What was already gone when WHO asked.
Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old scientist at the Irkutsk Antiplague Research Institute, who had worked in its plague microbiology unit, died on October 2nd in a hospital in Shelekhov. Five days later, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, said at a media briefing: “We have also sought verification of media reports of a second employee with pneumonia of undetermined cause.”
Several Russian outlets had already deleted their reporting on plague in Irkutsk.
How do you fact-check a rumor?
You trace it back to its source. Russian officials have been asking everyone to do exactly that. Rospotrebnadzor, the agency that runs Russia's anti-plague institutes and its disease surveillance, has called the second-illness reports fake on October 8th, the day after Dr. Tedros asked. Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, said that “the vast majority of what the media is reporting regarding this situation is false information.” He told reporters to rely on Rospotrebnadzor instead.
What happened to the first reports?
REN TV is a federal Russian channel. It ran five posts about plague in the Irkutsk region, then deleted all five. TGStat, an outside service that tracks Russian Telegram channels, had already indexed two of them. One said Shipilova had worked with plague strains. The other cited an unnamed source and said a suspected plague patient had died at a district hospital.
Lyudi Baikala, an Irkutsk newsroom, documented those deletions. Russia blocked its website in 2022, and its reporters do not use their names.
On October 2nd, Alexey Tsydenov, the head of the Republic of Buryatia, said a woman in the Irkutsk region had died of plague. He later edited the line to add “possibly.”
The Insider reported that on October 3rd, the Baikalsk city government warned residents to limit visits to Shelekhov. It cited “unofficial information about a confirmed case of plague.” The post stayed up about two hours before it came down.
On October 4th, Axios reported that the Trump administration was monitoring the situation, and Kommersant, a national daily, repeated it. Kommersant’s Telegram post and its website item came down 25 minutes later.
Why does a second case matter so much?
A second case is how you tell one exposure from a larger incident or outbreak.
Scott Minnich, a Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at the University of Idaho, assessed the captured trailers in Iraq for the Iraq Survey Group. I asked him what he would want if he were sent to Irkutsk. He’d start with the patient: whether she dropped a vial, whether she cut herself cleaning up a spill, whether she reported the exposure, whether anyone put her on antibiotics in time.
“The second priority is contact tracing and containment verification,” he wrote. “Have other personnel been exposed, and are any currently symptomatic? Are we looking at a common-source outbreak? Face-to-face interviews with laboratory members are essential.”
The tabloids got there first, but Minnich is asking the same question, as am I.
Rospotrebnadzor says nearly 5,000 lab tests found no dangerous germs. It hasn't said who those samples came from or what the tests looked for.
Sverdlovsk took 13 years.
“Ultimately, you are heavily reliant on human intelligence and testimonies. Obtaining truthful, uncoerced testimonies within Russia may be difficult given the potential institutional and political pressures personnel face,” Minnich said.
An anthrax release near Sverdlovsk killed dozens of people in 1979. The Soviet government blamed tainted meat. Nobody could inspect the site, so the meat story stuck. Thirteen years passed before Boris Yeltsin, then Russia’s president, acknowledged that the anthrax had come from a military facility and that the cause had been covered up.
The CIA reached the opposite conclusion about whether Iraq based on similarly shaky evidence. It leaned on secondhand material from an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball. Minnich wrote: “U.S. intelligence accepted this German intelligence at face value without ever vetting the information through their own direct interrogations.” He added, “Once an official determination has been made by authorities and endorsed by a select group of scientists, human nature makes it incredibly difficult to walk that conclusion back.”
The United States sent a classified démarche to Moscow on October 7th. It reminded Russia of its obligations under the International Health Regulations. WHO has offered technical support on lab biosafety, and says it still cannot finish a risk assessment.
What cuts against this?
Dr. Nahid Bhadelia is the founding director of Boston University's Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (CEID). “I can’t say that we have any one scenario that has more evidence than elsewhere,” she said. “Putting my geopolitical hat on, to me, it seems it’s a greater cost to Russia to say it’s a ‘pneumonia of unknown etiology’ than it is to say it was a careless lab worker.” She doesn’t anticipate that Russia will provide more information about secondary cases.
Dr. Bhadelia is right that this doesn’t add up. She deferred to people who know Russian politics better than she does. I’ll say what she wouldn’t. If Russia is concealing something it regards as worse than a careless lab worker — research it does not want made public, for instance — then admitting the lab accident was the easier way out, and Russia has not taken it. I have no evidence for what that something is.
A note on the Russian sources. Lyudi Baikala is an Irkutsk outlet. Russia blocked its website in 2022 and detained its founders, who have since left the country, and its reporters inside Russia still work anonymously.