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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1146 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 4, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Is anyone monitoring the biological attack in Russia?

The first reporting I saw on this was from Moscow Times, which, to put it mildly, is far from being a reliable source when it comes to Russia. I deliberately stopped following the story after that. Where is the information coming from? How is Western media getting enough details to report it being a lab leak? A biological weapon? As far as I know, exactly one person died in the middle of literal Siberia. Seems monkeypox-ish to me.

I wouldn't use The Moscow Times for anything. It's not a real Russian news source, it's some slop publisher LARPing as Russian.

If you want the official Russian perspective on things, I recommend TASS.

I learned from my early earning on Covid and ordered some n95 masks won't hurt to have them when sanding if this blows over in 3 months.

During Covid I semi-accidentally discovered ("well, we've got a box full of N95s anyway, couldn't hurt to try") that masks are great for yard work too. I can now pour mower bags into compost bags and bins without worrying that any shredded dry grass inside will get blown up into my face and trigger my allergies.

But as long as we're at it, what other weird supplies are good to have on hand for emergencies? The standard list does include "dust mask (to filter contaminated air)", but given the subsequent "plastic sheeting" entry and instructions on sealing your home with that, they were clearly thinking about airborne radioactives rather than about airborne germs. I've also got some potassium iodide pills (picked up after demand died down post-Fukushima) with similar "I'm probably not within the blast radius of any nuke targets but I may be smack in the middle of a downwind fallout plume" thoughts in mind. Not sure if they'll do any good or if they'll just keep my family's thyroids free of radioactive iodine while our bones accumulate radioactive strontium, but they were cheap to buy and tiny to store.

Nope. I have Indian wholesale antibiotics and recently got a second cat, I think the plague is irrelevant to me.

It’s a gain-of-function enhanced bioweapon version of pneumatic plague. The stock version naturally has a 90% fatality rate. 77% if you can get them on antibiotics less than a day after infection. This one has probably been bred or engineered to be resistant to most major antibiotics. There’s also some indications it’s been modified to have a longer-non-symptomatic carrying period to compensate for the high fatality rate.

Pneumatic plague? I hope my car doesn't catch it.

Ah, this is why your refrigerator is running.

Supposedly the function they were working on was making the bacteria produce a euphoric feeling to get infected people to go out and spread it rather than lay in bed.

What's your source for this information? Don't know anything about it and curious to read more where you're getting this from.

Same user posted a conspiracy theory that the Iranians hit the USS Lincoln with multiple ballistic missiles. Was proven wrong almost instantly.

Also claimed Lindsay Clancy was a MKUltra victim.

So... if I had to guess... ZeroHedge comments section.

Is it a lab leak or a bioweapon attack from Ukraine? What's your best guess about this whole thing?

The best guess is a common, regular, run of the mill Russian fuckup. A low-paid under-trained lab worker, in a lab neglecting basic safety protocols because nobody's got time for that elaborate shit, breaks a vial with live pathogen. Not wanting to get chewed up by the superiors, cause trouble, and maybe get docked some pay for causing trouble, she never reports it. When she feels bad, she goes to the regular local hospital. In the hospital, nobody has any idea about who she is and why she's there, so she is treated as anybody who'd show up with respiratory symptoms in the beginning of the flu season. Except it doesn't go like flu at all, instead she dies quickly and horribly. People start checking and find out where she'd been working. Major "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck" flags start going up, and people start bouncing it up the chain of command, which automatically engages "lie, deny and hide" strategy, but it's obviously too big to be handled like that now. So the real containment protocols - which existed in Russia since the Tsar's times, it's not their first rodeo by far - start activating, and that's where everybody learns about it.

The plague control labs have existed in Russia since forever, and not only for plague, for other diseases too. Those labs deal with monitoring, defending against, etc. various pathogens occurring naturally, including the plague. There were also weaponization efforts, including in Russia, but as far as it is known, Irkutsk lab hasn't been any part of that system. Of course, there's always possibility of something that we don't know coming up, but so far the best guess is the lab fuckup, followed by multiple chained safety protocol fuckups.

Multiple sources are saying that the index case was a worker at a lab known to have stocks of plague bacteria. So as close to smoking gun evidence of a lab leak as you are going to get in an authoritarian country.

Pneumonic plague is a rare natural variant of bubonic plague caused by the same Y pestis bacterium - I see no evidence that the variant we are seeing has been the subject of gain of function research (or that it wasn't, but a leak of unmodified plague is more likely even if some of the work being done at the Irkutsk lab was GoF). Weaponisation research on plague could include aerosolising (non-GoFed) plague bacteria in a way which would consistently generate the (more deadly and more transmissible) pneumonic form - a lab leak outbreak where the index case was pneumonic would be strong circumstantial evidence that this was happening.

To do weaponisation research on GoFed Y pestis (as opposed to doing the GoF work and the weaponisation work separately) would be an act of such monumental stupidity that I don't expect even the Russians to do it.

As I understand, if you get it from inhaling vapors from a broken vial, it'd be 100% pneumonic. One gets the bubonic one via an infected insect bite, and the way of ingress defines how it goes - if it's the bite, it goes to the closest lymph node, settles there and you have a bubo. If it's inhaled, it settles in the lungs, thus pneumonic. You don't need to modify anything between one and the other, it's just how it got in that matters.

or a bioweapon attack from Ukraine?

I'm generally dismissive of unconventional weapon scares, whether we're talking about Iraq, Iran, or in this case Ukraine. What would be the point? It would have zero impact on the war, and provide justification for an unconventional retaliation.

Irkutsk is in East Siberia. Why would Ukraine bother sneaking the bioweapon all the way there, instead of, say, Moscow? It would be either sabotaging an existing biolab or the biolab having an oopsie.

Was thinking of doing the same -- antibiotics, not cat. But not sure what or where to buy.

All day chemist has antibiotics if you're willing to wait.

The cat was my wife's friend not spaying and....

Attack or lab leak?

Lab leak supposedly but the FSB is heavily covering it up.

They reflexively cover up everything.

They

It's not only them.

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