Unfortunately, this is unlikely to do much in terms of moving policy. As it stands, President Donald J. Trump’s polling results are quicksand and Trump himself is visibly deteriorating. For now, it’s looking like a MAGA bloodbath in November, although a lot can happen between now and then.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Kennedy is “on a tighter leash” for the midterms, but that only appears to mean he should be less visibly anti-vaccine. Or at least he should try. That didn’t go over well with me and Jessica, since “trying” amounted to him saying whatever he likes when asked a question he didn’t want to answer, which is usually a choice between four options of varying degrees of dishonesty:

1. Talk about something else, usually incoherently

2. Aggressive gaslighting and blame-passing to the point that it’s more of an adjustable floodlight

3. Boo hoo, people are being mean to me! I’m pro-science! I am not anti-vax.

4. Insert fictional content here

Unfortunately, the majority party is not doing anything to hold Kennedy accountable, as they have sworn to do in their oaths of office. Instead they are doing the Congressional budget appropriations equivalent of ball-stroking about “flipping the food pyramid” (as Jess pointed out, it’s an inverted triangle). I failed to finish last week’s MMMWR because it was one of those weeks.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into see me and hold what I assume are Kennedy’s leathern werewolf feet to the proverbial fire. As usual, Kennedy walked out unsinged, but that won’t be forever. Like a couple of Terminators, we’ll be back.

BINGO CARD RESULTS IN OUR UPCOMING JOINT POST!

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Also thanks to this video, we realized that our logo looks too much like an ad for tactical vaccines or something, so we have a new logo.

Here, check it out on our draft BRAINWORM BUDGET BINGO CARD!!

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Unfortunately I accidentally tuned into the wrong Appropriations subcommittee so we watched the opening statements of the Congressional Budget Office, Government Publication Office, and Government Accountability Office. Oops! At least I had fun flexing about my academic performance in high school government class. I figured it out once I recognized how boring, accurate, and budget-oriented it seemed. Join me and Jess at 6 pm ET to hear about it!

and I will be doing LIVE play by play tomorrow for the grand finale of the Health Labor Education and Pensions (HELP) Committee. We’ve got MAHA Brainworm Budget Bingo and we’ll be recapping after. The fun starts at 2 pm ET right here on April 22nd, 2026!

Thank you (who was too busy being professionally into feet to join me), , , , , and many others for tuning into this impromptu effort to torture myself. Join us at 6 pm ET tonight for a short recap!

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As stated in today’s show, we really love virology. We are also really annoyed that we haven’t done a good enough job of sharing why we love it. As a result, the most unqualified people imaginable have used our misguided silence and neutrality to enact policies so reckless and destructive the body counts will be measured in the millions. How could this be normalized?

Well, why wouldn’t people think it is normal if the scientists only speak out in such bland, cautious, technical terms that they bore the shit out of everyone? As it is, scientists have not objected strongly enough to the lies about our profession and our research, and in many cases have just meekly accepted that the public doesn’t trust us as a result of these lies. We have also not explained to people why our scientific work is so amazing and important. We have not given the public any reason to disbelieve the lies that are being used to justify our own destruction.

Virology is amazing and important, so we should start acting like it. I am first and foremost terrified by the consequences of what is happening to science and health in the US. It is literally going to kill millions of people around the world. We are scientists and we can show evidence that this is true. But we aren’t taking the time to tell people why they should even care. We aren’t telling people that this affects everyone or how urgent it is because we aren’t putting it in those terms. We are acting like we don’t care enough to be human in the face of our own end.

Juliet and I would like to change that. We’re hoping that by talking about the scientific evidence that makes us think virology is amazing and important, we might make other people think about this too. By being our authentic selves, sharing our own thoughts in candid conversations between two old friends and colleagues, we might even earn some trust and build a bigger community. So please come along with us as we tell old stories from graduate school and talk about why our field of science means a lot to us, and why it means a lot to you too, whether you realize it yet or not. We’d rather have you realize that before the H5N1 or MERS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV-3 pandemic happens in the complete absence of an ability to respond, because viruses are cool and studying them helps avoid potentially civilization-levelling pandemics. And also just your kids dying from a viral disease you could prevent, like measles, polio, or flu. Which you would know is horrific, if only someone had explained how wild pathogenesis is in a way that didn’t put you to sleep or involve PowerPoint.

Join us in two weeks for another one! And please tell us what you want to hear about and what you think! If you liked this, please also consider subscribing!

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Even if Kennedy’s position appears secure for now, it won’t necessarily stay that way. Kennedy is a true believer in a cult of his own creation, but he may not always be its leader. If he doesn’t placate both MAHA and MAGA, whose interests are sometimes non-negotiably opposed, he risks his position. He doesn’t want to go back to just being the Sinatra of the Anti-Vax Pack. He only killed 83 kids in Samoa. He wants to do that to the world, and scaling is a lot easier if you are in charge of all the health of America. He is a delusional narcissist and psychopath who wants to be in charge of everything so he can do whatever weirdo serial killer red flag shit he does in addition to his hobby of performing primitive field necropsies on any animal carcass he happens to spot while on vacation with his children.

He might not be in political death throes just yet, but he is on shaky ground. He’s very skilled at embedding anti-vax doublespeak in everything he says, though, so it’s not even that much of a barrier to not talk proactively about how much he hates vaccines. He doesn’t need to use external policies to ban or limit vaccines directly; he can just pull a bunch of boring administrative levers that nobody wants to hear about and quietly reduce access that way. Enough bureaucratic obstruction has the same effect as a ban.

By continuing to draw attention to the many deceptive and treacherous ways Kennedy is hurting us, and his ambitions to hurt and kill at an even grander scale, perhaps we might eventually accumulate a critical mass that might do something about it. For example, voters could elect representatives in the midterms who might actually take action against Kennedy and/or Trump. Enough bad press could also compel the Trump administration to cut Kennedy loose and hire someone actually qualified. It’s free to bitch on many public platforms, whether you pay or not. It’s free to call your representatives or just pass reliable, truthful, easy to understand information on to your friends and family.

We’re here to try to help provide something you can pass on. We’re really grateful to those of you who have been joining us. Let us know what you think and we’ll see you next week for more of Bobby Morbillivirus and the Loss of Elimination Status denial tour.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in to TAKING SHOTS with me and ! Join us next Wednesday for Kennedy’s next visit to answer to our representatives for his masters’ catastrophic failure to serve the American people and betrayal of our country.

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One thing I did not expect about the rise of fascism is how absurdly stupid it all is. In the US, the entire federal government is fully stocked with the most outrageously unqualified kakistocrats who showed up to simp for MAGA authoritarianism. I thought modern technofascism would look like the situation room inside the Death Star and instead it’s like being inside a classroom full of hateful, sugar-addled preschoolers.

There are serious consequences to putting unserious people in charge of the things that matter the most. In the Trump administration, this is intentional. Destruction of essential services is the desired outcome. Destruction of the American government—and specifically its democratic structure—is the desired outcome. Destruction of all our Constitutionally protected rights and freedoms is the desired outcome.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how this made it possible to end my country and how it might be possible to stop it. As well as the equally stupid rise of fascism stuff occurring here in Canada, where I live now. Like the ostrich convoy. This refers to a group of pro-autocrat separatist knuckle-draggers who advocated risking Canada’s entire $2 billion poultry export trade to prevent a flock of ostriches used by a bunch of lifelong fraudsters to run an elaborate antibody-based wellness scam from being culled after being infected with H5N1 bird flu. The ostrich cause was a magnet for the Maple MAGA 51st staters whose previous efforts to subvert democracy include the trucker convoy’s occupation of Ottawa and blocking the border crossing in Coutts, Alberta. The ostriches were eventually culled by marksmen from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) when the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear their appeal.

In the course of this they subjected their neighbours, CFIA inspectors and officials, private business owners, me, and anyone even remotely suspected of supporting the government to vicious harassment and abuse. They ultimately cost Canadian taxpayers $7 million. For the individuals affected, the costs are much higher.

When I first stumbled upon my first ostrich-related tweet last May, I did not immediately recognize it as an attack on the sovereignty of the Canadian government. In fact, it took several months for me to see that this was not a grassroots activist movement of freedom-loving Canadian farmers who deeply misunderstood a long-established and effective agricultural policy on avian influenza management, but a foreign-funded, far-right anti-government extremist campaign.

This is not about the ostriches. Just like in my home country, it is lying and using disinformation about health and science to erode public confidence in the government. It is normalizing willful disregard of the law, just because someone decides they don’t want to follow it. If animal and public health laws are optional, then maybe other laws are optional, as well. Like, say, the US Constitution. Or the Constitution of Canada.

Canada isn’t as far along this path as the US, since thankfully our parliamentary democracy is intact and functioning as intended (I think…I’m still a student of Canadian politics and all kinds of wild things happen with side-switching, by-elections, and Francophone/Québéc drama). But I’ve had a growing sense of deja vu as I watched the ostrich debacle unfold. The same things are happening in Canada that happened a few years ago in the US: a systematic attack on trust and understanding of health and science that directly enabled America’s plunge into an authoritarian black hole.

I will do whatever it takes to prevent the same thing from happening in Canada. That’s why I was very happy to assist the team at CBC’s The Fifth Estate with their investigation and documentary into the entire affair. I spoke to the producers for hours, gave them access to my research files, and sat for a roughly two hour interview with journalist Mark Kelley when I was in New York in late February. I was impressed with how deeply they wanted to understand the science and how comprehensive their investigation was. The episode covers a lot of material, but an hour is still not enough to cover everything. The situation is extremely complex, so I thought I’d elaborate on a few things that didn’t make it in.

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A brief history of the ostrich drama

In December 2024, ostriches mysteriously began dying at a farm in a remote and very beautiful corner of British Columbia, as shown in the documentary. The owners did not report this to the CFIA as required by law. An anonymous tip about ostrich burn pits at the farm resulted in a visit from CFIA and detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), confirmed by sequencing the virus from samples collected from two dead birds.

CFIA issued a cull order as required by law and the farmers applied for an exemption on the grounds that the ostriches were subjects in critically important scientific research. However, they did not provide the evidence required by law to qualify for an exemption for being rare ostriches (breeding records or genomic data), CFIA determined the farm was unsuitable for research, and the farmers disregarded virtually every biosecurity rule that CFIA put in place. They were denied an exemption, so they sued CFIA to stop the cull. In May, a federal judge decided in CFIA’s favour. The farmers appealed. And all hell broke loose in Edgewood, BC when a mob of variably groomed, pro-fascist government haters moved their ramshackle fleet of RVs and vans to the property.

Before the farmers had even submitted their exemption request, Katie Pasitney, daughter of Universal Ostrich Farm owner Karen Espersen, was appearing on Canadian right-wing podcasts seeking sympathy for the ostriches’ plight. She found it in the chaotic Maple MAGA ecosystem of Fuck Trudeau types: Alberta separatists, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalist, preppers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, gun nuts, bigots, xenophobes, and assorted medical freedom lunatics.

Like some sort of bizarre Canadian reboot of The Grapes of Wrath where the Joads venture west to seek their fortune as right wing ostrich influencers and purveyors of quack ostrich antibody supplements (more on that in a moment), they migrated to Edgewood and camped at the farm for months. They filmed years’ worth of Reels and Lives. They had a live music show headlined by a convicted convoy traitor, Tamara Lich. They used the equivalent of a small city’s power grid usage making pro-ostrich AI slopaganda. This became so widely shared in this world that even US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. got involved. He sent a letter to CFIA President Paul MacKinnon, requesting that he violate multiple laws in both Canada and the US and multiple international trade agreements to export the flock to the Florida estate of US Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator and on-hiatus TV supplement salesman Mehmet Oz.

They also relentlessly harassed and threatened anyone they perceived as pro-cull, including publishing the home addresses and personal information of CFIA inspectors and their families. A 72-year-old neighbour, Lois Wood, was attacked by an ostrich supporter she caught mid-attempted arson, who punched her and poured gasoline on her. The documentary shows appalling footage of the ostrich supporters singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while Wood’s assailant walks off camera towards what is clearly Wood’s house, followed by the sound of Wood screaming. The alleged assailant, convoy supporter Tim Regan of Ontario, was clearly a beloved member of the ostrich inner circle. He is now facing assault charges.

In November 2025, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear their appeal and the cull proceeded. Two marksmen posted up outside the makeshift kill pen finally ended the ordeal, in perhaps the most inflammatory way possible. CFIA’s side of the story is here. I think it deserves more discussion.

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The anti-vaxxers who vaccinate

One of the reasons I got involved in this issue at all is that I am a virologist that studies emerging viruses and I study the emergence of H5N1 into new species (we have a recent preprint about our work in the US dairy cow outbreak). This is directly relevant to my active research program. The reason I stayed involved is that I couldn’t stop thinking about the claim that the ostriches were important scientific research subjects. In addition, on social media, Pasitney was talking about how the ostriches were involved in research on H5N1.

I am an academic virologist who studies H5N1, so if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s find evidence that legit virology research has occurred. I looked in the literature. Nothing by any of the farmers. So I looked in the court documents to see what they submitted to CFIA, which was rejected when CFIA determined the farm was not a lab. I didn’t see anything I’d recognize as scientific evidence. Instead, I found a PowerPoint pitch deck for prospective investors of Struthio Biosciences

.

