Dmitry Peskov
Role at the time: Press secretary of the President of Russia, answering journalists' questions in a conference call
Response to this claim
An employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute has been diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown etiology, expanded testing of her material found no microorganisms connected to her professional activity, and a biosafety commission found no emergency situations in work with pathogenic microorganisms at the institute, Rospotrebnadzor said on October 4, 2026.
“In this case, the lead agency with competence in this area is Rospotrebnadzor. And it is Rospotrebnadzor's official statements that one should rely on, without listening to various rumors, various speculation and so on. There is Rospotrebnadzor, where highly qualified professionals in this field work (Translated from Russian. Original: В данном случае головное ведомство, которое компетентно в этой области, - это Роспотребнадзор. И именно на официальные заявления Роспотребнадзора нужно ориентироваться, не слушая разные слухи, разные рассуждения и так далее. Есть Роспотребнадзор, где работают высокие профессионалы в этой области)”
RIA Novosti quotes Peskov and says he was answering a question on whether the Kremlin is following the situation in the Irkutsk region; the page shows 12:33 Moscow time. It prints the first sentence with a dash where TASS's text, as Fontanka reprints it, has a verb for is. It also carries the rest of the answer, including the remark about Rospotrebnadzor's professionals.
Why we used this label
The reference point is the proposition that the illness of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute employee, reported to have died on October 1 or 2, 2026, was plague. Peskov answers a question about whether the Kremlin is following the situation by naming Rospotrebnadzor as the competent agency and urging reliance on its statements, without saying what the illness was, so we used Explicitly stayed out. The closest competing label is Challenged the characterization, because he refers to rumors and speculation. We did not use it because the passages we found do not say which accounts he means and do not dispute plague by name.