Russia's Plague: The Next Epidemic?

The scientist at a plague research lab in Siberia is dead, her colleagues under quarantine. Could this be the start of the next global pandemic? Stay tuned to find out. Welcome to America Uncovered, I'm Chris Chappell. So let me introduce you to a little research center in Siberia called the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute. Its job is to study... the plague! You know, the disease that wiped out a third of Europe in the Middle Ages? It still lives in rodent populations across Siberia, Mongolia, and Central Asia, so the institute is in a prime location to study it. In late September, a 28-year-old lab technician started showing symptoms of what many at first suspected was COVID. She was later hospitalized in a nearby town, and died on October 2nd. Now, according to an exiled Siberian news outlet, a few days earlier, she had broken a test tube in the lab containing the pathogen. We can't say for certain whether or not that's how she got sick. Maybe she contracted it doing field research, or maybe it wasn't the plague at all. Who knows. But what we do know is that the hospital where she died was sealed off. Around 200 of her close contacts were put under quarantine, and more than 60 of her colleagues were effectively locked inside the institute for days. Meanwhile, residents of the city began posting videos of people walking the streets in hazmat suits, while workers at a nearby aluminum plant were told to mask up over fears of an outbreak. Now, the Kremlin has been pretty cagey about what's going on. In a lot of cases, Russian officials straight up refused to use the P word. No, not that one. It's plague. I'm talking about plague. Now, Russia's national health watchdog says her death had nothing to do with her work. Rather, she died from pneumonia of unknown etiology. Which is to say, unknown origin. The agency also says it found no accidents at the institute, which is kind of strange. If this was just a simple case of pneumonia, wouldn't quarantining 200 people, locking the lab staff inside the building, and restricting access to hospitals be kind of, uh, overkill? Now, one of the first people to publicly call it plague wasn't anyone in Irtyshk. It was the head of a neighboring region. He mostly just wanted everyone to know that the dead lab worker hadn't caught it in his territory, despite the rumors she might have caught it there. Then he quietly edited his post to say she only may have died of plague. Meanwhile, authorities in a nearby city posted a notice asking residents not to travel to the city where the technician was hospitalized because of plague, and then promptly deleted it. According to an independent news outlet, local news site irk.ru reported that the quarantine was imposed due to a suspected plague, but that got removed, too. But whoever scrubbed it forgot to take the word plague out of the site's URL. Whoops. Gee, Russia, you're really putting my mind at ease here. Now to be fair, we don't actually know whether or not she died of plague. Russia hasn't published the lab results that would settle it either way. And some specialists doubt the broken test tube story, since that kind of work is usually done inside sealed safety cabinets. And the World Health Organization, for its part, says the risk of an epidemic is low. Though considering their handling of Covid, you may want to take what the WHO says with the smallest grain of salt. And this is sort of the problem. We're being told there's nothing to see here, but we know from history that Russia has a... complicated relationship with the truth. In 1971, the Soviet Union was running an open-air bioweapons testing ground on an island in the middle of the Aral Sea. That summer, a research ship sailed a little too close to the island. The young crew member got sick, went home to the port town of Aralsk, and started the Soviet Union's first smallpox outbreak in over a decade. Ten people got sick and three died. The city was quietly quarantined, and the outside world didn't hear about it for 30 years. When researchers finally analyzed a secret Soviet report in 2002, they concluded it was the first evidence the Soviet Union field-tested a smallpox weapon, and that such testing caused civilian deaths. Eight years later, in 1979, a similar story occurred. This time, it was in the city known today as Yekaterinburg, a secret military facility called Compound 19. According to a Soviet bioweapons expert who defected to the United States, workers at the facility removed an air filter and forgot to replace it. As a result, anthrax spores drifted over the city, and at least 64 people died. But the official explanation? Tainted meat! Moscow stuck to that story for 13 years. That is, until in 1992, when Bortz Yeltsin, who had been the local Communist Party boss at the time, admitted that the anthrax outbreak was the result of military activity at the facility. And then, of course, there was Chernobyl, the cover-up par excellence. In April 1986, reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Moscow said nothing. The world only found out when workers at a nuclear plant in Sweden had their own radiation alarms go off and realized the radiation wasn't coming from them. Meanwhile, Kyiv held its May Day parade like nothing happened. The USSR may be gone, but old habits die hard. Putin's Russia has its own long history of burying the truth. In 2017, monitoring stations across Europe detected a radioactive cloud of ruthenium-106. Scientists traced it back to the southern Urals and found the most likely culprit was the Mayak nuclear complex. Russia initially denied that anything had happened, but they admitted there had been elevated radiation