WASHINGTON — President Trump gave an ominous assessment of the suspected outbreak of pneumonic plague in Siberia Monday, calling it a “big problem for Russia” and adding cryptically that “the microbes and the germs have gotten stronger.”
It was not immediately clear what Trump meant in his assessment of dangerous pathogens as global panic mounts following the death of Daria Shipilova, 28, who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute.
“It’s a rough disease. You know, that’s a disease we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have got stronger and smarter, they’re like an army,” Trump told reporters Monday afternoon as he left the White House for a pre-midterm campaign rally in Nebraska.
“The germs have really become relatively stronger than they were, and things that used to work on pneumonia don’t work as well anymore. So we’ll help. Anybody that has that kind of a problem will always be willing to help.”
Trump added that he had yet to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the matter.
Pneumonic plague is almost always fatal if untreated by common antibiotics — and unlike other forms of the plague can spread from human to human by respiration.
Trump’s comments follow years of controversy about the once-suppressed theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab that was doing risky “gain of function” research that modified bat viruses to make them more infectious.
