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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “closely monitoring” developments in a suspected case of pneumonic plague that led to the death of a researcher in Russia. “At this time, there is no indication of a broader threat to the United States, but CDC and our interagency partners are prepared and will continue to monitor the situation closely,” the CDC posted on X. Paul Friedrichs, a retired military medical officer who worked as the inaugural director of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy under former President Joe Biden, said Russian officials could help alleviate the worst fears if they disclosed what the researcher was working on, when she developed symptoms, and when she was treated with antibiotics. “What would really make me have trouble sleeping at night is if they continue to refuse to release really basic information,” Friedrichs said, adding that one key piece of information that should be released is the genomic sequence of the pathogen that killed the researcher. “It is understandable that people will assume the worst in a scenario when it would be so easy to disprove that the worst is occurring.” Still, the biosecurity expert cautioned against projecting onto the Russians how the US would handle a biosecurity incident. “The Russian culture and the Russian government bring security forces into all sorts of things that we would never, in normal circumstances, think about involving security agencies or military forces” in, Friedrichs said. “Assuming that their actions would look like ours, and then assuming because their actions don’t look like ours, it must be something nefarious — that’s a bad assumption.”
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