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Between the move to televise a firing squad execution and news of a plague death in southeastern Siberia, this week has felt like a real throwback — a throw way, way back.

The early days of the Black Death consumed medieval Europeans with fear and doubt. They had never before seen a scourge like the one burning through their homes with ferocious speed, covering some with foul-smelling black sores and ravaging others within a few bloody, gasping days. 

We now know that the bacterium Yersinia pestis – spread by bites from infected fleas; handling, skinning, or eating infected animals; or breathing in droplets coughed up by someone whose infection has reached the lungs — causes life-threatening disease of the lymph nodes, lungs, and bloodstream. But even the most el33t 14^th century Europeans didn’t know whether the plague was one blight or several; they didn’t know whether it was spread by breath or touch or sight. The mystery that cloaked the pandemic only made it more terrifying.

There’s almost as much intrigue surrounding last week’s death of a lab technician named Darya Shipilova at Siberia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute. A version of events circulated widely in Russian media and on Telegram suggested she broke a tube of Yersinia pestis at work and failed to report it — a claim no outlet has substantiated, that microbiologists call implausible, and that her mother flatly denies. When the local officials who first announced  abruptly changed some of their facts — including, critically, the pathogen involved — talk of conspiracy rose. 

The Russian government’s subsequent refusals to clarify details and share information have spawned speculation that the germ that killed Shipilova was part of a bioweapons development effort.

But the swirl of intrigue may say more about Russia and its relationship with the West than it does about whatever killed Shipilova, says Susan Jones, a historian and veterinarian at the University of Minnesota. She’s spent the better part of the last decade writing a book about the origins of zoonoses, diseases that spread from animals to humans. 

I spoke with Jones for a National Geographic story I wrote this week about the role of marmots in causing human plague infections. (It was extremely fun to write and you should read it.) She’s heard the speculation about the coverup of an engineered pathogen outbreak — but nothing she’s seen so far suggests weaponized plague germ is involved. 

Jones reads and speaks Russian and has visited the plague zones of central Asia and a different anti-plague institute in Kazakhstan. She’s been reading Irkutsk and Russian media coverage of the incident and following the reporting of journalists local to the area on Telegram.

She’s not particularly surprised by reports of Russian security agents (i.e. FSB, successor to the KGB) escorting contacts, forced quarantines, extraordinary meetings of public health leadership — that would all be standard procedure after a lab accident involving a pathogen as lethal as Y. pestis is even in its nonengineered state.

“All the facts that we know are consistent with a normal local epidemiological response to a potential case of death due to an especially dangerous infection,” she said when we spoke on Wednesday.

Russia (and the USSR before it) does have a long history of hiding high-stakes outbreaks. But it has a long history of hiding everything: the identity of Sputnik’s chief designer; the production of gold; the actual location of many of Moscow’s streets and landmarks. 

Russian information control isn’t calibrated to the sensitivity of what’s being concealed –— it’s a default posture. 

That’s not to say we should take communications from the Russian government at face value, nor that we shouldn’t demand transparency from its public health officials and pursue the truth with rigor and urgency. But should we assume the worst? 

One of the loudest sounders of the What Is Russia Hiding alarm (at least on TV, the source of many social media clips) is Annie Jacobsen. She’s a journalist and author of a book published Two! Months! Ago! about what a worst-case scenario of biological warfare might look like, and she recently said the Irkutsk facility has historically been used both for above- and below-board plague research. That means it housed work on methods to defend against biological warfare, but it also illegally helped develop tools for waging it.

But that’s not proof Irkutsk is doing that now. And while Jacobsen is well sourced in this area, her book has been criticized by scientists in international security for “stacking worst-case assumptions.” She may genuinely believe the worst is likely to happen — but it’s worth noting that the more people fear the Irkutsk event is a shot across the bow, the better it is for her book sales.

One other little detail raised my suspicion that she might not be making the most accurate assumptions in imagining risk right now: the way she talked about “pneumonic plague.” Pneumonic plague is plague that is infecting the lungs, sort of the way strep throat is a strep infection of the throat. Same germ as other kinds of plague, different focus in the body. 

But the way Jacobsen talked about pneumonic plague suggested it’s a different, more dangerous strain of the plague pathogen:

The overall message — that the germ is very dangerous if you inhale it — is true. But she’s missing some important nuance:

Also, pneumonic plague isn’t an organism — it’s a disease condition. Same as with strep throat: You caught the strep bug (which can also cause ear infections, pneumonia, and other badness). But your throat is what’s infected.

If a journalist has deep access to experts who really know the science on this, and cares a lot about accurately conveying the risk we face on this very high-attention issue, why would they make these errors?

As ever, be mindful of where you’re getting your freakout cues. So far, the only voice I really trust on this is CIDRAP. 

Got questions about plague or any other infectious disease baddies? An unrelated news tip? Email me at [email protected], fill out this form, or find me on Signal at kerenlandman.07.

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