What Worries Experts About the Russia ‘Plague’ Incident

“You can’t help but worry that there is something more here than meets the eye,” Jha tells TIME. “What I will say from my conversations with friends in the [Trump] Administration is that they’ve been very worried about this…[But] they’re not getting a lot of information and data.”

”I’m going to say something that’s going to sound incredibly naive, but I’ll say it: What I hope is that the Russians will be very forthcoming and transparent about what was going on in this lab, but one can imagine that they may not be,” Jha says. 

“If it’s plague, breathe a sigh of relief, because we know what to do about plague,” says Nuzzo. “We have a clear solution…The worry is it’s not that, it is something different, something for which we don’t have easy solutions.”

No, Nuzzo and Jha agree. We are in a worse situation now compared to pre-COVID times, Nuzzo says. “The protections we had in 2019, early 2020–there are now fewer of them, and we are more vulnerable now than we were then,” Nuzzo says, pointing to reduced monitoring and less information flow between countries. “This is why countries need to fund and maintain overseas scientific engagements, because then they know the actors, they know their motivations, they know what’s normal. It’s also why you want to have a strong, capable, and relied-upon WHO, because sometimes they’re the best entity to have the conversations to surface the information.”