levels. Just not from Mayak. Some Russian experts suggested that maybe a satellite burned up in the atmosphere, and that was causing it. In 2019, a study by scientists using data from nearly 30 countries pinned the source on a nuclear reprocessing facility. Again, likely Mayak. But Russia's state-owned nuclear energy corporation kept up the denial. They called the researchers' conclusions inconsistent with the established facts. That same year, in 2019, there was Nyonoksa. According to reports, an explosion at a Russian Navy testing range on the White Sea killed two servicemen and five nuclear engineers. US officials believed it was a test involving one of Russia's nuclear-powered cruise missiles. A nearby city reported a spike in radiation. But then several of Russia's monitoring stations— the ones that report to international agencies—went silent. Observers called it a coordinated effort to conceal the radiation data. And doctors who treated the injured said they weren't even told the patients were radioactive. So you see the pattern. Something goes wrong at one of these facilities, the government flat out denies anything is happening, and the world is left scrambling. Which brings us back to Irkutsk. It's not that we know exactly what happened there. It's that Russia has given us every reason not to take the government's word at face value. Now, every country has lab accidents. Even the US had a few really embarrassing ones. Like the research institute in Fort Detrick. The CDC ordered the suspension of research there after inspections found problems with how it disposed of contaminated waste. Granted, at least we were told about it. But embarrassing nonetheless. So why should Russia worry us more? Well, it's because Russia is running some of the world's most dangerous research programs on a foundation that's been crumbling for 35 years. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia's population fell off a cliff. Births plummeted, deaths spiked, and by the mid-90s, life expectancy for a Russian man dropped to the high 50s. At the same time, Russia's science budget collapsed. Low pay caused tens of thousands of researchers to either emigrate or to move to other sectors. It's what you would call brain drain. As a result, you have a competency crisis. Russian labs are full of aging, Soviet-trained scientists. And while they do have younger researchers, like that 28-year-old technician who died, there's a hole where all the mid-career experts should be. The war in Ukraine certainly hasn't helped things. Hundreds of thousands of young, educated people chose to pack up and leave the country rather than get drafted. And the war had the dual effects of cutting Russian scientists off from international collaboration, conferences, and journals. Sanctions make it harder to import specialized lab equipment and supplies. And that makes the next accident all the more likely. But despite this, the Kremlin is still dead set on conducting extremely dangerous research. Northeast of Moscow, there's a closed military town called Sergei Posad 6. During the Cold War, it was one of the Soviet Union's main bioweapons research centers. It experimented with weaponizing smallpox, among other things. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, satellite images analyzed by the Washington Post in 2024 showed major expansion of the site. We're talking 10 new buildings, totaling more than 250,000 square feet. Some of them have the hallmarks of the highest security labs, the kind built to handle the world's deadliest pathogens. Now Russia says these labs are for defensive research, like studying Ebola so that it can protect the country from bioterrorism. But here's the problem. Like many kinds of research, it can be dual use. The same lab, the same equipment, and the same research can be used to make a vaccine or a weapon. It's a bit like Iran's civilian nuclear program. Actually, no, it's worse. With nuclear programs, you've got inspectors from the IAEA. With bioweapons, that isn't really the case. The Biological Weapons Convention, or BWC, doesn't have a formal verification system at all. So all we have to go on is the country's track record. And Russia's is... less than stellar. The Soviet Union secretly ran a massive, offensive bioweapons program for decades after they signed a treaty banning them. And according to the US State Department, it never really ended. In its compliance report, they assessed that the Soviet program was absorbed, not dismantled, by the Russian Federation. But back to Irkutsk. Could this be the start of the next global pandemic? Hopefully not. Pneumonic plague is both infectious and almost 100% fatal if left untreated. But thankfully, it is treatable with antibiotics if you catch it early enough. And at least as of right now, we don't have any hard evidence that it's spreading. Problem is in how Russia handles these sorts of cases. No published test results. No independent investigations. All we get is a tightly controlled media telling us there's nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, Putin keeps on playing plague incorporated with his secret bioweapons labs. The next outbreak might not be the plague. It might be something antibiotics can't stop. And the world might find out the same way it found out about Chernobyl— when the alarms start going off across Europe, or even right here at home. But what do you think? Leave your comments below. I read as many as I can. But I read every comment on AmericaUncovered.tv, where you'll get access to thousands of episodes ad-free, plus a community chat, live streams, and more. Just click this button here or the link below. I'm Chris Chappell. Thank you for watching America Uncovered.