The Irkutsk Mystery: What Is Russia Hiding?
A 28-year-old lab worker is dead, official reports vanished, and Moscow’s story keeps changing.
A note from Lawrence
A 28-year-old worker at Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute fell critically ill and died after an alleged incident involving plague bacteria. Nearly 200 contacts were placed under observation, hospitals locked down, the security services got involved, and senior health officials flew in from Moscow. Then the story started disappearing: reports deleted, explanations changed, and an official insistence that there was no outbreak at all.
With Julie Roginsky and Michelle Kinney of the Mayday Network, I dig into the contradictions and the history Moscow would rather the world forget, from the Soviet bioweapons program and the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax disaster to today’s anti-plague labs, and ask why the response on the ground is so out of proportion to the benign explanation. Nobody knows yet what happened. That uncertainty is exactly why it deserves attention.
