October 7, 2026 - Trump and Putin To Speak About Possible Plague

President Trump said yesterday that he has a call scheduled with Vladimir Putin about the suspected plague death in Siberia, and that we'd probably hear about it today. Good.

Last Friday, a 28-year-old woman died at a hospital in Shelekhov, in the Irkutsk region. Local outlets reported pneumonic plague and said she worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, where she'd broken a vial. Moscow's health watchdog now calls it pneumonia of undetermined origin, state media scrubbed its earlier reports, and roughly 200 people are in quarantine.

Annie Jacobsen was my guest in August when her book Biological War: A Scenario came out. It opens with a plague accident at a Siberian lab that becomes a global crisis in six days. She was back on the program yesterday. Plague occurs naturally in that region, so Russia has a legitimate reason to study it. But Soviet defectors told the CIA those anti-plague institutes doubled as weapons labs, and weapons work violates the Biological Weapons Convention. That, she said, is why Moscow will be loath to share what happened. If antibiotics don't begin within about 24 hours, pneumonic plague is almost always fatal. Russia has a vaccine. We don't.

Annie told me the White House has eyes on this, including a principals committee meeting on Monday. Still, any phone call yields only what Putin chooses to say, and Wuhan taught us the cost of taking a dictator's word on an outbreak.

What to watch, according to Annie: additional deaths, and above all, pneumonic plague turning up in another country. That's the red flag.

My full conversation with Annie, including what she's hearing from inside the government and the questions she says nobody wants to answer, is on my YouTube channel. It's 20 minutes, and worth every one. 

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President Donald Trump says he plans to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin about a possible case of pneumonic plague at a Siberian research institute, though the WHO says the risk outside Russia is very low.

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