According to these documents, Struthio was on its way to generating $3.5 billion (yes, with a b) in annual revenue thanks to the awesome power of the ostrich immune system. There are a lot of slides talking about IgY (the type of antibody found in bird egg yolks, hence the Y) as if it’s the immunological equivalent of a tactical nuke. And there are also the sole pieces of data that Espersen and her business partner Dave Bilinski have ever presented as evidence of the “scientific research” occurring on the farm: graphs showing poorly described, insufficiently controlled cell culture, preclinical, and clinical data demonstrating that ostrich antibodies directed at a cocktail of digestive enzymes would lead to weight loss comparable to Ozempic. The slides also detailed products for hair growth, acne, cholera prevention, and leaky gut, along with revenue projections that border on some of the wildest fiction I’ve ever read

.It’s hard to describe how dumbfounded I was when I discovered that they were selling ostrich IgY snake oil, considering my entire introduction to them involved the farmers filming anti-vax TikToks and raging against government public health policy. The entire premise is quite incredible: in 2020, Bilinski and Espersen were leafing through old copies of Molecular Medicine Reports and found Japanese imunologist Yasuhiro “Dr. Ostrich” Tsukamoto’s 2008 paper on ostrich egg antibodies neutralizing H5N1 and protecting chicken embryos and chicks from lethal challenge. Bilinski’s understanding of immunology, as shown in the documentary, is—to put it nicely—unconventional. However, the magnificent ostrich immune system inspired them to transform their remote farm from a “vertically integrated” ostrich breeding facility, slaughterhouse, fat rendering plant, cosmetics factory, dog food manufacturer, and artisanal butcher to being “an antibody company.”

They claimed, repeatedly, that these ostriches held “the cure” for H5N1. There were various unconvincing reasons provided to support this: the ostriches were alive and thus must have the vaunted “natural immunity” they claim is better than vaccine immunity, ostriches don’t get very sick from H5N1 so let’s find out why (neither do ducks, cows, some other birds, many rodents, pigs, goats, sheep, and some humans), everybody already had H5N1 anyway so it’s no big deal, vaccines are bad and take away freedom so magical ostrich antibodies would be better instead, ostriches are weird so they must hold scientific secrets that can replace vaccines, and so forth. One thing they didn’t mention much: they were vaccinating their ostriches.

Yeah, no. This business is bullshit. Antibodies do bind their antigens (molecular targets they are raised against, like a protein) and sometimes they neutralize them (make them non-functional). Ostriches do produce IgY, but it’s no better than IgY from a chicken. These ostriches do produce antibodies, in the way all ostriches do. There is no shortage of ostriches. These ostriches aren’t special. And the reason why Struthio’s antibodies in particular are bullshit is that they aren’t against H5N1. They are against unproven targets to make unproven treatments that, contrary to the data shown in the Struthio business plan, are absolutely not going to devour a chunk of Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic market share or start generating billions of revenue once the ostrich revolution takes hold.

There are three fundamental things for people to understand about Struthio’s business and the ostriches’ scientific potential:

1. These ostriches weren’t very good at making antibodies. A partner terminated their collaboration because the ostrich eggs were not getting consistently high antibody titers (levels) to make commercial production viable. These ostriches were only special in that they were immunologically substandard.

2. We don’t have any idea if individual ostriches were ever infected with H5N1. Even if they all were, that may mean very different things in terms of antibody production. These ostriches would be completely useless for studying H5N1 since not enough is known about their history.

3. They were vaccinating the ostriches. It’s actually hilarious to me that the “medical freedom” anti-vax movement loves “natural” ostrich immunity, but they don’t seem to realize that Struthio’s entire business was based on generating ostrich antibodies by vaccinating their precious immunological wonders.

The ostriches also could not be spared by testing. I’ve previously discussed scientific reasons why at length, but it continues to come up. The farmers contend that the virus was never confirmed to be present except by PCR, which they claim is unreliable. They claim that CFIA basically made up the outbreak and the detection can’t be trusted because PCR only targets a tiny part of the viral genome.

That’s bullshit for several reasons. First, the PCR test is actually three PCR tests, one that defines influenza A virus based on a conserved region of the matrix gene segment (influenza virus genomes are segmented and exist in 8 pieces) and two that distinguish H5 and H7 avian subtypes. This virus tested positive for both flu A matrix and H5 specifically. PCR is the undisputed king of molecular diagnostics because it’s exquisitely sensitive and specific, so this being a false positive without contamination strains credulity. Second, the national lab in Winnipeg also sequenced the full viral genome. The sequence was deposited to a public database for virus genome sequences called GISAID. Here is the entry if you want to see for yourself that it is, in fact, HPAI H5N1.

This was a genotype D1.3 virus that hadn’t been seen before in Canada when the outbreak occurred. It was a recent reassortant (meaning a hybrid virus resulting from mixing during a co-infection with two viruses), with a newly acquired neuraminidase (N) segment. A few months later, it put a person in the hospital in Ohio, likely after it traveled south in a wild bird.

The farmers claim that the virus also can’t be HPAI, because it didn’t wipe out all their ostriches. However, the “HPAI” designation is very specific: it refers to the severity of disease in broiler or layer chickens. In other species, disease severity can vary. It can vary across breeds or strains, too. Because I am specifically an expert in the role of the host in viral pathogenesis, I have reviewed all of the literature on HPAI in ostriches. There isn’t much, but what there is suggests that severity decreases with age. To the best of my knowledge, all the surviving ostriches are older. Pasitney has discussed their advanced age on numerous occasions. There is no guarantee that a virus that didn’t kill an older ostrich won’t kill your older neighbour when it infects their backyard chickens. Viruses don’t magically lose their ability to kill you just because they didn’t kill someone else.

Alas, the story has changed yet again. Espersen didn’t like my commentary in the documentary (Kelley warned me before my interview that the farmers were dismayed to hear about my participation), so she brought up my friend ’s tweet that had a number of her supporters accusing us of satanism over in the hellsite replies (and was directed at relentless harassment from ostrich supporters). Espersen is still demanding that I debate flu pathogenesis in ratite hosts with her two expert witnesses, Byram Bridle and Steven Pelech. Both Bridle and Pelech have extensive experience with the Canadian court system, having testified numerous times before in medical freedom culture war cases about vaccine mandates and school closures. She hypothesizes that the ostriches had H5N1 but didn’t get sick because they 1. already had H5N1 antibodies (because of a presumed other unreported outbreak???) that forestalled death or any evidence of clinical disease and 2. they died of secondary bacterial infections anyway. I didn’t know that secondary bacterial infections were a big risk of completely asymptomatic primary infections, but maybe it’s another weird ostrich thing. Who knew that H5N1 is no big deal, but Pseudomonas (a bacteria found basically everywhere) is ostrich kryptonite!

Unfortunately for Espersen, we have evidence that the H5N1 sequence obtained from her dead ostrich is not a low pathogenicity virus. It took out 69 ostriches during the outbreak. Not only was this virus fully sequenced and confirmed to be HPAI based on its entire genome, but it is pathogenic enough in humans to make at least one person sick enough to require inpatient medical care. In CFIA’s experiments, it killed mice and ferrets which are regarded as the superior small animal model for studying HPAI pathogenesis and transmission. I am unsurprised that Espersen, Bilinski, or their esteemed expert witnesses didn’t seem to understand the court filings from CFIA that show the presence of a furin cleavage site in the hemagglutinin (HA) gene segment. When this sequence is present, it confirms that the virus is HPAI.

This was a highly pathogenic virus. It killed a lot of their animals. Just because it didn’t kill them all doesn’t mean this virus didn’t present a massive risk to Canadian agriculture and the food supply. Not culling the birds violated every major trade agreement Canada has made and threatened the entire $2 billion poultry export trade.

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The Freedom Ride of the Ostrich Convoy

That was eleven months after Pasitney started telling every thirsty far-right Rumble journalist and Maple MAGA separatist podcaster who would give her airtime that her family’s fraud scheme was the tragic victim of government overreach. Trudeau’s dictatorial health policies, which are enforced by his own personal army, the animal health inspectors of CFIA: all sinister forces conspiring to strip the hard-working scammers of their freedom. She invited supporters to come live their anti-government values at the farm. The trucker convoy showed up.

The trucker convoy—or “Freedom Convoy,” since many of them are not truckers but unemployed lemmings with nothing better to do than join the crowd—was a collection of aggrieved Canadians that decided to convoy to Ottawa in January 2022 to demand liberation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s oppressive Liberal vaccine mandates. They piled into their semis and proceeded to Ottawa, where they occupied the nation’s capitol for MORE THAN A MONTH, and to Coutts, Alberta, where they blockaded a border crossing and caused massive economic havoc. Four convoyers were arrested for conspiring to kill RCMP officers.

They burned Canadian flags, set up hot tubs on Parliament Hill, and flagrantly disrespected every Canadian by preventing the government from functioning and disrupting transportation and trade. They also raised a ton of money, much of it from foreign sources. The convoy was the Canadian equivalent of January 6th. Both were insurrections intended to overthrow democratic governments. Both failed.

In the US, the subsequent failure to adequately reckon with the January 6th insurrectionists and hold them accountable normalized directly ignoring or rejecting democratic laws and significantly contributed to Donald Trump’s re-election. The failure to hold Trump accountable for his many crimes, including those not directly related to January 6th, sent the message that laws are optional. And that path had already been extensively beaten by the many medical contrarian profiteers now in charge of HHS, particularly Kennedy himself.

According to them, everything should be optional if you decide it should, regardless of how it impacts anyone else. According to them, “freedom” is paramount over all, including the freedom to make decisions that will endanger you, your family, and potentially many others. And not just “freedom” as defined by the law, but choose-your-own-adventure libertarian freedom as you individually perceive and define it. If the facts don’t fit your beliefs, then they can be omitted, or new facts—aka lies—can be conjured out of thin air.

Like the trucker convoy, the ostrich convoy was “the tip of the spear,” according to one supporter, in a larger movement to take out the supposedly tyrannical Canadian government. Considering the convoy was composed of a number of people who generate income by making anti-government Facebook Lives to promote their GoFundMe pages all day, it was a spear with multiple semi-coherent tips. Judging by the owners’ string of debts, foreclosures, and failed business ventures, Universal Ostrich Farm wasn’t great at making ostriches profitable, but they struck gold producing pro-fascist, anti-science Maple MAGA content disguised as ostrich support. As covered by The Fifth Estate, the ostrich farm made hundreds of thousands of dollars from crowdfunded donations alone. That was helped along considerably by their American allies in HHS.

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Scammers alone don’t destroy democracy

The ostrich farmers were indeed “grifters,” as stated perfectly by fellow Edgewood, BC resident Deb Pion in the documentary:

“They don’t seem to have an income from a job anywhere. Their ostriches were failing for years. So how else are they paying their bills? They start GoFundMe pages.”

However, it’s worth paying attention to how those GoFundMe pages brought in a windfall. Pasitney called into The Cats Roundtable, a conservative talk radio show in New York City, and found a sympathetic ear in John Catsimatidis, who is like if a grocery store mogul was also a Hutt cartel boss. Catsimatidis is a long time friend of Trump and the type of loudmouthed New Yorker who bought his own radio station to have a soapbox upon which to issue the endless grievances so common to billionaires these days. Catsimatidis is a pretty standard MAGA yes-man, who cheerfully says hateful, un-American things in support of the dictator he venerates. Naturally he immediately was gripped by the ostriches’ unjust condemnation. He immediately opened his wallet, and encouraged all his listeners to do the same.

Pasitney found an easy mark grandfatherly mentor in Catsimatidis. Pasitney also told Catsimatidis that she had offered the Canadian government ostrich anti-H5N1 antibodies for the strategic national stockpile but Trudeau’s draconian public health enforcers had, as usual, refused such a freedom-filled pandemic remedy.

In fairness to Cats, his understanding of immunology is almost as removed from reality as Bilinski’s, so I can’t fault him for being hoodwinked on the science. Catsimatidis gave Pasitney extensive airtime to promote donations to the cause in the US and bankrolled their legal battle in Canada. By the time it becomes apparent to even Catsimatidis that, at best, the government was right to refuse Pasitney’s offer of an unknown quantity of raw possibly H5N1-infected ostrich yolks to safeguard the nation against a pandemic, the truth comes out. He doesn’t even care that Pasitney lied to him and everyone about the scientific value of the ostriches, because he was able to further his political agenda anyway: prop up MAGA objectives, divide and anger Canadians, undermine science, undermine the law, and undermine democracy.

Catsimatidis claimed that he talked to Trump about the doomed ostriches. “He acknowledged it,” Catsimatidis proudly noted, as if a grunt from Trump in response to the word “ostrich” or possibly “Canada” was some type of divine validation. And then, Kennedy got involved and brought in the full MAHA clown car to bear. Oz was still complaining that the ostriches should be studied until the day they were culled.

There are many ways that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and I are essentially polar opposites, and I’d guess one of the biggest ones is concerning influenza pathogenesis across host species. We are polar opposites in that I’m demonstrably an expert and he demonstrably is not. This lack of expertise led Kennedy to suggest violating multiple laws in both the US and Canada and all our international trade agreements to ship more than 300 nine-foot-tall walnut-brained terror birds to Oz’s Florida estate-turned-ostrich rescue. Once there, they would be “studied,” which was not clearly defined apart from looking at ostrich antibodies over the course of an octogenarian ostrich lifespan.

Thankfully nothing happened except MAHA press stunts that fell flat in the US. Most Americans have no idea about the ostriches at all. If Kennedy had actually pulled this off, it would have destroyed Canada’s poultry export industry. No country would accept poultry that had shipped live birds with HPAI to another country. It also would have destroyed the US’s poultry export industry, since they would have knowingly imported an infected poultry flock to maintain it. This would devastate the North American economy and food supply. As is true about everything these days, nothing good comes from America suggesting ideas for collaboration to its northern neighbour.

Announcing my retirement from the ostrich business

Just kidding. I’m not getting out of the bird flu business and if more ostrich drama flightlessly places itself in my path, I will probably roll my eyes, give a very melodramatic sigh, and pull out all seven or so ostrich papers that exist for review. I’ve never actually been in the ostrich business, but I’m looking forward to not thinking about Struthio camelus as an H5N1 host any more. I’m also looking forward to whatever fresh hell the extremist world that spawned my ostrich opps has waiting for me. I’m the co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Vaccine, so I have all kinds of other fun “medical freedom” shenanigans in my life. And H5N1 itself might have the worst fresh hell of all in store for us, if it manages to become an efficient human respiratory pathogen.

