Deja vu: New Siberian lab leak leaves Trump officials scrambling

Let’s accept that very little information has been revealed about at least one death, and perhaps two, of workers at a Russian plague lab in Siberia that killed within 24 hours of exposure. The death or deaths have been reportedly linked to some form of pneumonic plague.

Isn’t the next logical question what is being done to quarantine the reported disease and to revisit U.S. preparations for what seems like inevitable travel-borne communicable illness.

Amid all the fuss still being stirred over responses to Covid, including the endless campaign of Republican senators and Donald Trump to find some reason to prosecute virologist Anthony Fauci for his role in directing Covid response, one might think there would be just a tad more concern about the appearance of a “plague.”

Apart from all else, this apparently involved a lab leak of the sort critics repeatedly suggested caused the escape of the Covid menace, late recognition of a public contagion, and all sorts of presidential dismissals by Donald Trump about the seriousness of a pandemic that ended shutting the country. In this case, there are undisputed reports that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. approved funding for research in the very lab about diseases among foxes, the parallel to Fauci’s investment in trying to understand species-crossing contagion.

All that has been disclosed formally so far is that a 28-year-old woman working at a Russian plague lab was exposed to “some sort of plague” and died within 48 hours. Maybe there was a second death. Russian authorities are reportedly monitoring and quarantining the people with whom the woman came into contact. Her death has been reportedly linked to some form of the pneumonic plague.

U.S. Response

Trump last week asserted that U.S. officials did not believe that a Russian lab worker’s reported death was linked to a bioweapon or biological weapons research. “We’re going to find out soon enough, but we don’t think so,” Trump told reporters, adding that he was planning a call soon with Russian leader Vladimir Putin over the matter.

Trump said that Russian officials had reassured their U.S. counterparts that the situation was being contained. The president acknowledged some similarities to how Chinese officials in early 2020 initially claimed they had contained the covid-19 virus before it caused a global pandemic.
World Health Organization officials — Trump has cut ties between the U.S. and WHO — said they still do not know what pathogen caused the first worker’s fatal illness, which pathogens Russian laboratories tested for or why authorities placed roughly 200 contacts under quarantine or medical observation. Without those answers, officials said, they cannot fully assess the public health risk.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it has established measures to “identify and assess” any travelers from the Russian region where a possible plague case was reported, again counting on halting travelers who rarely come directly from Siberia to the U.S., but rather go to international stops in between, including Istanbul. The CDC said only 200 travelers from the region arrive in the U.S. each year.

The White House has shut down its pandemic response units, fearing association with Covid shutdowns as politically toxic.
One Russian news report said that the technician “allegedly broke a test tube containing the pneumonic plague pathogen” on Sept. 25, that she soon fell ill and died in a local hospital. Pneumonic plague is almost always fatal when untreated, but many patients recover with a prompt course of antibiotics. The incubation period for this type of plague is up to six or seven days. And, we know that Kennedy has canceled much of the CDC’s ability to track communicable disease and to issue warnings.

The Kennedy Research

According to an investigation by animal testing watchdog White Coat Waste, which claims it was the first to raise questions about Covid escaping the Chinese lab thought to be a possible origin for Covid, Kennedy has overseen nearly $800,000 in federal funding for a research project involving a Russian laboratory with ties to the Siberian facility at the center of a suspected plague outbreak.

It’s of interest by itself, of course, but more directly because it so parallels the exact arguments that selected Republican senators and the administration have pursued against Fauci.

The National Institutes of Health awarded $779,689 to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2025 and 2026 for research conducted in partnership with Russia’s state-run Institute of Cytology and Genetics.

Federal records obtained by the group and reported on Wednesday show that the project received $389,943 in July 2025 and another $389,746 in September 2026. The NIH-funded research was to examines the genetic underpinnings of social behavior using foxes raised at a Siberian breeding facility. According to documents, Russian researchers euthanize the animals and transport biological samples to the United States for analysis.

In 2022, Joe Biden’s administration ordered a winddown federally supported scientific partnerships with Russian government institutions following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Nervous yet?

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Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.