Unverified claims of plague cases in China are spreading online, days after a researcher at a Russian plague laboratory died of a pneumonia that authorities say remains unexplained.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, flagged the rumors on X, noting that posts on Chinese social media have urged residents of the country’s three northeastern provinces to stockpile food and protective supplies, “with some warning of possible future lockdowns.”
“Separate anonymous claims circulating on X allege plague cases or deaths in Shanghai and Chongqing linked to recent Russia travel,” Huang wrote, adding his own caveat: “These reports (rumors?)” have not been confirmed. “No official Chinese announcements have confirmed related cases in the Northeast, Shanghai, or Chongqing,” he noted.
The chatter follows the Oct. 2 death of Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia, who was hospitalized with severe pneumonia on Sept. 29. Local reports suggested she was exposed in a lab accident, and nearly 200 people were placed under medical observation. A senior Russian official initially posted that she had died of plague before editing the post to add “possibly,” according to The Conversation.
Russian authorities have since told the World Health Organization that testing found no plague or other high-threat pathogens, and that no plague cases have been registered recently in the Irkutsk region. But the WHO, in a notice published Sunday, said “a key uncertainty remains the absence of a confirmed diagnosis,” and WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has pressed Moscow to clarify reports of a second sick employee, which Russia dismissed as false. President Donald Trump has called the death a “big problem for Russia.”
The rumors drew attention from Pulitzer Prize finalist and author Annie Jacobsen, who shared Huang’s post with a single wide-eyed emoji, and Chinese commentator Wen Yunchao, who asked whether authorities were “going to implement lockdowns again.” Jake Adler, a Thiel Fellow who works on pandemic prevention at Pilgrim Labs, according to his X bio, wrote that “the lack of concrete information on the spread is incredibly alarming.”
Health experts have urged calm. The WHO rated the risk as moderate to low in Irkutsk, low for Russia overall and very low for Europe. Plague, while serious, is treatable with antibiotics, and human cases occur every year. Ian Jones, a virologist at Britain’s University of Reading, said the Irkutsk case “seems like a rare lab accident and is unlikely to go much further.”
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