In Egypt, the fifth plague was dever, a pestilence that swept through Pharaoh’s herds and left the empire’s wealth dead in the fields. Centuries later, the prophet Ezekiel used that same Hebrew word for the weapon God will unleash on Gog, the invader from the far north whom generations of Bible readers have identified with Russia. This Biblical plague scenario may be playing out today. This month, in a Siberian laboratory the Soviet Union built to stockpile plague and anthrax, a 28-year-old scientist named Darya Shipilova reportedly broke a test tube of pneumonic plague. She was dead within a week. Five hospitals went into lockdown, nearly 200 people were placed in isolation, and the Kremlin went silent.
The institute in Irkutsk is a relic of a Soviet bioweapons program that the US State Department says Russia “absorbed, not dismantled.” The silence that followed the death is the same silence the world heard from Wuhan in the winter of 2020.
“The news of a suspected ‘plague’ outbreak from Russia should be treated with the utmost seriousness, especially considering the source,” wrote Mike Pompeo, who served as CIA director and secretary of state in President Trump’s first term. “COVID showed us how the lies and obstruction of authoritarian governments seeking to cover their tracks can turn a containable outbreak into a global pandemic.”
A Broken Test Tube and a Wall of Silence
Shipilova was a lab technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, about 2,500 miles east of Moscow near the Mongolian border. The independent Siberian outlet Lyudi Baikala reported that she broke the test tube on September 25. She was admitted to a hospital in Shelekhov with severe pneumonia on September 29, was put on a ventilator, and died early on October 2.
The response was immediate. More than 60 institute staff were confined inside the facility, and an aluminum plant in Shelekhov ordered its workers to wear masks. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan stepped up screening at their borders. Law enforcement reportedly opened a criminal investigation into health and safety violations resulting in death.
Then came the cover. Russian authorities deny any lab accident took place. Alexei Tsydenov, head of the neighboring Republic of Buryatia, first posted that she “died of plague.” The post was later edited to say she “possibly” did. A local government warning against travel to Shelekhov was deleted shortly after it went up, and several Russian media reports on the outbreak were taken down. Since 2020, spreading “false information” about public safety threats has been a crime in Russia.
Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s public health agency, says she died of “pneumonia of unknown etiology.” The agency says nearly 5,000 lab tests on her contacts found no dangerous pathogens. It also says Shipilova had been vaccinated and was therefore “immune to the dangerous infections with which she worked.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “the vast majority of what the media is reporting regarding this situation is false information.”
The World Health Organization still has no answer. In a statement on Saturday, October 10, the WHO said Russian tests on Shipilova and her contacts came back negative for the high-threat pathogens tested, and that no further linked cases of severe pneumonia had been found. The agency was careful to say that this does not settle the matter.
“A key uncertainty remains the absence of a confirmed diagnosis in the deceased laboratory worker,” the WHO said.
“We don’t understand how she was infected,” said Maria Van Kerkhove of the WHO. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asked Moscow to explain “media reports of a second employee with pneumonia of undetermined cause” at the same institute. “We cannot ignore any reporting that comes,” he said. Ten days after her death, Russia still has not said what killed her.
The COVID Playbook
The fear spreading online has a basis in experience. COVID-19 first appeared as a cluster of fatal pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, about 1,500 miles south of Irkutsk and home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Beijing silenced the doctors who raised the alarm, destroyed samples, and blocked investigators. The FBI, the Department of Energy and the CIA have since concluded that a lab leak is the most likely origin of the pandemic, which killed more than seven million people worldwide.
President Trump compared Russia’s silence to China’s handling of the early days of COVID, though he said he expects Moscow to share “a lot” more. Asked whether the Siberian case could involve a bioweapon, the president said, “We don’t think so. We’re going to find out soon enough, but we don’t think so.”
Global health officials have been on alert for unexplained fatal pneumonia since the pandemic began. Moscow’s answer, a death with no named cause from a lab that stores plague, is exactly what COVID taught the world to fear.
