MARC SIEGEL: Russia's mysterious lab death exposes a danger the world isn't ready for

Plague is an ancient scourge, and fear of the plague is buried deep in our unconscious. The Black Death caused over 100 million deaths in the 14th century, six centuries before the advent of antibiotics. Compare that to 50 to 100 million deaths from the Spanish flu in 1918 or over 15 million deaths from COVID. On top of severe illness and death, these devastating pandemics have caused worldwide fear and panic.

Flash forward six years from the origins of COVID, and once again we learn of a mysterious pneumonia death of a scientist, this time a laboratory worker, Darya Shipilova, who was working in a lab in Siberia that has been studying dangerous pathogens, including the plague.

Once again, as with COVID, there are far more questions than answers. Is the pathogen pneumonic plague? The Russians deny it. Has it been bioengineered to make it more resistant to antibiotics and more easily transmissible through the air? The Russian health authorities deny it. Have hundreds of patients been isolated and several hospitals been shut down out of an abundance of caution, as the health authorities there would have you believe, or is this something far worse, as it was during the initial Wuhan lockdown for COVID? Russia is now saying that it is winding down precautionary measures, but why were these extensive measures necessary in the first place?

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We may never have the answers to any of these questions, but unfortunately, they not only bring back bad memories of COVID, but they also unmask a continuing lack of a comprehensive global health surveillance network to protect us. The assertions and gesticulations by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at press conferences are no more reassuring now than they were back then.

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The treatment for these scourges, both ancient and modern, for both fear and the actual disease, as I write in my new book, "," is messengers from God to reassure us, treat us, and guide us through, just as Dr. Stephen Kornfeld recently did on the hantavirus ship, the MV Hondius, when another scary disease, the Andes strain of hantavirus, emerged.

In fact, fear of an unknown pathogen sparking a global pandemic was the motivation for an international call for a global network of scientists to protect us more than two decades ago. Unfortunately, that so-called network failed miserably with COVID, as Chinas smokescreen was famously amplified by the WHOs declaration in January 2020 that this was only a regional problem. 

COVID whistleblower ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who died in a Wuhan hospital from COVID in February 2020 after a middle-of-the-