Foreign Affairs

Russian Agency Overseeing Infectious Disease Lab Says Worker’s Death Not Caused By Accident

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Anna Popova, the head of Russia’s national public health agency, arrived from Moscow to the city of Irkutsk near the Mongolian border on Saturday to meet with local officials about the death of twenty-eight year old Daria Shipilova, an employee of an infectious diseases lab there, according to several reports.

By Sunday, Popova’s agency, the Russian Federal Service for Customers’ Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing or “Rospotrebnadzor,” issued a statement describing the cause of death only as a “pneumonia of undetermined etiology,” asserting that tests had detected no pathogens linked to her work, and that no emergency had occurred at her lab.

But the same agency, Rospotrebnadzor, oversees the Irkutsk lab where Shipilova worked, according to a 2013 biodefense paper about the structure of the Russian Federation’s network of anti-plague labs.

The governor of a territory near the Russia-Mongolia border announced the death of a young laboratory worker due to a “particularly dangerous infection.”

Shipilova was hospitalized last Tuesday and died by Thursday, according to a Moscow Times report, which is not state-affiliated.

Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev is appearing to maintain calm after the meeting Saturday, posting on his social media page over the weekend about the autumn weather, the opening of a new gym and a fish festival, according to a post on Telegram by local news outlet Baikal People. Kobzev has said the situation is stable.

Several city hospitals have been placed under a three-week quarantine, including a children’s and maternity hospital, Baikal People said. The children’s hospital denied this information on its social media accounts on Oct. 4. The Irkutsk Regional Government press service stated Oct. 5 that hospitals are operating normally.

Kobzev’s statement that Shipilova died from a “particularly dangerous infection” echoes the language of the lab’s website, which describes its mission as working with “epidemic control for especially dangerous bacterial and virus infections.” It also studies cholera, brucellosis, tularemia, anthrax, arbovirus infections, the website states. The lab houses 1840 strains of plague, or Yersinia pestis.

Kremlin-aligned REN TV deleted five stories about the incident, Baikal People alleges. The Daily Caller News Foundation identified one broken link to a previously available REN TV news story.

The Irkutsk Aluminum Smelter has introduced a mask mandate for its two thousand employees, Artem Fominykh, the plant’s director, announced in a social media post, saying “better safe than sorry,” according to independent outlet Govorit NeMoskva.

An exposure to Yersinia pestis would have required several biosafety failures, including inadequate personal protective equipment and a failure to initiate antibiotics after exposure, according to the Boston University Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Plague can be cured with antibiotics. If untreated the disease is usually fatal.

Like China and the U.S., Russia has only accelerated its participation in the global race in gain-of-function research and biodefense laboratories since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged near the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019.

The State Department maintains Russia has revived its biological weapons program.

“We don’t know what we don’t know obviously about whatever the Russians have provided which is seems there was a worker at a lab that was infected and there’s concern that it could have spread,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday. “There is very limited travel between the U.S. and Russia obviously. But like anything else if it gets out it could spread quickly so we’re monitoring it closely. I don’t think it’s cause for alarm but it is cause for focus and we’re keeping an eye on it.”

The Russian Federation has lobbed accusations at the U.S. about biolabs in Ukraine.

Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents earlier this year describing U.S. support for biodefense labs conducting high-risk research in Ukraine through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).