I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
> made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.
The German secret service has assessed that 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel.
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
I expected that arguing for Lab Leak would be a huge uphill battle but it was surprisingly almost the exact opposite. Some of the biological arguments are above my head, but they decompose into timelines and other consequences that make it hard for a Lab Leak origin to be coherent.
almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory over a zoonotic source. There are huge leaps of faith required by the lab leak theory that don't hold up against slight scrutiny. People will get into the weeds about "furin cleavage sites" etc. when none of that argumentation is necessary to determine the most likely source.
It's difficult to say for sure, but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market. (I'm not very well researched on this topic and don't have any formal background in it, so hedge accordingly)
The Science community says no. And Statisically I say no as well. The strongest piece of evidence in my opinon is that for this virus to NOT have come from the lab is this.
A lab worker would need to have taken public transit for 7 miles through a place more densely populated than Manhattan infect no one arrive at the wet market infect 1 person than leave and go several miles home without infecting anyone. This basically seems impossible and if it did happen it would have radically changed the infection pattern and with how we know how covid works seems impossible. Its not bullet proof but it basically requires us abandoning everything we know about epidemology for it to have come from that lab.
Now there are issues we never found the animal of origin but its hard because China killed and bleached the whole market trying to hid evidence. It seems very consistent though with China trying to perserve reputation. There could be scheme to sell infected dead animals from the lab to the wet market but its conspiry theory seeking as there is no evidence supporting lab leak besides China bad. (And Trust me I think China is bad they are a horrible government who definitely hid covids existence and that behavior propably enhanced the likelyhood of it become the pandemic it was but there is just no hard evidence that lab leak as theory is true just scary hypothetic and stories. I hate that I sound like a China shill here)
We knew it was from day one, but the nudge unit was just suppressing it so that people wouldn’t be mean to China.
It’s like when Russia bombed the olympics in Paris and the story got nudged to “mysterious explosions happen across France for no reason, move along citizen”
I don’t know why we keep doing it. People should be mad at these countries.
Well, Americans were essentially prohibited from discussing this (most obvious) possibility because of fears that doing so would incite racist feelings towards Chinese people.
Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
I get downvoted every time I say this but the evidence doesn’t even prove it started in wuhan, or even China. It could of easily been brought here by the military games that happened before that
I enjoyed it but it felt more sci-fi than the Nuclear War book. Mainly because it centers around a pathogen that is engineered for maximal transmission and it seemed quite unbelievable that so many things that came down to bad luck would all happen at the same time. The Nuclear War scenario seemed a lot more plausible because only a couple of bad things need to happen to set off the chain of events and they all seemed plausible.
I preferred the Nuclear War scenario book. Same style of narrative mixed with expert insights. The first several days of the scenario were riveting, after that less so. This one tries to describe the impact of social media and influencers, which I found inconclusive.
She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.
I thought it was better than the Nuclear war scenario, which I also enjoyed. I thought she did a better job in this one explaining possible off ramps or inflection points in the scenario but saying "this is the one we're exploring", which answers some of the critique of the nuclear war scenario.
You're absolutely right! I was excited about this book, having heard Ms. Jacobsen discuss it on a podcast. She was a great guest, and her book is well researched, for sure. Unfortunately, I found the prose unbearable and gave up half-way through. To me, it reeks of LLM. If you can somehow set that aside, you might enjoy it.
Containment in Russia is different from that in China.
They expect stuff like this to happen, and to be fair I think Russia never stopped their bio programmes, and the fact that we are not all dead yet seems to prove them right, that their containment protocols are overall working.
But there is no public or otherwise evidence that this is a military pathogen-production plant comparable to Sverdlovsk-19.
The institute’s activities include surveillance of naturally occurring plague in the Russia–Mongolia border region and training Mongolian specialists in plague diagnosis and prevention.
So the handling of pneumonic plague in this facility is probably an everyday occurrence, and not related to a weapons programme.
This is an institute for biodefense, not offence.
There was a single person messing up and she paid the price for that mistake.
I understand people are on edge since Covid, but this is not that, or a bio weapon. Just a 28-year-old that dropped a tube by accident and then probably panicked and didn’t follow containment protocol. Shit happens.
Let’s hope she stays the only victim of her mistake.
Sucks to die because of pneumonic plague because a 28-year-old sneezed in the same cafe you get your matcha latte fix.
You're claiming that everything is fine because Russians have procedures in place. Russians. You're appealing for calm based on the trust in Russian competence, after referencing Sverdlovsk incident. It's just too funny.
