WHO and US press Russia for data after suspected plague death at Irkutsk lab

Gregory Koblentz is a biosecurity-policy specialist at George Mason University who studies lab safety ^[8]. He explains the low risk by comparing it with 2020. SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus whose immunology nobody understood, and there were no antivirals or vaccines for it ^[10]. "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," he told Nature ^[11].

The public record is thinnest on the test results. A count of negative tests means little without the method behind it. You need to know which pathogens the panel covered, which assays were run, and when each person was sampled relative to their contact with the researcher. So far Russia has given a total and a verdict. Nature describes the government's disclosures as sparing, and the WHO and the US government have asked for the epidemiological data underneath them ^[3].

The order of events matters too. Russian officials released the vaccination and testing details on 7 October, five days after the death ^[4], so the researcher died on or around 2 October ^[19]. The WHO held its briefing on 6 October, a day before those details were made public ^[20]. The thing the vaccination detail doesn't tell you is the cause of death. The regulator has attributed it to pneumonia of unknown origin ^[2].

Rumours online have linked the institute to bioweapons research ^[12]. Koblentz said plague is endemic in that part of the world, so a public-health lab there has a legitimate reason to study Y. pestis and develop diagnostic and detection methods ^[13]. "I'm not aware of any historical evidence linking this institute to the Russian bioweapons programme," he said ^[14]. According to Koblentz, Russia has at least three known military facilities that do research on biological weapons ^[15]. "The idea that all public-health labs are secretly working on bioweapons is just nonsense," he said ^[16].

His concern about Russian bioweapons is about those military sites. Koblentz said Russia inherited the world's largest bioweapons programme when the Soviet Union collapsed and has spent roughly the past ten years modernizing it. He said that breaks the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, the treaty that banned developing, producing and stockpiling biological weapons ^[17].