Sverdlovsk Anthrax Leak: The USSR’s Deadly Lab Leak
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50 kilometers away only it wasn't dust the cows contained but anthrax tiny aerosolized spores of one of the deadliest bacteria known to man what followed would be a nightmare beyond all imagination that spring local hospitals were flooded deaths racked up the military moved in desperate to contain the fallout yet even as fedloves descended into hell the authorities were already preparing one of the greatest cover-ups in soviet history in the early 1970s the world had a problem by this point humanity had gained the technological know-how to cause armageddon countless times over reducing civilization to so much radioactive dust by just flicking a switch luckily while the dangers of nuclear weapons were extremely obvious so were the forces stopping anyone from actually using them less obvious were the incentives against biological warfare that was an issue in this era you see scientists have become absolute experts at concocting nightmares in little glass vials in pristine laboratories dedicated teams were weaponizing smallpox or creating strains of tularemia that could resist all kinds of antibiotics in the u.s researchers became so proficient at refining anthrax it was estimated they could use the bacteria to kill everyone in a one kilometer radius for the bargain basement price of a dollar with such awesome capacity for germ warfare it was clear that the planet was becoming a biological accident just waiting to happen that we might all wipe ourselves out with a weaponized plague before we managed to do it in nukes hence the biological weapons convention first ratified in 1972 the bwc pledged all signatories to abandon their bioweapons programs and basically just stop messing around with really terrifying among those who joined the convention were the us the uk and the ussr apparently though the soviet delegate had kept his fingers crossed the entire time within two years of signing a piece of paper committing to doing the exact opposite the ussr was establishing its bio preparat agency designed to mimic a civilian disease research facility bioprepared was in reality a sprawling network of labs dedicated to breeding germs capable of screwing the human body up in new and exciting ways across 40 sites some 50 000 employees conducted experiments on things like bubonic plague and legionnaires disease things that could cause chaos if released into a human population and frequently that human population was closer than you would imagine while the ussr maintained a few remote bioweapon facilities like the notorious aeroskin the bwc meant western spy planes were now on the lookout for secret laboratories so the soviets started sticking their new labs in the last place that anyone would look slap bang in the middle of populated areas the kremlin gambled that the west's thought process would go something like this known the risks no one would be crazy or stupid enough to place a bioweapons facility in the middle of the city therefore these shiny new labs must be for civilian purposes to which we can only imagine leona brezhnev laughing in soviet unbeknownst to the wider world labs began popping up across populated districts labs working around the clock producing the bioweapon equivalent of a neutron bomb it was a crazy strategy one which required an absolute iron commitment to safety but this being the soviet union safety was basically russian for not giving a in 1971 a bioweapons test near the city of morale in kazakhstan resulted in a smallpox outbreak ten people were sickened three of whom died but it would be in a city over a thousand kilometers away that the worst accident of all took place known as fiddlovsk today ekaterinburg the city's outskirts were home to a laboratory known as compound 19 and compound 19 had one task to produce weaponized anthrax on an industrial scale in terms of scary things mother nature can throw you it's hard to think of anything scarier than bacillus anthracis the bacteria that causes anthrax bacillus anthracis is found naturally in the soil but that doesn't mean it's harmless not at all contract anthrax and unless you get some powerful antibiotics asap your chances of fiber will arrange anything from unlikely to well dude it's been nice knowing you at the less worrying end of the scale is cutaneous infection caused by the bacteria getting through a cut on your skin the result is usually a large coal black welt and a 20 chance of death remarkably this is about the best possible outcome if bacteria instead gets in by your mouth say by eating infected meat then your chances of death leap as high as 60 percent by way of comparison small box has a fatality rate of about half of that but the real nightmare comes if you inhale anthrax spores what follows is the medical equivalent of wiley coyote dropping an anvil on your chest as the bacteria releases toxins your lungs fill with fluid your oxygen levels drop until your skin turns blue for all but ten percent of victims that's it for nine in ten people who contracted inhalation anthrax is the final stop on the scenic road that we call life thankfully inhalation anthrax is extremely rare the spores of bacillus anthracis are ever so slightly too big to be easily breathed in capable of getting stuck in human