A Plague of Clickbait - National Logistics Post

“Something About Russia Insisting Everything Is Fine After the Lab Leak Death Is Making Us Nervous,” ran one headline. As the sign above the entrance to Hell reads: “Damned if you do; damned if you don’t.” Presumably “Us” would feel better if Russia insisted things weren’t fine.

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Yes, it’s plague panic time again. Except this time that referred to as plague probably actually is.

According to reports, a 28-year-old female technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Shelekhov, Siberia, died after a bout of severe pneumonia. Russia’s health watchdog has called it “pneumonia of unknown etiology” and at this writing has not publicly named plague. But given the site, it’s tendentious.

Local media say she may have been exposed after breaking a test tube, or after a work trip to a region near the Mongolian border where plague is known to circulate. Nearly 200 people were put under medical observation. The Kremlin says so far contract tracing has turned up no contagious illness. European and American health agencies say they have seen no secondary cases and no evidence of person-to-person spread.

That is the whole story, as of this writing: one death, a lot of precautionary monitoring, and a pathogen that has not even been officially confirmed. And yet you would think the Middle Ages had come roaring back. Russia is already building carts to carry away the bodies, digging plague pits, and supplying medical professionals with those scary bird beak masks.

Say the word “plague” and the imagination does the rest. A medieval Europe emptied out by the Black Death. So yes, a panic or feigned panic was something of a given. Washington announced it was “monitoring” the situation. Cable news booked every infectious disease expert with a working microphone and a free evening.

Now let’s spoil the fun and look at what actually happened.

I am not saying nobody should care. A lab worker’s death in her prime is a tragedy. The Russian government’s habit of fogging up inconvenient news does not help, and the Soviet Union’s record of weaponizing pathogen research gives people reason to ask hard questions about what goes on in such labs. Transparency would be welcome. But asking questions about secrecy is one thing. Pretending we are on the brink of the 14th century is another.

Bubonic plague was terrifying, and with good reason. The Black Death of the 1340s killed an estimated third or more of Europe’s population, although as with actual COVID deaths there was a definite connection to having prior poor health. Basically, back then, everyone was in poor health. The Plague of Justinian centuries earlier and a pandemic that spread out of China in the 1800s killed millions more. Nobody then had the faintest idea what was happening. People blamed bad air, comets, planetary alignments, Jews, and sin. They persecuted the wrong people and prayed to the wrong saints. They killed cats, which given the role of rodents, was particularly unbright.

The key point is that this was before anyone knew how plague spread or how to treat it. In 1894, Alexandre Yersin, working in Hong Kong, identified the bacterium that now bears his name, Yersinia pestis. A few years later, researchers showed that rat fleas were the vector. In the 1940s came streptomycin and, later, a family of antibiotics that kill the bug with ruthless efficiency. Doctors now have a menu of options, including doxycycline, ciprofloxacin, and gentamicin. This is a bacterial infection, not some mysterious curse. Bacteria are what antibiotics were invented for.

Here is what the scare-mongers tend to bury under the second paragraph: when plague is caught and treated promptly with antibiotics, the cure rate approaches 100 percent. A disease that once wiped out cities now responds to the same kind of prescription you might get for a stubborn sinus infection, though in a hospital and under close supervision. The Black Death was not terrifying because the bacterium was especially clever. It was terrifying because humanity was ignorant and defenseless. We are neither anymore.

Now, to be fair, pneumonic plague is the most dangerous form. It allows the rats and lice that spread the bubonic and septicemic forms to take a break. It infects the lungs and spreads through sputum. It progresses fast, and left untreated it is almost always fatal. The World Health Organization puts the fatality rate for untreated cases at somewhere between 30 and 100 percent depending on the form.