So breaks a test tube of live bacteria at an “anti-plague institute”, possible infects 100 colleagues, then when she developed plague like symptoms is taken to hospital and possibly infects 100 patients.
I think they need to investigate their safety protocols
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
> At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.
Was this a glass test tube? I understand why glass is probably the best material for the inner lining of containers that hold biological material, but I'm surprised that there aren't better solutions for hazardous material (e.g. an unbreakable, transparent polymer outer coating).
I believe the biggest reason to use glass is that it doesn't react with much stuff, but I've yet to see an explanation for why your idea wouldn't work. I imagine there could be problems with autoclaves (i.e. degradation of the polymer) and fear of chemical leaching.
I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube because she would have started on prophylactic antibiotic treatment immediately.
Luckily you need to be in close contact with someone already very sick to catch it. It's not silent transmission like COVID. But maybe there is something different about this outbreak?
That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway. You can ask a ton of questions, like was she immunized before working with plague (Russia has pretty effective vaccines against all types) and if not why the heck not, why they use easily breakable test tubes to hold dangerous pathogens, how the incident with live biomaterial was not immediately reported and caused a lockdown, but they allowed waiting for symptoms and then going to a general hospital, etc., etc. - but the answer for all of that, I suspect, is: "it's Russia". For an American, it's hard to appreciate to what measure Russia is not a "safety culture" country.
Irregardless of the claim of correlation, between Russia and a lack of safety culture, it is currently a country in a war economy with populace shortages.
Are we fairly confident that these labs do more good than the risk they present to the public? I’m not sure we should be keeping dangerous pathogens around just for giggles and PhD papers. What are examples of how the research done in these places improves public health?
This is the exact reason that the Lab Leak vs Natural Origin question around COVID-19 matters. If it was a Lab Leak, then we should probably be scaling these labs down and restricting what they can research. But if COVID really did come from a wet market, then the risk is probably worth it.
One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
The conclusion I drew from that is that people like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow have asked a lot of questions about bioweapons in secret for a long time. And if he did it, you bet all similar leaders, in a wide sense, did it too. And I wouldn't like to be the scientist who got approached by security state people with these questions.
I guess I'm not conveying this well. What I'm trying to say is that we're not at all confident about anything like that - none of us - because it's all so hush hush because it's WMD-adjacent. The secrecy cripples our ability to have an honest well-informed discussion about it.
> One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
For all the hand wringing we're doing over AI, I'm surprised that post-covid, regardless of origin, there wasn't a more serious discussion on what sorts of biological research are worth the risk.
No one wants to give up their grant money. That was a big part of the letters floating around during covid asking/begging to keep things quiet IIRC. No one wanted their money pulled.
It's because The Experts (specifically those in the public space) made it clear that they Had Spoken and that COVID had come from a wet market. From there, any dissent was met with incredible vitriol that still lasts to this day.
I think this is in part because more people have some amount of knowledge about software and can directly see the effect AI has on the job market around them than do about biological research. Biological research labs usually don't expose convenient chat interfaces, besides, you only hear and read about them in scientific papers as long as things go well.
But totally agreed that that conversation should be had, a kind of test ban treaty would be useful but frankly, the three groups most likely to conduct this kind of research would never agree to such a ban.
Because discussions of the idea that covid was the result of biological research was shut down hard, and suggesting it would quickly get you labeled as conspiracy theorist or put in a camp with the most extreme vaccine deniers
I wonder if people downvoting consider your question to be a thoughtcrime or something. It’s a legitimate line of inquiry. Research happens because somebody is interested and writes a grant request that is accepted. Governments and institutions where the research happens have rules as well. It’s possible that the researchers, the folks reviewing the grants, and the people making the rules haven’t done a cost-benefit analysis that adequately covers the tail risks. For some kinds of research, the answer can be: no, we shouldn’t do this. It’s reasonable to publicly discuss these concerns.
Plague exists naturally. It's not some kind of a movie-land bioweapon McGuffin. The US has half a dozen cases of plague each year.
Russia did a lot of work to control the plague with anti-plague vaccinations of cattle and pets, resulting in almost no human plague cases. This obviously requires research and development for vaccines.
BTW, same applies to anthrax. It also exists naturally, which surprises a lot of people.
Too bad you're not condemning the live animal / wet market trade because from that we've had SARS, H5N1, H7N9 and Covid19, so are you fairly confident the wet markets are doing a public good or just condemning research labs for some reason?
Do you think bird flu came from a lab?
