US study linked to Russia plague lab received $800k in taxpayer funding from from RFK Jr's Health Department
By STEPHEN M. LEPORE, US SENIOR REPORTER
PUBLISHED: 06:27 BST, 8 October 2026 | UPDATED: 23:15 BST, 8 October 2026
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Robert F Kennedy Jr allegedly allowed over $800,000 in taxpayer money to go to a research project with ties to the Siberian lab behind the possible Russian plague outbreak.
The death of a worker from the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute last week caused concern worldwide and is said to have killed at least one other person since and has many curious about the Siberian lab.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign conducted a partnership with Russia's state-run Institute of Cytology and Genetics, which has worked in the past with the now under fire Irkutsk facility, in 2025 and 2026.
White Coat Waste, a bipartisan government watchdog that largely fights animal testing, reported that the National Institutes of Health - which Kennedy oversees as part of Health and Human Services - granted nearly $800,000 to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2025 and 2026 for their research.
The university received $389,943 from NIH in July 2025 and another $389,746 in September 2026 for the research, which investigated social behavior using foxes that had been raised at a breeding facility in Siberia.
It came to White Coat Waste's attention because the researchers kill the animals before sending samples to the university for further analysis.
The website claimed that Kennedy shouldn't have been funding the research at all given a 2022 directive from President Biden to stop funding animal testing in Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine.
An HHS spokesperson told The Daily Mail that White Coast Waste's characterization of the funding is 'misleading' and made it clear that 'HHS is not funding a Russian plague laboratory.'
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16191937/RFK-Russian-plague-lab-funding-NIH-HHS.html
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