The Kremlin is stonewalling the Trump administration over the mysterious death of a technician at a remote Russian plague-research laboratory.
State Department officials are panicked by the lack of answers as to what exactly killed the lab worker at the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia, several sources have told CNN.
“It’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Tuesday. “Maybe it’s bigger than we thought. We don’t know, but I think it would be reckless at this moment, given the limited information we still have, to speculate.”
President Donald Trump added later that day that he was due to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and suggested that his administration would have new details of the incident, “probably tomorrow.”
The key question at present is whether the researcher, 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, died from a treatable disease like pneumonic plague, or potentially some of the more dangerous illnesses studied at the facility, which include brucellosis, cholera, and anthrax.
Initial reports suggested she had died of pneumonic plague that escaped from a broken test tube, but officials later backed off on that version of events after her death last week.
U.S. officials also remain in the dark about whether the disease that killed the lab worker had been modified during the institute’s research, which could complicate any public health response to a potential outbreak.
The Trump administration has taken pains to downplay any threat posed to the U.S. by the technician’s death. But the Kremlin’s response, which includes a quarantine at the local hospital that has put almost 200 people under observation, has rattled officials behind the scenes.
“We don’t know a lot right now about what actually happened,” a source told CNN. “But one thing most of us feel certain about, the Russians are going to act like the Chinese did with COVID. They won’t be forthcoming.”
Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, echoed those concerns. “If they’re not transparent, if they’re not open to independent accountability, how is it possible to trust the Kremlin is telling us the full and accurate information?” he said.
“Clearly, on its face, the lab was conducting extremely high-risk research and using shoddy biosafety measures,” he added.
The Daily Beast has contacted the State Department for comment on this story.
