Trump calls reported pneumatic plague outbreak ‘big problem for Russia’: ‘The microbes and the germs have gotten stronger’

Shopping Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days are back, but they won't last long. Shop our picks! WASHINGTON — President Trump gave an ominous assessment of the suspected outbreak of pneumonic plague in Siberia Monday, calling it a “big problem for Russia” and adding cryptically that “the microbes and the germs have gotten stronger.”

It was unclear what Trump meant by his assessment of the dangerous pathogens as global panic mounts following the death of lab technician Daria Shipilova, 28, who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute.

“It’s a rough disease. You know, that’s a disease we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have got stronger and smarter, they’re like an army,” Trump told reporters Monday afternoon as he left the White House for a pre-midterm campaign rally in Nebraska.

President Donald Trump said the US is willing to help Russia as it deals with a suspected outbreak of pneumonic plague. AFP via Getty Images “The germs have really become relatively stronger than they were, and things that used to work on pneumonia don’t work as well anymore. So we’ll help.”

Trump told reporters he had yet to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the matter.

Earlier Monday, the State Department implored Moscow to “share accurate information quickly and openly” about the potential pestilence.

“There’s very limited travel between the US and Russia, obviously.  But like anything else, something like that gets out, it could certainly spread,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters as he left Washington Monday morning to travel to Europe.

“So we’re watching and monitoring it closely. I don’t think it’s cause for alarm but it is cause for focus and a cause just to keep an eye on it.”

Pneumonic plague is almost always fatal if not treated quickly with common antibiotics and unlike other forms of the plague can spread from human to human by respiration.

Daria Shipilova, 28, a laboratory assistant at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, is reported by Russian media as the country’s first fatal pneumonic plague case in years. Daria Shipilova/e2w In the 1980s, Soviet biological warfare scientists successfully modified the bacterium responsible for pneumonic plague, Yersinia pestis, to make it resistant to antibiotics.

It’s unclear whether the biodefense lab in Irkutsk — a Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) facility — could have contained such potentially devastating material.  BSL-4 labs typically house the most dangerous pathogens. 

Trump’s comments follow years of controversy about the once-suppressed theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab that was doing risky “gain of function” research that modified bat viruses to make them more infectious.

The origins of COVID-19 remain debated due to Chinese government secrecy.

The Russian government has not confirmed that Shipilova died of plague, but it has quarantined hospitals in the Irkutsk area, placed about 200 people who contacted the lab tech under observation, restricted public events and screened domestic travelers for fevers.

Shipilova broke a test tube days before being hospitalized on Sept. 29, the independent Moscow Times reported. She died of pneumonia Oct. 2.

Historically, pneumonic plague outbreaks have not caused global health emergencies, though the best-known flareups occurred before intercontinental airline travel.

A devastating pneumonic plague outbreak killed about 60,000 people from October 1910 to April 1911 in Manchuria. A different outbreak killed 30 in Los Angeles in 1924.

Bubonic plague, which spreads by fleas, caused the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the mid-1300s, killing half of the population of London in a two-year span, with centuries of further flareups claiming millions of lives.

Both bubonic and pneumonic plague are extremely rare in the developed world but still occur in small numbers annually, particularly in Africa.