A Lab Built for War
The Irkutsk institute was created in 1934 by order of the Soviet Council of Labour and Defense. It studies plague, cholera, brucellosis, tularemia, anthrax, and arboviruses, which together make up a list of the most-studied biological warfare agents of the Cold War. It is one of more than 80 infectious disease labs the Soviet Union built.
On paper, those labs existed for public health. Microbiologist Raymond Zilinskas of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies spent years studying the Soviet anti-plague network. In a 2006 paper in Critical Reviews in Microbiology, he wrote that its work “came to include undertaking tasks for the offensive biological warfare program, codenamed Ferment.” Under the Soviets, the Irkutsk institute held wild, highly virulent strains of plague, anthrax, and other pathogens collected from animals across Siberia and East Asia. Zilinskas found that Irkutsk itself did only a small share of weapons work. Analysts at the Atlantic Council, summarizing his research, concluded that the anti-plague network as a whole almost certainly supplied virulent strains to Biopreparat, the program’s nominally civilian front, and to military facilities.
The lab’s ties to the program reached the top. “Igor Domaradskij, a founder of Biopreparat, the Soviet weapons enterprise, previously directed the Irkutsk institute,” wrote Dr. Ashish Jha, who served as President Biden’s White House COVID-19 response coordinator, in the Boston Globe. Domaradskij later described his weapons career in a 2003 memoir, Biowarrior: Inside the Soviet/Russian Biological War Machine. “The Soviet Union ran a biological weapons program on an industrial scale,” Jha wrote. “Russia has never allowed inspections of its sites.”
Marshall Billingslea, President Trump’s former arms control envoy, interviewed Ken Alibek in the 1990s. Alibek was the senior Soviet bioweapons scientist who defected to the United States. According to Billingslea, Alibek named at least six Soviet Ministry of Health laboratories that did classified weapons work, and the Irkutsk institute was one of them. Soviet scientists worked to make plague “far more resistant to antibiotics,” Billingslea said. A 2021 CDC report confirms that the Soviet Union developed antibiotic-resistant plague strains for biological warfare.
The program outlived the Soviet Union. “Russia maintains an offensive biological weapons program and is in violation of its obligations under the BWC,” a State Department official said, referring to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. John T. O’Brien and Isobel Sowells of the Atlantic Council’s Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense wrote that “Russia’s offensive biological weapons program never ended, and military-linked laboratories are expanding.”
“It’s not acceptable in this day and age for the Russians to have a biological warfare program,” Billingslea said, calling on Moscow to “come clean” and release the pathogen’s genetic sequence, the timeline of Shipilova’s illness, and the lab’s biosafety procedures.
Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, pointed out that the Kremlin spent years accusing Ukraine and the United States of running secret bioweapons labs. “I remember hearing from anti-Ukraine voices about their so-called bio labs. It was Russian disinformation ops at their best,” Bacon wrote. “But in reality, it is Russia with the biolabs.”
of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said the institute’s name tells you little about what goes on inside it. “Just because there’s plague on the door doesn’t mean that’s the only thing they work on,” Adalja said. “We know that Russia has used novel nerve agents in England.” He said the scale of the quarantine stood out: “Even if it were a drug-resistant version, it seemed to be a very major response to it.”
MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt said the measures matched an effort “to contain a potentially transmissible biological agent before it spreads.” He added, “The question is why they will not tell the world which one.”
Russia has covered up exactly this kind of event before. In 1979, anthrax spores escaped from a military bioweapons facility in Sverdlovsk and killed at least 64 people, and by some counts 68. Moscow blamed contaminated meat for 13 years, until Boris Yeltsin admitted the truth in 1992. The Atlantic Council analysts wrote that “denial and deflection are part of a Kremlin playbook around toxins and biological agents,” and that “Russia’s safety and transparency record gives reason to doubt that the world will get the full story.”
The Plagues of Egypt Return
Russia’s plague lab, China’s virus lab, and the bioweapons arsenals of the world’s tyrants have a precise place in the Hebrew prophets’ account of how history ends. What, then, does the Bible say about the plagues that will strike the nations in the final war?