nostrils unfortunately for the residents of sverdlovsk compound 19's entire deal was making sure that those spores could be ground up fine enough to enter any lungs now it's important to note that a lot is still unknown about compound 19 for example some still contend that it was not working on bioweapons but instead vaccines however high profile defectors from the biopreparat program such as former colonel ken alabeck have painted a much darker picture according to their recollections the svedlovsk lab was basically an anthrax factory based on germlab blueprints captured from the japanese at the end of world war ii compound 19 was reportedly filled with machines for drying spores and grinding them into an unbelievably fine powder that such concentrations a mere 100 kilograms of anthrax released into the air over a city can kill up to 3 million people and compound 19 was producing way more than just 100 kilos one estimate we saw put the lab's production capacity at nearly 30 times that every single year even if that's a wild overestimate it still signals that this was a serious facility it was also one lacking the safety protocols that you'd expect of somewhere so dangerous while employees were vaccinated against anthrax the only thing standing between the lethal spores and the city of spadlovsk was a single set of air filters if one of those air filters were to break the results could be catastrophic sadly in spring of 1979 break is exactly what one of those air filters was going to do all right we'll get back to today's video in just a moment but first here's a word from today's video sponsor squarespace think about it this is the age of creation everyone is out there on the internet and they're 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geographics to save 10 or first purchase of a website or a domain and let's get back to it when writing about the sverdlovsk anthrax league people often compare it to chernobyl the infamous 1986 nuclear disaster that irradiated northern ukraine there are many similarities both resulted in a failed cover-up both came close to being much much worse and both happened because of human failure but while the failures that led to chernobyl were long and technical the scrub that released a bioweapon into svedlovsk was both simple and depressingly stupid at the end of a shift at compound 19 a technician discovered one of the air filters leading to the outside world was clogged no one knew for sure when this occurred some sources say march the 30th 1979 others say march 31st or even april 2nd what matters though is that the technician removed the clogged filter and then wrote a note for the guy overseeing the shift telling him that it needed to be replaced unfortunately though the guy either never saw the note or was more like ah i'm on my break i'm geared either way the missing filter was never recorded in the logbook so when the next shift started the new supervisor checked for any mechanical errors and finding none written down he ordered the spore drying machines be switched back on and so the pipe with the missing filter roared back into life and as the hours passed it began to expel an invisible cloud of microbes into the cool russian air microbes that were picked up by the wind and scattered in a 50 kilometer line known as the wind zone this line swept south passing over a ceramics factory over a park over streets and homes undetectable to the naked eye it was also incredibly narrow the sort of corridor you could cross over in moments without ever noticing but for anything alive in that corridor at that time well let's just say they probably weren't alive for very much longer the first sign something was badly wrong came in early april by now the missing filter had been noticed and replaced yet no one at compound 19 had thought to report the accident further up the chain of command it was only a minor mistake one which they hoped had gone unnoticed that hope finally collapsed on april 4. that evening the chief medical officer of hospital 24 margherita yenko received a panicked phone call from a doctor at another hospital for a couple of days patients had been coming in complaining of fevers chest pain and difficulty breathing no one had been sure what to make of it but now ianko got perhaps the scariest news she'd received in a professional life the other hospital had just confirmed diagnosis of anthrax and a worker named nicolaive already two patients were dead in no time at all that death count would skyrocket the next day five patients died at ayenko's hospital from the disease and more and more people were arriving every hour all displaying the horrifying symptoms of inhalation anthrax people like 32 year old minova a worker at the ceramics factory downwind of compound 19's marova was at her job one morning in april when a colleague asked why her hands were blue within hours she and dozens of co-workers were wracked with fevers every breath they took as painful as a rubber bullet to the chest the same afternoon sminov was rushed unconscious to the hospital by the time she woke up 18 of her colleagues would have died come mid-may there'd been at least 100 anthrax diagnoses in sverdlovsk and some 66 deaths yet even as the city slipped toward chaos the soviet authorities had already made a fateful decision rather than concentrate on the