WASHINGTON — The United States issued a formal diplomatic démarche to Moscow late Tuesday requesting more information about the death of a 28-year-old technician at a Russian anti-plague research institute in Siberia, after days of what U.S. officials described as Russian stonewalling, according to CNN.
The technician died last week at the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute, which studies plague, cholera, anthrax, and brucellosis. U.S. officials said Washington has been in contact with Russia’s Foreign Ministry since Friday, and escalated to the formal complaint after Moscow failed to provide details about the incident.
Russian regional sources said nearly 200 people are under observation and the hospital where the worker was treated was quarantined. Washington wants answers to two questions: whether the worker died of pneumonic plague — which is treatable with antibiotics — or another disease, and whether any pathogen at the facility had been modified.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he had a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin scheduled “very soon,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio cautioned it would be “reckless” to speculate given the limited information. U.S. officials are also weighing a potential public-health response in case cooperation is not forthcoming.
The episode is a new development from the White House’s monitoring of the incident since last week, and it lands amid sharpened U.S. scrutiny of biological-risk facilities abroad. U.S. intelligence agencies have long listed Russia’s network of high-risk pathogen laboratories as a concern, though Moscow has said the Irkutsk institute conducts defensive public-health research.