Chinese authorities considered to crack down on these markets before Covid 19 but didn't...because the markets are a major source of income for the peasant class in China so it's politically dangerous to do it because it would put millions out of their businesses.
This information that she "broke a tube" is tabloid bs.
Non-tabloid version is that she didn't catch it in the lab, she got ill "while being on a research trip to Buryatia region near the border where sources of the disease were found".
So far I have seen claims of her contracting it doing fieldwork in Buryatia only in telegram groups with no sources. The head of Buryatia Tsydenov released a statement saying she had not been there and that the republic doesn't have animals that carry it.
the government does cover-ups. There was already an epidemic problem earlier this year when they seized and killed cattle in Siberia while keeping silence and pretending nothing happens. Then they have to admit that there is a disease after unrest cause them keeping silence was used for messages like "gov helps big corpos destroy local farmers' business". But they still named less dangerous one, which didn't match the harshness of the protocol they used. Cause if they named the real problem, other countries would've stopped buying meat.
The Irkutsk governor, Igor Kobzev, seems to actually have experience in emergency management, and has served for many years in the Ministry of Emergency Situations. This makes the serious response a little bit less surprising (actually doing something instead of just covering it up is the thing that made me actually worried about this situation).
How often does this sort of thing happen? I'm guessing more than we think, either because we forget the news stories we read or because it isn't reported.
A while ago a researcher at the Univ. of Chicago died of the plague. Although most labs use a mutated form that can't get iron needed to reproduce, he had a medical condition that caused an excess of iron in his blood that might have yet the bacteria grow.
However, every year there's a few deaths in the US from the plague because it's present in a variety of animals. If you look worldwide, there's probably on the order of a thousand deaths annually.
In the US, chipmunks out west sometimes carry it. You go to a national park, you see a cute little chipmunk, you decide to feed it (which you're not supposed to do anyway), you get really close to it...
A few people get infected that way. Not a thousand a year, but some every few years.
If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.
Also ask how much is this failed route procedures because organisms or viri of this variety won't continue without human sustainment which is prone to human failures...
I've read this story before, in Russian, and, honestly, it doesn't make any sense to me.
According to Wikipedia, plague responds to antibiotics very well, since it is a bacteria, not a virus and it hasn't been widespread since the development of antibiotics, so it didn't develop any resistance to antibiotics.
If she knew that she broke a flask with plague (and, as I understand, she did know that), why don't start a course of antibiotics immediately, before any symptoms? Wouldn't she be totally fine it this case?
Of course we all agree that research on germs that can cause deadly epidemics is safe. Since after all, the Covid outbreak in Wuhan was also not caused by the research lab over there, despite the many reported accidents.
> The woman was identified as Daria Sh., a 27- or 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk anti-plague institute, by the exiled news outlet Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal) and pro-Kremlin broadcaster REN TV.
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
This is just weird. Plague is easily treated if antibiotics are given right away. I'm shocked that an anti-plague institute wouldn't have detailed and proactive plans in case of mishaps. Obviously I think it's likely that there is more to it than what's reported in the article, but I would find it truly baffling if within 60 seconds of her breaking that test tube that protocols weren't initiated to protect her, her colleagues and the community.
It's not clear if she even died from plague. The Russian-language version of the article lists various "versions" of what happened, and her breaking a test tube is only listed as one of the versions. Sounds like random rumors but at the same time, you can't trust the government either (which says no one has tested for plague positively). What's clear is that an employee at an "anti-plague' institute suddenly died from pneumonia-like symptoms, which certainly sounds suspicious but interpreting it as evidence of a plague infection may also be an overreaction
I'm assuming if its a bio-lab that its a gain of function version that may be immune to conventional antibiotics.
Actually went to a scout camp as a teenager (in the 80s) and one of our scouts got the plauge. Took a long while for the hospital to identify it and get him on heavy antibiotics because no one had seen it in real life before.
She probably didn't tell anybody she broke the tube, because, you know, they might yell at her and it may cost her a bit of money if they discover she was clumsy. So she just went home and when she felt bad, went to the hospital. Where nobody knew shit about the plague, as expected - when a person with respiratory symptoms in the autumn shows up in a hospital, nobody thinks "let's test her for plague". When she died, and when they learned where she worked, probably some major "oh shit!" lightbulbs gone up, but by then it was a done deed.
Sounds implausible, because even if you can rationalize, "I probably didn't get contaminated" after breaking the test tube and being worried about retaliations, once you start developing symptoms, why would you go to a normal hospital and not tell them that you suspect plague, almost surely guaranting your own death?
