Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s department has awarded nearly $800,000 in federal research grants to a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign project that works with a Russian state laboratory tied to the Siberian plague institute now under international scrutiny, according to an animal-testing watchdog group.
White Coat Waste, the watchdog group, said its review of federal spending records turned up the payments, and it published the investigation on Oct. 7, 2026. The most recent payment went out in September 2026, weeks before the death of a laboratory technician in Siberia.
Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died Oct. 2. Russian authorities called her death pneumonia of unknown etiology.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $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, the group said. The money arrived in two near-identical installments, $389,943 in July 2025 and $389,746 in September 2026.
What the Fox Grant Funds
The research examines the genetic basis of social behavior and domestication in silver foxes, which the Institute of Cytology and Genetics breeds for tame and aggressive temperaments. The research itself has nothing to do with plague.
White Coat Waste obtained the grant records through the Freedom of Information Act. Those records show that the foxes are raised at a Siberian experimental fur farm, killed by overdose and that their brain tissue is shipped to the United States for further testing.
The group said records show the Institute of Cytology and Genetics has collaborated on plague research with the Irkutsk institute. The two are separate facilities, more than 900 miles apart in different Siberian cities.
The records do not show NIH money reaching the Irkutsk institute, paying for plague research or connecting the American scientists to the suspected incident there. The grant funds a U.S. laboratory.
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, which was later placed under quarantine. Authorities placed nearly 200 of her contacts under observation, and Irkutsk regional officials said Oct. 8 that all quarantine and monitoring measures had been completed.
The Telegram outlet Mash reported that Shipilova fell ill after a trip to Buryatia, near the Mongolian border. Buryatia’s leader, Alexei Tsydenov, said she had not visited the region.
Some local reports claimed she had been sick with pneumonic plague, and Tsydenov initially wrote that she had died of plague before softening his post. Some Russian outlets reported a second death in the Irkutsk region, which authorities have not confirmed. Rospotrebnadzor called reports of a second case fake.
Russian reports on the first plague case have been disappearing from national media, including one from Channel 5. The independent Russian outlet The Insider reported that the federal television channel REN TV deleted all five of its publications about the plague in the Irkutsk region on Oct. 2.
Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s health regulator, said Shipilova died of pneumonia of unknown cause and that an investigation found no incidents involving the handling of dangerous pathogens at the institute. Officials said testing of her contacts, about 60 percent of those identified, found two Covid-19 cases and two rhinovirus infections and no other pathogens.
Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have tightened border health controls over the situation.
Washington and WHO Press Moscow
Russian authorities told the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday, Oct. 6, that no case of the disease had been recorded in Irkutsk and that contacts of the dead technician tested negative for dangerous pathogens. The WHO said it is still waiting for confirmation of the pathogen that killed her, and it relayed the Russian account that her illness first looked like a common respiratory viral infection. The organization has said the risk to the general population appears low. On Saturday, Oct. 10, the WHO said Russia had confirmed the death but registered no plague case, and that the cause had still not been established.
The WHO and the U.S. government have both formally pressed Moscow for more detail. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Iceland: “I think it’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world.”
President Donald Trump said he has a call scheduled with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the matter. Trump has said the United States does not currently believe the incident involved a biological weapon. On Monday, Oct. 5, Trump said the United States would help and called the outbreak a “big problem for Russia.”
Critics and the Department Respond
Erik Polyak, executive director of 314 Action, said: “This is what you get when you hand America’s health agencies to a conspiracy theorist: idiotic decisions that create a national security liability.” Polyak also accused Kennedy of being unable to find money for American cancer researchers.
An HHS spokesman called the group’s characterization misleading and said the department does not fund a Russian plague laboratory. The spokesman said the money supports a U.S. laboratory in Chicago that studies how genes and proteins shape behavior, with the aim of advancing understanding of psychiatric disease, and that none of it goes to the Russian institute.
White Coat Waste first exposed the fox collaboration in 2023. In early 2020, the group alerted the Trump White House that NIH money was flowing to Russian government animal laboratories, including the Institute of Cytology and Genetics. Its Worldwide Waste campaign later uncovered taxpayer-funded experiments on kittens in Saint Petersburg, and the group says that ended NIH funding for Russian animal laboratories.
The Biden White House in 2022, after a White Coat Waste investigation, directed agencies 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.
Kennedy has spent years warning 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 that none are immune from leaks.
A separate White Coat Waste investigation, “MAHA Betrayed,” tallies more than $225 million in new NIH spending on dog and cat experiments since Kennedy took office. 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.
The plague scare and the fox research are two separate stories joined by a single thread: the Russian laboratory breeding the foxes has also worked with the Siberian institute now under scrutiny. No U.S. money pays for plague research, and the fox grant is unconnected to the technician’s death. Critics argue that the issue is that the money flows at all, that the grant pays for animal experiments watchdog groups say Kennedy’s MAHA movement opposes, and that the plague headlines made a long-running funding question impossible to ignore. HHS maintains that the money supports only a U.S. laboratory studying psychiatric disease and reaches no Russian institute.
