The animal-testing watchdog White Coat Waste said nearly $800,000 in federal research grants awarded under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went to a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign project that works with a Russian state laboratory tied to the Siberian plague institute now under international scrutiny. The group published its investigation Oct. 7, 2026.
The most recent payment came in September 2026, weeks before the death of Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East. She died Oct. 2 of what Russian authorities called pneumonia of unknown etiology.
What the Grant Records Show
White Coat Waste (WCW) said its review of federal spending records found that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $779,689 to the Urbana-Champaign campus in 2025 and 2026. The money arrived in two near-identical installments, $389,943 in July 2025 and $389,746 in September 2026.
The researchers conduct the work with the Institute of Cytology and Genetics (ICG) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Siberia. The watchdog group said records show ICG has collaborated on plague research with the Irkutsk institute.
The project studies the genetic basis of social behavior and domestication in silver foxes, which ICG breeds for tame and aggressive temperaments. The research itself has nothing to do with plague.
White Coat Waste obtained the grant records through the Freedom of Information Act. Those records say workers raise the foxes at a Siberian experimental fur farm, kill them by overdose and ship their brain tissue to the United States for further testing.
The records do not show NIH money reaching the Irkutsk institute, paying for plague research or connecting the American scientists to the suspected incident there. The grant funds a U.S. laboratory. ICG is a separate facility from the anti-plague institute, more than 900 miles away in a different Siberian city.
A Technician’s Death in Siberia
Russian media reported, without official confirmation, that a test tube containing the plague bacterium broke in a laboratory accident on Sept. 25. Shipilova was admitted Sept. 29 to a hospital in Shelekhov, Russia, which was later placed under quarantine, and nearly 200 of her contacts were put under medical observation. Irkutsk regional officials said Oct. 8 that all quarantine and monitoring measures had been completed.
The Telegram outlet Mash reported that Shipilova fell ill after a trip to Buryatia, near the Mongolian border. Buryatia’s leader, Alexei Tsydenov, said she had not visited the region.
Some Russian outlets reported a second death in the Irkutsk region, which authorities have not confirmed. Rospotrebnadzor called reports of a second case fake. Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have tightened border health controls over the situation.
Some local reports claimed she had been sick with pneumonic plague, and Tsydenov initially wrote that she had died of plague before softening his post. Russian reports on the first plague case have been disappearing from national media, including one from Channel 5. The independent Russian outlet The Insider reported that the federal television channel REN TV deleted all five of its publications about the plague in the Irkutsk region on Oct. 2.
Moscow’s Official Account
Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s health regulator, said Shipilova died of pneumonia of unknown cause. The regulator said an investigation found no incidents involving the handling of dangerous pathogens at the institute.
Officials said testing of her contacts, about 60 percent of those identified, turned up two Covid-19 cases and two rhinovirus infections and no other pathogens.
Russian authorities told the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday, Oct. 6, that no case of the disease had been recorded in Irkutsk and that contacts of the dead technician tested negative for dangerous pathogens. The WHO said it is still waiting for confirmation of the pathogen that killed her, and it relayed the Russian account that her illness first looked like a common respiratory viral infection. The WHO has said the risk to the general population appears low. On Saturday, Oct. 10, the WHO said Russia had confirmed the death but registered no plague case, and that the cause had still not been established.
The WHO and the U.S. government have both formally pressed Moscow for more detail.
“I think it’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Iceland.
President Donald Trump said he had a call scheduled with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the matter. Trump has said the United States does not currently believe the incident involved a biological weapon. On Monday, Oct. 5, Trump said the U.S. would help and called the outbreak a “big problem for Russia.”
Critics and the Department’s Reply
“This is what you get when you hand America’s health agencies to a conspiracy theorist: idiotic decisions that create a national security liability,” said Erik Polyak, executive director of 314 Action. Polyak also accused Kennedy of being unable to find money for American cancer researchers.
An HHS spokesman called the group’s characterization misleading and said the department does not fund a Russian plague laboratory. The spokesman said the money supports a U.S. laboratory in Chicago, that the work studies how genes and proteins shape behavior, that it aims to advance understanding of psychiatric disease and that none of it goes to the Russian institute.
Years of Watchdog Warnings
White Coat Waste first exposed the fox collaboration in 2023. The group alerted the Trump White House in early 2020 that NIH money was flowing to Russian government animal laboratories, ICG included. Its Worldwide Waste campaign later uncovered taxpayer-funded experiments on kittens in Saint Petersburg, and the group says that ended NIH funding for Russian animal labs.
The Biden White House directed agencies in 2022, after a White Coat Waste investigation, to wind down research collaborations with Russian government-affiliated institutions. The group says Kennedy’s NIH renewed the Illinois-Siberia funding twice since that policy took effect.
Kennedy has spent years warning about laboratory risk. He said last year, at Trump’s announcement of an executive order restricting gain-of-function research, that no laboratory handles such work correctly and that none are immune from leaks.
A separate White Coat Waste investigation, “MAHA Betrayed,” tallies more than $225 million in new NIH spending on dog and cat experiments since Kennedy took office. The group is pressing Congress for legislation and Farm Bill provisions to permanently bar federal funding for animal laboratories in Russia, China and other adversarial nations.
The plague scare and the fox research remain two separate stories joined by a single thread: the Russian laboratory that breeds the foxes has also worked with the Siberian institute under scrutiny. No U.S. money paid for plague research, and the fox grant is unconnected to the technician’s death.
Critics argue the issue is that the money flows at all, and that the grant pays for animal experiments watchdog groups say Kennedy’s MAHA movement opposes. They say the plague headlines made a long-running funding question impossible to ignore. HHS maintains that the money supports only a U.S. laboratory studying psychiatric disease and reaches no Russian institute.