"Don't worry, Mikhail. We have extensive containment measures in place. In case pathogen breaks containment, detachment of troops stands ready to terminate all remaining personnel and burn facility to ground."
"But sir, you are talking about—"
"I am talking about courageous scientists giving their lives to protect Mother Russia. Any further questions?"
>Irkutsk region Governor Igor Kobzev urged the public to remain calm after meeting with Rospotrebnadzor chief Anna Popova to coordinate emergency containment measures.
>“All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative,”
Why is the knee jerk reaction of authority figures to say everything is fine? Be it epidemic risk, or cybersecurity incidents, the spokepeople always output noise in the form of "everything is fine", there's almost no signal
As the pro-COVID-measures-crowd largely overlaps with the Putler-crowd it’s going to be interesting to see their agenda re-alignment.
When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime, and even if it wasn’t, that the regime is going to milk it internally (vs dissent) and externally (vs the west). Especially given that this happened just a few months after the Hong Kong protest crackdowns.
The western center-left didn’t want to acknowledge any of this until it became politically feasible for their own gain and this alone cost us roughly the first three months of properly responding.
Let’s see if and how they’ll going to put their political shenanigans before their countrymen this time. I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
> I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
It's "sowed" from the concept of "sowing seeds" not from sewing textiles.
From Google: `Combined Metaphor: Just as a farmer scatters seeds into soil expecting a harvest, to "sow division" means to plant small acts, words, or policies of conflict that grow into a larger harvest of hostility and separation between people.`
> When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime
oh well then I guess if your personal contacts were 100% sure then case closed
Are you speculating? Or what are you basing this off of? Are you saying this is the next COVID and the government will use it to crack down on protests?
I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
> made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
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Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.
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The German secret service has assessed that 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...)
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It’s not even rumors. The MERS/SARS gain of function research started in UNC, US, then paused due to safety concerns, then moved to Wuhan.
The entire thing is very well documented by Nature and Science, among others.
Dr. Shi Zhengli of WIV was involved in the original UNC research prior to 2014 defunding.
In 2017 she had combined DNA of few different bat coronaviruses to “study their virulence”.
In 2019 she published a paper forecasting a new virus outbreak likely to originate in China.
You know the rest of the story.
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That was exactly the strain of Coronavirus that the lab was working with, and exactly the kinds of mutations you'd expect them to make.
But no, I'm sure it was the wombats.
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I believe it was zoonosis, not a lab leak: https://marketwise.substack.com/p/did-covid-19-come-from-a-l...
Man, you started an off-topic subthread which, at the moment, contains 100 out of the 165 total comments.
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> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
If you enjoy diving deep on the topic I highly recommend watching the entire Rootclaim Covid Lab Leak debate https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...
I expected that arguing for Lab Leak would be a huge uphill battle but it was surprisingly almost the exact opposite. Some of the biological arguments are above my head, but they decompose into timelines and other consequences that make it hard for a Lab Leak origin to be coherent.
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almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory over a zoonotic source. There are huge leaps of faith required by the lab leak theory that don't hold up against slight scrutiny. People will get into the weeds about "furin cleavage sites" etc. when none of that argumentation is necessary to determine the most likely source.
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Pretty much confirmed by western intelligence including the German BND
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Asking this question on an internet forum is like dumping a pound of sodium chloride in a bathtub: explosive, and highly unlikely to inform anybody.
Def not confirmed, just assumed. People act like it's a fact though because it's plausible.
It's difficult to say for sure, but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market. (I'm not very well researched on this topic and don't have any formal background in it, so hedge accordingly)
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Bill Gurley has a presentation about it, asking questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765794
There was endless discussion about how unlikely or reasonable it was with furin cleavage sites and whatnot. I wouldn't trust authoritative summaries.
Last I saw, plausible, unconfirmed, nobody is willing/able to provide enough information to be able to confirm one way or another.
The Science community says no. And Statisically I say no as well. The strongest piece of evidence in my opinon is that for this virus to NOT have come from the lab is this.
A lab worker would need to have taken public transit for 7 miles through a place more densely populated than Manhattan infect no one arrive at the wet market infect 1 person than leave and go several miles home without infecting anyone. This basically seems impossible and if it did happen it would have radically changed the infection pattern and with how we know how covid works seems impossible. Its not bullet proof but it basically requires us abandoning everything we know about epidemology for it to have come from that lab.
