A broken test tube containing a plague sample is one thing. A test tube containing a weaponised virus is quite another

Anne Gulland

Deputy Editor, Global Health Security

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Anne Gulland is Deputy Editor for The Telegraph’s Global Health Security desk. She has written about health for more than 20 years and has had work published in a range of titles including academic journals such as The BMJ and Nature.

Published 07 October 2026 8:00am BST

The facts about the laboratory accident in Russia are scant.

A lab technician at the Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East in Siberia is dead, 200 people have been quarantined, and the state security services are saying “nothing to see here, folks”.

Denials from the country that has run a covert biological weapons programme since the Cold War have done nothing to quieten speculation about what is really going on in the vast Siberian tundra.

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, demanded on Tuesday that Russia be “transparent”…