Russia’s Plague Mystery and the Coming Age of Bioweapons

In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Ashish Jha about the mysterious death of a Russian lab worker.

Derek Thompson: Let’s begin in Russia. A 28-year-old woman working at a laboratory in Siberia died last week of a mysterious disease. What do we know about what happened to her?

Ashish Jha: Yeah, Derek, unfortunately we know very little. What the Russian authorities have told us is now they’re saying they don’t think it was plague, even though there were reports that she had died of plague. They say they don’t actually know why she died. And a 28-year-old woman who’s otherwise healthy dying of pneumonia is pretty unusual. The fact that she worked in a lab that had a long history of biological agent manipulation, you can call it biological weapons, is concerning. So I would say we know very little about exactly what happened to her, and what the Russian authorities have told us is not super reassuring to me.

Thompson: You use the word “plague,” and sometimes that word is used generically to mean a disease that kills lots of people. But in this case it’s used specifically to refer to a very particular disease. Can you just tell me a little bit about what that disease is and why people even thought that this was the cause of death?

Jha: Yes. So, the plague is actually a specific disease. It’s caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. It has been a cause of human pandemics throughout human history, the Black Death. And in the Middle Ages, it was pretty devastating; it would kill a third, half of the population. The good news is we have antibiotics against it, and so that’s why it is no longer quite as scary, even though the word, of course, has taken on a much broader meaning. This specific lab was part of a network of labs in Russia called the Anti-Plague Network because plague occurs naturally in Siberia, as it does, by the way, in parts of the U.S. Southwest and other places. And the story, at least in the first couple of days after she died, was that she was exposed to the plague bacteria and died from that.

Thompson: I think one thing that confused me and confused other people is that on the one hand, Russia is saying, “Oh, we’ve got this covered, this wasn’t a death from plague, nothing to see here.” But at the same time, there’s reports that there was a quarantine of roughly 200 people, there were security officials that were sent to this biolab. Why such an extraordinary response if at the same time the government is saying this is essentially a nothingburger?

Jha: Yeah. Well, that’s the disconnect, right? So if you just think of it as, OK, a 28-year-old woman dies of pneumonia, that’s tragic, but again, very unusual for a healthy 28-year-old to die of pneumonia. But then you don’t generally put hundreds of people into quarantine, you don’t put several hospitals into lockdown, and you don’t send security officials to that city to manage it. None of that is consistent with either a simple lab accident or just a healthy young woman dying of pneumonia. All of that, of course, in the context of a lab that has a rich history of working on biological weapons. You put all that together, and you understand why both U.S. government officials have been very concerned, why I have been very concerned that there is something else that we are not being told.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Ashish Jha
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman