Freedom Index
Listen to the article
One thing I learnt this week: that the plague, in its various strains, never went away, and in fact still kills people in tiny pockets of the globe. One thing I didn’t learn this week: how a 28-year-old lab technician called Daria Shipilova managed to catch, then die from, pneumonic plague. If indeed it was the plague that killed her, because Russian authorities have censored so much about the incident that the dominant story – about it leaking, infecting and killing Shipilova, who worked at an anti-plague research institute in Irkutsk and thus must have been wearing a hazmat suit precisely so she wouldn’t be exposed to the disease – doesn’t make much sense. But then, nor do any of the other theories circulating at the moment. Indeed, we may never know the truth because Putin, the Kremlin, Russia.
Over the last week, media outlets and state officials in Russia have been busy deleting or moderating reports about Shipilova’s death. Last Friday, the governor of Buryatia, which directly borders the impacted Irkutsk region, wrote that a woman in Irkutsk “had died of plague”. The statement was later edited to say she had “possibly” died of plague. On Saturday, the authorities in Baikalsk urged residents to avoid Shelekhov – home to the hospital Shipilova died in – and nearby towns because of “unofficial information about a confirmed case of plague”. The post, on Telegram, disappeared within two hours. On Monday, Russian daily Kommersant quoted a report by US media outlet Axios, about the US monitoring claims of a possible outbreak; the Kommersant article and accompanying Telegram post were deleted 25 minutes later. Speaking to the press about the situation, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists to “stick to the official statements” and ignore “rumours and speculation”. In other words, keep quiet or expect a visit from the FSB. As it happens, FSB operatives were seen escorting ambulances taking people who had been in contact with Shipilova for medical screenings.
Igor Kobzev, governor of the Irkutsk region, insists that “everything is under control”. Control is very much the operative word. If by this he means that the Kremlin remains the arbiter of the narrative, then he’s right. There’s a lot of control going on at the moment. But if he means that the virus itself is under control, he may be woefully wrong. I am not an expert on disease and I have no doubt that the biological composition of pneumonic plague (if it is that!) differs from that of Covid-19, for better or worse. I am an expert on censorship, though, and this I know: if China hadn’t tried to conceal what was happening in Wuhan in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, if they hadn’t silenced the whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang (who subsequently died of the disease), the virus may have been controlled. Millions would have been saved. The last six years would have been very different.
Covid-19 was the most painfully perfect example of how censorship many thousands of miles away can still impact us all, how censorship extends into the most basic and intimate areas of everyday life. I hope that what Daria Shipilova died of was not, in fact, pneumonic plague; and if so, that it has been contained. But I’m not going to trust anything the Kremlin says on the matter.
Read the full article here
Fact Checker
Verify the accuracy of this article using AI-powered analysis and real-time sources.