disaster itself they were going to use all of their energies to make sure no one found out what caused it the scenes that greeted residents of svodlov's that spring were of a scale and nightmarish intensity that wouldn't be seen again until the height of the covet 19 pandemic as hospitals filled with pneumonia patients the city desperately scrambled to stop the steady trip of deaths from becoming a tsunami penicillin was handed out like candy thrown at anyone with even the faintest flu-like symptoms teams armed with needles fanned out across the city administering anthrax vaccines up to 50 000 people were given either the shot or antibiotics a sign of how far local authorities feared the microbes had spread meanwhile the bodies of the dead were being soaked in agricultural disinfectant hospitals scrubbed with chlorine in streets where the spores were thought to have landed all the stray animals were shot and every house and road and tree were blasted with fire hoses unfortunately some of the cleanup crews seemed to have had no experience dealing with biohazards in the chakalovsky district buildings were sprayed with water rather than kill the anthrax spores this again kicked them high up into the air causing a whole new wave of infections this was the background against which margarita ienko was writing her secret diary on the outbreak recording the emergency establishment of a new hospital hospital 40 to deal with the victims yet even amidst this growing emergency the kgb was working overtime to establish a bulletproof cover-up while the chernobyl meltdown seven years later would emit so much radiation that keeping it secret would be physically impossible in spedlovsk the kgb were helped by several factors the fact was that the leak had been a one-time event that meant that there was a finite amount of anthrax that had escaped meaning an upper limit on how many it could kill the second came thanks to the nature of anthrax itself unlike say influenza anthrax doesn't spread from human to human so while having 100 cases was 100 more than any city needs it also wasn't just the beginning no matter how many family members the infected coughed over the case numbers wouldn't start rising exponentially the third advantage the kgb enjoyed was dumb luck when the spores leaked from compound 19 the wind had been blowing away from the city center towards less inhabited places had it been blowing in the opposite direction the case numbers by mid-may wouldn't have peaked at a hundred but at a hundred thousand and so with their asses happily covered the kgb got to work in hospitals doctors suddenly found themselves being led into back rooms and ordered to hand over all of their records bodies went missing from morgues death certificates were altered so victims appeared to have died months apart but the real genius lay in the cover story since it was certain that news of an anthrax outbreak in a major russian city would escape the kgb decided to roll with it rather than deny anything they were all like sure there's anthrax here but it's gastrointestinal these guys didn't inhale a bio weapon they just ate infected meat for any doctor actually on the ground in svedlovsk this was clearly nonsense the effects of gastrointestinal and inhalation anthrax are utterly different but only doctor actually in svedlovsk would have also been a doctor the kgb could easily have arrested meanwhile experts on the other side of the iron curtain would be unable to verify if the infected meat story was true or not especially when the kgb was going all out on spinning their tail that april and may flyers were distributed over sverdlovsk warning people against eating black market meat several butchers and unofficial vendors were arrested and charged with contaminating food the regional health authority began seizing stocks of meat running tests and destroying it it was a bizarre charade a painful attempt to deflect attention from the truth for 12 years it would also work come summer the situation in svedlovsk was back under control the last confirmed anthrax death would be in mid-june meanwhile the cover story was doing exactly what the kgb had dreamed of in 1986 after years of studying the data american expert matthew messelson would tell the cia he thought the soviet explanation was plausible that same year the nobel prize prize-winning molecular biologist joshua liedeberg would take a trip to moscow to examine reports on the outbreak and come back similarly convinced in 1988 a team of soviet scientists even gave a detailed talk at the national academy of sciences where they showed autopsy photos and tissue slides that all seemed to point to infected meek being the culprit it was almost as if through sheer effort the ussr believed it could will an alternative universe into existence one in which there had never been a bioweapons facility in svedlovsk but while it might be fashionable today to talk about there being no single objective truth the trouble is that pesky things like evidence usually say otherwise and despite the best efforts of the kgb not all evidence of the leak had been destroyed during the depths of the anthrax crisis autopsies have been carried out by finer abramova and lev grimberg after opening up her first anthrax victim abramova had approached grinberg at a swedlov's dance there under the cover of