The Daily Plague

They've said "pneumonia of undetermined etiology" since Oct 4 and found no microbes linked to her work. The exception was Buryatia's leader, who posted on Oct 2 that she died of plague and then changed it to "possibly."

RIA, TASS and the rest carry the official wording. Anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova found they only used the word "plague" when they were quoting Trump.

They called it pneumonic plague on Oct 2, hours after she died. All three have ties to the security services.

Their health-sector sources say doctors talked about plague openly. It just never made it into the official paperwork.

"We don't know exactly how this person died," Maria Van Kerkhove said on Oct 7. "I know what you know from the media."

The State Department calls it a "suspected" pneumonic plague case. Europe's ECDC says the suspicion is "not yet confirmed."

They pin the plague claim on Russian media. Reuters says it couldn't find out whether her own samples were ever tested for plague.

Mash, Baza and SHOT reported the broken tube on Oct 2.

It cited journalist Pavel Stepanov. Colleagues say Sept 25 was her last day at the institute.

An expert commission found no accidents with pathogens on Oct 4. Gov. Kobzev said the same on Oct 8.

She told Lyudi Baikala the tube couldn't have broken.

He doesn't buy the tube story, given the protective gear, and thinks she was infected during routine work. He also says negative tests prove little when an infection kills this fast.

They report it as an allegation. Deutsche Welle's fact-check rates it unproven.

On Oct 2 it counted 197 contacts and 189 in hospital (114 + 63 + 12). REN TV later deleted its posts.

About 200 "under medical observation." It never gave a hospital count.

The Insider says about 200 were isolated in a COVID centre. Sibir.Realii says more than 60 institute staff were locked in the building and slept on the floor, and all 114 patients at the Shelekhov hospital were confined.

They mostly say "quarantined" or "under observation." The Washington Post put it at 90 to 200.

It asked Russia to check reports of a second employee with pneumonia. Tedros said the reports came from two media outlets, one of them Russian.

On Oct 6 it reported a second death at the Shelekhov hospital, citing unnamed Russian media. IBTimes, United24 and Business Today picked it up.

On Oct 2 it said only two people worked in her unit and the other one had no symptoms.

Peskov said on Oct 7 that most of the coverage is "false information." On Oct 8 Rospotrebnadzor called the second case a social-media fake.

As of Oct 6 it had "no reports of secondary cases."

On Thursday evening he lifted the quarantine and said every contact was clear after almost 5,000 negative tests. "It was a test," he wrote.

It had 60% of contacts cleared on Oct 6 and more than 90% on Oct 7. That's also when it first said she'd been vaccinated against plague.

On Oct 7 it said it's "not able to conduct a full risk assessment." It's still waiting on the lab results.

Pneumonic plague shows up within one to three days, so new cases would already be visible, says Samuel Scarpino at Northeastern. A seven-day watch from her last contact runs out around Oct 9.

On Oct 6 and 7 it quoted Russia as saying 100% of contacts were cleared. Russia's own figures said 60%, then 90%.

Lots of people say so. Nobody's offered evidence.

He told LBC the lab "may well have been weaponising" plague. His reasoning is the Soviet program's history.

The Johns Hopkins and MIT researchers told Newsweek the response looks big for plague alone. But they see no evidence of a weapon.

On Oct 7: "We don't think so." He didn't say why.

Officials say there was no accident, and Peskov calls the institute's staff "high professionals."

A 2025 State Department report says Russia keeps an offensive bio program, but nothing ties it to this institute. And the Soviet anti-plague network wasn't run by the military.