However, this has taken a pretty big toll on me, both personally and professionally. In September, Viva Frei, a failed anti-vax parliamentary candidate turned prominent Canadian anti-vax podcast star discovered an interview I did on Hanomansing Tonight about the ostriches. When I declined his invitation to let him attack me with intellectually bereft questions on his Rumble show, he rallied his entire million-chud audience of conspiracy-minded incel shut-ins to do the thing they love most in the world: tell a dumb, desperate bitch that she is a dumb, desperate bitch. Also talk about prosecuting, stalking, sexually assaulting, raping, beating, stabbing, shooting, hanging, or killing me.

The anti-Angie ostrich campaign that ensued lasted for months. It peaked multiple times in the fall. I had to talk to various law enforcement and security agencies and officials. That is why last November, Dean tweeted at Frei to draw some of the hate away from me to him, since he had criticized the ostrich convoy for the same reasons I did: they are pro-fascist, foreign-funded, extremist threat to national security and they are trying to undermine democracy in Canada. Unfortunately, Dean’s strategy did not work. It triggered a campaign to have me fired. A senior university official described it as “bigger than the Monsanto thing.”

My university’s response has been deeply disappointing. Rather than supporting me for mitigating a threat to Canadian health, agriculture, the economy, and national security and advocating for our colleagues at CFIA to carry out their mandated duties, they chose silence. There’s not much benefit to being a world-renowned virologist and vaccine expert when your institution decides that it values virology and vaccines and the safety and well-being of its scholars less than staying out of the publicity crosshairs of a foreign-funded mob of anti-vax political extremists. In my observation of our civilization’s descent into the Dark Ages, most of the supposedly storied institutions lack the courage to do the right thing. That is why individual people have to step in, if the right thing is to be done at all.

In December, I was invited to be the guest at the Salt Spring Forum. It is a wonderful community event on Salt Spring Island, BC (right off Vancouver Island) that recruits guests based on their reputation as an interesting person who will sit for two hours of questions and discussion without boring the hell out of everyone (prior speakers include Naomi Klein and my man from The Globe and Mail, Andrew Coyne). The event was fantastic andIt was such an honour to be invited. So I was surprised when my escort told me they needed security for the first time ever in advance of my event.

Then, there were anti-Angie pamphleteers passing out anti-Angie literature from supporters of one of the farm’s expert witnesses, Byram Bridle. Bridle was mad that I had tweeted that I didn’t find his history of claims that the spike protein is the turbo cancer easy button to be the mark of a fellow expert.

In fairness, it seems I was wrong that Bridle was a “paid expert witness.” I should have known: the ostrich grifters got him to provide thousands of dollars in expert witness work for free! Bridle wrote a very long Substack about it and also filled up four pages with his demands that I stop thinking he’s an anti-vax dipshit and quit saying the spike protein isn’t toxic because HERE ARE 50 MORE PAPERS IN ADDITION TO MY ENCYCLOPEDIC SUBSTACK ON HOW YOU ARE WRONG, DR. ANGELA RASMUSSEN. I’ve never met such a stan for spike toxicity. These were being passed out to all in attendance on their way in, like a program or party favour, except one is an ad for Bridle’s Substack and the other is an ad for an anti-vax propaganda movie produced by anti-vax media mogul Del Bigtree.

I do hate to be factually incorrect, though, so let me print a correction and an apology to Byram “Pro Bono” Bridle. CORRECTION: On X, I mistakenly claimed that Bridle was paid to make up nonsensical bullshit about avian influenza and ostrich immunology, as I assumed all the anti-vax medical freedom scammers would naturally insist on cash up front from their peers. I didn’t actually expect Bridle would do it for free, so let it be known he did it for love of ostriches and hatred of spike protein. Dr. Bridle, I apologize for overestimating your shrewdness and skill at grifting. Spike still isn’t toxic, though.

But the biggest surprise was still in store. After the event, several young women in their teens or early twenties came to talk about their scientific ambitions. This is one of my favourite part of giving talks outside of academic conferences: meeting my future colleagues. I was approached by a college-aged woman who looked as though she were about to ask a career or science question. Suddenly, there was a microphone in my face, with Drea Humphrey, Rebel News’ dedicated ostrich correspondent, on the other end asking why I was maligning the science skills of Bridle and Pelech. The young woman was filming the encounter for Rebel News, Canada’s least-favourite Russian-backed right wing news blog. Humphrey was embedded on the farm for months. After the cull, Humphrey joined Frei in calling for some good old fashioned hellsite mob justice against my science-based ways. And the ostrich media team was still so outraged a month after the cull that they put Humphrey on a float plane to Salt Spring Island and cooked up a plan for her to ambush me.

I had a fun exchange with Humphrey in which she was unable to explain the scientific point Bridle and Pelech told her to tell me I was wrong about. I asked her to tell me specifically what exactly I “lied about” regarding PCR as a reliable molecular diagnostic assay and am still waiting for her reply. I still get hate mail, am the subject of shitty social media posts, and occasionally even get an alert about another credible violent threat. I have multiple security services monitoring for online threats, both at my university and externally. I can no longer drive myself to work because there is a stretch of sidewalk with no camera where it isn’t safe for me to walk alone. I have had to change the way I live my life because I live in western Canada, and so do many of these people. Some of these people are Nazis. Some of these people have guns. Saskatoon isn’t that big. I’m not that hard to find.

Living like this for months at a time has had a big impact on my physical and mental health. To gather evidence of the abuse for legal reasons, even reading the messages again was having such a negative effect that my husband (a data scientist) built a tool for AI to do it automatically. I don’t need to be bathed in a torrent of opinions that I am evil, heartless, cruel, irreverent, unprofessional, disrespectful, a criminal, crazy, ugly, old, irredeemable, condemned to hell, and utterly worthless in every way.

That is the purpose of campaigns like this. It’s why the ostrich farmers terrorized their neighbours, CFIA, and anyone crossing their path. This tactic works. If you abuse people to their breaking point, they are broken, and they won’t be able to work anymore. It is forcible self-censorship by violent dehumanization. The reason it is happening to me isn’t because I’m a bitch to liars and bullies or Viva Frei is a dishonest professional media manipulator whose primary tactic is abuse (both are true). It’s not about me as a person. It’s because what I am saying is a problem for the extremists who are trying to use medical disinformation and pseudoscience to both personally profit from and hasten the fall of democracy in Canada.

Unfortuately for the ostrich fascists and all of the cowards who enabled this, I can tolerate a lot of damage before I break. And I’m in bad physical shape now, but I’m getting better. With fewer ostriches in my life, I will get better still. It didn’t make the final cut, but Mark Kelley asked me why I have persisted with this: why keep at it, when it’s exacting such a terrible cost?

Because it’s the right thing to do. What kind of a scientist am I if I won’t stand up for the science I know best? What kind of virologist am I if I won’t accurately assess the risk these ostriches presented, when that risk is potentially catastrophic and I am among a very small group of people with the expertise to do so? What kind of vaccine researcher am I if I won’t defend the critical importance of vaccination? What kind of a person am I if I won’t live my values, of which the foremost is freedom (I am American).

Somebody has to object to the lies and the scamming. My parents taught me that if I see a job that needs doing, I should do it. Especially if it’s important. Even if it’s hard. With more people being aware of exactly what this whole stupid debacle was about, it’s less likely to keep sucking Canadians into the ostrich radicalization maelstrom. It’s less likely to continue to disturb our national discourse with its malevolent stupidity, at a time when we most need to be united in the face of the threat America presents. Canada can continue as a healthy, functioning democracy in the face of the devastating tragedy in my home country, rather than the next to fall.

These days, that could be a lot of countries. At a conference last year, one of my European colleagues told me, “We are all just one election away.” That is true. It’s true in Canada and Europe and many other places where nationalism and far-right authoritarianism is gaining steam. The ostrich farm seemed so absurd that it was funny. But the many consequences to not culling were all severe: economic ruin, agricultural collapse, food scarcity, cultural upheaval, a pandemic far worse than COVID, and, the one I worry about the most, the end of democracy in Canada.

There were no ostriches, but I know this story. America’s story should not become Canada’s story. That means in Canada, we need to be honest about what the story is: undermining the stability and authority of democratic governments, while normalizing the encroachment of kleptocrats trying to ride a wave of manufactured public distrust to power. The Fifth Estate did that in this documentary. You should watch it!

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I’d like to recognize producers Krista Hessey and Harvey Cashore and reporter Mark Kelley for their exceptional work. This was really well done and they were incredibly professional, thoughtful, and just a pleasure to work with. I agree with Edgewood neighbour that “Canadians need to know the truth of” this story and I’m grateful The Fifth Estate took such care in making that happen. Happy to help any time in the future.

On this episode of Taking Shots

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has announced a new podcast!

• MAGA vs MAHA

• Kennedy’s political standing going into the midterms

• Laundering anti-vax conspiratorial bullshit into Gold Standard Science on chronic disease

• USA #1 in anti-vax influence

ACIP has a new charter

• Kennedy had two options: reinstate competent ACIP or change the rules

• Clown car ACIP will likely be back, minus Robert Malone, who has some conspiracy theories about secret anti-MAHA operatives within the government and rage-quit so he’s going to the State Department to use AI protect us from bioterrorists

MAGA mechanisms for plundering the budget for American health

• Budget cuts

• Bureaucratic trickery

• Lab leak and lying

Casey Means is STILL in the running

• Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is too cowardly to call a vote in the Health Education Labor and Pensions and Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are talking to the White House

• TELL YOUR SENATOR TO VOTE NO:

  • Residents of the US (Senate Switchboard): (202) 224-3121

  • Residents of ALASKA: (202) 224-6665

  • Residents of LOUISIANA: (202) 224-5824

  • Residents of MAINE: (202) 224-2523

Just like measles, anti-American fascism isn’t limited to the US

• I was on a CBC documentary about the Maple MAGA ostrich convoy up here in Canada

• I also really want to shout out Aritzia for killing it every time in terms of TV wear. They are my go-to for almost everything, but especially for prime-time foundational national news magazine shows talking about bird flu in the context of national policy and threats to democracy. They did me right on 60 Minutes and now on the fifth estate too.

Reduce your risk of RSV and measles!

• RSV vaccination season has been extended—it’s not too late and timing for this vaccine is important

• Measles is going to break records again this year. Vaccinate anyone over 12 months old in your family!

• These vaccines are both tested and safe. If you have questions, let us know!

Let us know what you think

• Got comments or feedback? Let us know!

• Do you have any questions? We literally do all of this to answer them. Your health is important and you deserve honest answers that are factually correct

• I promise to improve as a producer

Links

ACIP coverage with :
Unpacking AAP vs Kennedy (the case that resulted in ACIP’s stay order)

Relevant to ACIP:
Taking Shots: ACIP Shot Down
A Massive Win for Public Health: AAP v. RFK Jr.

Casey Means coverage with :
Taking Shots: Casey Means nomination hearing pre-game
Taking Shots: Casey Means nomination hearing
Taking Shots: Casey Means post-hearing analysis
Casey Means Conspiracy Hour with and

Relevant to Casey Means:
Rasmussen Retorts Episode 4: Casey Means as US Surgeon General
A Means to an End for Public Health

If you’re a US citizen who wants to find their Senator to say no on Casey Means, go here

Lab leak resources:
Five Reasons Why It Still Wasn’t a Lab Leak
Rasmussen Retorts Episode 5: Five Reasons Why We Think It Was Zoonotic
NIH FFS: The Freedom from Science Lab Leak Lecture Series

Ostrich fascism:

The documentary for CBC’s the fifth estate about the anti-vax ostrich antibody scammers who responded to an outbreak of avian flu they failed to suppress by suing the government and inviting every anti-government medical freedom activist in Canada to squat at their farm for ten months until they were finally culled.

Ostrich convoy info (I wrote about this a lot):
Release the Ostriches’ Grippe: after the cull
Last Stand in Bird Flu Ostrich Land: ostrich DEFCON 1
Follow the Bird Flu Ostrich Antibody Money: ostrich antibody grifting scheme
The Saga of the H5N1 Freedom Ostriches: how I started chasing the ostrich

Make sure you read ’s story about her son’s hospitalization with RSV in 2019, especially if you are a parent. Jessica and her son Laith didn’t have the option to vaccinate then, but parents do now. Ask about vaccination!

We go into more detail about some of these things here:

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into this week’s episode with me and ! Join us next Friday at 5 pm ET/2 pm PT.

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I’ve been remiss on posting new articles lately, but with all of my least favorite American public health and science officials bringing up lab leak nonsense, I couldn’t stay quiet. So I wrote a long article about it. And then made Episode 5 of the Rasmussen Retorts show! Share either or both with the lab leakers in your life.

I also can’t think of anyone better to talk to about hardcore virology topics than the guy who taught me virology to begin with: Vincent Racaniello, my PhD mentor. Also, he is the actual star of the show.

Unfortunately, I appear to be cursed to have some sort of personal involvement with every stupid thing the MAHA brain trust does. This is likely because I have been beefing with them on the hellsite for the past six years about the same stupid things since we all came up together in the academic tier of fledgling pandemic Twitter celebrities. One of these stupid topics was the lab leak. And one thing I can do is not shut up about my own research into pandemic origins, since I’ve actually done this research.

This is not because most people are even interested in this anymore. I’ve had people ask me why I don’t think it was a lab leak and the second the word “geospatial” comes up, eyes glaze over. Most people don’t care at all and want to put COVID behind them. But the group who cares—the MAGA/MAHA contingents—very much want you to think the lab leak is settled science, because it will allow them to steal from us. If research causes lab leaks and lab leaks cause pandemics, then Making America Healthy Again means no more research. Since we aren’t doing research anymore, our science and health agencies don’t need such big budgets. Those should go back to the White House, according to the current regime. I think people should know that there is no evidence that supports the lab leak theory except the pandemic started in Wuhan and there is a lab there. A LOT of evidence shows that the pandemic emerged from the live animal trade at the Huanan Market. People should know that when the government says it was a lab leak, they are lying to the America.