The prophet Micah gives the blueprint:
“As in the days of thy coming forth out of the land of Egypt will I show unto him marvelous things.” (Micah 7:15)
The Sages read this verse as a promise that the redemption from Egypt was a rehearsal. The Midrash (Tanchuma Buber, Va’era 10) sets the two events side by side. God declares, “In this world I have exacted retribution from Egypt through ten plagues,” and in the future He will exact retribution from Gog. The Midrash then quotes the weapons God will use in that war, taken word for word from Ezekiel.
Dever: From Pharaoh’s Herds to the Armies of Gog
The fifth plague in Egypt struck with a single word:
“Behold, the hand of the LORD is upon thy cattle which are in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the herds, and upon the flocks; there shall be a very grievous murrain.” (Exodus 9:3)
The Hebrew for “murrain” is dever, pestilence. Ezekiel used the same word to describe God’s war against Gog:
“And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and I will cause to rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many peoples that are with him, an overflowing shower, and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.” (Ezekiel 38:22)
Ezekiel’s list reads like a replay of Egypt. Pestilence recalls the fifth plague, blood the first, hail the seventh, and fire mingled with hail is the same combination that fell on Pharaoh. In this war Israel barely lifts a sword. God fights through nature and disease, exactly as He did when He brought Israel out of Egypt.
Gog, Rosh and Moscow
Ezekiel identifies the enemy as “Gog, of the land of Magog, nesi rosh Meshech v’Tuval” (Ezekiel 38:2), which some read as “the prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal.” The 19th-century Hebrew scholar Wilhelm Gesenius linked Rosh to the Russian people and Meshech to Moscow. Ezekiel places Gog’s homeland in “the uttermost parts of the north” (Ezekiel 38:15), and Siberia fits that description better than almost anywhere on the map. A teaching attributed to the Vilna Gaon, the great 18th-century sage of Lithuania, holds that when the Russian fleet passes through the Bosphorus, it is time to put on Shabbat clothes in anticipation of the Messiah.
Jewish mystics have also taught that the war of Gog and Magog may be fought with microbes instead of missiles. In 2018, more than a year before COVID emerged, Rabbi Yisrael Nissan Rosenbaum, leader of the Kretchnif Hasidim in Kiryat Gat, warned that “Hashem can bring down a tiny virus and spread it throughout the world,” and that “this will disrupt and turn the entire world upside down.” He described such a disease as “effectively acting in the place of the pre-Messiah War of Gog and Magog.”
Flesh That Rots Where They Stand
The prophet Zechariah describes the plague that will strike the armies that come against Jerusalem in the final war:
“And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the peoples that have warred against Jerusalem: their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their sockets, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.” (Zechariah 14:12)
The Hebrew word for plague here is magefah, the same word God used when He warned Pharaoh, “I will this time send all My plagues upon thy heart” (Exodus 9:14). Zechariah describes soldiers whose flesh dissolves while they are still standing, faster than any natural disease could work. Readers in the 20th century saw a nuclear flash in this verse. Readers who have watched governments engineer pathogens in sealed labs, and watched one virus shut down the planet, may recognize something closer to home.
The Weapon Turns on Its Maker
God has a consistent way of dealing with nations that make war on Him: the weapon returns to its owner. Pharaoh drowned Hebrew babies in the Nile, and the Nile turned to blood. Pharaoh marked the firstborn of Israel for death, and the firstborn of Egypt died. In the war of Gog, Ezekiel says the invaders will destroy themselves: “every man’s sword shall be against his brother” (Ezekiel 38:21).
The Soviet Union spent decades collecting the deadliest strains of plague on earth and breeding them to resist antibiotics. China built a virus lab in Wuhan, and the world counted seven million dead. These regimes believe they are stockpiling power. The prophets describe that same arsenal as God’s instrument of judgment, held in reserve for the day He chooses to use it.
A young scientist is dead in Siberia, a former Soviet weapons lab will not say what killed her, and the WHO still cannot name the cause. Micah promised that the wonders of Egypt would return. Ezekiel named the dever that would fall on Gog. Zechariah described flesh-consuming away on men who were still standing. The nations of the north are building the plagues in their own laboratories, and the prophets wrote long ago how that war ends.
