By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
I am concerned some may be considering Yersinia pestis a conquered bacteria of no threat to mankind now armed with antibiotics. That may be incongruent with the work Russian scientists likely have completed in their Siberian Anti-Plague Institute where one 28-year old woman has died of a mysterious fulminant pneumonia. It’s sobering that our CDC classifies it as Category A bioterrorism agent due to its high fatality rate and potential for aerosol dissemination.
☣️ Pneumonic Plague, Antibiotic Resistance, and the Bioweapons Question
The featured paper — Andrianaivoarimanana et al., “Transmission of Antimicrobial Resistant Yersinia pestis During a Pneumonic Plague Outbreak,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2022 — is one of the more quietly alarming documents in the open literature. It describes something that was, until recently, mostly theoretical: a strain of Yersinia pestis that is both transmissible human-to-human via respiratory droplets/contact and resistant to a first-line antibiotic. That combination is the exact pairing that bioweapons programs have chased for decades.