After more than two decades, I’m still learning a lot from Vincent. And one thing he continues to teach me is that it’s more important than ever for as many of us to stand up in whatever way we can, because science is worth fighting for. Our field—virology—is worth fighting for. Not just because my colleagues and I think viruses are fascinating and beautiful (they are), we like studying them (we do), and we think it’s important (it is), but because it is literally a matter of life or death. Without virology research, we would be set back decades in our understanding of cell and molecular biology. We would not have vaccines. We would not have many drugs, for viruses and other diseases. We would not have the basic knowledge required to prevent something like the death toll from the 1918 influenza pandemic. That occurred when we knew so little about flu that they named a bacteria after it before they figured out it was a secondary infection. Estimates for mortality due to the 1918 pandemic usually fall somewhere around 50 million people. That is what happens in a world where the approach to pandemic preparedness is health platitudes and bullshit rather than a functioning health system and medicine that works and won’t kill you.

The Trump administration will not stop at virology or infectious disease research. They will terminate as much scientific research and funding as possible. The lab leak will be used to declare almost all research unsafe and used as a pretext to redirect taxpayer funds into the pockets of authoritarians and traitors. Yes, a lot of scientists and health care workers will lose their jobs. Sad for those of us affected, but worse for the entire economy and for everyone who gets sick, injured, or killed as a result. This is not about just destroying a field that me and Vincent love. It’s about destroying America and everything we value so the President can steal our money, our freedom, and our future.

I’m not going to be quiet about this. I urge you to speak up as well, in whatever way you can.

And check out more from Vincent at microbe.tv.

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Jessica is back from vacation! But Angie is still not feeling so hot. As a result, we are a day late coming through with this week’s newsletter, but there is a lot going on to discuss. We’ll be covering it Friday for Taking Shots, as usual. Thanks to Dr. for co-hosting last week. Due to popular demand, we’re working on getting Juliet back sooner than later for more neverending virology talk.

Table of Contents

1. Secretary Kennedy gets his own podcast

2. ACIP has a new charter

3. Robert Malone has multiple complaints

4. The White House only wants to cut NIH to the tune of $5B next year

5. Casey Means is still a thing

6. We’re almost at double the measles cases for all of 2025 and it’s only April

7. Canadian H5N1 ostrich fascist documentary with Angie is out on April 10

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Say Hello to Podcast Bobby

US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has once again threatened the American people with a good time. By “good time,” we mean he just announced a podcast that sounds a lot like a reboot of the anti-vax conspiracy theory hour he used to host before entering government service, just with the official seal of HHS on it. Kennedy says the government has been lying to people for too long, so he’s assembling his top tier squad of MAHA experts to ensure that the MAHA message continues to be broadcast far and wide.

Although there are a lot of rumors about Kennedy’s future and it is very clear that the Republicans would generally like to downplay Kennedy’s vaccine policies in particular, he seems to be on board with the MAGA midterm plan. This podcast makes sense as a way for him to both focus on the more popular “Eat Real Food” nonsense (which is still not evidence-based) and to walk back some of his more extreme vaccine positions. Kennedy is a master of revisionist history with regard to his own actions and public statements on vaccination, so expect every episode of Podcast Bobby’s HHS Propaganda Hour to take a “vaccine skeptical” tone: I’m not anti-vax, but I have questions! In many cases, those questions are definitively answered (do vaccines cause autism? NO), and the vaccine skeptics will not accept the answers. Usually that’s because they have something to gain or something to sell.

We are calling it now: every “independent doctor” and “respected scientist” who shows up will either be promoting their own pet scientific brand or content (lab leak, functional medicine, etc) or peddling supplements, ivermectin (“early treatment”), phototherapy, mitochondrial nonsense, untested synthetic peptides and nootropics, energy healing, hormones, diets, cold plunges, tests you don’t need, wellness protocols, and assorted other pseudoscientific quackery. We will be tracking guests as they come in and out so that you don’t have to.

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ACIP Has a Freshly Renewed Charter

There are few things that bring as much joy as a federal register notice that has something to do with vaccination, and by “joy,” we actually mean abject dread. So naturally we were delighted to see that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) had its charter renewed, which happens every two years.

Too bad ACIP can’t meet until the federal court order staying the panel is lifted. Judge Brian E. Murphy issued the stay due to the abject lack of qualifications or any kind of vetting process of the members appointed by Kennedy last June.

When we discussed this on the heels of yet another cancelled ACIP meeting a few weeks ago, we were uncertain about the future. In one sense, it is good that the many anti-vaxxers and MAHA yes-men of ACIP are restricted to lamenting their loss of status by inventing unhinged conspiracy theories on various Rumble shows (see Robert Malone discussion below).

On the other hand, it’s very bad if ACIP can’t meet at all over the long term. Vaccine access depends on ACIP recommendations. Kennedy is rumored to be on a very short leash leading up to the midterms, with specific directives to rely on falconry or whatever he does in his spare time to scratch his crazy itch. He can’t allow ACIP to be cancelled indefinitely and he also likely wants to maximize ACIP’s utility for laundering typical anti-vax garbage into Gold Standard Science.

There are only two options for bringing ACIP online anytime soon. One is to restore the ACIP that Kennedy fired last June, since they are highly qualified and were properly vetted. They have written multiple articles and given many interviews on their strong disapproval, including two peer-reviewed papers in Vaccine that quantify their replacements’ degraded performance. It’s extremely unlikely that these colleagues are regarded as anything but enemies by MAHA. The other is to change the rules for who is qualified and eligible to be on ACIP, as well as selection criteria.

That brings us to the renewed ACIP charter, which has gotten a subtle glow-up that may be intended to smooth the path for the return of the ACIP members in exile. This is the main change:

This doesn’t seem too bad, except when you consider that prior criteria was restricted to disciplines relevant to vaccination. That makes sense, since it’s an expert advisory committee on immunization. This has now been broadened considerably to include biostatistics, general clinical practice, and toxicology. It’s hard not to view this as Kennedy’s next move to restock ACIP with bumbling non-experts who oppose vaccines, particularly since it came on the heels of a letter from anti-vax ambulance chaser Aaron Siri on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) advising Kennedy to change the charter.

This could open the door to restore Kennedy’s anti-vax ACIP in compliance with the federal stay order. This “balance” seems tailored to include many people who didn’t meet the prior Charter’s established standards.

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Robert Malone Has Grievances

Of all the spurned MAHA ACIP members in exile, nobody has taken the court order as hard as Vice Chair Robert Malone. He quit ACIP despite the panel being disbanded, for the stated reason of wanting to avoid drama.

Since then, Malone is stoking the content engine to which he owes his fortune: extremist conspiracy theories and grievance-based medical freedom grifting. First he appeared on The Highwire with ICAN founder and president Del Bigtree last week to complain that ACIP’s vaccine descheduling would have proceeded harmoniously if there weren’t a mole secretly interfering with the MAHA agenda. “The word ‘saboteur’ has been used,” Malone confided in an incredulous Bigtree, who was so shocked by Malone’s revelations that he could merely stammer “wow.” The identity of the ACIP mole remains unclear. However, it seems the federal government still teems with MAHA enemies, because there are a lot of people on Malone’s shit list.

A few days ago, he appeared on Redacted, a “news” podcast that regularly features 9/11-was-an-inside-job technical analysis, hosts intellectual luminaries like raging crackpot antisemite Holocaust denier David Icke (he believes Jews are secretly lizard people), and is a two-person content generating operation for assorted anti-vax, UFO, Egyptian pyramid, freemason, and New World Order globalist conspiracy theories.

In the interview, Malone identifies White House Domestic Policy Council Deputy Director Heidi Overton as the main problem in interfering with Kennedy’s yearned-for destruction of our national immunization program, as she is the lead architect of the MAGA political plan for the midterms. Malone doesn’t stop with Overton. He goes on to blast Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Marty Makary, who was apparently Overton’s postdoctoral mentor, for continuing to block the big reveal of the proof that COVID vaccines supposedly killed at least 10 kids.

He claims he has his own mole, a “Senior FDA Official” who occasionally visits the Malone horse farm to spill tea on some sort of implied behind-the-scenes pro-vaccine Operation Warp Speed conspiracy that is influencing Trump. Malone extensively lamented the many slights and setbacks he’s suffered at the hands of conventional scientists, physicians, public health practitioners, journalists, anyone interested in factual accuracy, and assorted MAHA enemies. There is also some fun discussion about secret government weather control technology, chemtrails, glyphosate, the lab leak theory, and Malone’s favorite villain: the MSM. No, not men who have sex with men, but the mainstream media, who are covering up widespread vaccine injury and death (as well as UFOs and whatever else).

Watching too much Malone content has prompted Angie to write the first ever interior design style power analysis for the MMMWR, examining whether the golden lion head that Malone has hung as a centerpiece between his wall of diploma shelves and his framed other Important Robert Malone Documents succeeds at enhancing his aura of kingly grandeur.

Good news, though. Malone tells Redacted that he’s not leaving public service. He’s merely switching from ACIP to making an AI-powered bioweapon detector for the State Department. We can rest easy knowing that an unstable charlatan prone to rage-quitting has vigilantly set Grok to the task of making sure we catch America’s adversaries with their fingers in the synthetic biology smallpox jar before they can lab leak it at us.

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The White House Sends Its Annual Wish List of HHS Funds to Redirect to Itself

The White House has submitted its annual budget request. This year, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought would like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to get by with $5 billion in fewer grants that the current administration finds ideologically distasteful. They want to shut down several NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs), as well, on the grounds of being excessively DEI. This represents “wasteful spending,” because the Fogarty International Center, which has had an extraordinary impact advancing health both in the US and abroad, supports programs geared toward building global health infrastructure and preventing and treating HIV, all of which promote “dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”

Caption: Only in a MAGA budget do you see a budget justification for a multi-billion dollar cut on the basis of the evidence-free claim that it “broke the trust of the American people”

Last year the White House asked for an even bigger cut. That was firmly rejected by Congress. Last time, the request was more extreme: the NIH budget would be cut by $20 billion, with NIH being reduced to a handful of ICs from its current 27. Congress rejected such a radical cut, but they are still unlikely to accept a substantial cut this year, even if smaller. In the run up to the midterms, most Republicans are not likely to embrace wanton razing of further government services.

Unfortunately, this isn’t particularly good news. The NIH budget is being cut anyway via other mechanisms (mostly just cutting grants or not funding them and then lying about it) by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. analyzed the current state of American science and found that “the U.S. scientific enterprise is threatened with severe damage, even collapse, over just the next year.” Given the extent to which NIH funding has flatlined, the number of staff that have been lost, the number of grants that haven’t been funded, and the dismal future forecast, the prospects for collapse seem more plausible than ever. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

We are working on some ideas. Stay tuned.

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Vote No on Means

Can you believe that it’s APRIL and we still have to talk about MAHA functional medicine grifter Casey Means’ nomination for Surgeon General? We cannot, because it’s quite clear that Means has no business being Surgeon General or leading the entire US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. She did not complete her training. She is not a licensed physician. She does not practice medicine or see patients. She opposes vaccines, doesn’t appear to understand how sex hormones or the endocrine system works, hates glyphosate, and whose entire philosophy can be described as pseudoscientific, inaccurate, and extreme. The Surgeon General is the nation’s top physician. Casey Means fails that basic job description. She earned a medical doctor degree, but she is not a physician by training, practice, or occupation.

For the tenth (?-we’ve lost count) week in a row, cowardice and/or stupidity remain major distinguishing features of the Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee. The stupid faction of HELP Republicans will advance her because they don’t care. The cowardly faction, comprised of Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Susan Collins (R-ME), prefers to wait until her nomination ages as poorly as miasma theory. Cassidy could call for a vote at any time, and has chosen not to, despite the fact that he is a board-certified hepatologist. It’s difficult to understand how he can ignore that Means once tweeted that the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose was a “crime.”

Cassidy likely hasn’t called for a vote to advance Means out of the HELP committee because he is waiting for her nomination to languish until it has to be withdrawn. He is being primaried in Louisiana and Trump has endorsed his opponent (whose campaign is managed by the recently departed Principal Deputy Director of the CDC, Ralph Abraham). He’s likely hoping that Means’ nomination is tanked by the White House, so her figurative low glucose blood won’t be on his hands. Hoping is likely the operative term, because it’s very unclear what the White House will do regarding Casey Means. Two days ago, President Trump threatened to kill an entire civilization and there were genuine concerns that he would launch nukes at Iran. We cannot count on the White House to accurately assess risk or make rational decisions. The HELP committee still needs to act.

So…CALL your Senators. We still won’t have a Surgeon General (we haven’t had one since Vivek Murthy stepped down in 2025). No Surgeon General is better than an incompetent one. If Cassidy can’t show the courage or the commitment to his medical ethical obligations, he isn’t qualified for his job, either. Call your Senators and tell them.

Residents of the US (Senate Switchboard): (202) 224-3121

Residents of ALASKA: (202) 224-6665

Residents of LOUISIANA: (202) 224-5824

Residents of MAINE: (202) 224-2523

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More MAHA, More Measles

It is rapidly becoming unremarkable, but the US has more than 1700 measles cases so far. That is probably underreported compared to the actual number. At this rate, we are a month out from blowing past the record 2,200 measles cases in the US for all 2025.

Going forward, we may start to see really erratic updates to measles case numbers. This is because large outbreaks are reported by CDC, but the data is not primarily collected by them. Local officials in states and counties where outbreaks occur report diseases to CDC officials. Because of lost federal funding to local health departments, limited access to health care, and severely degraded capacity at CDC, there will be large delays and lag times in updating national case numbers. Given that deemphasizing the preventable disease consequences of the MAHA policy experiment so far is a priority for the Trump White House going into the midterms, I expect that there will be no political incentive for CDC to shore up its reporting. In the before times, this would not have mattered, since it would have been a scientific issue for our colleagues at CDC to address. Now, however, that is all that matters, as CDC priorities are determined by the political appointees leading the agency and not the dedicated public servants who remain at the agency, committed to the CDC’s mission and doing their best to fulfill its promise to the American people, even as its leadership tears it to pieces.

