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There’s a lot we don’t know about what has happened in Siberia. What we do know: A 28-year-old laboratory worker at an anti-plague research institute in Irkutsk died last week after developing severe pneumonia. Russian authorities have described her illness as pneumonia of unknown origin and said tests found no connection to the dangerous pathogens she worked with. But reports have circulated that she may have accidentally broken a test tube containing plague bacteria, and the hospital where she was treated has been quarantined. Around 200 people who may have had contact with her have reportedly been placed under observation.

So, no, it’s not Covid again. And it might not be a plague outbreak at all. But the possibility of a laboratory accident involving Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for plague, is sufficiently alarming to have attracted international attention.

Pneumonic plague is particularly dangerous because it can spread between people through respiratory droplets. However, it is a bacterial disease rather than a viral one, meaning it’s generally treatable with antibiotics when caught quickly. It’s also not that transmissible: you’d have to be in very close contact with an infected person to catch it. None of this was the case with Covid.

Dr. Simon Clarke, an associate professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, puts the lab-leak theory in useful perspective. “It is not unheard of for pathogens to escape from labs,” he says. High-containment laboratories are designed around precisely this possibility, with multiple layers of protection, safety cabinets, airflow systems and strict procedures. Lab-acquired infections are rare, and “a broken tube would not automatically lead to exposure or infection.” But it is unusual, he says, for test tubes to be used that much at all these days, which raises its own questions.

All of this means that “an awful lot must have gone wrong” for a worker to become infected in the way that’s been reported.

The Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute is a large research facility that deals with the kind of plague bacteria still circulating among animals in Siberia (and other parts of the world.) Irkutsk itself is a long way away from major international cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg — the distance is similar to the distance between New York and Los Angeles, necessitating seven-hour flights or multi-day train rides across desolate landscapes — and the Siberian region, which borders Mongolia and China, has very different weather patterns to the European parts of Russia, which border places like Finland and Ukraine.

All of this context is important, when you consider how successful a quarantine might be and why a plague lab might be based in Irkutsk in the first place. Indeed, the whole institute is currently locked down with around 60 people inside, according to local media reports. But none of this is fully reassuring to a world that’s still reeling from the Covid pandemic.

The Trump administration says it is watching the situation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday that he was “monitoring it closely,” and that he doesn’t believe it’s a cause for alarm. American agencies including the CDC and the State Department are, like everybody else, seeking more information. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has somewhat kneecapped itself in this regard.

The U.S. formally withdrew from the World Health Organization in January, ending its membership, funding and personnel involvement amid claims of political motivation and a lack of transparency. The WHO isn’t perfect — and Russia is certainly not the most transparent country in the world — but it was the best we had when it came to information-sharing during Covid.

America can, of course, still gather intelligence on the current situation. It can certainly speak directly to Russia. But global disease surveillance works best when information moves quickly and scientists and public health officials have established channels through which they can share it. And although Putin and Trump have shared a few friendly visits, Trump himself complained during the early days of the Ukraine war that he’d have a phone call with Putin that he thought had gone well and then hear a couple of hours later that Russia had just bombed a hospital.

America is currently trying to work out what its place is in the next era of biomedical science. The Trump administration has restricted federal support for research, disrupted the NIH, made it harder for talented foreign students to get visas to study at elite universities in the US, and made it harder for US scientists to collaborate with scientists across the world. When I asked researchers in cutting-edge genetics and cancer research in New York what the effect had been on their work, they said that it had been slowed and fractured to the point that they believed China would now take over as the global leader in biomedical breakthroughs. In their view, the damage has already been done.

Being longtime allies, China and Russia already have closer comms than the U.S. has with either country. If China becomes the world leader in medical research, it will bring Russia along for the ride. They will share developments and experiments both publicly and privately, especially during times of emergency and quarantine. They will be more honest with each other than they will be with the rest of the world. Current research suggests America still has significant advantages in the quality and commercial reach of its biomedical science. But China is closing the gap, particularly in areas such as clinical trials, drug development and manufacturing.

The country that can sequence a pathogen fastest, develop a diagnostic fastest, test a treatment fastest and manufacture it at scale is building the infrastructure that determines how quickly it can protect its own population when something unexpected happens. This is also where Trump’s hand-wavey, vibes-based approach to medicine starts to become extremely concerning for Americans.

America spent decades building an extraordinary scientific and public health infrastructure partly because infectious diseases do not respect national borders. Now, at the moment when biological technology is becoming more powerful, more consequential and more strategically important, the country is pulling back from some of the international institutions and research structures that helped give it that advantage. A steadfast belief in rampant individualism has eroded America’s ability to wield bigger, more effective influence from within a group.

Meanwhile, over 1,000 miles away, Russian officials don’t seem to be able to agree on whether there was a lab leak or not — but enough local media (and social media) exists around Irkutsk that details have emerged of hospital lockdowns and mask mandates. Contacts at the UN told me that they started hearing rumors about a Russian lab leak last week, but nothing concrete had been confirmed by anyone within the country’s diplomatic corps. This is how information does tend to filter out of Russia: through hearsay, with an effort at state control that doesn’t entirely hold, and a lot of bluster about how the media can’t be trusted. It’s not a winning strategy.

Still, the Irkutsk incident may turn out to be nothing more than a frightening story about a laboratory worker who died from an illness that was never the pneumonic plague; or perhaps it will prove to have been the plague, and a serious breach, followed by successful quarantines and lessons learned. But it is hardly the only pathogen we should be worrying about.

From Ebola to the other coronaviruses already circulating in the world, there are viruses and bacteria with the potential to become epidemics given the right, or wrong, conditions. The only real defence is the unglamorous stuff: open communication, functioning institutions and countries willing to share information before a pathogen has crossed their borders.

One would hope the most powerful countries in the world might understand that. But none of it guarantees a shareable soundbite — so perhaps hope is all we have left.