Now there are issues we never found the animal of origin but its hard because China killed and bleached the whole market trying to hid evidence. It seems very consistent though with China trying to perserve reputation. There could be scheme to sell infected dead animals from the lab to the wet market but its conspiry theory seeking as there is no evidence supporting lab leak besides China bad. (And Trust me I think China is bad they are a horrible government who definitely hid covids existence and that behavior propably enhanced the likelyhood of it become the pandemic it was but there is just no hard evidence that lab leak as theory is true just scary hypothetic and stories. I hate that I sound like a China shill here)
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We knew it was from day one, but the nudge unit was just suppressing it so that people wouldn’t be mean to China.
It’s like when Russia bombed the olympics in Paris and the story got nudged to “mysterious explosions happen across France for no reason, move along citizen”
I don’t know why we keep doing it. People should be mad at these countries.
All the evidence was destroyed (probably just a coincidence, LOL), so it can't be proved either way.
Well, Americans were essentially prohibited from discussing this (most obvious) possibility because of fears that doing so would incite racist feelings towards Chinese people.
Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
Last thing I read on it, it was confirmed to originate from a wet market. The Wuhan lab theory has become a conspiracy theory lacking substance.
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> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
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I get downvoted every time I say this but the evidence doesn’t even prove it started in wuhan, or even China. It could of easily been brought here by the military games that happened before that
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How did you enjoy the book? I did like her nuclear war volume, but it could have used some editing.
I enjoyed it but it felt more sci-fi than the Nuclear War book. Mainly because it centers around a pathogen that is engineered for maximal transmission and it seemed quite unbelievable that so many things that came down to bad luck would all happen at the same time. The Nuclear War scenario seemed a lot more plausible because only a couple of bad things need to happen to set off the chain of events and they all seemed plausible.
I preferred the Nuclear War scenario book. Same style of narrative mixed with expert insights. The first several days of the scenario were riveting, after that less so. This one tries to describe the impact of social media and influencers, which I found inconclusive.
She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.
I thought it was better than the Nuclear war scenario, which I also enjoyed. I thought she did a better job in this one explaining possible off ramps or inflection points in the scenario but saying "this is the one we're exploring", which answers some of the critique of the nuclear war scenario.
You're absolutely right! I was excited about this book, having heard Ms. Jacobsen discuss it on a podcast. She was a great guest, and her book is well researched, for sure. Unfortunately, I found the prose unbearable and gave up half-way through. To me, it reeks of LLM. If you can somehow set that aside, you might enjoy it.
How’d it turn out, are we boned?
No spoilers but Jacobsen's scenario books don't end with "and society came together, acted rationally, and solved the problem!"
Netflix ends up the series after Season 1, just after your are emotionally invested...
What are you reading next and what should we do to prepare?
I was planning to read this book but, now not really
"The Siberian Incident", "Devil's Pass", Incident", Lake" also all deal with outbreaks of various sorts originating from Siberia. It's a trope.
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I wouldn’t worry too much.
Containment in Russia is different from that in China.
They expect stuff like this to happen, and to be fair I think Russia never stopped their bio programmes, and the fact that we are not all dead yet seems to prove them right, that their containment protocols are overall working.
This is not 79' Sverdlosk.
https://meselsonarchive.hsites.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omn...
The lab in question in this incident has a documented Soviet Biodefense connection.
https://nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/cns-archive/...
But there is no public or otherwise evidence that this is a military pathogen-production plant comparable to Sverdlovsk-19.
The institute’s activities include surveillance of naturally occurring plague in the Russia–Mongolia border region and training Mongolian specialists in plague diagnosis and prevention.
So the handling of pneumonic plague in this facility is probably an everyday occurrence, and not related to a weapons programme.
This is an institute for biodefense, not offence. There was a single person messing up and she paid the price for that mistake.
I understand people are on edge since Covid, but this is not that, or a bio weapon. Just a 28-year-old that dropped a tube by accident and then probably panicked and didn’t follow containment protocol. Shit happens.
Let’s hope she stays the only victim of her mistake.
Sucks to die because of pneumonic plague because a 28-year-old sneezed in the same cafe you get your matcha latte fix.
You're claiming that everything is fine because Russians have procedures in place. Russians. You're appealing for calm based on the trust in Russian competence, after referencing Sverdlovsk incident. It's just too funny.
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So breaks a test tube of live bacteria at an “anti-plague institute”, possible infects 100 colleagues, then when she developed plague like symptoms is taken to hospital and possibly infects 100 patients.
I think they need to investigate their safety protocols
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
> At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.
Was this a glass test tube? I understand why glass is probably the best material for the inner lining of containers that hold biological material, but I'm surprised that there aren't better solutions for hazardous material (e.g. an unbreakable, transparent polymer outer coating).
