You need to have the plagues to make a cure. You can say one of two things. There was a tragic accident by a researcher who dropped a vial or something, and for some reason they have no idea what it is (even though they very well should it being a research lab), or they are trying to weaponize something, and don't want to say what they are doing.
Ok, but if it was a cover-up, you'd think they would just lie about the pathogen. "Yup, definitely just a bad flu. Yuri wasn't the best about maintaining his health to begin with."
This story is a few days old, initially published details heavily implied an incident with plague, but those could well be rumors; later official claims said "pneumonia of unknown etiology". But do you lock up 200 potentially contacted people in hospitals within a single day for a random seasonal crap?
(No, they aren't ill yet, they are contacts; plague is not nearly as infectious by itself as SARS-CoV-2 (unless they be breeding it), and anybody found ill early enough would have treatment far better than in Middle age.)
If you like to worry, I have a more realistic one for you. Ok, lets assume this one is a case of negligence with natural plague - not nearly as infectious as we can imagine after COVID, and relatively easy to treat with but common antibiotics. What if it was something more infectious (transmission probability on contact * incubation period), like smallpox? The fact that a worker assumedly just walked home after exposure like nothing happened should be the nightmare fuel; a similar case of negligence can easily start a new pandemic.
If they wanted, this just would not have gotten out at all. For one reason or another, they want people to hear about this, in the context which it is presented.
They’re doing exactly what I’d expect for pneumonic plague. Y. pestis has been neutralized as a societal threat for now, but it is not to be fucked with on an individual level.
The Problem is the victim is a trained researcher and even in Russian labs standard procedure is wearing full body suits precisely to mitigate accidental contamination from say a test tube spilling. So either their labs have extremely lax safety standards or it wasn’t just as something as incidental as an accidental test tube breaking.
There was an incident at a Russian lab some years ago that was working on anthrax. Apparently someone did routine monthly maintenance changing filters and forgot to put the new filter in one of the labs. If I remember correctly, the anthrax contaminated part of the nearby town and killed a few people. So they can have good practices, but human error can be a weak link.
Kinda like the VECTOR lab explosion no one was allowed to investigate 11 weeks before Covid showed up in a neighboring country that they are rivals with?
I think it's unlikely to be plague. There are a million things that can give a person pneumonia and in Russia plague researchers get a plague vaccine we don't have in the US.
She was a published yersinia pestis researcher and worked on lab that handles yersinia pestis strains.
Изучение чувствительности к антибактериальным препаратам Yersinia pestis из природных очагов чумы Сибири is her recent publication. It's not just about the name of the institute.
The institute does likely handle other bacterias and I guess some of them could also cause rapid, fatal pneumonia. It's also possible she got sick somewhere else with something else entirely.
Attenuated vaccine exists but it's not super effective at preventing pneumonic plague. Unless they recently have a new one?
119
u/Xytakis 7h ago edited 7h ago
You need to have the plagues to make a cure. You can say one of two things. There was a tragic accident by a researcher who dropped a vial or something, and for some reason they have no idea what it is (even though they very well should it being a research lab), or they are trying to weaponize something, and don't want to say what they are doing.