Five Hospitals and a Denial Update on Plague case in Siberia —Robert W. Malone, MD, MS and Jill Glasspool-Malone, PhD On Saturday, October 4, Russia’s federal health agency announced that nothing had happened at its plague laboratory in Irkutsk. No accident. No pathogen in the dead technician’s body. The epidemiological situation is stable. The same day, Irkutsk closed five hospitals. City Clinical Hospitals No. 1, No. 3 and No. 10 went under three-week quarantine. So did the Ivano-Matreninskaya Children’s Clinical Hospital and at least one maternity hospital. The Shelekhov district hospital, where Darya Shipilova died, was already closed. At the Irkutsk Aluminum Plant in Shelekhov, the chief executive ordered mandatory masking as a preventive measure. Those two facts arrived within hours of each other, and they don't fit together. Nobody quarantines a children’s hospital and a maternity ward for three weeks over one case of undiagnosed pneumonia. This is an update to “The Broken Tube,” published yesterday, which ran the Shelekhov death through the six-layer Biological Weapons Convention verification framework that Dr. Jill Glasspool-Malone, my co-author and wife of almost fifty years, and I have been testing since March. That assessment returned a moderate biosafety concern and a low treaty compliance concern. The developments of the past twenty-four hours do not overturn it. They sharpen one layer considerably, and they clarify what the remaining question actually is. Three denials, carefully worded Rospotrebnadzor is the Russian federal consumer protection and public health service. Think of it as the Centers for Disease Control, the consumer safety functions of the Food and Drug Administration, and a national workplace sanitation authority combined into one agency reporting to the prime minister. Anna Popova has run it since 2013. She flew to Irkutsk personally for this incident. Its October 4 statement made three claims, and the wording of each one repays attention. On cause of death. The technician was diagnosed with “пневмония неустановленной этиологии,” pneumonia of undetermined etiology. The agency did not name plague. It also did not rule plague out. On the pathogen. Expanded testing “не выявили в ее биоматериале микроорганизмов, связанных с профессиональной деятельностью,” did not detect in her biomaterial microorganisms associated with her professional activity. On the accident. “Комиссия по биологической безопасности также не обнаружила в институте аварийных ситуаций.” The biological safety commission found no emergency situations at the institute. That directly contradicts the account published by the Siberian journal Lyudi Baikala, which reported that Shipilova broke a tube containing the plague pathogen on September 25. The agency also stated that the sanitary and epidemiological situation in Irkutsk Oblast and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov “remains stable.” Yesterday’s essay noted that no official had named the pathogen and that no formal death notice had been issued. That is now superseded. Rospotrebnadzor has spoken, on the record, and what it said is more useful to the analysis than its earlier silence. malone.news/p/five-hospitals…