But this is where the context gets lost. Pneumonic plague is not measles. It does not drift through a room and infect everyone breathing in it. Spread generally requires close, prolonged contact with a person who is already visibly, seriously ill, coughing up the bacteria. Victims get sick fast and look sick, which makes them easy to spot and isolate. The incubation period is short, typically a few days, which means outbreaks burn out rapidly when public health authorities do the basics: isolate the sick, give antibiotics to their close contacts, and track down exposures. The worst contagious diseases are those that can be asymptomatic for years, of which HIV is a classic example.

Consider the numbers, an occasionally effective hysteria treatment. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says an average of seven human plague cases are reported each year, with a range of zero to seventeen. More than 80 percent are the bubonic form. In 2025 an Oregon man died from bubonic plague exposure to his cat, perhaps while photographing it for social media. That’s the thanks we feline lovers get.

Worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) counted 2,646 confirmed cases, 3,860 suspected cases, and 423 deaths worldwide from plague during 2019–2025. Of those, 15.5 percent were pneumonic. Most turn up in African countries with poor health systems and in Peru.

Madagascar in 2017 suffered a remarkable outbreak with more than 2,000 cases, about three-fourths pneumonic. Fortunately, even in a nation not known for effective disease control (hence the high figures) it was contained within a matter of months, using the tools I described above. A country with some of the weakest infrastructure on earth beat it back. It is difficult to argue that a country with Russia’s scientific establishment, which includes entire research institutes devoted to the study of plague, is going to be overwhelmed by a single case.

Then there is the irony that should have been the lead in every story. The victim worked at an anti-plague institute. That is a facility staffed by people who deal with this bug professionally, know the symptoms on sight, and keep antibiotics on hand. If plague had to show up somewhere, a building full of plague experts is about the best place for it.

So why the panic? Partly because the word itself is radioactive. “Plague” has been wired into our collective memory for 700 years. It’s so much so that it’s not only applied to non-related diseases but to anything of which we think we have to much such as “We’re currently plagued with clickbait about the possible Russian plague case.” Partly because we live in a media environment where a story that begins with “suspected” and “unconfirmed” gets more clicks than one that ends with “contained.” And partly because we recently lived through a declared pandemic, with a public conditioned to expect the worst will see the worst in every ambiguous headline.

That conditioning is understandable but misplaced. The impact of COVID-19 was grossly and intentionally exaggerated (having COVID wasn’t a requirement for dying of it). But in fairness it was a novel virus that nobody had immunity to, had no treatment and no vaccine at the start, and could spread silently before symptoms appeared.

Plague is the opposite on nearly every count. It is a known bacterium, with a known mode of transmission, a known treatment, and a century or more of epidemiological data. There is a vaccine, but the CDC recommends against it for most people because the disease is so rare.

There is also a cost to this hype. Each false alarm erodes public trust, the one resource public health cannot do without. Chicken Little is not a public health strategy. (Yeah, that’s a boilerplate line I use in every article about faux epidemics. But it’s a good boilerplate line.)

What should we actually do? Exactly what authorities are doing. Verify the diagnosis. Identify and observe contacts. Provide antibiotics where indicated. Demand honest information from Moscow, such as we didn’t get from China regarding COVID. And most of all, keep our heads. Plague is still out there, quietly circulating in rodent populations from the American Southwest to central Asia and the highlands of Madagascar. It always will be. We will never eradicate it, because we cannot eradicate every squirrel and prairie dog on earth.

And you can’t even trust your damned cat despite all those treats and changing the litter box and being actually being allergic to her! (Sorry.)

But we do not have to fear it, either. We have the science, the drugs, and the public health systems to handle it, and those are the things that turned the Black Death from an apocalypse into a footnote in a medical textbook.

The people who died in the 14th century had no such advantages. We do. It is a fine thing to remember the next time somebody tells you the end is near. Someday it will be and the clickbait media will miss it.

Michael Fumento ([email protected]) is an attorney, author, and journalist who has been writing about epidemic scares since the dawn of time — or four decades anyway. He has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Forbes, Reason, Policy Review, the Spectator (London), the Sunday Times ofLondon, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.