Plague scare: what scientists know — and what Russia won’t say

The death of a 28-year-old researcher at a Siberian laboratory, possibly from pneumonic plague, has triggered international alarm over whether the incident could spark a wider outbreak. Biosecurity specialists have been assuring the public that this is highly unlikely. Their concern about the incident is the lack of transparency around it.

Although news sources have reported that about 200 people at the lab might have been exposed to the researcher and quarantined, Russia’s public-health regulator has insisted that there was “no emergency” at the Anti-Plague Research Institute in Irkutsk, and that the researcher died from pneumonia of “unknown” origin.

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The Russian government’s sparing disclosures combined with unverified rumours of a lab accident have fuelled demands by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US government for epidemiological data. Only on 7 October — five days after the researcher’s death — did Russian officials reveal that the researcher had been vaccinated against the plague, and that “thousands of tests” revealed that neither she nor others who might have been exposed had tested positive for dangerous pathogens.

Russia has dismissed the concerns over secrecy, with Kremlin officials telling news outlet CNN that it has kept the WHO informed “in accordance with established practice”.

Although the risk of a wider epidemic is minimal — the Yersinia pestis bacterium that causes the disease is treatable with antibiotics — the incident exposes vulnerabilities in global biosurveillance, says Gregory Koblentz, a biosecurity-policy specialist at George Mason University near Washington DC, who studies lab safety.

Nature spoke with Koblentz about why pandemic fears are misplaced and the dangers of government secrecy when responding to this type of incident.

People online have worried that this incident could resurrect the Black Death, a pandemic caused by Y. pestis in the fourteenth century. Why is that not realistic?

There is a reason the Black Death happened 600 years ago, when we didn’t have sanitation, hygiene or modern medicine. Today, we are much better prepared to handle plague than back then.

Post-COVID-19 pandemic, there is this speculation: “Is this going to be COVID-26?” SARS-CoV-2 was a novel virus for which we didn’t understand the immunology, and didn’t have antivirals or vaccines. In contrast, Y. pestis is a very well-studied, well-characterized bacterium for which we have lots of different antibiotics and for which there are vaccines available.

The WHO [which held a press briefing on 6 October] characterized it well: there is a low risk for people who live in Irkutsk, an even lower risk across Russia, and an extremely low risk for Europe and the world.

Rumours online suggested that the Irkutsk institute is conducting bioweapons research. Is there any evidence for that?

Plague is endemic in that part of the world, so there is a legitimate public-health reason to do research on Y. pestis to develop diagnostic and detection methods at such a lab.

I’m not aware of any historical evidence linking this institute to the Russian bioweapons programme. Russia has at least three known military facilities that do research on biological weapons, so those would be where the programme is mostly located. Conflating this accident with Russian bioweapons research activities is not helpful because this was a public-health lab where this accident happened. The idea that all public-health labs are secretly working on bioweapons is just nonsense.

Separately, Russia inherited the world’s largest bioweapons programme when the Soviet Union fell apart, and for the last 10 years or so, they have been modernizing that programme. That is a major concern, because it’s a violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention [which internationally banned the development, production and stockpiling of biological weapons].