Oct 6, 2026 · 17 min · 8 segments
Dr. Raj Panjabi, the former White House Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense and author of "Safer: A Playbook—Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community," joined “Forbes…
Raj PanjabiGuest
Brittany LewisHost
An employee at an anti-plague lab in Siberia died last week, and her suspected cause of death has been cause for concern around the globe.
There have been reports that she died after allegedly developing pneumonic plague, but Russian officials have said that the researcher died after contracting pneumonia from an unknown origin.
To start off the conversation, as the former biosecurity director at the White House, what's your reaction to the news and what we know so far?
Right now, as you noted, the Russian authorities have said that this individual researcher died of pneumonia of unknown origin or unknown etiology.
And it's been days now that, uh, she has died, unfortunately, and she worked in a lab that is very capable of sequencing the pathogen, telling us what the genetic code, which would tell us whether this is truly a natural pathogen or something that might have been engineered in a lab.
I think those questions are gonna be critical to answer, and so that's why we have to demand the data.
I think before we even get into the responses and how dangerous this is, if we could take a step back here, what exactly is, if this is a case of pneumonic plague, what is that? How possibly could this worker could have contracted that, and how dangerous is this all?
The things that would keep me up at night in the Situation Room at the White House would be not the clear emergencies, but the ones that had ambiguous signal.
And so when that happened, and I write about this in, in my new book, Safer, uh, we would actually articulate three very simple questions.
There's been nearly two hundred contacts being observed for about a week, and there's thankfully, at least as far as we know, no secondary cases, meaning those contacts, no one's fallen sick as far as we know.
The second question we ask is, whom is it most likely to harm? Now, r- right now, it would be the clinicians who cared for that initial patient who died and the colleagues who worked with her at the lab.
Uh, of course, without an independent lab confirmed diagnosis, I'd say the risk to the wider public is uncertain.
So, and the last thing is, what can we do now? I'd say the most useful, that's the third question we often ask to protect people, and, and I'd say number one, if this is pneumonic plague, it, it is treatable with common antibiotics if caught early.
An employee at an anti-plague lab in Siberia died last week, and her suspected cause of death has been cause for concern around the globe.
There have been reports that she died after allegedly developing pneumonic plague, but Russian officials have said that the researcher died after contracting pneumonia from an unknown origin.
To start off the conversation, as the former biosecurity director at the White House, what's your reaction to the news and what we know so far?
Right now, as you noted, the Russian authorities have said that this individual researcher died of pneumonia of unknown origin or unknown etiology.
And it's been days now that, uh, she has died, unfortunately, and she worked in a lab that is very capable of sequencing the pathogen, telling us what the genetic code, which would tell us whether this is truly a natural pathogen or something that might have been engineered in a lab.
I think those questions are gonna be critical to answer, and so that's why we have to demand the data.
I think before we even get into the responses and how dangerous this is, if we could take a step back here, what exactly is, if this is a case of pneumonic plague, what is that? How possibly could this worker could have contracted that, and how dangerous is this all?
The things that would keep me up at night in the Situation Room at the White House would be not the clear emergencies, but the ones that had ambiguous signal.
And so when that happened, and I write about this in, in my new book, Safer, uh, we would actually articulate three very simple questions.
There's been nearly two hundred contacts being observed for about a week, and there's thankfully, at least as far as we know, no secondary cases, meaning those contacts, no one's fallen sick as far as we know.
The second question we ask is, whom is it most likely to harm? Now, r- right now, it would be the clinicians who cared for that initial patient who died and the colleagues who worked with her at the lab.
Uh, of course, without an independent lab confirmed diagnosis, I'd say the risk to the wider public is uncertain.
So, and the last thing is, what can we do now? I'd say the most useful, that's the third question we often ask to protect people, and, and I'd say number one, if this is pneumonic plague, it, it is treatable with common antibiotics if caught early.
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