Rubio tells Russia to share more information about plague death

Russia should share more information about the death of a plague laboratory worker who died last week, US secretary of state Marco Rubio said on Tuesday, in an incident Washington was watching “very closely”.

A laboratory worker at Siberia’s plague research institute fell ill and died in undisclosed circumstances on Friday, prompting authorities to quarantine dozens of ‌people and sparking public health fears on social media.

Russian authorities have said the situation is under control.

“I think it’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Rubio told reporters in Iceland. “We’re watching it very closely, hour by hour.”

Rubio said the US has measures available to help Russia if the situation turns out to be more serious than has so far been acknowledged, but needed to know more before it could step in.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday he had a call scheduled very soon with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

When asked what intelligence agencies were saying about the situation in Russia, Trump replied: “So far we are in very deep discussions, we’ll be able to report about it probably tomorrow.”