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Just when you thought it was safe to forget about the ostriches…

Angie wishes she could, but alas…the ostriches seem to be her eternal curse. CBC’s The Fifth Estate asked if she would participate in an hour-long documentary episode about the H5N1 ostrich freedom debacle and…sure, she was already the subject of an unprecedented campaign in the University of Saskatchewan’s history to have her fired that involved thousands of calls, emails, and social media posts directed at nearly every senior person at the university and her research institute. These were often accompanied by additional suggestions to have her prosecuted, imprisoned, abducted, beaten, tortured, raped, or killed, since that had been already occurring for months thanks to encouragement from professional pubic louse Viva Frei.

Why? For being one of three scientists in Canada who would stand behind the truth that there was real risk to animal and human health from not culling the ostriches, providing receipts that the ostrich farmers were grifters, correctly assessing that refusal to cull risked the entire $2 billion Canadian poultry export market, and observing that the ostrich supporters were rallied by convoyers—also known as traitors—and bankrolled by foreign, far right extremist political interests. Also, Angie not only willingly associated with , but both of them repeatedly made jokes and used profanity when discussing the thousands of abusive messages that she received for accurately analyzing the situation and sharing her own expert opinion.

However, self-censorship is the point of mob abuse, and it usually indicates that the person targeted has something important to say. Self-silencing rarely benefits anyone, least of all the person self-silencing. Angie has never known when to shut up anyway, so she sat for a long interview with Mark Kelley when she was in New York a few weeks back. The episode will be available to stream and will air on CBC at 9 pm on April 10 (Friday). The Fifth Estate team did some incredible reporting and there are going to be some pretty wild ostrich revelations. Don’t miss it!

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Today we discussed the horrific conditions at the Dilley ICE detention facility. Anita has been working closely with a network of physicians, nurses, lawyers, and journalists to get children released from Dilley. Not only are the children kept in horrific conditions and subjected to starvation and abuse, but they have no access to medical care whatsoever. There were two cases of measles reported at Dilley in early March. There have been no further updates. I don’t believe that it was just two cases.

Most of the measles cases in Texas in 2026 are occurring in detention facilities (!). The majority of the reported measles cases are occurring in a different facility—but that requires reporting. There is no testing. There is no facility access. There is no ability to administer medical care, even something as simple as providing Tylenol for a fever. There are long delays to getting medical care from external emergency medical services. There is no vaccination or attempt to vaccinate. Respiratory disease is rampant in the facility. To me, that sounds like an uncontained measles outbreak. Potentially other outbreaks, as well. That sounds like potentially many more than 2 cases, given the ages of some of the kids at the facility (the MMR is recommended at 12 months for most kids, as it is a live attenuated vaccine and presents risks for very young infants). It’s hard to say, however, given there is no capacity for diagnostics beyond saying respiratory disease because there are a bunch of kids who are coughing. Whether it is still spreading or not, that sounds a lot like a serious threat to kids in the facility as well as the community, since there is extensive traffic in and out of Dilley. This is also a serious public health threat, given that vaccination rates continue to decline.

We also discussed the culpability of the CoreCivic board members at the helm of the company. One of the board members is Thurgood Marshall, Jr. He is the son of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the namesake of the Marshall Project, which has done some of the best work out there to quantify the atrocities and human rights violations at Dilley that Anita discussed. I wonder how it hits Thurgood Jr. to see his dad’s practically-synonymous-with-civil-rights name emblazoned above a graph of his own shared culpability in violating said civil rights egregiously:

ICE detention has a long history of being bad for detainees’ health. There have been preventable disease outbreaks in ICE detention facilities as long as there have been ICE detention facilities. But what is different now is the level of aggressive neglect and its application to children. People need to be aware of the danger that children are being subjected to by ICE and their contractors like CoreCivic. They are being starved, abused, and tortured. The ICE detention business model is based on cost-efficiency and dehumanization and the Trump administration has incentive to encourage both. Cutting costs to the point where basic life needs cannot be met is not only an appalling violation of human rights, but a violation of both the US Constitution and international law.

It would cost less than $2 per person to immunize with the MMR, which is standard practice for containing a measles outbreak. Vaccination has not even been offered. One of Anita’s colleagues reported that alert signs at Dilley are outdated, warning of a different (also vaccine-preventable) virus, varicella (chicken pox). The signs were recycled from a previous outbreak years before. The added public health threat that allowing infectious diseases to run rampant in detention facilities, especially in kids, and then moving them around between facilities, sending them home, or deporting them is right in line with the MAHA playbook: cull the weak and make everyone so sick that they are unable to stand in the MAGA regime’s way. This also presents a significant national security threat, by the way—and we are already in a very perilous situation given degraded health emergency response capacity.

But it’s true that the walls around the Trump regime are starting to crumble. The more Americans see what MAGA values are, the more they realize that they are as un-American as you can get. That’s why I’m really grateful to Steve and Dean for having Anita and I on to get this out there: the more people know about what’s happening at Dilley, the better our chances of stopping it and holding the people carrying it out accountable.

A quick correction: Anita had heard just before coming on the show about a 2-year-old detainee who had been given an ankle monitor. This was a miscommunication and it was the child’s parent who was fitted for the monitor, not the child. Apologies for the error, but we do strive for accuracy.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for joining us!

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This week, is on a well-deserved break. On Friday, Taking Shots will be guest co-hosted with our colleague and friend, Dr. . Juliet is a virologist who specializes in host inflammatory responses to respiratory virus infection and vaccination, and she is also far more talented than Angie at cloning. Come for the expertise on public health and immunization and stay to watch Angie get dunked on repeatedly via reminders of molecular virology failures from two decades ago.

Close Dilley ICE Detention Center

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention has been a menace to public health since the agency’s founding under President Barack Obama. Since then, ICE detention facilities have failed to provide basic medical care for detainees under administrations from both parties.

However, now that ICE has been transformed into the modern day equivalent of the MAGA Gestapo, the medical conditions faced by detainees are more horrific and inexcusable than ever. Preventable disease outbreaks, which have always had too much of a foothold in ICE detention, are commonplace. Detainees are not offered adequate food or water or essential medications, much less immunizations. And we are breaking records for the number of kids being detained. In a little over one year, the Trump administration detained nearly 4,000 children.

The Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas is the largest facility for family detention. Conditions described by the Marshall Project would be illegal for laboratory mice, much less human children. Children are kept in overcrowded conditions and deprived of diversion, education, food, water, sleep, and medical care, sometimes for weeks or months. The suffering being inflicted upon these kids is unimaginable.

Our colleague Dr. is a critical care pediatrician who has been acting as a medical advocate for these kids, working closely with a local network of charities, lawyers, and elected officials to get them out of detention. Respiratory illness was widespread at the facility at the time of the measles outbreak. Measles is a respiratory virus. There is no ability to test for anything, much less measles (which is not always immediately identifiable by the rash and which is not always easy to visualize on darker skin tones). There are no staff capable of providing even rudimentary health care. CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates Dilley, clearly does not incentivize the staff to care. Medical treatment is only available in the event of an emergency. It must need to be a very serious emergency, since Anita has been working tirelessly to get kids out of Dilley and has had children going days without eating before being released. In some cases, children have had multiple seizures or severe vomiting episodes prior to emergency medical services being called.

We got in touch with Anita to see if she had any insight what happened with the measles outbreak reported at Dilley in early March. Given the conditions she described, our best guess is that the measles outbreak at Dilley is likely still ongoing. Measles is an incredibly contagious virus, conditions are ideal for its spread in detention, and there is a steady supply of susceptible children entering and leaving the facility. Since access to Dilley is heavily restricted, even to lawyers and congresspeople, nobody knows how many measles cases might be active within.

Petitions may sometimes feel futile, but they can bring a lot of attention to an issue. In the Trump administration, negative attention is one way to effect change. That is why we signed this petition. This can inflict grave or even lethal injury on thousands of children and needs to be stopped immediately.

We were thrilled to be described as among the petition’s “latest big name signatories.” Join us in standing up to say that we are not a nation of people that will allow children to be injured or killed because our politicians do not value their humanity enough to provide them with basic necessities like food or medicine. It is against our values to imprison children and expose them to deadly viruses because we don’t care enough not to. Dilley is an affront to everything that makes us American and it’s critical that we let our leaders know. Sign the petition and demand that Dilley be closed. We are teaming up with to discuss further later this week—stay tuned for details.

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Podcast Jay’s Dual Rule Continues

Last week, the deadline came and went for nominating a permanent replacement for Susan Monarez as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Monarez was fired last August for refusing to rubber stamp dangerous anti-vax policies demanded by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and per the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 the government has 210 days to nominate a replacement. explains on our last Taking Shots show:

We’re now on day 216 and Chris Klomp, the new wunderkind management consultant brought in to slather Kennedy’s viper pit of snake oil and cod liver oil with a veneer of competence and professionalism, has yet to name a replacement. This is likely because the only people who are sufficiently qualified to be confirmed by the Senate are insufficiently deranged to meet Kennedy’s demands for MAGA Gold Standard Science. So, as always, they are just going to see how long they can get away with it.

It is unclear if National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya, who had been pulling double duty as Acting CDC Director, is still technically entitled to that role. He is still acting as CDC Director, but I don’t think he’s allowed to still call himself Acting CDC Director. In any case, HHS insists it’s legal for Podcast Jay to continue running things at two major, extremely complex health agencies. As former CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease Director Demetre Daskalakis told NPR, both of these tasks are impossible for one person to successfully carry out. From what we can tell, this is because he is bland enough to not appear as unhinged to the public as others in federal leadership, so he is seen as more scientific than his counterparts. He will draw less attention as he helps deprive the American people of essential services while illegally redirecting budgets meant to safeguard our health to the administration.

The Boring Method of NIH’s Demise

It seems that Bhattacharya is also acting as proactively at CDC as he has done at FDA when it comes to distributing funds to help projects move along sustainably, which is to say not at all. Projects “floundered” under both his and his predecessor Jim O’Neill’s leadership, due to negligent management of agency budgets. Speaking of O’Neill, he’s the nominee for Director of the National Science Foundation, a position he, like all loyal MAHA men, is completely unqualified for. Let your Senator know that when his nomination hearing comes around (it hasn’t been scheduled yet), they should vote no on Jim O’Neill.

O’Neill and Bhattacharya are both minions serving the larger political goals of the MAGA and MAHA movements. That is ultimately to cut the NIH budget and redistribute it to the White House, as prescribed by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought’s plan for destroying American democracy and centralizing power. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former career NIH Program Officer, just released a new analysis of funding forecasts that have been archived (cancelled), including many with no obvious “DEI” framing that would run afoul of MAHA censors. Programs about health topics of obvious importance, like suicide prevention, Alzheimer’s disease, opioid addiction, pediatric cancer, and dental research, and workforce training including nuclear and hazardous materials safety training for health care workers, first responders, and researchers.

Sifting through data about how grantmaking paper trails are being disrupted isn’t exactly most people’s idea of a thrilling beach read, but that is what we need to pay attention to. We are grateful for experts like Ginexi, who is a scientist with exceptional fluency in the complexities of NIH fund administration, because these are the banal bureaucratic mechanisms that spell the doom of biomedical science. As boring as it may be for most people who don’t get NIH funding to contemplate, the consequences are so severe that EVERYONE needs to be aware of this. If we don’t, we will see our entire scientific enterprise get quietly archived into oblivion or trapped in bureaucratic purgatory.

Congress is authorized to appropriate funds and HHS officials, like Bhattacharya, are Constitutionally required to spend the money as appropriated. Pay attention to how CDC and NIH spend the funds that Congress appropriated for specific projects.

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For the Last Time (Not the Last Time), It Wasn’t a Lab Leak

Angie’s prior efforts to debunk lab leak conspiracy theorist Matt Ridley speaking at NIH failed to deter Ridley and Podcast Jay from proclaiming intellectual victory for the conspiracy theorists in the great COVID origins war. It was successful in the sense that we had a surprisingly great viewer turnout for a nearly five hour stream. It was not successful in the sense that we have now reached the “annoy the living shit out of me with a crappy article by the mansplainiest statistician to never meet a reply button he didn’t want to smash.

If you understood that last sentence, I’m sorry, my intention was not to trigger your descent into the futile and deeply tedious rabbit hole of fourth string lab leaker mathematical navel-gazing. I was merely trying to convey how fundamentally irritating it is trying to have a serious discussion about my own research without having a tinfoil-wearing leaker pop in with a bunch of ResearchGate links and a confident declaration of having debunked the Zoonati yet again. Here is the great debunking, if you care to investigate the devastating scientific takedown of our virus origins research in Econ Journal Watch, which is essentially a blog devoted to scholarly commentary on articles published in economics journals. They don’t have a dedicated external review process, so this is not the same level of rigor as what our papers went through at journals better known for publishing important scholarship on virology.

Anyway, some people still do find this persuasive, although it appears to be mostly know-it-all men who run around on Substack being smug and deflecting from their total lack of expertise by babbling about Bayesian priors. Unfortunately, I still hear it enough that I felt it was important to summarize what the evidence actually shows in an accessible way: the pandemic emerged in humans via zoonotic spillover at the Huanan market. Angie goes over all the evidence here and explains why its incompatible with a lab leak, without getting too technical. So if you have a loved one who is afflicted with lab leak derangement syndrome, please feel free to send them this article:

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Surgeon General’s Warning About the Surgeon General Nominee

So much time has passed since her hearing in late February that it’s hard to believe that Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee Chair Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a board-certified hepatologist, has not called for a vote and cast the first no for Casey Means to be confirmed as Surgeon General.

