The Troubled History of Russia’s Anti-Plague Institute
Swathed in secrecy, the Siberian institute fell foul of regulations, including weeks before a mysterious death
Earlier this year, Russian authorities issued a stern warning to a Siberian institute that researches the pathogens behind bubonic plague, anthrax and other diseases: It lacked a sufficient decontamination plan in the event bacteria accidentally escaped.
The Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute landed in the global spotlight in recent weeks—months after the warning—when a biologist who worked at the laboratory died of a mysterious pneumonia.
What wasn’t widely known at the time of Darya Shipilova’s death was that for more than a decade the lab had been cited multiple times for safety violations, insufficient emergency plans and training gaps among senior officials, turning it into a potential danger zone.
In the days after the 28-year-old died, Russia’s consumer watchdog that oversees the institute warned of a dangerous infection in the area, without giving details. The country’s surgeon general traveled to Irkutsk for an in-person meeting with regional officials. All Shipilova’s recent contacts were quarantined.
The World Health Organization appealed to Russian authorities five times this month for more information about what happened in Irkutsk as it tried to determine the level of danger posed by Shipilova’s death. Russian officials repeated what they had already stated publicly: The lab worker had died of pneumonia of an unknown origin.
There hasn’t been an update since.
“Health authorities, the healthcare bodies, are very actively concealing from the WHO what is actually happening,” said Alisa Litovka, a microbiologist who has worked in labs across Russia but decided to leave the country for political reasons.
Neither Russia’s main public health agency nor the Irkutsk institute responded to a request for comment.
Weeks before Shipilova’s death, the institute had received a warning from Russia’s Emergencies Ministry, which said it lacked a robust civil-defense plan and that its training for top officials was out of date.
The institute carries the Soviet-era title, the Irkutsk Order of the Red Banner of Labour Scientific Research Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East. It isn’t alone in potentially failing to meet health and safety standards inside Russia, said Litovka, adding that she had worked in numerous labs in Russia that had highly trained personnel working under difficult conditions and in a climate of secrecy imposed by the state.
In the past, that secretive atmosphere has prevented information about other infectious outbreaks from becoming public, including an anthrax outbreak in 2016 in the Siberian province of Yamal that officials said killed two people. Health authorities at the time said that high temperatures had caused naturally occurring anthrax spores in the environment to become contagious. Litovka, whose colleagues worked on that outbreak, blamed local officials for failing to administer anthrax vaccinations according to schedule.
The warnings that the institute received, which online records show date to 2015, were issued after the regulator suspected or had evidence of a violation.
The one in June said that the organization hadn’t put in place any measures to decontaminate buildings or equipment. The facility also lacked stockpiles of decontamination and degassing agents, the Emergencies Ministry said.
In September, the institute’s civil-defense plan was cited for not having been updated to reflect new information and that the official in charge of civil defense hadn’t completed extra training for their role.
The institute triggered a warning in 2015 for having rooms without required automatic fire alarms. In 2019, it had failed to prepare the required safety documentation for biologically hazardous facilities.
The alerts didn’t appear to restrict the work the anti-plague lab was doing. Over the summer, it took part in the first Russian-Chinese training exercises against “infectious threats,” replete with mobile laboratories. In the city of Khabarovsk, about 20 miles from the Chinese border, lab workers from Irkutsk and elsewhere in Russia and China spent three days reviewing best practices to fight infectious diseases.
The institute itself was established under Joseph Stalin in 1934 at a time when the Soviet Union was suffering thousands of plague cases annually, particularly in the farthest-flung corners of Siberia and the Far East.
One of the institute’s directors during the Cold War rose to become a forefather of the Soviet Union’s program to develop defenses against Western biochemical weapons, a project that the Soviet bureaucracy referred to as Problem No. 5. Western scientists say that program soon turned into a cover for Soviet offensive bioweapons, in which plague, carried by aerosols, played a significant part.
Links between the institute and Russia’s Defense Ministry continue. Last year, they joined forces to upgrade the laboratory, using ministry procurement funds to outfit it with new equipment, procurement data shows.
U.S. and international oversight of Russian labs has been severely hampered by worsening ties between Moscow and the West. In 2013, President Vladimir Putin pulled Russia out of scientific engagement and threat-reduction programs run jointly with the State Department and the Defense Department.
“That dramatically reduced the visibility of Russian labs to U.S. experts,” said Gregory Koblentz, professor and director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. “This situation has gotten worse following the Russian invasion of Ukraine due to sanctions and Russia’s increased international isolation.”
Still, conditions in Russian labs are now better than those in facilities across the former Soviet Union in the years following its collapse. The conditions then were shocking, said Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, who worked across Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia under the U.S.-funded Cooperative Threat Reduction Program during the early 2000s.
“They had almost no biosafety equipment; they worked on simple tables in the labs, with no gloveboxes or full protective suits. In some cases,” she said.
The plague, known in the Middle Ages as the “Black Death,” once killed millions of people in Europe. Today, the disease is rare, with a few hundred cases reported globally each year. The bacterium that causes it still exists in parts of Africa and Asia, including Siberia. The disease can be cured with antibiotics, but only if treatment is given quickly.
“The thing about the plague is that it’s part of the entire globe’s cultural zeitgeist, it’s the thing that everyone in the world knows about and is scared of,” said Samuel Scarpino, a professor of public health and health sciences at Northeastern University.