A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign project carried out with a Russian state laboratory tied to the Siberian plague institute now under international scrutiny received nearly $800,000 in federal research grants awarded under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to a watchdog group. White Coat Waste, an animal-testing watchdog, published its investigation on Oct. 7, 2026.
The most recent payment went out in September 2026, weeks before a laboratory technician died. Darya Shipilova, 28, worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East. She died Oct. 2 of what Russian authorities called pneumonia of unknown etiology.
White Coat Waste said its review of federal spending records turned up a National Institutes of Health (NIH) award of $779,689 to the Urbana-Champaign campus in 2025 and 2026 for work conducted with the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Siberia. Two near-identical installments carried the money: $389,943 in July 2025 and $389,746 in September 2026. The group said records show the institute, known as ICG, has collaborated on plague research with the Irkutsk institute.
What the Grant Pays For
The research examines the genetic basis of social behavior and domestication in silver foxes, which ICG breeds for tame and aggressive temperaments. Grant records that White Coat Waste obtained through the Freedom of Information Act say a Siberian experimental fur farm raises the foxes, which are then killed by overdose and their brain tissue shipped to the United States for further testing. One University of Illinois report said researchers received $1.22 million in NIH funding for work involving the foxes.
The research itself has nothing to do with plague. The records do not show NIH money reaching the Irkutsk institute, paying for plague research or tying the American scientists to the suspected incident there. A U.S. laboratory is what the grant funds; ICG is a separate facility from the anti-plague institute, roughly 1,000 miles away in a different Siberian city.
HHS Disputes the Finding
An HHS spokesman called the group’s characterization misleading. The spokesman said the department does not fund a Russian plague laboratory, and that a U.S. laboratory in Chicago draws the money for its study of how genes and proteins shape behavior in order to advance understanding of psychiatric disease. None of it goes to the Russian institute, the spokesman said.
The Death in Siberia
Russian media reported, without official confirmation, that a test tube containing the plague bacterium broke in a laboratory accident on Sept. 25. Shipilova was admitted Sept. 29 to a hospital in Shelekhov, Russia. Officials later put that hospital under quarantine and placed nearly 200 of her contacts under observation.
Some local reports claimed she had fallen sick with pneumonic plague, and local officials made the same claim in posts later deleted. Reporters were told by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov to treat statements from Russia’s health watchdog as their only source. The watchdog said samples taken from her body contained no micro-organisms linked to her work.
Russian authorities told the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday, Oct. 6, that Irkutsk had recorded no case of the disease and that contacts of the dead technician had tested negative for dangerous pathogens. The WHO has said the risk to the general population appears low. Moscow has been formally pressed for more detail by both the WHO and the U.S. government.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Oct. 6, the same day as Russia’s response to the WHO, that the United States had “measures” available to help Russia if the situation turned out to be more serious than has so far been acknowledged, and that the United States needs to know more before stepping in. “I think it’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Rubio told reporters in Iceland. “We’re watching it very closely, hour by hour.”
President Donald Trump, speaking outside the White House on Tuesday, said he “has a call scheduled for very soon” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the matter. Trump has said the United States does not currently believe the incident involved a biological weapon. He said on Oct. 5, the day before Russia’s response to the WHO, that the United States would help and that the outbreak is a “big problem for Russia.”
A Watchdog’s Long Campaign
White Coat Waste first exposed the fox collaboration in 2023. In early 2020, the group alerted the Trump White House that Russian government animal laboratories, including ICG, were receiving NIH money. Taxpayer-funded experiments on kittens in Saint Petersburg surfaced later through its Worldwide Waste campaign, and the group says that work ended NIH funding for Russian animal labs.
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.
The group’s investigation page describes the Irkutsk facility as “a gain-of-function animal lab in Siberia.” The group said it “has exposed how RFK has continued to fund dangerous virus experiments on animals at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory and other facilities around the world.”
Dog and cat experiments have drawn more than $225 million in new NIH spending since Kennedy took office, according to a tally in a separate White Coat Waste investigation, “MAHA Betrayed.” The group is pressing Congress for legislation and Farm Bill provisions that would permanently bar federal funding for animal laboratories in Russia, China and other adversarial nations.
“This is what you get when you hand America’s health agencies to a conspiracy theorist: idiotic decisions that create a national security liability,” said Erik Polyak, executive director of 314 Action. Polyak also accused Kennedy of being unable to find money for American cancer researchers.
Kennedy has warned for years about laboratory risk. Last year, at Trump’s announcement of an executive order restricting gain-of-function research, Kennedy said no laboratory handles such work correctly and none is immune from leaks.
The plague scare and the fox research remain two separate stories joined by one thread: the Russian laboratory breeding the foxes has also worked with the Siberian institute under scrutiny. No U.S. money paid for plague research, and the fox grant has nothing to do with the technician’s death. Critics make a different point — that the money is flowing at all. Under Kennedy, the NIH has twice renewed funding for work tied to a Russian state laboratory covered by the 2022 White House wind-down directive, and the grant pays for animal experiments of the kind watchdog groups say his MAHA movement opposes. Critics argue the plague headlines have made a long-running funding question impossible to ignore. HHS maintains the money supports only a U.S. laboratory studying psychiatric disease and does not reach any Russian institute.
