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What’s the probability the Irkutsk lab worker death is actually totally unrelated to plague research and just a wild coincidence? As far as I know the broken test tube story is both incredible and mere speculation at this point.

I ascribe a higher probability to the hypothesis that there was an exposure event and that it does not involve your “garden variety” plague.

To be precise, that is in comparison to the probability of an exposure event involving garden variety plague. In both cases it’s conditional on the observation that the exposure event was reported and handled as best as possible, which still resulted in death.

Feel free to use observation/assumption interchangeably above, as it’s meant to be hypothetical