Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s department awarded nearly $800,000 in federal research grants to a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign project. That project partners with a Russian state laboratory linked to the Siberian plague institute now facing international scrutiny, an investigation by the watchdog group White Coat Waste found; the group published its findings Oct. 7, 2026.
September 2026 saw the most recent payment go out, weeks before a death in Siberia. The woman who died, Darya Shipilova, worked as a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East and was 28. Her death came Oct. 2, attributed by Russian authorities to pneumonia of unknown etiology.
According to the animal-testing watchdog White Coat Waste (WCW), federal records show the Russian laboratory receiving the American money has collaborated on plague research with the Irkutsk institute. The records do not show National Institutes of Health (NIH) money reaching the Irkutsk institute, paying for plague research or connecting the American scientists to the suspected incident there. The grant funds a U.S. laboratory.
What the Watchdog Found
The group says its review of federal spending records turned up an NIH award of $779,689 to the Urbana-Champaign campus across 2025 and 2026. The partner on the work is the Institute of Cytology and Genetics (ICG) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Siberia, where researchers carry it out jointly.
The money arrived in two near-identical installments, $389,943 in July 2025 and $389,746 in September 2026.
The project studies the genetic basis of social behavior and domestication in silver foxes, which the Russian institute breeds for tame and aggressive temperaments. Grant records the group obtained through the Freedom of Information Act say the foxes are raised at a Siberian experimental fur farm. Handlers kill the animals by overdose, and their brain tissue goes to the United States for further testing. One University of Illinois report put $1.22 million in NIH funding behind work involving the foxes.
The anti-plague institute occupies a different Siberian city, roughly 1,000 miles from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, which is a separate facility, and the research itself has nothing to do with plague.
An HHS spokesman called the group’s characterization misleading and said the department does not fund a Russian plague laboratory. The spokesman said the money supports a U.S. laboratory in Chicago studying how genes and proteins shape behavior, with the goal of advancing understanding of psychiatric disease, and that none of it goes to the Russian institute.
The Death in Siberia
A test tube containing the plague bacterium broke in a Sept. 25 laboratory accident, Russian media reported, without official confirmation. Hundreds of people Shipilova came into contact with, and five hospitals including a maternity unit, were placed into quarantine.
Pneumonic plague was the illness she had, according to some local reports, and local officials made the same claim in posts they later deleted. Reporters were told by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov to rely solely on statements from Russia’s health watchdog. The watchdog said samples from her body turned up no micro-organisms linked to her work.
Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s health regulator, said its investigation found no incidents involving the handling of dangerous pathogens at the institute. The regulator said testing of Shipilova’s contacts, about 60 percent of those identified, found two Covid-19 cases and two rhinovirus infections, but no plague.
On Tuesday, Oct. 6, the World Health Organization (WHO) heard from Russian authorities that Irkutsk had recorded no case of the disease, and that tests on the dead technician’s contacts came back negative for dangerous pathogens. The WHO said it is still waiting for confirmation of the pathogen that killed Shipilova, and relayed the Russian account that her illness had first looked like a common respiratory viral infection. The organization has said the risk to the general population appears low.
Local Russian media reported a second person dead of plague in the Irkutsk region. The Insider, an independent outlet, said Oct. 2 that the federal channel REN TV removed all five of its publications about plague in the Irkutsk region. Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, all bordering Russia, were tightening border health controls over the situation as of Oct. 8.
Washington Presses Moscow
The WHO and the U.S. government have both formally pressed Moscow for more detail. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Iceland: “I think it’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world.”
Rubio said the United States has “measures” available to help Russia if the situation turned out to be more serious than acknowledged, but needs to know more first. “We’re watching it very closely, hour by hour,” he told reporters in Iceland.
President Donald Trump said Monday, Oct. 12, that the United States would help and called the outbreak a “big problem for Russia.” Trump said he has a call scheduled with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the matter. He has also said the United States does not currently believe the incident involved a biological weapon.
A Long-Running Funding Fight
White Coat Waste first exposed the fox collaboration in 2023. The group alerted the Trump White House in early 2020 that NIH money was flowing to Russian government animal laboratories, including the Institute of Cytology and Genetics. Its Worldwide Waste campaign later uncovered taxpayer-funded experiments on kittens in Saint Petersburg, and the group says that ended NIH funding for Russian animal laboratories.
The Biden White House directed agencies in 2022, after a White Coat Waste investigation, to wind down research collaborations with Russian government-affiliated institutions. The group says Kennedy’s NIH has renewed the Illinois-Siberia funding twice since that policy took effect.
Erik Polyak, executive director of 314 Action, accused Kennedy of being unable to find money for American cancer researchers. “This is what you get when you hand America’s health agencies to a conspiracy theorist: idiotic decisions that create a national security liability,” Polyak said.
A separate White Coat Waste investigation, “MAHA Betrayed,” tallied more than $225 million in new NIH spending on dog and cat experiments since Kennedy took office. The grant pays for animal experiments of the kind watchdog groups say his MAHA movement opposes.
Kennedy said last year, when Trump announced an executive order restricting gain-of-function research, that no laboratory handles such work correctly and that none is immune from leaks. The disclosure lands awkwardly for a secretary who has spent years warning about laboratory risk.
A single thread joins what remain two separate stories, the plague scare and the fox research: the Russian laboratory breeding the foxes has also worked with the Siberian institute under scrutiny. Plague research drew no U.S. money, and the technician’s death bears no relation to the fox grant. Critics say the point is that the money is flowing at all, and that the plague headlines made a long-running funding question impossible to ignore.
White Coat Waste is pressing Congress for legislation and Farm Bill provisions to permanently bar federal funding for animal laboratories in Russia, China and other adversarial nations.