Russia’s Anti-Plague Lab Had a Plague. Then Officials Refused to Say “Plague.”
Six days, a dead lab tech, two hundred people in quarantine, and not one official who will say the word.
A note from Lawrence
I tried to play this one straight, which for me is unusual. Annie Jacobsen’s Biological War: A Scenario builds a terrifying fiction out of pieces that have all happened separately. Then Russia ran its opening chapter as a live table read.
On September 25, a twenty-eight-year-old lab assistant at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute broke a tube of live bacteria. She was diagnosed with “severe pneumonia” and died. Nearly two hundred contacts went into quarantine, and the public learned about it from a regional website and a Telegram channel. One official wrote “plague,” then edited it to “may have.” It looks like ordinary, curable plague. What failed first wasn’t the lab or the antibiotics. It was the telling.
