Something About the Irkutsk Plague Story Doesn’t Add Up
The dead lab worker. The extraordinary containment response. The Kremlin’s silence. The more we learn, the stranger this gets.
A note from Lawrence
I woke up thinking about a question that has been staring at us from the beginning. If Daria Shipilova was a lab tech at a place called the Anti-Plague Institute and broke a tube in an accidental exposure, wouldn’t she, of all people, know that antibiotics in the first twenty-four hours were the difference between living and dying? And wouldn’t that building have them? Yesterday I wanted people informed. Today I am more skeptical, and in a strange way both more hopeful about good outcomes and more wary of a real crisis.
Julie Roginsky makes the case that this is less a problem of epidemiology than of Kremlinology, and Kevin Esvelt, who leads a biosecurity lab at MIT, has called the Irkutsk facility a weapons-lineage lab. What we have is a mystery with potentially civilization-level stakes, told by an unreliable narrator, in a place where no independent reporting can reach. My biggest hope is that I am completely wrong. My biggest fear is that the people who know are telling us to pay attention, and the wrong people are in charge.