I believe the biggest reason to use glass is that it doesn't react with much stuff, but I've yet to see an explanation for why your idea wouldn't work. I imagine there could be problems with autoclaves (i.e. degradation of the polymer) and fear of chemical leaching.
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My guess would be cost. Glass is cheaper and with sanctions and the economic strain of war I'm sure everyone in Russia is trying to cut corners
Or a double wall - one glass one polymer
There is regular soda-lime glass and there is borosilicate glass.
Why on earth would she have contact with 197 people after she got exposed to bacteria? She should have immediately triggered safety protocols
I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube because she would have started on prophylactic antibiotic treatment immediately.
Luckily you need to be in close contact with someone already very sick to catch it. It's not silent transmission like COVID. But maybe there is something different about this outbreak?
> I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube
What does this mean? The article we’re discussing says the woman who died told colleagues she broke a test tube.
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That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway. You can ask a ton of questions, like was she immunized before working with plague (Russia has pretty effective vaccines against all types) and if not why the heck not, why they use easily breakable test tubes to hold dangerous pathogens, how the incident with live biomaterial was not immediately reported and caused a lockdown, but they allowed waiting for symptoms and then going to a general hospital, etc., etc. - but the answer for all of that, I suspect, is: "it's Russia". For an American, it's hard to appreciate to what measure Russia is not a "safety culture" country.
> That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway.
Speaking as someone who has a part of their job convincing people to follow safety processes, this isn't a Russia thing, it's a human thing.
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Irregardless of the claim of correlation, between Russia and a lack of safety culture, it is currently a country in a war economy with populace shortages.
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Are we fairly confident that these labs do more good than the risk they present to the public? I’m not sure we should be keeping dangerous pathogens around just for giggles and PhD papers. What are examples of how the research done in these places improves public health?
This is the exact reason that the Lab Leak vs Natural Origin question around COVID-19 matters. If it was a Lab Leak, then we should probably be scaling these labs down and restricting what they can research. But if COVID really did come from a wet market, then the risk is probably worth it.
One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
The conclusion I drew from that is that people like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow have asked a lot of questions about bioweapons in secret for a long time. And if he did it, you bet all similar leaders, in a wide sense, did it too. And I wouldn't like to be the scientist who got approached by security state people with these questions.
I guess I'm not conveying this well. What I'm trying to say is that we're not at all confident about anything like that - none of us - because it's all so hush hush because it's WMD-adjacent. The secrecy cripples our ability to have an honest well-informed discussion about it.
> One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
citation needed.
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Not so much with gain of function and bio warfare type research.
knowledge. how to handle that and how it looks/works. if you forget it you will be reminded later.
You’re describing documentation though.
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For all the hand wringing we're doing over AI, I'm surprised that post-covid, regardless of origin, there wasn't a more serious discussion on what sorts of biological research are worth the risk.
No one wants to give up their grant money. That was a big part of the letters floating around during covid asking/begging to keep things quiet IIRC. No one wanted their money pulled.
It's because The Experts (specifically those in the public space) made it clear that they Had Spoken and that COVID had come from a wet market. From there, any dissent was met with incredible vitriol that still lasts to this day.
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I think this is in part because more people have some amount of knowledge about software and can directly see the effect AI has on the job market around them than do about biological research. Biological research labs usually don't expose convenient chat interfaces, besides, you only hear and read about them in scientific papers as long as things go well.
But totally agreed that that conversation should be had, a kind of test ban treaty would be useful but frankly, the three groups most likely to conduct this kind of research would never agree to such a ban.
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Because discussions of the idea that covid was the result of biological research was shut down hard, and suggesting it would quickly get you labeled as conspiracy theorist or put in a camp with the most extreme vaccine deniers
Much like nukes game theory favours keeping them.
I wonder if people downvoting consider your question to be a thoughtcrime or something. It’s a legitimate line of inquiry. Research happens because somebody is interested and writes a grant request that is accepted. Governments and institutions where the research happens have rules as well. It’s possible that the researchers, the folks reviewing the grants, and the people making the rules haven’t done a cost-benefit analysis that adequately covers the tail risks. For some kinds of research, the answer can be: no, we shouldn’t do this. It’s reasonable to publicly discuss these concerns.
Plague exists naturally. It's not some kind of a movie-land bioweapon McGuffin. The US has half a dozen cases of plague each year.
Russia did a lot of work to control the plague with anti-plague vaccinations of cattle and pets, resulting in almost no human plague cases. This obviously requires research and development for vaccines.
