by Raw Egg Nationalist
Russia claimed its offensive biological weapons program ended with communism, but there’s no clear proof it did.
Earlier today (Monday), I got a message from a friend who works in Russia. With some difficulty, I might add, since he’s British and has to go back and forth circuitously via the Middle East. I won’t give too much away about him, but here’s what he’d heard: Realtors in St. Petersburg are cancelling viewings because the city is about to enter a lockdown. Tomorrow (Tuesday). The reason? An outbreak of pneumonic plague that’s spread from Siberia and is now, apparently, threatening European Russia, the country’s most populous region.
By the time this essay has been published, we’ll know whether that prediction was correct. Either there will be a COVID-style lockdown in St. Petersburg and maybe elsewhere in Russia too, or there won’t. As much as I like being right—who doesn’t? —I don’t fancy a repeat of the COVID pandemic. I’ve had my fill of being confined to my house, told where I can go and whom I can associate with, being unable to go to a pub or a restaurant without a mask and a stupid app on my phone, forced to bargain with the government for my own freedom, threatened with ostracism for refusing experimental treatments I know will do far more harm than good. I’m never doing that shit again. Ever.
I hope it’s all a big, fat, juicy nothingburger, and you can pin a rosette on my chest for being 100% wrong, and I’ll smile for the camera and laugh.
As for my friend, he’s a stand-up bloke. Private school, Oxbridge, Sandhurst, patriotic, smart, very funny. If that’s what he was told, that’s what he was told, and I believe him.
Truth is, nobody really knows what’s happening in Russia right now—not even the Russian people. Only the Russian government, and it’s being tight-lipped even by its stony standards.
What has been confirmed by the Russian government is that a 28-year-old researcher at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, Darya Shipilova, was hospitalized at the end of September with pneumonia and died a few days later. Local media claimed it was pneumonic plague, but state media has denied that claim. Actually, tests showed the pneumonia had nothing to do with the pathogens she was working on, and there was no evidence of a lab accident.
On Telegram, the governor of Irkutsk made reference to a “suspected case of a particularly dangerous infection” and confirmed that the head of Russia’s public-health watchdog, Anna Popova, traveled 2,600 miles from Moscow to the region. It also appears around 200 people suspected of coming into contact with the victim are being monitored, some confined to the hospital.
The claims of pneumonic plague appear to derive from an early statement made by the governor of the neighboring region of Buryatia, Alexey Tsedenov. He has since walked back that statement.
We have independent reporting to thank for the persistent claim that the infection was no mere pneumonia, and for further details about the circumstances of the infection, which apparently took place as a result of a broken test tube.
Given everything that’s happened over the last six years and the reputation of the Russian government, it’s hard not to jump to conclusions. A worker at the—*checks notes*—Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East dies of a “suspected case of a particularly dangerous infection” that’s then confirmed as an undisclosed form of pneumonia? Yeah, that’s pneumonic plague, and the Russkies are lying out of their Жопы. Why would the head of the public-health watchdog fly all that way for a case of pneumonia? Grandmothers die of pneumonia.
Videos on social media, including footage apparently showing men in hazmat suits walking the streets of a town close to Irkutsk, don’t exactly inspire confidence. Neighboring states in Central Asia are tightening their borders with Russia, and President Trump is telling the press he’ll gladly help the Russians.
It really does feel like the spring of 2020 all over again.
But even the independent, non-Kremlin reporting doesn’t seem to add up. Experts have already poured cold water on the idea that a broken test tube may have been the cause. Here’s Dr. Simon Clarke of the University of Reading in the UK.
“One claim attracting attention is that a laboratory worker may have been infected after breaking a test tube in the lab,” he said.
“It is not unheard of for pathogens to escape from labs, but an awful lot must have gone wrong for a lab worker to be infected by a broken test tube.
“Having worked in high-containment laboratories, I know that handling dangerous pathogens involves multiple layers of protection, strict procedures, safety cabinets, airflow systems, and careful procedures carried out by well-trained staff. Lab-acquired infections are rare events, and a broken tube would not automatically lead to exposure or infection. We also don’t tend to use test tubes very much.
“Until more details emerge, it is difficult to assess whether this represents an isolated case, an occupational exposure, or evidence of wider transmission.”
So what’s really going on?
