“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — David Barboza, founder of WireScreen and former Shanghai Bureau Chief for The New York Times.
1. The Wall Street Journal:
Russian authorities are investigating the death of a woman who worked at a Siberian institute for infectious diseases and have placed her contacts under close medical observation as they try to determine how she died.
The worker at the Antiplague Scientific Research Institute in Irkutsk province died Friday after contracting “pneumonia of an unknown cause,” the region’s governor, Igor Kobzev, said Monday.
Russian authorities have taken steps to prevent the spread of an infectious disease since the worker’s death. The mayor of the town of Shelekhov, home to around 40,000 people and where the patient was hospitalized, said the local hospital had been placed under quarantine and was no longer accepting patients. The nearby Irkutsk Aluminum Factory, which is located in the same town and employs more than 2,000 people, has imposed a masking mandate. Russia’s Surgeon General Anna Popova held an emergency meeting with the Irkutsk antiepidemiological commission on Friday.
On Monday, the Kremlin sought to play down concerns about the potential spread of an infectious disease. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the issue was being handled by the federal consumer-protection agency, which oversees the institute.
“The dangerous infection that was found in Irkutsk province is most likely not plague, but even in case it is, the disease won’t spread in Russia, and preventive measures and the method of treatment is well-known,” said the agency’s chief Gennady Onishchenko, who added that the region’s “sanitary-epidemiological situation” was stable. (Source: wsj.com)
2. Yesterday’s story, from The Moscow Times, sketched a markedly different picture of the region’s “sanitary-epidemiological situation”. Headline: “Nearly 200 people have been hospitalized in the Irkutsk region with suspected plague infection.” Unfortunately, reliable local reporting on this is hard to come by. Among the many reasons for concern is the fact that Russian public health infrastructure in Siberia is virtually non-existent. And the likelihood that the Putin regime will allow the World Health Organization (or the CDC) “transparency” into the “outbreak” is, safe to say, unlikely. For more, this report from the PBS News Hour is a useful backgrounder. It featured an interview with Annie Jacobsen, author of ‘Biological War’, whose X.com feed is worth following. MIT Associate Professor Kevin Esvelt is also a reliable (and expert) source on this subject. (Sources: themoscowtimes.com, t.me, eastasiaforum.org, pbs.org, youtu.be, penguinrandomhouse.com, sculptingevolution.org, x.com. Italics mine.)
3. John Authers:
The 10-year Treasury yield, the most important number in global finance, has now broken through its high from 2007, when a bond sell-off triggered the Global Financial Crisis. It’s now the highest since 2002.
That, evidently, is scary. The latest impulse upward came from the ISM Services report for the US. Services inflation is proving intractable, and the proportion of supply managers complaining about rising prices climbed to its highest since the post-pandemic surge. With the exception of a few months at the top of the oil price spike in 2008, and in the brief spasm that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the reading is the strongest since the series began in 1997. (Source: bloomberg.com)
