The Memo: Experts seek to calm panic over mysterious Russia ‘plague’ case
The Hill · C · trust 58/100
Link copied by Niall Stanage - 10/05/26 6:30 PM ET Link copied NOW PLAYING A new cloud of anxiety is hovering over the public amid reports of an infectious disease, a laboratory accident and a death.
The fact that the story comes out of Russia heightens American concerns rather than assuages them, raising dark talk of bioweapons, artificial intelligence and Kremlin secrecy.
“I hate to see them having it. It’s a rough disease,” he told reporters Monday. “That’s a disease we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have gotten stronger and smarter. They’re like an army.”
He told another reporter: “We’re looking at it very strongly.”
The core concern here is pneumonic plague — not the infamous bubonic plague that ravaged the Middle Ages — and whether the Russian case, if officially confirmed, could spread. There are some reports that 200 people are already under medical observation in Siberia.
To Americans still traumatized by the peak years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the whole matter sounds an ominous warning bell.
But health experts who spoke to this column sought to calm incipient panic, noting that pneumonic plague — despite its horror-inducing name — is not particularly easily transmissible, usually requiring exposure in very close quarters.
In most instances, basic masking and hospital isolation for those affected is “more than sufficient” to contain any broader dangers, said Dr. Mike Ryan, who led the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergency response division for eight years until 2025.
Ryan, like other experts who spoke to this column, also noted that it has yet to be officially confirmed that the Russian story even involves a death from plague.
Russian officials have acknowledged only that someone working at a lab in Siberia died from pneumonia of no clear origin. According to The New York Times, the authorities have also insisted that “no microorganisms linked to her professional activity were identified in the patient’s samples.”
But it’s easy to see why the matter has caused alarm.
The laboratory in question is the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia — a name that for some will carry echoes of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the controversy over the origins of COVID-19.
In the Russian case, local reporting has indicated that the 28-year-old woman — named by CNN as Darya Shipilova — died after breaking a test tube.
Public skepticism has been further fueled by mixed messages from officials. According to The New York Times , the governor of a neighboring region posted a social media message about “the woman who died of plague” before amending that message by adding the word “possibly.”
A separate message from a town in the region about “a case of plague” was reportedly deleted.
“We don’t even know for sure that it’s plague,” Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told this column. “It certainly could be pneumonic plague, but we are not getting a lot of information out of the Russians.”
Hotez, like Ryan, also noted that even if plague is confirmed, that does not necessarily suggest malevolent weaponization.
“Even if it is pneumonic plague, it’s important not to jump to too many conclusions. This is right in the heart of where plague occurs naturally, so potentially she was working on a naturally occurring isolate.”
Larry Gostin, a Georgetown Law professor who specializes in public health, told this column that his “general view is that we don’t have to be, as Americans, particularly concerned” on the basis of what is known so far.
“Right now, we don’t have any evidence that they were designing a bioweapon, but it’s Russia, and we don’t know for sure,” Gostin said.
But he also noted that, separate from the specifics of events in Siberia, the story is landing at a time when concerns are growing about potential misuses of AI.
“I don’t want to be overly alarmist but this is one of the existential threats that we don’t talk about,” he said. “Normally, it’s a scenario of the AI agent taking over and doing harm to us. But a much more likely scenario is that a human with bad intentions will use the AI to be able to create a pandemic.”
All the experts who spoke to this column Monday, including Gostin, stressed that they viewed the chances of a pandemic springing from his incident as low.
But they separately expressed broader concerns, including about pandemic preparedness in the United States.
“The likelihood that this is going to lead to a plague epidemic is probably pretty small,” said Hotez. “But it’s another reminder of the importance, on the U.S. side, that we don’t put pandemic preparedness on ice, because there are always these possibilities.”
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking of events in Russia, told reporters : “We’re watching and monitoring it closely. I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus and a cause to just keep an eye on. And we’re doing that.”
Ryan, the former WHO official, characterized Rubio’s position as “a reasonable stance.”
“Keeping a watching brief is perfectly sufficient at this point,” he said.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
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