BTW, same applies to anthrax. It also exists naturally, which surprises a lot of people.
Yes, but natural plague isn't what people are worried about here. Russia has worked on bioengineered versions that would be much worse.
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Too bad you're not condemning the live animal / wet market trade because from that we've had SARS, H5N1, H7N9 and Covid19, so are you fairly confident the wet markets are doing a public good or just condemning research labs for some reason?
Do you think bird flu came from a lab?
Chinese authorities considered to crack down on these markets before Covid 19 but didn't...because the markets are a major source of income for the peasant class in China so it's politically dangerous to do it because it would put millions out of their businesses.
This information that she "broke a tube" is tabloid bs.
Non-tabloid version is that she didn't catch it in the lab, she got ill "while being on a research trip to Buryatia region near the border where sources of the disease were found".
OP article claims the former. Is there a better source for the latter?
So far I have seen claims of her contracting it doing fieldwork in Buryatia only in telegram groups with no sources. The head of Buryatia Tsydenov released a statement saying she had not been there and that the republic doesn't have animals that carry it.
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In absence of sources, the latter sounds like government cover-up bs to me.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261003051644/https://www.gazet...
the government does cover-ups. There was already an epidemic problem earlier this year when they seized and killed cattle in Siberia while keeping silence and pretending nothing happens. Then they have to admit that there is a disease after unrest cause them keeping silence was used for messages like "gov helps big corpos destroy local farmers' business". But they still named less dangerous one, which didn't match the harshness of the protocol they used. Cause if they named the real problem, other countries would've stopped buying meat.
for the cattle epidemic see: https://ru-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1...
The Irkutsk governor, Igor Kobzev, seems to actually have experience in emergency management, and has served for many years in the Ministry of Emergency Situations. This makes the serious response a little bit less surprising (actually doing something instead of just covering it up is the thing that made me actually worried about this situation).
Yersinia Pestis is normally treated with doxycycline, cipro, or streptomycin.
Is this a resistant strain?
https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/235627-medication#1
Unfortunately, even prompt antibiotics don't always help with the pneumonic form.
Wonderful. I’m so glad they’ve decided to weaponise a disease that can’t be treated. Just what the world needs.
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How often does this sort of thing happen? I'm guessing more than we think, either because we forget the news stories we read or because it isn't reported.
There was a COVID 19 lab leak in Taiwan about a year into the pandemic.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/4374289
Six errors contributed to this leak.
A while ago a researcher at the Univ. of Chicago died of the plague. Although most labs use a mutated form that can't get iron needed to reproduce, he had a medical condition that caused an excess of iron in his blood that might have yet the bacteria grow.
However, every year there's a few deaths in the US from the plague because it's present in a variety of animals. If you look worldwide, there's probably on the order of a thousand deaths annually.
Wow 500$ for an NGS kit to detect it before working there would have been money well spent
In the US, chipmunks out west sometimes carry it. You go to a national park, you see a cute little chipmunk, you decide to feed it (which you're not supposed to do anyway), you get really close to it...
A few people get infected that way. Not a thousand a year, but some every few years.
Bubonic plague is known to be active in Colorado, I think there are a handful of cases each year
Endemic in Antananarivo (very many deaths per year), not sure about the rest of Madagascar.
If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.
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Also ask how much is this failed route procedures because organisms or viri of this variety won't continue without human sustainment which is prone to human failures...
Janet Parker was the last person to die of smallpox and, yes, she caught it in a lab [1].
[1]: https://whyy.org/segments/the-tragic-case-of-smallpoxs-final...
>Oct. 2
Here's a newer CNN story from today:
>Researcher at Russian plague laboratory dies of ‘unknown’ infection
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/04/europe/russia-laboratory-...
This post from local Irkutsk region media (now in exile) is also interesting:
https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651 (in Russian)
I've read this story before, in Russian, and, honestly, it doesn't make any sense to me.
According to Wikipedia, plague responds to antibiotics very well, since it is a bacteria, not a virus and it hasn't been widespread since the development of antibiotics, so it didn't develop any resistance to antibiotics.
If she knew that she broke a flask with plague (and, as I understand, she did know that), why don't start a course of antibiotics immediately, before any symptoms? Wouldn't she be totally fine it this case?
Don't be fixated on the "tube" thing; it's at the rumour-level certainty at this point (see https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651
Of course we all agree that research on germs that can cause deadly epidemics is safe. Since after all, the Covid outbreak in Wuhan was also not caused by the research lab over there, despite the many reported accidents.
