RFK Jr's health department funded $800k study linked to Russian 'plague lab' institute, watchdog reveals

From the Newshound archive · first published 9 October 2026.

A government watchdog has revealed that the National Institutes of Health, overseen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., granted nearly $800,000 to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for fox-behaviour research conducted in partnership with Russia's Institute of Cytology and Genetics — a body that has previously collaborated with the Siberian plague lab at the centre of an international health scare. The grants of $389,943 in July 2025 and $389,746 in September 2026 were flagged by White Coat Waste, which argues the funding breached a 2022 Biden-era directive barring US money from animal research in Russia after the Ukraine invasion. HHS has pushed back, insisting it is "not funding a Russian plague laboratory."

Researcher Darya Shipilova, 28, died at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute after a broken test tube incident on 25 September, with nearly 200 contacts placed in quarantine.

The NIH-funded fox research was not plague research — critics say the link to Irkutsk runs through the collaborating Novosibirsk institute, not directly.

Trump told reporters outside the White House this week that he has a call scheduled "very soon" with Putin to discuss the Siberian outbreak.