Americans still haven’t gotten straight answers about what went on inside that lab in Wuhan.
Now a deadly accident at a second foreign lab has people asking the same uncomfortable questions all over again.
And one Republican Senator just floated a possibility about Anthony Fauci that has the corporate press howling.
A broken test tube in Siberia
The trouble started at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, a Russian research facility in Siberia that handles one of the deadliest germs known to man.
According to the Siberian outlet Lyudi Baikala, as cited by the Ukrainian news agency UNN, lab technician Daria Shipilova broke a test tube holding the pneumonic plague pathogen on September 25.
She got sick fast. Doctors at the district hospital in the town of Shelekhov admitted her on September 29, according to Meduza, and she died overnight going into October 2. She was 28 years old.
Pneumonic plague isn’t some relic from a medieval history book. It attacks the lungs, and it can pass from one person to another through the air.
Russian officials scrambled. Investigators identified 197 people who had contact with Shipilova, according to the Russian paper Izvestia as cited by UNN, and Mediaite reported that authorities put at least 200 people under medical observation. Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev said on October 2 that those contacts showed no signs of illness and that their lab tests came back negative.
Alexey Tsydenov, who leads the neighboring republic of Buryatia, publicly confirmed the plague death. But Meduza reported that he later edited his post to say the woman “may have died of plague.”
That’s Russia for you. Even the official story comes with an edit button.
Russia hadn’t logged a single human plague case since 2016, according to UNN, which makes this one all the more alarming.
How Mike Lee got pulled into it
The Fauci angle began with Blake Scholl, the CEO of Boom Supersonic, who posted on X on October 5, 2026, “Don’t tell me Fauci also funded the Irkutsk Institute of Virology.”
US Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) picked up the thread the same day. In his own post on X, Lee wrote, “I wish we could say with certainty that U.S. government funding wasn’t involved.”
He went a step further and said he also wished he could be sure the mainstream media wouldn’t cover for Fauci if any such funding existed.
Then Lee closed with four words that sent his critics into orbit. “Stranger things have happened.”
Mediaite wasted no time branding Lee’s suggestion “baseless.”
But read what Lee actually wrote. He didn’t claim to hold a receipt. He didn’t accuse Fauci of bankrolling the Irkutsk lab. He said he wished he could rule it out with certainty, and he can’t, because Washington burned through its credibility on this exact subject years ago.
One detail does deserve a flag. Scholl referred to an “Irkutsk Institute of Virology,” while Russian and Western outlets identified the facility as the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute. No public record reviewed for this story shows Fauci, the National Institutes of Health, or any other US agency sending money to the Irkutsk lab.
And that’s precisely where things get interesting.
Why Americans stopped taking Washington’s word for it
Lee’s question didn’t come out of thin air. It came out of Wuhan.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic found that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its NIH grant by failing to report a potentially dangerous gain-of-function experiment that Communist China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted. The subcommittee also found that EcoHealth turned in a required progress report on that work nearly two years after the NIH deadline.
The first Trump administration spotted the problem and told NIH to fix it, and NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant, according to the subcommittee. But NIH turned around and reinstated that grant in 2023.
It took until May 2024 for the Department of Health and Human Services to suspend EcoHealth’s federal funding and recommend debarment, according to The Federalist. HHS also cut off funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself and proposed debarring it, according to Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
So the same public health establishment that sent American tax dollars, through a middleman, into a Communist Chinese lab now expects the public to shrug and move along when a second foreign pathogen lab springs a fatal leak.
And for years, anyone who raised the lab-leak question got the full treatment. Big Tech platforms throttled them. Cable hosts mocked them. Health bureaucrats waved them off as cranks.
Then the cranks turned out to have a point.
Now, to be fair, none of that history proves a single thing about Irkutsk. It doesn’t. A Russian anti-plague institute in Siberia and a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan are two different animals, and nobody has produced a dollar trail linking Washington to the Russian facility.
But the burden shouldn’t sit on a Senator asking a question. It should sit on the agencies that wrote the checks. If NIH and its partners never funneled a cent to Irkutsk, they can open the books and say so. The Make America Healthy Again movement built much of its following on that simple demand for transparency, and medical freedom advocates have every right to keep making it.
President Trump took a steadier tone than the pundits did. Mediaite reported that he said his administration was “looking at it very strongly” and that the US would “help as much as we can,” despite the ongoing tensions over the war in Ukraine.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the outbreak “cause for focus” while noting there was “very limited travel between the U.S. and Russia.”
That’s what clear-eyed leadership looks like. Trump didn’t panic, and he didn’t slam the door on Moscow over a public health emergency, either.
Expect the scrutiny on foreign pathogen research to keep building from here. Every lab accident overseas will raise the same question Lee asked, whether the press likes it or not.
The media can keep calling those questions baseless. The public has already watched what happened the last time officials said the matter was closed.
“GOP Senator Suggests Fauci Funded Russian Lab that Caused Plague Outbreak,” Mediaite
“Hospital in Russia’s Irkutsk region quarantined amid reports that a patient died of pneumonic plague,” Meduza
“In the Russian Federation, a young woman died of plague: nearly 200 people who had contact with her were hospitalized,” UNN
“Pneumonic Plague Has Been Detected In The Irkutsk Region Of The Russian Federation,” Charter97
“New Select Subcommittee Report Recommends EcoHealth Alliance President Debarred and Criminally Investigated, Exposes Failures in NIH Grant Procedures,” House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
“HHS Strips EcoHealth Alliance Of Federal Funds Over Reckless Coronavirus Research,” The Federalist
“E&C Republicans Statement on Suspension of Funding and Proposed Debarment of WIV,” House Energy and Commerce Committee