She is grossly unqualified. If you don’t believe us, you should ask former Surgeon General Jerome Adams. He was appointed by Trump in his first term, and was extremely qualified for the job. He carried out his duties seriously, with an eye towards evidence and a commitment to service. Adams has been tirelessly presenting receipts on why Means is not just a bad choice, she is such an unqualified one that she would actually endanger those taking her advice. Don’t let his efforts be in vain!

Call your Senator, especially if they are Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), or Susan Collins (R-ME).

Residents of the US (Senate Switchboard): (202) 224-3121

Residents of ALASKA: (202) 224-6665

Residents of LOUISIANA: (202) 224-5824

Residents of MAINE: (202) 224-2523

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I haven’t been feeling well lately and haven’t been up to throwing as many punches at fascists as I’d like, which is also why it’s taken a few days—okay, more than a week—to get this up. However, when I learned that Lord Matt Ridley had been invited to speak at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) about his search for the origins of COVID-19 by NIH Director “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya, I reacted like John Wick after his dog got killed. I felt a return of the fighting spirit that earned me rave lab leak reviews like this one.

I was filled with the familiar yet profound irritation that only the ardent believers in the lab leak hypothesis can elicit. They have been going after me for being the Minister of Propaganda for the Zoonati—like the Illuminati except we orchestrate our sinister globalist agenda by studying zoonosis and publicly commenting on it—for years because I wrote peer-reviewed papers on the topic. So I recruited two of my Zoonati comrades and our friends at , Stand Up for Science, and and we spent nearly 5 hours fact-checking the entire thing. There were a lot of facts to check.

In fact, Ridley’s talk was so devoid of facts, expertise, or good faith, I got pretty fired up about it. Excessive emotion is one of my many disqualifying flaws, according to Ridley, a trait I share with climate scientist Michael Mann, environmental activists, trans people, and the terrorists in Hamas.

The only thing extreme about my emotional state with Ridley is my epic level of annoyance with this obnoxious man, who seems to think that constantly lying about everything from his qualifications to his basic understanding of virology to his intent in advancing right wing political interests in a foreign country is okay so long as you do it politely. He gets away with it by gaslighting his opponents with this civility horseshit.

In my view, it is decidedly uncivil to accuse people of starting a pandemic that killed 20 million people without any evidence to support the allegation, as Ridley has. He insinuates that the pandemic was started by a group of my American colleagues, namely Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, in collaboration with Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Ridley implies this was all funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci, who also compelled my Zoonati co-author Kristian Andersen to help him cover it up by publishing a peer-reviewed academic commentary. He further accuses me and many of my colleagues of participating in the ensuing larger conspiracy to protect virology research, which has involved everyone from top officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) to Xi Jinping to the entire Biden administration to me and my colleagues. He presents no evidence that any of this occurred.

I take issue with Ridley framing a pseudoscientific sermon on his conspiratorial beliefs as a serious scholarly talk, considering I have known pretty confidently since 2022 that it was probably not a lab leak. That’s not because I can prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” or whatever pseudo-legal standards that top lab leakers apply to distract from their lack of evidence. Scientists know that you cannot prove a negative and I know better than to waste my time trying. We can never prove that it wasn’t a lab leak. But we can use the scientific method to see what the evidence tells us about what it was: lab leak, zoonosis in the market, or any of the other sometimes wild (shout out to my fave, panspermia theory—space COVID!) but not very plausible hypotheses.

The totality of the evidence—and there’s a lot—is consistent with spillover from animals to humans at the Huanan market in Wuhan, China, under extremely similar circumstances as SARS-CoV-1. It is incompatible with all lab leak hypotheses proposed. It’s true that the evidence base is incomplete (the WHO origins report mapped out gaps to fill), but that does not mean it is uninformative. It’s very clear what it suggests, if you look only at the evidence and resist Ridley’s urge to indulge in unsupported speculation. This is what it shows.

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Five Reasons Why We Think It Was Zoonotic

1. Early cases cluster around the Huanan market

In 2021, our first Zoonati initiative as a larger group of collaborators was a review on origins that was published in Cell. During the process of writing, we observed that reported influenza-like illness didn’t start rising in Wuhan until January 2020, and that reported cases radiated outward from the north side of the Yangtze River. Same with mortality, which increased a couple weeks later and followed the same pattern.

The Huanan market is on the north side of the Yangtze River, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on the south side, about 10 miles away. Chronologically, these increases in hospitalization for respiratory illness and mortality are consistent with lag times following COVID outbreaks. It’s hard not to notice that both COVID cases and excess mortality begin as small clusters north of the Yangtze River that radiate outward over time. This is consistent with an outbreak beginning with a small cluster of cases in one place and gradually spreading in all directions as time passes.

This observation was interesting, so we kept digging and decided to be more analytically rigorous. We extracted the coordinates of early cases of COVID-19 (reported both by Chinese and international sources like the WHO. One of our co-authors painstakingly teased out the timeline of early cases. We superimposed these on a map based on their geospatial coordinates and set out to test the hypothesis that early cases were near the market by chance or because of biased sample collection. We found that the earliest COVID cases form a target, with the Huanan market being the bullseye. We published this study in Science in 2022.

Some people think that, because the market was identified early on by Chinese health authorities as associated with many cases, cases in other parts of Wuhan were missed. They think the concentration of samples at the market render our analysis insignificant because of “ascertainment bias,” the idea that the market was preferentially sampled and thus the data is incomplete and can never be conclusive.

However, if this is true, then cases with no epidemiological link to the market should be randomly distributed around the city. They weren’t. The statistical association with the market is even stronger when all the cases with links to the market are excluded.

Some have suggested that the market was a superspreader event. If this were true, the outbreak would already be underway in Wuhan when the first case linked to the Huanan market appeared. A study testing Wuhan blood bank samples from almost 45,000 donors for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 found nothing until January 2020, a timeline consistent with emergence in late 2019. There is no evidence that anyone in Wuhan had SARS-CoV-2 prior to cases emerging at the Huanan market.

We also know that many of the early cases went to hospitals around the entire city, which has a population of 11 million people. They lived near the Huanan market, whether they went there or not. It seems implausible that if they were getting treatment wherever and they were presumably mobile before that, and yet they all still lived in the immediate vicinity of the Huanan market. The Huanan market was big, but it was by no means the biggest market in Wuhan—not even close. It was, however, one of four that sold live animals. That’s not a coincidence. It’s an epidemiological pattern.

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2. Genetic evidence proves the virus was in the part of the market where they sold live animals

The Huanan market was closed on December 31, 2019. This was the day that most of the world found out about the outbreak via this unassuming ProMED-Mail update.

Chinese officials rushed to respond the second there was even a hint of a SARS-related coronavirus. The SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks were a major impetus for China to invest in science and virology research in particular. These outbreaks were still fresh in the national memory, even after 20 years. SARS-CoV-1 spilled over to humans by infected masked palm civets, raccoon dogs, and ferret badgers in live animal markets in Foshan and Guangzhou. The markets remained open for months before they were recognized as the source. This allowed for repeated cross-species transmission, which may have also included transmission from people back to animals in the markets.

The mortality rate of SARS-CoV-1 was 10%. The prospect of SARS-CoV-1 becoming a pandemic was truly frightening. SARS-CoV-1 spread in multiple waves, with secondary cases popping up all over outside of Asia. There was a big outbreak in Canada in early 2003. A lot of transmission occurred in hospital settings. It was not immediately obvious that the virus had been introduced through intermediate live animal hosts. When that was discovered, the Chinese government pledged to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade, although there were concerns about loopholes and enforcement, as well as resistance in the industry. This incredible story from 2003 quotes an animal trader saying that SARS didn’t come from animals, but from foreign germ warfare programs. Evil-government-doing-a-lab-leak has been popular for deflecting blame throughout sarbecovirus emergence history.

The wildlife trade is a multibillion dollar industry in China and is culturally significant and important for food security in some places. That’s why the Chinese government acted swiftly when SARS-CoV-2 was first identified as a SARS-related coronavirus to shut down the market. That might also be why Chinese officials repeatedly denied the involvement of the live animal trade, rapidly shut down farms, sat on environmental sequencing data for years that linked the beginning of the pandemic to the Huanan market, and still have not fully shared all the data requested by WHO. We knew that there were animals at the Huanan market from this paper, in which an international team of researchers catalogued exactly what species were sold there, and how many, through November 2019. We also already know some of those species are susceptible to infection with SARS-CoV-2 and can transmit it to other animals, including raccoon dogs (but also civets, foxes, and minks).

As soon as the Huanan market was linked to the outbreak, it was shut down and decontaminated. Health officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CCDC) collected environmental swabs from around the market and sequenced them to look for virus. When we got hold of this data in a leaked report first published by The Epoch Times, we had data about positivity for virus and location.

So we mapped the virus positivity data out over the market and found that the samples clustered in the southwestern corner. We found additional documentary evidence—administrative records, fines and citations, permits, and so forth—that this was the part of the market where animals were sold.

But we already knew where animals were sold in the market. Our co-author Eddie Holmes, who also is probably one of the world’s greatest living experts on virus evolution in different hosts, visited the Huanan market in 2014. His colleagues at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control took him there as an example of a place where a pandemic could emerge because unregulated live animal sales occurred there. Eddie took some pictures of the animals on sale, including this picture of a caged raccoon dog kept on top of some birds. That same stall had five positive swabs.

Did Eddie Holmes take a picture of the stall where SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from an animal—maybe a raccoon dog, maybe something else—into the human population? We will likely never know, but the evidence certainly points toward that exact scenario.

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3. Genetic evidence proves susceptible hosts were present in the section of the market where they sold live animals and where the virus was

In March 2023, I was in my lab meeting when my Zoonati chat started blowing up. The virus sequence repository GISAID had posted FASTQ (raw data) files of the Huanan market samples. Previously, the assembled virus sequences were posted on GISAID, but not the raw data that would contain sequences (called “reads”) from potential host species. We set to work downloading nearly 3 Tb of data file by file.

The next morning, our co-author Alex Crits-Christoph sent a mystery sequence and told us to BLAST it (Google for sequences). It was one of those holy shit scientific moments that all the Zoonati who happened to be in the chat experienced at once when the BLAST results returned a full raccoon dog mitochondrial genome from the reads off a swab taken at Eddie’s stall.

This is hard genetic evidence that a raccoon dog was there to deposit its genetic material on that cart, which was eventually swabbed, sequenced, and turned into the data we fed into BLAST. It also proves that it was there recently enough that it didn’t degrade much, since Alex assembled the whole thing.

In my lab, we separately BLASTed the entire mitochondrial genome against species reported to be at the market, and found similar results. This showed that it wasn’t just residual mitochondrial DNA present, but sequences across the genome. We notified the CCDC of our findings and invited them to collaborate with us. We also notified WHO, since this work had obvious importance to pandemic origins.

It is too much to include here, but this triggered an international incident that resulted in all 19 of us who had downloaded FASTQ files to be kicked off of GISAID until the CCDC authors finally published their findings and shared the full dataset. They used mitochondrial barcoding to identify different species around the market. They also found DNA from wildlife hosts known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 in the southwestern corner.

We went on to use mitochondrial sequences to identify tons of other species throughout the market. We assembled genome sequences from other viruses that happened to be there, including a number of viruses specific to wildlife species we also identified. This puts genetic evidence of susceptible animals at the market, in exactly the part of the market where most of the virus was found. It is not a stretch to imagine how it got there, considering this is exactly what happened with SARS-CoV-1.

The lab leak world melted down in 2023 when I told Katie Wu at The Atlantic that the only real plausible explanation for SARS-CoV-2 genetic material being found in the same place as genetic material from a susceptible intermediate host was it being from an infected animal.

This is not the same thing as saying we found an infected animal. We will not find an infected animal unless we can access samples collected directly from the animals, and there is no evidence such samples were ever taken. We cannot analyze data that wasn’t collected or evaluate evidence that doesn’t exist. But even though we don’t have this, we do have other types of data. Scientists use data to develop hypotheses that explain what happened.

Genetic material from the virus was found in the same place—often in the same swabs—as susceptible host species. How do we explain that data? Viruses do not materialize out of thin air. They can only come from infected host cells. As someone who has devoted my career to studying how viruses infect and cause disease in different hosts, I know that the simplest, most likely explanation for finding RNA from the virus comingled with DNA from susceptible animals, some of which were the same species being handled in the same circumstances as SARS-CoV-1, is an infected animal. It is a hypothesis built on the data, but it is not proven with the data that we have. It is my opinion as a virologist who studies this topic, despite Ridley’s lamentations about the assault on truth in his tale of woe about a friend who found the article more persuasive than he did, that an infected host animal is the most likely explanation for this evidence. If Ridley thinks that is wrong, he is welcome to provide evidence to demonstrate that claim.

I was deeply vexed once again by what has become a pattern of bad faith misinterpretation of normal scientific methods applied to complex questions, so my lab continued this work. I presented my preliminary findings at a meeting in December 2024, and it was covered by both Science and Nature. We used a combination of experimental testing in the lab and our expertise in host transcriptomics to find signatures that indicate an infected host. This will not prove an infected host, no matter what. But it will provide further evidence that we can use to deduce what happened, in the absence of the data that would be conclusive.

We worked with a collaborator to complete some validation experiments, but publication has been unfortunately delayed by events outside my control, including a fairly serious health issue, the rise of fascism, and the existential threat it presents to my country and my profession. However, this work is very important and it is a scientific priority for me, as our findings provide further support to the hypothesis that infected wild animals were present at the Huanan market. We’re finishing it up!

