Irkutsk, Siberia (The Daily Whatever Press)—I’m going to do something unusual here (for me) and try to play this one as straight as I can.
Annie Jacobsen is a science reporter, an investigative journalist, and an author. Several years ago, she published the best-selling Nuclear War: A Scenario. It was the inspiration for Kathryn Biglow’s Netflix hit: A House of Dynamite, showing the precariousness and the peril of our aging nuclear weapons fleet and the very many ways in which things could go wrong.
She followed it up several months ago with Biological War: A Scenario. I devoured the book the moment it came out. It’s my kind of thing. It’s educational, it’s deeply researched, and it’s full of facts. I learned things constantly; for example, the fact that the wild marmot population is apparently a really capable plague carrier and has been the bane of Siberian existence since time immemorial.
Also, the bubonic plague, if left to fester, can turn into the pneumonic plague, which is a highly transmissible version of plague, guaranteed to kill you if not treated with antibiotics within three days.
Also, this tidbit: the former USSR had a highly advanced biological weapons research program, which included creating a chimeric plague bacteria that makes the people who fall ill feel euphoric as they are most contagious, and they fused into it the genetic code for horse encephalitis so that the moment the plague is treated by antibiotics, it triggers a secret second disease making the cure worse than the disease.
You die from plague, infecting everyone around you, or you die from massive brain hemorrhaging. It’s two, two, two killers in one!
Part of what I love about Jacobsen’s work is that she wraps all the science and details around a fictionalized scenario. I say fictionalized because, even though the scenario she offers is not true in its whole, it is true in its parts. Everything she writes about in her fictional scenario has happened individually. The thing that makes the scenario plausible is that none of it is unrealistic. Every part of it has already happened, just piece by piece, not all at once.
What Margaret Atwood did for theocratic authoritarianism, Annie Jacobsen does for nuclear war and biological war.
See how calm I’m being?
My original paragraph was going to read like this: “Buckle the fuck up, because Russia just ran the opening chapter of Annie Jacobsen’s Biological War: A Scenario as a live table read, and the only thing missing was the part where somebody says the name of the disease.”
The current situation in Irkutsk
Almost none of what follows comes from anyone in charge. We learned about it on the internet.
On September 25, Daria Shipilova, a 28 year-old lab assistant at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute broke a test tube full of live bacteria. Oooops!
Anti-Plague. It’s right there on the building. The Soviets founded the place in 1934 for the single purpose of keeping Yersinia pestis inside the marmots of Siberia and out of the apartment blocks, and for ninety-two years it seemed to do that job well.
Four days after the accident, Shipilova was admitted to the district hospital in Shelekhov, a few miles down the road, where doctors diagnosed her with “severe pneumonia”—which is exactly how pneumonic plague presents. She died on Thursday, October 1.
+The public found out on Friday, from a regional website and a Telegram channel, which is to say, basically the same way you find out your ex got re-married.
The word they won’t say
Governor Igor Kobzev went in front of the cameras and announced “a full range of anti-epidemic measures” against what he called “a particularly dangerous infection.” He has still not said plague. His colleague next door in Buryatia, Alexey Tsydenov, posted that she died of plague, and then, presumably after a phone call from the Kremlin that made his ear sweat and fall off, he edited the post to say she “may have.” A man edited the bubonic fucking plague into a maybe.
Picture the meeting. “Igor, the lab with PLAGUE on the sign had an accident.” “What kind of accident?” “A plague kind.” “Call it a particularly dangerous infection.” “Sir, the sign.” “The sign is not a doctor!”
The numbers so far (if they’re telling the truth)
One hundred ninety-seven contacts. One hundred eighty-nine of them under observation, more than a hundred in hospital beds. At least one district hospital sealed, no one in, no one out. No uses of the five-letter word by anyone with a title.
And, wouldn’t you know it, one criminal case reportedly opened, under the article for sanitary violations causing death, into the technician, and not the institute, or into the protocol that put a live culture in a glass tube in a twenty-eight-year-old’s hands. The dead woman. Ambulances in Shelekhov, according to local reports, now roll with an FSB (the rebranded KGB) escort, because the thing you want most during a plague scare is for the paramedics to feel spied upon.
The good news, which is real
As far as we can tell, the bug is ordinary, “normal” plague, and not an engineered chimera bacteria. That’s insanely good news. Wild plague has been curable since streptomycin showed up in the forties, and every one of those contacts is almost certainly swallowing handfuls doxycycline right now.
Kobzev says they’re testing negative. If that’s true, and if it holds, Daria will be the only grave, and I hope for that ending with everything I’ve got. A twenty-eight-year-old is dead because somebody’s safety culture was a laminated poster and maybe nothing else.
But look at what failed first. Not the antibiotics. Not the lab. The telling. Six days of silence, a euphemism, a deleted post, a cop car behind the ambulance. Jacobsen’s whole book is about what happens when a pathogen gets a head start because the people holding it would rather protect the regime or the building than inform the town, and Russia just demonstrated that the head start comes standard, no superweapon required.
Our biggest hope is that what was in Daria’s tube was plain, ol’ normal plague.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
A lab accident at a Siberian plague institute used to be the kind of thing the United States noticed on purpose. We had people for it. The global health security team at USAID, which Trump and Elon and DOGE dissolved. The surveillance networks we ran through the World Health Organization, which we finished walking out of in January, owing it $287 million on the way to the door. The disease detectives at CDC, fired on a Friday and un-fired on a Monday because of “a glitch in the system.” Remember that?
We learned about Irkutsk from a Siberian blog and a governor’s typo, which is exactly how Jacobsen says we’ll learn about the next one, and America under Trump and RFK Jr. just spent the whole year making sure of it.
Russia built a building that says ANTI-PLAGUE and then wouldn’t say plague. America had the people who would have said it and fired them to save money. Pick your idiot. But handy tip, pick your idiot while you’re at Costco stocking up on water and freeze-dried meals and antibiotics, just in case.
Let me drop the volume for a second. Somewhere in Shelekhov there is a hospital full of nurses who found out from the news what they had been breathing for a week. They are the ones who always find out last, in every country, in every scenario, in every chapter Jacobsen wrote.
I’m not saying we won’t make it to the Midterm Elections. But I am saying that Annie Jacobsen’s book did a damn fine job of postulating a doomsday scenario that just might be coming true in Siberian hospitals right now.
Thanks for stopping by!
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Lawrence, I am so afraid of something like this happening here in the USA due to what they did to the CDC and their anti-vaxx theories. The last person(s) we need in charge right now are the ones there. RFKjr and TRUMPSTEIN. I keep a supply of antibiotics on hand.
When I first heard these kind of stories it was in the mid seventies. The alleged global cabal was led by England, Holland, America and I don't know who else. It seemed plausible but fictional. It was allegedly on purpose, a way to kill off most of the earth's humans. Fast forward thirty years and I read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. None of it sounded far fetched but deeply staggering. This the result of how many billions of years of earth revolving and evolving? Devolving of the human species, or a failure to bloom? What kind of creatures are we?!