Pneumonic plague is one of those diseases that’s actually too deadly to have a real chance of causing a global pandemic; although caught very early, it can be treated with antibiotics. Some diseases are just like that; they kill too violently, too quickly, preventing people from incubating the disease and transmitting it for long periods. If you were looking to create a really awful global pandemic, you’d balance deadliness and transmissibility very carefully. Unfortunately, Soviet scientists were working on doing exactly that for decades (see Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program (Harvard, 2012)). The plague was one pathogen the Soviets engineered extensively. Genetic engineering was used to make strains that don’t exist in nature. Pneumonic plague was crossed with diphtheria and pathogens that made it antibiotic-resistant, and scientists also found a way to make the plague drop a “secondary toxin” when antibiotics were used: you try to treat it, and instead it delivers a second dose of poison. Strains were altered so they couldn’t be detected by standard tests. We call such research “gain-of-function” now.
While the Institute at Irkutsk was not used for primary weapons research—that happened at places like Kirov and Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, where baboons were infected—the Institute did provide virulent strains for the offensive program.
The Soviets may have had something like 20 tons of weaponized plague on hand, much of it aerosolized and placed inside warheads. Russia claimed its offensive biological weapons program ended with communism, but there’s no clear proof it did. Russia is still listed by the U.S. as a biological and chemical concern, and Putin’s regime is even more paranoid, defensive, and inscrutable than ever. In the face of an existential threat—and losing the war in Ukraine is an existential threat, for Putin at least—nothing is off the table. Putin has accused the U.S. and NATO of conducting “military biological programs” in Ukraine for use against Russia.
This, of course, is the nightmare: not just a strain of pneumonic plague that’s been picked up from a marmot on the steppe, but something that’s been engineered in a lab to be much, much nastier.
We don’t know that’s the case, and it’s possible we’ll never know. As I say, this could all be a nothingburger—and I hope it is.
At the very least, now is a good time to remind ourselves that lab leaks are actually very common. According to a 2024 report from The Lancet, at least 16 lab leaks took place across the world between 2000 and 2021. One of them was in China in October of 2019, and it wasn’t COVID-19. An outbreak of brucellosis took place in Lanzhou, in the northwest of the country. As was later discovered, waste gas from fermentation vats containing the bacteria had not been properly sanitized before it was discharged into the atmosphere. Over the next year, 10,000 people were infected with brucellosis, a disease that used to kill thousands of people every year in warmer climes until the invention of antibiotics.
As well as those leaks, researchers identified more than 300 cases in which workers acquired infections in laboratories, involving 51 different pathogens. One of them was Ebola. Another was Yersinia pestis—plague.
Most of the infections were confined to the labs where they occurred. Eight researchers died.
The vast majority of these leaks and infections took place in North America, Europe, and Asia, with more than three-quarters of the total infections taking place in the U.S.
As the report notes, those numbers are just “the tip of the iceberg.” There’s no standard reporting system, which complicates matters. There are also strong incentives not to report leaks, which is to say, cover-ups happen. The report doesn’t mention COVID-19, whose origins are still heavily disputed, thanks to a concerted early effort by politicians and technocrats, including Anthony Fauci, to rubbish the idea of a lab leak and heavily penalize anybody advocating for it.
Although it’s beyond the scope of the Lancet report, we know the Soviets covered up a very nasty accidental release of weaponized anthrax at Sverdlovsk in 1979. The outbreak killed more than 60 people but could have killed many hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands if the wind had been blowing in a different direction that day—towards the city and not away from it. Authorities blamed the deaths on contaminated meat. It wasn’t until 1992, after the fall of communism, that President Yeltsin admitted the outbreak was caused by a military facility. A malfunctioning air filter had allowed spray-dried anthrax spores to be released outside the facility.
Human error is intrinsic to science. The first-ever recorded lab leak happened in 1893, when a French physician sucked too hard on a mouth pipette and swallowed a gulp of typhoid. But some kinds of error are avoidable. We still live in the same very dangerous, very stupid world that existed prior to March 2020. We haven’t really learned a thing.
Photo: A maintenance worker walks out of the headquarters of Russia's consumer and health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor in Moscow on October 5, 2026. Russian officials on October 5, 2026 downplayed reports that a laboratory technician in Siberia had died of plague, insisting the situation was under control and that post-mortem tests had not found traces of the disease. (Photo by Igor IVANKO / AFP via Getty Images)
Raw Egg Nationalist is an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated historian and anthropologist. He rose to prominence as “Raw Egg Nationalist.” He has a large social media following, is a bestselling author, has appeared on national television, and has influenced debates on health, fitness, politics, and culture. His latest book is 'The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.'
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/07/a-plague-on-your-house-whats-really-going-on-in-russia/
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