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4. There were two separate spillovers

There were two lineages of virus present at the Huanan market, called “A” and “B” (yes, not creative, I know; they are alternatively called “S” and “L”). These two lineages represent two divergent evolutionary paths the virus took. They are distinguished by their sequences. When RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 replicate, they make mistakes as they copy their genomes. These are mutations. Sometimes these are under positive selection (they give the virus an advantage) and become fixed. Sometimes they are just mistakes that are not under selection or are under negative selection, and they appear transiently, and can revert or mutate to something else. All of this mutation results in an elaborate genetic fingerprint that can be used to trace SARS-CoV-2 as it spread from person to person. We can use phylogenetic analysis to look into the past of any given virus, provided we have enough sequence data. SARS-CoV-2 caused a pandemic that infected millions. We have a lot of sequence data.

My colleagues in the evolutionary virology department over at Zoonati HQ were working on a model that could simulate various spillover scenarios by analyzing sequences from early cases, as well as the millions of sequences that followed as SARS-CoV-2 spread around the world, acquiring tell-tale mutations as it went. Their work showed that single spillover scenarios were not likely, meaning lineage A and B did not diverge in humans. They have gone on to show this more rigorously. If they didn’t diverge in humans, then they either diverged in an intermediate host or in the lab.

The known cases associated with the market were all lineage B. However, the market hypothesis predicts that both lineages would be present at Huanan market, since they diverged in a host being sold there. This prediction came true when the CCDC first released their preprint in February 2022 and revealed a lineage A sequence at the market. This is consistent with the virus diverging in intermediate animal host(s), and then spilling over into humans at least twice, one to two weeks apart. I say “at least” because the lineages represent the two times we know about, since sustained human-to-human transmission was established and we can study all the sequences of the viruses that evolved from these initial introductions.

A lab leak scenario that fits with these two spillovers is much more farfetched. In order for these data to be consistent with a lab leak, someone working at the WIV, which is over 10 miles away on the other side of the Yangtze River, gets infected with lineage B at work. They go straight to the Huanan market without infecting anyone else along the way. They only infect other people at or near the Huanan market. Then, one to two weeks later, the same thing happens with lineage A.

Almost anything is possible. It’s possible that Ridley will realize the error of his ways and apologize for comparing me to Hamas because I swore on Twitter, but even compared to that, this seems pretty farfetched. Even if you are willing to believe biosafety practices are so bad that lab leaks happen constantly at WIV, how do you explain getting two independently infected lab workers all the way to the market without infecting anyone else at work, home, or anywhere else in Wuhan they happened to go? They are really good at accidental virus infection at work, but not anywhere else? Contrary to claims made by Ridley, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report declassified in 2023 verifies that there were no lab workers confirmed to have COVID-19. One of the accused lab workers, Ben Hu, has vehemently denied getting sick at all in late 2019 and further verified Shi’s claim that he tested negative for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in March 2020, meaning he had never been exposed to the virus.

Does it make more sense that this technically possible but very unlikely dual lab leak occurred? Or does it make more sense that SARS-CoV-2—a virus that is very good at infecting a LOT of different species without any adaptation—found its way into an intermediate host on sale at Huanan market, and then found its way into humans in a city of 11 million people, where sustained spread and further adaptation could occur? The latter scenario is exactly what happened with SARS-CoV-1. The evidence suggests that zoonotic spillover is also what happened with SARS-CoV-2.

5. The evidence is not consistent with any plausible lab leak scenario

The fact is that there is only one piece of hard evidence consistent with a lab leak: the pandemic started in Wuhan and there is a lab that studies coronaviruses there. There are labs that study coronaviruses in every major city in China. Coronavirus research drove heavy investment in Chinese science as a result of the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak. We have many Chinese colleagues who have contributed enormously to our understanding of coronaviruses in general. Wuhan is not special in that it has labs studying SARS-related coronaviruses.

There is no other evidence supporting a lab leak besides speculative or selective interpretation of cherry-picked data. That hasn’t changed since 2020. Back in 2020, that is all Kristian Andersen knew when he looked at the sequence to SARS-CoV-2 and thought it was weird and possibly artificial. So he did what scientists do: consulted experts and collaborated to analyze the data and eventually wrote a paper on it. This paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, is one of the most downloaded, talked about, and cited publications from the entire pandemic. It looks at the genome sequence and assess three hypotheses: 1. Natural selection in an animal prior to zoonosis, 2. Natural selection in humans after zoonosis, 3. Selection in a lab after passage.

In the course of writing the paper and analyzing the data, the Proximal Origin authors changed their minds. They found scientific explanations for the features they previously thought were weird. They described this in the paper, which underwent peer review. It’s held up well, considering how little the authors knew about SARS-CoV-2 at the time.

“Since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD (receptor binding domain of spike) and polybasic cleavage site (furin cleavage site), in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

-The Proximal Origin conclusion that fueled a thousand angry leaker tweets

The data is still incomplete. WHO has called for China to share their data fully. That may never happen. We need to do the best that we can with what we have. Fortunately, we have a lot. It all points to the market. My co-author Mike Worobey and I have written multiple pieces, including for The Globe and Mail (shout out to Canada) and Foreign Policy. We’ve all given many interviews. No matter how much evidence we share, how hard we endeavor to explain it, or how many papers we publish, the lab leak faithful continue to insist that our work is shoddy, unsound, and even fraudulent. I have been given a great deal of feedback about my many inadequacies and failures as a scientist, virologist, advocate, trusted expert, and human being, including about and from Bhattacharya, as well. I am “unhinged and nasty,” and incompetent because I disagree that he has anything useful to contribute whatsoever except passive-aggressive whining that it’s rude of me to call out the fact that he is an unqualified liar with no evidence to support his claims.

There is one piece of evidence that would make me immediately convert to lab leaker: evidence that the WIV possessed a progenitor virus (a virus that is similar enough to SARS-CoV-2 that it was used to create SARS-CoV-2). There is no evidence that WIV had ever collected a virus similar enough that it could have been passaged, engineered, or otherwise become SARS-CoV-2. We can’t prove this evidence doesn’t exist, but I think it is telling that the closest relative was found by a different team of scientists in bats in Laos. These viruses could not become SARS-CoV-2 either, but the point is that the WIV didn’t even have the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 in their collection, much less a progenitor.

Ridley’s talk contained all the classics in the things-that-might-have-happened-in-Matt-Ridley’s-imagination-but-didn’t JAQ off (just asking questions) bingo card about origins science:

• There’s a furin cleavage site with two CGG arginine codons in a row, and according to Nobel laureate David Baltimore, this is a “smoking gun”. What if this is the molecular virology equivalent of writing “Shi Zhengli was here” in genetic code and then what if it leaked?

• What if Shi and Daszak went virus hunting and found the SARS-CoV-2 progenitor virus and kept it a secret and then what if it leaked?

• There was an unfunded application to DARPA that talked about sticking furin cleavage sites into other coronavirus backbones. What if Baric and Dazsak dug $14 million out from their couch cushions to do the work anyway and then what if it leaked?

• What if Fauci funded biodefense and was concerned about emerging pandemics because he was actually a sociopath and secret bioterrorist and was getting paid by Big Pharma and the globalists to fund dangerous gain-of-function (DGOF) research (juicing up viruses to make them deadlier and more transmissible) and then what if it leaked?

• What if Ralph Baric was doing secret DGOF and made SARS-CoV-2 and then what if it leaked?

• What if Baric was a spy and gave his DGOF recipes to Shi and what if she made SARS-CoV-2 and then what if it leaked?

• What if (invented complaint about Baric, Daszak, Shi, or Fauci) proves that they were doing DGOF with other totally different viruses but what if they secretly had SARS-CoV-2 and DGOFed it and then what if it leaked?

• Because lab leaks have happened before, what if they actually were happening all the time because biosafety level 2 (BSL2) is inherently unsafe (it is the US standard for handling bat SARS-related coronaviruses per the Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories, 6th Edition) and what if they were DGOFing SARS-CoV-2 at BSL2 and then what if it leaked?

Ridley loves to talk biosafety despite never having worked in any type of containment lab, nor taking anyone seriously who has, so I’ll just close this off with footage of me from 2024 demonstrating both proper biocontainment practices for working with SARS-CoV-2 in my lab, as well as going over the evidence for the origin of the pandemic. Who are you going to believe, the unqualified British pheasant mating expert and popular book author, who is just going to ask leading questions about speculative scenarios he made up? Or me, the virologist who actually has made genuine, evidence-based contributions to our understanding of how the pandemic began?

Yes, I know I am not a neutral party since we’re talking about my skills relative to an officious, interloping, deeply overconfident amateur, but I’m willing to wager all the coal in the earth beneath Ridley’s ancestral manor lands that I have more experience handling pandemic viruses than the 5th Viscount.

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Why is NIH hosting lab leak lectures?

I don’t know Ridley’s motivation besides being a pompous literal coal baron who led the UK into the 2007 financial crisis with the first run on a British bank in 130 years, and who expects to be taken seriously despite the fact that he seems like a foppish secondary antagonist in a forgettable Dr. Who episode. Unfortunately, Ridley is taken seriously by his fellow pompous, insubstantial windbags, and even more unfortunately, they are the windbags in charge who invited him.

It is no mystery why Podcast Jay rolled out the red carpet for the distinguished Viscount despite his lack of qualifications or relevant expertise on the topic. He knows that Matt Ridley is writing fiction. He shows up to launder conspiracist lies through an indignant upper class British accent in service of Bhattacharya’s ultimate goal: to declare all NIH research reckless, dangerous, and absolutely the worst thing we could possibly do. Better redirect the money for these irresponsible Alzheimer’s, HIV, and diabetes treatments to the White House. President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought will know what to do with all those funds.

Indeed, Matt King Coal dutifully validated Podcast Jay’s revisionist history that prior to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) regime, pandemic preparedness in the US proceeded as follows:

1. Go virus hunting

2. Unrestricted DGOF: VIROLOGIST PARADISE

3. Make vaccines against our new DGOFed superviruses for the strategic national stockpile

4. CASH IN WITH BIG PHARMA

This is not remotely true. Most pandemic preparedness concerned hospitals and health care infrastructure and services. Of the research funded by NIAID, development of new vaccine technologies like mRNA against known pathogens (flu, MERS-CoV, RSV, CMV, etc) was a much bigger component of pandemic preparedness than virus discovery. Bhattacharya has eagerly participated in cutting this research already, then claiming that it’s because mRNA vaccines “lost trust.”

However, Ridley happily aided Bhattacharya in lending credibility to this idea by getting on stage and claiming with no evidence or any relevant expertise whatsoever that the pandemic began through efforts to prevent pandemics, because that is going to be the excuse for gutting the NIH.

Many people are unaware that last May President Trump’s Executive Order on Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research put major restrictions in place that can be interpreted to effectively ban a significant chunk of research. Not just virology research; ALL biomedical research.

When the COVID.gov website transformed into the LAB LEAK cautionary tale of design and font choices that it is today, I finally understood the endgame of the lab leak misery that has tormented me for the past six years:

1. If the pandemic was caused by a lab leak, then we need to shut down the labs

2. If pandemics are caused by lab leaks, then we will no longer be in danger of pandemics if we shut down the labs

3. Lab leaks are the result of research, which has many risks

4. If we want to minimize risks, we should stop doing research and just get healthy

5. MAHA!!!!

This “pandemic preparedness” plan and approach to risk mitigation, otherwise known as “doing nothing so we can illegally impound the Congressionally appropriated NIH budget”, is completely divorced from reality, evidence, and the interests of the American people.

And think about this: what if he is wrong? What if lab leaks aren’t a big pandemic risk, but natural pandemics are? Are you willing to trust $48 billion of your tax dollars to Podcast Jay, who says to trust him and Ridley, despite neither of them giving any reason to do so. If the NIH continues to lose its functionality in advancing American scientific research, we will hardly be in a position to stand up another Operation Warp Speed or respond at all to an emerging outbreak, wherever it comes from. The fact is, all of the data also shows that naturally emerging viruses are a much bigger threat than lab leaks. All of the emerging threats we face today: H5N1, dengue virus, West Nile virus, Chikungunya virus, Zika virus, MERS-CoV, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus, mpox, Rift Valley fever virus, and many, many more including those we haven’t discovered yet did not come from labs. They came from the most unregulated, least responsible DGOF virologist of all time: Mother Nature.

If H5N1 gained the ability to transmit between people tomorrow and maintained its mortality rate in a preimmune population, it would kill 2% of infected people, or about 165 million people worldwide in a pandemic. That’s a lot more than COVID. If we waste all our resources avoiding imaginary threats presented by imaginary virologists doing imaginary research, we will have nothing left to counter the very real threats that we face. Using “lab leak” to justify the theft of the NIH budget will make us terribly vulnerable to medical emergencies, and the potential to massively amplify the toll of another pandemic.

We should not have to spend an afternoon correcting the NIH Director as he lies about our research and about other NIH-funded work. We should not have an NIH Director who accuses his colleagues—or anyone—of starting a pandemic that killed millions around the world without evidence to back up such a serious accusation. We should not have an NIH Director who invites propagandists like Ridley to distract from the fact that he is actively destroying the agency he has been tasked with leading. His leadership has been characterized thus far by inaction, double-speak, corruption, cronyism, political partisanship, and the annihilation of America’s entire biomedical future.

In my professional field, whether you are talking about grants, publication, or any type of scientific, evidence-based reporting, truthfulness is key. In every research ethics training I have ever taken, you learn that lying is a form of scientific misconduct. Fabricating data, misleading, manipulating data, and being intentionally untruthful about your data is scientific misconduct. Bhattacharya engages in it regularly.

The evidence is clear: all of the evidence aligns with SARS-CoV-2 emerging into the human population by zoonotic spillover at the Huanan market. None of the evidence, except for the pandemic starting in Wuhan, is consistent with a lab leak. We need to understand how pandemics begin to effectively respond to them, much less prevent them. My co-authors and I have done that, as have many of our colleagues.