music she'd whispered an audacious plan in his ear a plan to preserve proof of the outbreak's true nature as the morgues flooded with corpses they'd both taken lung tissue samples preserving them in formaldehyde and hiding them among the other jars of pickled organs at the pathology museum it'd been the sort of work that could have gotten them arrested but they weren't the only ones over in hospital 24 margaritienko kept a secret diary recording symptoms and death counts informers too managed to speak some information out before 1979 was even over the first reports had appeared in the british press that the svedlovsk outbreak could be traced to a secret lab clear proof that the ussr had violated the bwc then there were the defectors in 1989 leading buyer preparation scientist dr vladimir pochennick defected to the uk where he revealed the existence of the soviet bioweapons program suddenly the lab leak theory was back in the news in the end there would be global events that confirmed what everyone suspected the collapse of the soviet union in 1991 overturned notions of secrecy across all of its former republics even in russia itself the year zero effect of communism's implosions or people who'd once swam liberally in a sea of lies start freely admitting the truth in 1992 boris yeltsin confirmed to a reporter that the anthrax outbreak had been a result of a lab accident but proof would go beyond just the word of one magnificently drunk politician for a brief window in the early 1990s the kgb files were open to western researchers a steady trickle of academics immediately headed east to uncover hidden truths of soviet history most of them headed straight from moscow where the action was but not all of them perhaps annoyed at being duped in 1986 matthew messelson and his wife janine giermann led a group of american scientists not to the russian capital but to ekaterinburg east of the ural mountains there they would finally find hard scientific evidence of the worst biological accident in soviet history the fact the american team uncovered the truth was due to both diligent work and good fortune good fortune because when abramova and lev grinberg found out about the investigation they retrieved their hidden samples and handed them over those samples clearly showed lymph node swelling in victims chests a sure sign of inhalation anthrax and diligent work because the team made several inspired decisions during the investigation the first came when they plotted those who'd been infected on a map and found them scattered all over the city rather than give up though they went and interviewed the families and found out where the victims had worked that done they replotted the map to show where they'd been during shift time what came back was a map with a narrow band of infections on it all stretching downwind from compound 19 in a straight line for 50 kilometers as dr meselson really noted in his report bad meat does not go in a straight line 50 kilometers long eventually the team concluded that the lab's missing air filter reported previously by defector ken alibaic had released a few milligrams of spores that had been carried by the wind a few milligrams probably not even enough to be visible to the naked eye and yet it had caused so much damage and so much suffering and so much death and it's here that we come to the great unknowns that still surround this case despite the fall of the soviet union despite meselson's investigation and the accounts of defectors is still unknown exactly how many died in the svedlovsk anthrax leak meselson logged 77 infections not all of whom died other estimates have put the number closer to 105 dead with many thousands of infections potentially treated with penicillin and that's just the more plausible totals in a secret diary margaritarienko recalled 45 dying in a single day at a hospital alongside hearing rumors that over 200 had died during the same period at hospital 40. well that's almost certainly a massive overcount it does highlight the mysteries still surrounding the disaster mysteries that also include why only two of the dead were female and why no one under the age of 24 was infected as time goes by these lingering questions are only going to become harder to solve today the kremlin has once again turned to denying a lab leak ever happened as fedlovsk only instead of blaming infected meat the new theory pinpoints a more convenient enemy a western agents who deliberately released anthrax spores to sabotage russia in our current age of disinformation it seems like any lie can find an audience the svedlovsk lab leak then may not quite have been in the same league as chernobyl unlike the abandoned wastes around pripyat yet ketterinburg is still inhabited and even thriving yet it's worth remembering the similarities between the two in both cases authorities responded to a disaster not with openness but with obfuscation lies and a half-assed cover-up a cover-up that helped nobody but those in power while leaving ordinary people exposed to incredible danger this video may have been mostly the tale of a grim accident at some long forgotten soviet facility but it should also act as a warning of what happens when those in charge care only about protecting themselves we can only hope it's a warning that one day humanity will learn to heed
2022-03-09 23:35
