Nearly $800,000 in federal research grants awarded under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went to a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign project that operates in partnership with a Russian state laboratory tied to the Siberian plague institute now under international scrutiny, according to an investigation the watchdog group White Coat Waste published Oct. 7, 2026.
The most recent payment landed in September 2026 — weeks before Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died Oct. 2 of what Russian authorities called pneumonia of unknown etiology.
White Coat Waste (WCW), an animal-testing watchdog, says its review of federal spending records shows 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 (ICG) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Siberia. The money came in two near-identical installments: $389,943 in July 2025 and $389,746 in September 2026. The group says records show ICG has collaborated on plague research with the Irkutsk institute.
What the Grant Actually Pays For
The research itself has nothing to do with plague. It examines the genetic basis of social behavior and domestication in silver foxes bred for tame and aggressive temperaments at ICG. Grant records WCW obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show the foxes, raised at a Siberian experimental fur farm, are killed by overdose and their brain tissue shipped to the United States for further testing. One University of Illinois report said researchers received $1.22 million in NIH funding for work involving the foxes.
The records do not show that NIH money reached the Irkutsk institute, paid for plague research or connected the American scientists to the suspected incident there. The grant funds a U.S. laboratory; ICG is a separate facility from the anti-plague institute, roughly 1,000 miles away in a different Siberian city.
A Death Russia Says Was Not Plague
Russian media reported, without official confirmation, that a test tube containing the plague bacterium broke in a Sept. 25 laboratory accident. Shipilova was admitted Sept. 29 to a hospital in Shelekhov, Russia, which was later placed under quarantine, and nearly 200 of her contacts were placed under observation. Some local reports claimed she had been sick with pneumonic plague, and local officials said as much in posts that were later deleted. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters to rely solely on statements from Russia’s health watchdog, which said samples from her body turned up no micro-organisms linked to her work.
On Tuesday, Oct. 6, Russian authorities told the World Health Organization (WHO) that no case of the disease had been recorded in Irkutsk and that contacts of the dead technician had tested negative for dangerous pathogens. The WHO has said the risk to the general population appears low. Both the WHO and the U.S. government have formally pressed Moscow for more detail.
“I think it’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Iceland. President Donald Trump said he had a call scheduled with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the matter, and has said the United States does not currently believe the incident involved a biological weapon.
A Collaboration Washington Already Tried to End
WCW 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 ICG. Its Worldwide Waste campaign later uncovered taxpayer-funded experiments on kittens in Saint Petersburg, which the group says ended NIH funding for Russian animal labs. In 2022, after a WCW investigation, the Biden White House directed agencies to wind down research collaborations with Russian government-affiliated institutions. WCW says Kennedy’s NIH has renewed the Illinois-Siberia funding twice since that policy took effect.
An HHS spokesman called the group’s characterization misleading, saying the department does not fund a Russian plague laboratory. The money, the spokesman said, supports a U.S. laboratory in Chicago studying how genes and proteins shape behavior in order to advance understanding of psychiatric disease, and none of it goes to the Russian institute.
The disclosure lands awkwardly for a secretary who has spent years warning about laboratory risk. When Trump announced an executive order restricting gain-of-function research last year, Kennedy said no laboratory handles such work correctly and none is immune from leaks.
“This is what you get when you hand America’s health agencies to a conspiracy theorist: idiotic decisions that create a national security liability,” said Erik Polyak, executive director of 314 Action, who accused Kennedy of being unable to find money for American cancer researchers. A separate WCW investigation, “MAHA Betrayed,” tallies more than $225 million in new NIH spending on dog and cat experiments since Kennedy took office.
WCW is pressing Congress to pass legislation and Farm Bill provisions that would permanently bar federal funding for animal laboratories in Russia, China and other adversarial nations.