Soviet anthrax leak revisited as source of covid-19 sought

YEKATERINBURG, Russia — Patients with unexplained pneumonias started showing up at hospitals; within days, dozens were dead. The secret police seized doctors’ records and ordered them to keep silent. U.S. spies picked up clues about a lab leak, but local authorities had a more mundane explanation: contaminated meat.

It took more than a decade for the truth to come out.

In April and May 1979, at least 66 people died after airborne anthrax bacteria emerged from a military lab in the Soviet Union. But leading American scientists voiced confidence in the Soviets’ claim that the pathogen had jumped from animals to humans. Only after a full-fledged investigation in the 1990s did one of those scientists confirm the earlier suspicions: The accident in what is now the Russian city of Yekaterinburg was one of the deadliest lab leaks ever documented.

The story of the accident and the cover-up that hid it has renewed relevance as scientists search for the origins of covid-19.

“Wild rumors do spread around every epidemic,” Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel-winning U.S. biologist, wrote in a memo after a fact-finding trip to Moscow in 1986. “The current Soviet account is very likely to be true.”

Many scientists believe that the virus that caused the covid-19 pandemic evolved in animals and jumped at some point to humans. But scientists are also calling for deeper investigation of the possibility of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

There is also widespread concern that the Chinese government — which, like the Soviet government before it, dismisses the possibility of a lab leak — is not providing international investigators with access and data that could shed light on the pandemic’s origins.

“We all have a common interest in finding out if it was due to a laboratory accident,” Matthew Meselson, a Harvard biologist, said, referring to the coronavirus pandemic. “Maybe it was a kind of accident that our present guidelines don’t protect against adequately.”

Meselson, a biological warfare expert, in 1980 studied classified intelligence suggesting that the Soviet anthrax outbreak could have been linked to a military facility nearby. Six years later, he wrote that the Soviet explanation of the epidemic’s natural origins was “plausible.” The evidence the Soviets provided was consistent, he said, with the theory that people had been stricken by intestinal anthrax that originated in contaminated bone meal used as animal feed.

Then, in 1992, after the Soviet Union collapsed, President Boris Yelstin of Russia acknowledged “our military development was the cause” of the anthrax outbreak.

Meselson and his wife, medical anthropologist Jeanne Guillemin, came to Yekaterinburg with other American experts for a painstaking study. They documented how a northeasterly wind on April 2, 1979, must have scattered as little as a few milligrams of anthrax spores accidentally released from the factory across a narrow zone extending at least 30 miles downwind.

“You can concoct a completely crazy story and make it plausible by the way you design it,” Meselson said, explaining why the Soviets had succeeded in dispelling suspicions about a lab leak.

Sverdlovsk public health researcher Viktor Romanenko said he knew immediately that the disease outbreak striking the city could not be food-borne anthrax as senior health authorities claimed. The pattern and timing of the cases’ distribution showed that the source was airborne and a one-time event.

“We all understood that this was utter nonsense,” said Romanenko, who went on to become a senior regional health official in post-Soviet times.

He and his colleagues spent months seizing and testing meat. KGB agents took medical records from his office. The Soviet Union had signed a treaty banning biological weapons, and national interests were at stake.

As the Soviet Union crumbled, so did its ability to keep secrets. In a 1992 documentary, a retired counterintelligence officer who had worked in Sverdlovsk at the time said that telephone intercepts at the military lab revealed that a technician had forgotten to replace a safety filter.

Soon, Yeltsin — who himself was part of the cover-up as the top Communist official in the region in 1979 — admitted that the military was to blame.

Meselson said that determining the origins of epidemics becomes more critical when geopolitics are involved.

Unlike covid-19, anthrax does not easily pass from human to human, which is why the Sverdlovsk lab leak did not cause a broader epidemic. Even the Sverdlovsk case, however, has not been fully solved. It remains unclear whether the secret activity at the factory was illegal biological weapons development or vaccine research.