> The woman was identified as Daria Sh., a 27- or 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk anti-plague institute, by the exiled news outlet Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal) and pro-Kremlin broadcaster REN TV.
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
This is just weird. Plague is easily treated if antibiotics are given right away. I'm shocked that an anti-plague institute wouldn't have detailed and proactive plans in case of mishaps. Obviously I think it's likely that there is more to it than what's reported in the article, but I would find it truly baffling if within 60 seconds of her breaking that test tube that protocols weren't initiated to protect her, her colleagues and the community.
Of course, Russia...
It's not clear if she even died from plague. The Russian-language version of the article lists various "versions" of what happened, and her breaking a test tube is only listed as one of the versions. Sounds like random rumors but at the same time, you can't trust the government either (which says no one has tested for plague positively). What's clear is that an employee at an "anti-plague' institute suddenly died from pneumonia-like symptoms, which certainly sounds suspicious but interpreting it as evidence of a plague infection may also be an overreaction
I'm assuming if its a bio-lab that its a gain of function version that may be immune to conventional antibiotics.
Actually went to a scout camp as a teenager (in the 80s) and one of our scouts got the plauge. Took a long while for the hospital to identify it and get him on heavy antibiotics because no one had seen it in real life before.
Hopefully long while is under 24 hours like this plague is.
>the exiled news outlet
i wouldn't rely as a source of information on some very niche outlet whose stuff located thousands kms from the place where something happens
> REN TV.
these are guys whose bread and butter are paranormal activity and UFOs
She probably didn't tell anybody she broke the tube, because, you know, they might yell at her and it may cost her a bit of money if they discover she was clumsy. So she just went home and when she felt bad, went to the hospital. Where nobody knew shit about the plague, as expected - when a person with respiratory symptoms in the autumn shows up in a hospital, nobody thinks "let's test her for plague". When she died, and when they learned where she worked, probably some major "oh shit!" lightbulbs gone up, but by then it was a done deed.
Sounds implausible, because even if you can rationalize, "I probably didn't get contaminated" after breaking the test tube and being worried about retaliations, once you start developing symptoms, why would you go to a normal hospital and not tell them that you suspect plague, almost surely guaranting your own death?
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Interesting theory.
"Don't worry, Mikhail. We have extensive containment measures in place. In case pathogen breaks containment, detachment of troops stands ready to terminate all remaining personnel and burn facility to ground."
"But sir, you are talking about—"
"I am talking about courageous scientists giving their lives to protect Mother Russia. Any further questions?"
>Irkutsk region Governor Igor Kobzev urged the public to remain calm after meeting with Rospotrebnadzor chief Anna Popova to coordinate emergency containment measures.
>“All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative,”
Why is the knee jerk reaction of authority figures to say everything is fine? Be it epidemic risk, or cybersecurity incidents, the spokepeople always output noise in the form of "everything is fine", there's almost no signal
Because admitting there are problems causes the stock market to go down.
The Russian stock market is already down.
Because in at least some situations, panic can kill people, or at least make it more likely that they will die.
not only that but there are knock on effects like people hoarding toilet paper etc.
lol
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What a lousy summary of the lousiest years.
The antiscientific, ventral, paternalistic-in-democracy (an absurdity) attitude had been systemic.
Now back to the topic.
As the pro-COVID-measures-crowd largely overlaps with the Putler-crowd it’s going to be interesting to see their agenda re-alignment.
When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime, and even if it wasn’t, that the regime is going to milk it internally (vs dissent) and externally (vs the west). Especially given that this happened just a few months after the Hong Kong protest crackdowns.
The western center-left didn’t want to acknowledge any of this until it became politically feasible for their own gain and this alone cost us roughly the first three months of properly responding.
Let’s see if and how they’ll going to put their political shenanigans before their countrymen this time. I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
> I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
It's "sowed" from the concept of "sowing seeds" not from sewing textiles.
From Google: `Combined Metaphor: Just as a farmer scatters seeds into soil expecting a harvest, to "sow division" means to plant small acts, words, or policies of conflict that grow into a larger harvest of hostility and separation between people.`
> When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime
oh well then I guess if your personal contacts were 100% sure then case closed
Are you speculating? Or what are you basing this off of? Are you saying this is the next COVID and the government will use it to crack down on protests?
Oh, I see a lot of interest here.. Russia, plague, laboratory..
You know where they do really develop biological weapons, on a much greater scale?
..but of course you do, this is the whole thing about your hypocrisy.
And you know why you are being fed with this, right?
..but of course you do..
Another account created just to defend ruSSia.
Sounds cartoon-like and unbelievable.