By every account, 28-year-old Daria Shipilova was a promising scientist whose work had earned the respect of both colleagues and supervisors.
Two years earlier, she had graduated from a medical university in Irkutsk, Russia, receiving a Red Diploma—roughly equivalent to a first-class degree.
Shipilova was recruited by the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia, where she began publishing research on the bacterium responsible for the Black Death, the devastating plague pandemic that swept through the medieval world.
She was also in a relationship and appeared to be building a settled future. But on Friday, September 25, Shipilova made what would be her final visit to the institute.
According to reports, she accidentally dropped a test tube containing the pneumonic plague pathogen inside the laboratory. The account claims she later contracted the disease and died from it.
The following Tuesday, Shipilova was taken to Shelekhov District Hospital. Reports suggest doctors initially diagnosed her with acute coronavirus infection. “Her relatives say the doctors treated her symptoms as a severe form of Covid right up until the end, put her on a ventilator, and antibiotics were administered too late,” said Miroslava, a former colleague.
As her condition deteriorated ahead of her death on October 2, alarm spread through scientific and medical circles, first across Siberia and then in Moscow. In the hours before she died, authorities moved to quarantine both the hospital treating her and the Irkutsk institute.
“From October 2, the entire inpatient section of Shelekhov hospital was closed for quarantine, with all 114 patients locked inside,” Miroslava said.
By every account, 28-year-old scientist Daria Shipilova was highly regarded by her managers and peers. Her death has since triggered alarm across Russia’s medical and scientific communities.
Russia’s chief sanitary doctor, Anna Popova, 65, flew five hours east to Irkutsk to oversee the response personally. The trip came just weeks after her September 15 meeting with President Vladimir Putin, during which she told him that Russian medical teams were vaccinating people in Mongolia against plague.
“A great deal of work is being done on the plague,” Popova told him. “It is an important infection which, unfortunately, continues to affect the world and probably always will.”
That context has added to the mystery surrounding Shipilova’s death. Although plague remains a serious disease, it is not unprecedented in that region. In July, Mongolia’s National Centre for Zoonotic Diseases confirmed a human plague case in Khovd province in the country’s west. The centre said 17 of Mongolia’s 21 provinces were considered at risk, with several cases—including fatal infections—recorded in recent years.
Even so, the response to Shipilova’s death has been far more dramatic than the reaction to previous reported cases.
Questions have consequently been raised over why she was not treated promptly with antibiotics, which can be effective against plague when administered in time. Others have asked why Popova travelled urgently to Siberia, where isolated plague cases have occurred periodically for years.
Regional governor Igor Kobzev said Popova worked “virtually around the clock” after Shipilova’s death. However, she did not publicly explain the situation, while Russia’s consumer and health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, insisted there was no crisis and described the death as pneumonia “of unknown aetiology.” The agency also rejected the test-tube account, saying Shipilova’s infection and death were not linked to her laboratory work.
Further concerns emerged in Irkutsk when pregnant women were reportedly asked to complete a checklist related to plague. Blogger Ulyana Gavryunina said she encountered the measure during a visit to the Irkutsk City Perinatal Centre on October 5. Her mother was barred from entering the maternity ward, and the centre had introduced restricted access, allowing only pregnant patients inside.
“They explained to me that there was unconfirmed information about a virus that could be even more dangerous than the coronavirus, that it was unclear what kind of virus it was and how to deal with it,” Ulyana said. “So, they introduced a quarantine, and it’s unclear how long it will last.”
As many as five hospitals in the area were reportedly placed under lockdown, despite official denials. A patient at City Clinical Hospital No 1 said: “We are under full quarantine. None of our relatives are being allowed in. We are not being allowed out.”
Shipilova’s parents, Nikolay and Svetlana, along with her four siblings, were also reportedly placed in quarantine and unable to hold a funeral for their daughter and sister.
The conflicting accounts have fueled speculation that the full circumstances of Shipilova’s death and the institute’s work remain undisclosed. Some theories have gone further, suggesting—without publicly confirmed evidence—that she and the institute may have been involved in biological-weapons research or work on a genetically modified organism that accidentally escaped.
Daria’s funeral might, in time, tell its own story: will her coffin be zinc-lined and hermetically sealed, and against Russian tradition, unopened for the ceremony? This would indicate a serious infectious disease.
Russia’s chief sanitary doctor and head of health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, Anna Popovar, pictured with President Vladimir Putin
Locals have an eye for official obfuscation even if there are no confirmed additional cases of infection. ‘They take us for idiots,’ said one. ‘Something sinister has happened in this institute which they cannot admit to,’ said a medic in Irkutsk.
One commenter, Elena, remarked astutely: ‘The more they reassure us, the more frightening it gets.’
Another, Svetlana, posted: ‘They’re already lying just for the sake of lying, automatically.’
So was it a mysterious strain of pneumonia? Or perhaps some other sinister unknown disease – an unusually powerful plague strain, for example – that was under investigation at Daria’s laboratory for reasons suiting the Russian state?
