Russian Lab at Centre of Plague Scare Linked to Nearly $800K in US Research Funding Under RFK Jr

A US university study run in partnership with a Russian institute tied to the laboratory at the centre of a suspected plague scare has drawn nearly $800,000 (around £588,600) in federal funding under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an animal-testing campaign group says.

The most recent payment, part of a National Institutes of Health grant, cleared in September 2026, the same month a technician at the Siberian lab was hospitalised. She died on 2 October.

The grant went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for research carried out with Russia's state-run Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk. That institute has separately worked on plague research with the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, the state-run plague research institute where the current scare began, according to the records. The money went to the US university, not to either Russian institute.

Where the Money Went

The figures come from the White Coat Waste Project, a group that campaigns against taxpayer-funded animal testing. Federal spending records it obtained show the Illinois team received $389,943 (about £294,400) in July 2025 and a further $389,746 (about £294,200) in September 2026.

The research itself has nothing to do with plague. It studies social behaviour in foxes bred at a Siberian fur farm, work that drew the group's notice because the animals are killed and their brain tissue shipped to Illinois for analysis.

The foxes come from a long-running Siberian breeding programme and are put down by overdose before the tissue is sent to the United States, the group said.

A Death Moscow Is Playing Down

Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old technician at the Irkutsk institute, was hospitalised on 29 September and died on 2 October. Local reporting, unconfirmed by Russian authorities, said she had broken a test tube holding live bacteria days earlier. Some accounts point to pneumonic plague, the most severe form of the disease, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium and often fatal within days without treatment.

Russian officials reject the plague theory. The health regulator Rospotrebnadzor said Shipilova died of pneumonia of unknown cause and that its investigation found no incidents involving the handling of dangerous pathogens at the institute.

Testing of her contacts, covering about 60 percent of those identified, turned up two Covid-19 cases and two rhinovirus infections, but no plague, officials said. The institute's regional branch also dismissed reports of a stepped-up sanitary regime as fake. The hospital where she was treated was closed for quarantine, and roughly 200 contacts were placed under observation.

Washington and the WHO Wait for Answers

US officials are tracking the case. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the White House was 'watching and monitoring' the situation, and the State Department said it was following the case with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization, for its part, relayed the Russian account that the illness had first looked like a common respiratory viral infection and that no plague case had been recorded in Irkutsk, and said it was still waiting for confirmation of the pathogen that killed her.

Renewed After 2022 Guidance on Russia Ties

The group argues the money should not have kept flowing. It points to White House guidance issued in 2022, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that called on agencies to 'wind down institutional, administrative, funding, and personnel relationships and research collaborations' with Russian government bodies. The Illinois grant has paid out twice since, most recently in September 2026, according to its figures.

Kennedy has not been shown to have personally approved the award, which the NIH issues as an agency within his department. The Daily Mail said it had asked the NIH and the department for comment.

For now, the cause of Shipilova's death remains officially unconfirmed, with Russian authorities and the WHO still waiting on final laboratory results.