in downtown Irkutsk can be found here. So far, no military trucks or guys running around in chem-bio suits, just ordinary traffic.
Nonetheless, we’re left with the explanation of the Russian government that a researcher who worked at an institute studying anthrax, tularemia, and plague — which can cause lung infections — died suddenly from an entirely unrelated “pneumonia of unknown etiology.” (Pneumonia is a lung infection.)
One other wrinkle: In 1999, Ken Alibek, formerly Kanat Alibekov, wrote Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World — Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It, describing his time as a bioweapons developer in the former Soviet Union.
In that book, he described “Biopreparat,” the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program that was considered one of the “best-guarded secrets in the old Soviet Union” and a blatant, large-scale violation of Moscow’s signing of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972:
These were just some of the facilities opened by Biopreparat. Existing state laboratories and research centers were also sucked into the new world created by Brezhnev’s program. Several biological facilities managed by the Ministry of Health, including the large anti-plague research complexes in Kuybyshev, Minsk, Saratov, Irkutsk, Volgograd, and Almaty, were given special funding for weapons-oriented genetic research. [Emphasis added.]
Later in the book, he again mentions the intertwining of regular medical research and biological weapons research at this site.
Second Main Directorate Controlled about a dozen antiplague institutes and research facilities for work on microbiology and epidemiology scattered around the USSR. In addition to peaceful medical research, overseen by the Main Sanitary Epidemiological Directorate, which ran them, these facilities were responsible for investigating new strains of pathogenic microorganisms that could be used as biological weapons.
The institutes were located in Minsk (Belarus), Saratov, Irkutsk, Samara (formerly Kuybyshev), Rostov-on-Don, Almaty, and Volgograd, among others. [Emphasis added.]
In other words, while this facility was doing legitimate research on how to combat an infection of plague, it was also completely integrated into the old Soviet Union’s biological weapons program. The 2025 threat assessment of the U.S. intelligence community declared, “Russian scientific institutes continue to research and develop CBW capabilities, including technologies to deliver CBW agents.” The 2026 threat assessment stated, “China, North Korea, and Russia probably maintain the knowledge and capability to produce and employ traditional biological pathogens and toxins, and historically have pursued — or, in the case of North Korea, continues to pursue — pathogens that cause highly infectious or contagious diseases.”
How likely is it that the Irkutsk Antiplague Research Institute of Siberia has completely clean hands when it comes to biological weapons research today? At this point, we can’t even be certain that they have clean hands after a broken test tube.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it over the weekend, James Lileks laments the City of Minneapolis requiring that self-driving cars have a $31.50/hour non-driver sitting in the driver’s seat, even though they are not driving the car, and imagines a scenario where the city banned people from pumping their own gas. James, you’re not going to believe what life in New Jersey is like! Plus, a bunch of states want to mandate a ratio between manned-checkout-lanes and self-checkout lanes at grocery stores. We call it big government, but it manifests in the form of micro-managing.