We cannot be sure. But Cold War researchers say the institute where Daria worked maintained millions of doses of plague vaccine for use in wartime and trained specialists from military institutes. A former director, microbiologist Igor Domaradsky, later became a senior figure in the USSR’s secret biological-weapons establishment.
There is no doubt about Russia’s research into bio-warfare.
In August reports emerged of a mysterious facility on Lisiy (Fox) Island in Russia’s Tver region. It lies in the Vyshny Volochyok reservoir, 170 miles north-west of Moscow.
Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence warned that an accidental release of pathogens or hazardous chemicals from this facility could have serious consequences for people, livestock, and the surrounding environment.
Soldiers guarding the installation ‘express fear in private conversations of contracting an unknown ‘infection’,’ the GUR report claimed.
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The complex, officially called the Centre for Experimental Physiology, was established on Putin’s direct orders as a project of particular importance to Russia’s ‘defence capability and security’.
Military research into potentially lethal pathogens at Daria’s institute would explain the panic following her death. And not just in Russia.
Ex-Soviet state Kyrgyzstan has ordered heightened sanitary controls at all its border checkpoints.
Up to five local hospitals are now in lockdown – despite official denials. A patient at City Clinical Hospital No 1 insisted: ‘We are under full quarantine’
People, vehicles and cargo crossing its frontier were subjected to increased ‘epidemiological surveillance’.
Uzbekistan, meanwhile, was ‘taking measures to prevent the importation and spread of highly dangerous infections’.
Kazakhstan’s Health Ministry took ‘preventive measures’ after monitoring the Irkutsk incident. With a mammoth 4,750-mile frontier with Russia, it was carrying out sanitary-quarantine controls at state-border crossing points.
In the US, a White House spokesman said: ‘The Trump administration is aware of the outbreak, is monitoring it, and is evaluating possible courses of action.’
There are other oddities about the official response to the crisis.
Governor Alexey Tsydenov, from the neighbouring Russian republic of Buryatia, initially referred to Shipilova as ‘the woman who died from plague’. Later, seemingly under Kremlin pressure, he stepped back to say ‘may have died from plague’.
The authorities in nearby Baikalsk briefly cautioned residents not to travel to Shelekhov because of unofficial information about a plague case – and then they deleted the claim.
The director of the giant Irkutsk Aluminium Plant in Shelekhov imposed a mask regime on workers as a ‘precaution’.
Meanwhile, friends of Daria are anxious to dispute key claims in this story.
Her university classmates are ‘outraged by claims circulating that she may have violated procedures for working with a dangerous pathogen and then concealed what had happened,’ reported Radio Svoboda.
‘We are all in shock, especially over the accusations that Daria broke a test tube and kept quiet,’ said friend Valentina. ‘You don’t understand – working at the anti-plague institute is quite prestigious and very interesting for graduates of our Medical Biochemistry faculty.
‘Daria graduated in 2022 after six years of study at Irkutsk State Medical University.
‘She was intelligent [and] responsible. The institute is excellent and they follow the rules strictly.’
But suppose Daria had become infected with some version of the plague. She would have known pneumonic plague ‘is quite treatable if treatment starts very early,’ said one colleague.
‘It would not have been in her interests to hide it.’
What work Daria was undertaking in the days before her death remains a matter of conjecture. REN TV – owned by a media giant headed by Putin’s lover Alina Kabaeva, 43 – reported that ‘she studied the plague bacterium from natural plague foci [where bacteria live] in Siberia, Mongolia and the Altai and examined the body’s immune response to infection. ‘One scientific paper involving the researcher described experiments on white mice, including the study of the body’s response after infection with pathogenic strains of plague.’
But the situation became murkier yesterday when it was reported by Russian medical publication Medvestnik that ‘a criminal case was opened under the article concerning violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules which, through negligence, resulted in the death of a person.’
This clearly contradicts the official version from the health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor that her infection was unrelated to her professional duties and there was no laboratory accident.
When the story first broke, Russian-born, US-based epidemiologist Mikhail Favorov, 74, a veteran former US Centres for Disease Control official who previously headed its operations across Central Asia, and has investigated outbreaks of plague and other dangerous pathogens, warned that there was ‘a lot of nonsense circulating’ about the case. He said that the test tube story was ‘laughable’ while highlighting that Anna Popova’s rush to Irkutsk showed a ‘terrible, critical situation’.
He highlighted mistakes in Daria’s treatment saying: ‘I rather doubt she was treated with antibiotics.’ If prescribed early these could have saved her.
Instead, the treatment she received could have put others at risk.
‘It seems to me they diagnosed her with Covid because she was having trouble breathing and put her on a ventilator. It’s absolutely hair-raising.’
He suggested a major cover-up was under way, but predicted the Putin system would not reveal the truth.
‘We will not be told what really happened,’ he stated.
After the attempts by Rospotrebnadzor to suggest all is well and there is nothing to worry about, he was asked online: ‘Did you believe it?’
He responded: ‘I might be old, but I am not a fool.’
