Forbes Reporting 2nd Plague Case

The Russian Government is known to be as clear as mud, even this regime.

In the 1970’s, fearing Americans were lying about biological weapons convention compliance, the Soviets developed a covert, offensive biological weapons program known as Biopreparat. Biopreparat was superficially tasked with academic research on vaccines and countermeasures for diseases, an academic guise that enabled its researchers to acquire samples of anthrax, plague, tularemia, Marburg, and other pathogens through academic collaborations, and then convert these academic-acquired pathogens into biological weapons through clandestine programs.

A former deputy director of Biopreparat, Ken Alibek, defected from Russia in the early 90’s. In 1999, Dr. Alibek wrote a book – Biohazard – providing a personal account of the history of Biopreparat and Russian biological weapons lore. Dr. Alibek touches on the history of Soviet bioweapons going all the way back to the Bolsheviks, a massive tularemia outbreak among German (and Soviet) troops during the battle of Stalingrad which Dr. Alibek believes to have been a biological weapons attack due to the sudden incidence and predominately pneumonic form of disease, the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak and corresponding KGB efforts to cover it up, and even the research activities underway at facilities such as those in Irkutsk

Soviet bioweapons research, according to Alibek, focused on developing strains of pathogens capable of evading Western countermeasures, causing infections with smaller doses at the same lethality, stabilizing pathogens for longer shelf life and more robust deployment, chemical additives to improve the stability of pathogens deployed via aerosols, and studies of how weather conditions affected deployment. According to Dr. Alibek, Irkutsk housed a bioweapons research institute, likely the historic Irkutsk Antiplague Institute first founded in the 1930’s.

The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the United States Intelligence Community assess Russia maintains an active and expanding chemical and biological weapons threat. While we don’t know everything about research underway in Irkutsk, the history of clandestine bioweapons facilities in Russia, the large stockpiles of weaponized plague developed then, and the current warmongering, adversarial posture of former KGB agent and now Russian authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin provide ample reason to be concerned about possible ongoing covert bioweapons activities in Russia.

Verified details on the Irkutsk incident are scarce.

We don’t know the strain of plague that infected the researcher, nor the nature of research they were conducting. While Irkutsk historically worked with Biopreparat, the nature of that research is unclear. The Irkutsk institute may have been focused on countermeasure development while other facilities focused on improvements in the lethality, stability, or countermeasure evasion of plague strains. Thus, we don’t know if this strain is a wild type Y. pestis or one of the more dangerous strains developed in the long history of Soviet bioweapons programs.

The reports of a laboratory worker experiencing a pneumonic form of disease suggest an inhalation route of exposure as opposed to exposure through conjunctival contact (touching the face/eye causing conjunctival plague), cuts in the skin (causing septicemic plague), or fleas (bubonic plague). While reports of the incident claim the exposure happened due to a broken test tube, those can’t be verified and other alternatives can’t be ruled out, including the researcher working with dried and milled powders similar to the several tons of plague stockpiled by Biopreparat, powders prone to inhalation.

The epidemiology of pneumonic plague has historically prevented this serious illness from causing global pandemics in its pneumonic form. The onward transmissibility of wild type pneumonic plague is limited due to a basic reproductive number of 1.3, meaning index patients will on average infect 1.3 secondary infections. With an R0 of 1.3, successful containment of 30% of close contacts is sufficient to contain the outbreak. The incubation period lasts 1-3 days, and the infectious period begins with symptom onset as coughs can generate droplets of various sizes with high enough titers of pathogens to infect others. The disease can be treated with antibiotics but, left untreated, patients may cough blood and 100% of untreated infections result in death from respiratory failure within days of symptom onset.

The reported scale of the response in Irkutsk is large, with reportedly 200 people quarantined and provided prophylactic administration of antibiotics. The scale of response suggests some aspects of the official story are almost certainly untrue. An individual researcher who dropped a test tube with liquid cultures of wild type Y. pestis would result in a highly localized incident. If a broken test tube were the initial cause of this outbreak, the patient would begin feeling ill and have only a few days of rapidly worsening coughs before dying. While we can’t rule out the “broken test tube” theory with the scant available information, it would be unusual for an institute reportedly employing 90-some scientists across many buildings to quarantine 200 people due to a broken test tube that would need to have been stored in a secure facility that only a subset of the 90-some scientists would likely access as the tube is cleaned up. It would also be unusual for a plague researcher who broke a test tube to develop symptoms consistent with pneumonic plague while working at the Antiplague Institute and not be immediately isolated. It’s not impossible, though, and one should never underestimate the security risks that can result from cost-saving measures of a financially strained authoritarian regime and the opposite of safety culture caused by punishments for anyone who causes and reports an accident.

The reports of large scale response is also consistent with other incidents in the history of Russian bioweapons programs caused by more severe containment breaches than a mere broken test tube. The Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak of 1979, for instance, was reportedly caused by someone removing a clogged filter that prevented the escape of anthrax spores from a milling room (the room in which large quantities of dried anthrax was pulverized or milled into a fine powder, generating significant concentrations of anthrax spores in the air that clog filters and required frequent replacement of filters only while mills were turned off). After removing the filter for just a single night, a continuous cloud of invisible, highly infectious anthrax spores seeped out of the Sverdlovsk facility and killed dozens, possibly hundreds of people. The exact number of fatalities from the Sverdlovsk incident was obscured by the KGB deleting hospital records and reportedly attempting to misdirect the world to avoid embarrassment by e.g. claiming this outbreak of pneumonic anthrax was caused by ingestion of contaminated meat and arresting meat vendors to add more news and misdirection supporting their account. However, when I hear that 200 people in Irkutsk were isolated from a single lab researcher who broke a test tube, I’m reminded of the scale of response in Sverdlovsk, the lies of the KGB, and the epidemiology of a broken test tube suggesting such a large number of patients monitored seems more consistent with a larger scale accident than a single test tube.