NIH funding linked to Russian research amid Siberian lab death

National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, overseen by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been linked to research involving a Russian institution following the death of a lab worker in Siberia.

Reports indicate that the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign received approximately $800,000 in grants for a project involving the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk. While some claims suggest this funding directly supported a ‘plague lab,’ records show the research focused on the genetics and social behavior of silver foxes rather than plague pathogens.

The controversy follows the death of Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, who died from suspected pneumonic plague. While nearly 200 contacts of Shipilova were placed under medical observation, Russian authorities have dismissed allegations of a plague outbreak, stating that testing found no such pathogens. The Institute of Cytology and Genetics is a separate facility from the Irkutsk institute where the death occurred.