The NIH Director (and Acting CDC Director) are rejecting this in favor of politics. It will cripple our health and economy in the process, and slow our engine of American innovation to a grinding halt. We will all become sicker, not more healthy. By using the lab leak to justify defunding research across the board, we will shut off our pipeline of new medicines and vaccines. We will be sitting ducks for the next pandemic, with nothing ready to go, and no ability to study anything quickly enough to make a difference. The body count will be astronomical if this happens with H5N1.

Bhattacharya cannot be allowed to inflict such a profound injury on Americans using the pretext that he just thinks it came from a lab because he doesn’t like the scientists who showed evidence that, once again, his ideas about pandemics are wrong. Like the lab leak hypothesis itself, he has failed testing. He has no justification for his position. His leadership endangers us all. Bhattacharya must be removed.

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Key papers and reviews (not comprehensive):

Andersen et al, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Medicine, 2020: The paper that started the Zoonati, it shows that SARS-CoV-2 was not likely the result of engineering or passaging in a lab

World Health Organization, WHO-convened Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part, 2021: WHO China mission from January 2021

Xiao et al, Animal sales from Wuhan wet markets immediately prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientific Reports, 2021: Observed evidence of animals at Huanan market

Holmes et al, The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review. Cell, 2021: Evidence review

Worobey, Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan. Science, 2021: Identification, timing, and location of early cases

Worobey et al, The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Science, 2022: Early cases cluster around the Huanan market, even after controlling for bias. Animals cluster in the southwestern corner of the market.

Pekar et al, The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2. Science, 2022: Evidence and timing of two spillovers, about 1-2 weeks apart.

Jiang and Wang. Wildlife trade is likely the source of SARS-CoV-2. Science, 2022: Risk of new pandemic emerging due to live animal trade

Temmam et al. Bat coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 and infectious for human cells. Nature, 2022: Discovery of most closely related viruses in Laos

Chang et al, Serosurvey for SARS-CoV-2 among blood donors in Wuhan, China from September to December 2019. Protein and Cell, 2022: Blood bank serology data shows no evidence of infection in Wuhan prior to January 2020

Liu et al, Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 at the Huanan Seafood Market. Nature, 2023: Genetic evidence of susceptible hosts at Huanan market

Alwine et al, A Critical Analysis of the Evidence for the SARS-CoV-2 Origin Hypotheses. mSphere, 2023: Evidence review

Latinne et al. Origin and cross-species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China. Nature Communications, 2024: Survey of coronaviruses collected by EcoHealth Alliance as part of the PREDICT program

Holmes. The Emergence and Evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Annual Reviews in Virology, 2024: Evidence review

Crits-Christoph et al, Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cell, 2024: Genetic evidence of susceptible hosts at Huanan market

Alwine et al, The harms of promoting the lab leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 origins without evidence. Journal of Virology, 2024: Commentary on public discourse on origins

World Health Organization Special Advisory Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), Independent assessment of the origins of SARS‑CoV‑2. 2025. The SAGO report at the close of SAGO-1’s term, mapping out knowledge gaps to fill

Pekar et al, Recently reported SARS-CoV-2 genomes suggested to be intermediate between the two early main lineages are instead likely derived. Virus Evolution, 2025: Shows that lineage A and B did not diverge in humans

Garry, SARS-CoV-2 Spike displays multiple adaptive changes in addition to the furin cleavage site, Virology, 2026: Analysis on adaptive changes in spike

Havens et al, Dynamics of natural selection preceding human viral epidemics and pandemics. Cell, 2026: Demonstration that SARS-CoV-2 likely did not need to spend a long period of time adapting in an intermediate host prior to spilling over

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I truly can’t believe how stupid it is, thinking about what happened in public health and science this week, or any week. Thirty minutes is insufficient to cover it all. But we managed to get through a lot, including a delightful review of Jay Bhattacharya’s administrative fuckery and questionable legal authority, Robert Malone’s I-quit-a-committee-disbanded-by-court-order!, and the fact that all the papers report that it’s all going to be chill because Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is on a short leash. I guess we will see what that means, but in my view I’m suspicious that this predatory ejaculation bandit can be effectively contained.

Thanks for joining despite time zone management and cellular coverage in random parts of the Tri-State area on I-95. I’ll leave you with one of my most aggressive hot takes that I’ve strongly held for nearly 30 years: Connecticut is the worst state in America, just because even New Jersey isn’t dropping my calls in those lonely intermittent stretches so long they warn you that if you run out of gas, you will starve if you cannot walk 19 miles to the Cinnabon at the Molly Pitcher service center.

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Has it been a week already? It feels like a year, but that is mostly because public health has been reeling beneath an onslaught of boring but nonetheless important news. In the aftermath of last week’s decision in the American Academy of Pediatrics vs Kennedy, there was a huge sigh of relief that the vaccine schedule has been restored…for now. We covered this immediately in the aftermath of the decision, then teamed up with to explain what this means in terms of vaccine access going forward for you.

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Bad Week for Anti-Vax Advisors

Immediately, this decision disbanded the Advisory Committee Clown Car on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which was largely composed of anti-vaxxers who had been wreaking havoc on immunization policy. That includes Keebler Kenny Rogers, also known as ACIP Vice Chair Robert Malone, who, as we pointed out last week, continues to stretch the truth about his role inventing mRNA vaccines in pursuit of his endless revenge tour against evidence-based medicine and public health.

Malone and his fellow members of the mRNA is Murder Squad have been making the grand tour of all the top tier anti-vax podcasts and hellsite accounts. Currently there is a lot of aggrieved whining coming from MAHA HQ, as the former ACIP members are shaking their fists and raging that they now have to return to pretending to be experts and lying to the public on behalf of their masters.

In the short term, it’s good news. Since MAHA Grand Wizard and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been ordered to soften his overtly anti-vax position until after the midterms and he seems to be on board, we’ll probably hear a lot more about eating real food than anything else.

In the long term, a good outcome is very uncertain. There is a lot Kennedy can still do behind the scenes. He will likely make some move to disrupt the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). There is also a lot that can be done behind the scenes at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), particularly with a competent manager in place to sanitize some of Kennedy’s craziness when the brainworm takes the wheel or whatever. I fear that newly appointed HHS Chief Counselor Chris Klomp may be that competent manager.

Klomp is an observant Mormon who spent his career prior to government service as a businessman in the health tech sector. He distinguished himself by cozying up to Jared Kushner to use COVID as an excuse to loosen restrictions on sharing sensitive patient data and being famously cheap. He’s sober, poorly suited to overseeing the nation’s health given his enthusiasm for sleeping in rental cars and flying Frontier, and sufficiently competent as a bureaucrat that he can do a lot of quiet damage simply by cutting costs, moving money around, and replacing experienced agency staff with MAHA loyalists..

“Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya appeared before the House Appropriations Committee last week to assure Congress that he would indeed spend the entire NIH budget as appropriated. He just hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Theoretically this is because the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought only approved disbursement of the congressionally appropriated budget the night before Bhattacharya’s hearing. This should be a relief.

It’s not, given that Bhattacharya has yet to spend any of it and Vought is exercising such tight control over the process. Now Klomp, Vought’s soul mate in Christofascist cost-cutting, will be in this new “counselor” role assisting with how various HHS budgets are disbursed and how many more career public servants will be replaced with political lackeys that will further erode our national capacity.

A manager like Klomp will be able to cripple agencies’ normal function (or what is left) through administrative maneuvers that will not be noticeable or newsworthy to most people. It doesn’t compare with gas prices or bombs or war. Those things are immediate and obvious. But just because it’s less dramatic to kill thousands with the stroke of a pen instead of a ballistic missile strike doesn’t make it any less consequential.

The HHS agencies are already on life support in terms of their intended function. Loss of employees with centuries of institutional experience and expertise and draconian cuts to key programs have resulted in our agencies functioning in name only. Slowly, leadership who had earned their positions through years of dedicated service are being replaced with political operatives like Klomp. The agencies remain, but they are not functioning. When this becomes apparent to all—probably with the next national health emergency, natural disaster, pandemic, or whatever it may be—we will have long passed the event horizon. Without NIH, we will not have doctors, hospitals, or new drugs or vaccines. Without FDA, we will not have safe or effective medicine. Without the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), we will not have public health. Without the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), we will not have health care.

Jeneen Interlandi just captured this in an incredible New York Times Magazine piece that, through quotes from departed employees, really drives home how thoroughly gutted the CDC is. Former CDC Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry described her tenure until her resignation in August as “this was like being in a mass disaster nonstop for eight months.” The article details in the heartwrenching words of the CDC’s former public health professionals how this meant watching the wholesale destruction of chronic disease, violence prevention, outbreak response, HIV, sexual health, rape prevention, collaboration with the World Health Organization, and America’s standing on the global stage.

The entire American health and scientific enterprise is in a treacherous and highly vulnerable position and it will not take much more strain on the system for the damage to become catastrophic. But it might take a while for the public to notice or care. Our capacity for even tracking and reporting outbreaks and coordinating responses is so diminished that, barring a nationwide emergency, people will not realize how much we have lost until it is too late.

Let’s Focus Group the Next CDC Director!

Klomp is wasting no time installing said leaders. He’s busy interviewing candidates and the Washington Post reports a trio of names floated for the next CDC Director; in the meantime, Podcast Jay has been doing double duty as Acting CDC Director. HHS is running out of time to pick a new permanent CDC Director, as the agency has been led by an Acting Director since Kennedy fired Susan Monarez last August. If a new Director is not nominated by TOMORROW, MARCH 25, Bhattacharya’s appointment will expire and the CDC won’t have anyone in charge. So who are these three people? They cover a range of perspectives:

1. Reasonable, competent public health official. Daniel Edney, MD. Mississippi state health officer

Since taking the helm as head of Mississippi’s state health department, Edney has boosted Mississippi from 50th to 48th in the nation in overall health ranking, which is no small achievement. He is pro-vaccine. Also, somewhat shockingly, he used to be a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but his experience as a physician made him dedicate his career to addressing racial and ethnic health disparities and fighting—in his words—”structural racism” and “implicit bias.” It’s surprising that they are considering a candidate who seems, frankly, pretty woke for a rehabilitated former member of a Klan-adjacent racist group.

2. MAGA Republican and health executive. Ernie Fletcher, MD, former Kentucky governor

Fletcher was governor of Kentucky from 2003-2007, when his reelection bid was trounced by an investigation into abuse of the state’s merit system and he and several staffers were indicted. Although it was settled without Fletcher facing any criminal penalties, Kentucky voters elected Democrat Steve Beshear and he went into a quiet life as a health care tech executive. He doesn’t seem overtly anti-vax. He got publicly vaccinated with Moderna Spikevax in January 2021 with a bunch of other former Kentucky governors.

3. MAHA anti-vaxxer. Joseph Marine, MD, Johns Hopkins Cardiologist.

Marine, like FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, is a credentialed physician at Johns Hopkins who also likes to hang with his anti-lockdown libertarian friends at the Brownstone Institute.. He is a lab leaker who opposes lockdowns, mRNA vaccines, and any kind of public health measures. Here, for example, is a shitty Substack he wrote for Vinay Prasad’s mentor’s newsletter in which he claims flu shots don’t work and the Moderna seasonal mRNA vaccine trial was terribly designed and adverse events are more common than flu and assorted dog whistles to the MAHA anti-vaxxers in the crowd.. He is totally unqualified to be CDC Director and under no circumstances should he get anywhere near public health or immunization policy.

There are supposedly a half-dozen candidates in total, but it’s interesting we are only presented with these three. It’s almost like Klomp is asking the American people to pick the most palatable option. They might even go with Marine, if enough of the MAGA base finds him as credible as the MAHA base does. So here’s an action item if Marine is nominated: IMMEDIATELY write to your Senator and oppose his nomination.

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Casey Means’ Surgeon General Nomination is Stalled!

Here’s a good example of how complaining to Senators can keep an unqualified candidate out of a position to harm millions of Americans with her unrepentant scamming. Lauren Weber and Rachel Roubein at the Washington Post report that psychedelic, druidic aspiring tradwife and Instagram functional medicine grifter Casey Means’ nomination for Surgeon General is stalled in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee!

We did play-by-play with pre- and post-game analysis on Means’ nomination hearing six weeks ago. The only thing that is a surprise to us is that there are still people on this committee who are undecided, because Means’ performance was truly awful. Of course it’s the usual spineless members of the GOP who are on the fence about this.

Yeah, we already dealt with this.

“Academic credentials”: she went to Stanford, but didn’t complete the residency that would qualify her as surgeon general. Lots of people go to elite schools but are still not qualified to be Surgeon General.

“Research background”: LOL is that the research Means did before she sponsored snacks and supplements on her Instagram that had lead, cadmium, or toxic ingredients that resulted in 36 people having their gallbladders removed?

“Advocacy on America’s chronic disease epidemic”: selling continuous blood glucose monitors and helping her brother commit insurance fraud to cure imaginary mitochondrial diseases.

Still, HHS is sticking with their girl. The agency is working on her “swift” confirmation, but considering she was nominated almost a year ago, “swift” may be measured in geological time.

Let’s translate some more:

“Attempted character assassination”: correctly pointing out that she is unqualified for Surgeon General

“The senators are calling her anti-vaccine”: this probably has something to do with her being unwilling to admit that flu shots work and are safe and pretending she didn’t describe the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine as a crime during her hearing. She refused to tell Senator Bill Cassidy, himself a board certified hepatologist, that reducing babies’ risk of hepatitis B infection as much as possible is a good idea. And she may not have used the word “vaccine” in her book, but when she was promoting her book on Joe Rogan last year, she did say that combination vaccines were bad and caused autism, among a bunch of other medically inaccurate things about estrogen and reproductive biology.

Call your Senators, especially if they are on the HELP Committee! ESPECIALLY call them if they are Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), or Susan Collins (R-ME). They need to move from “stalled” to HARD NO. They will if you tell them to. And even if your Senators are not on the HELP committee or are Democrats (go on, Queen Patty Murray, Angie’s Senator D-WA), call them anyway. It doesn’t take long to say “NO ON CASEY MEANS, SHE IS UNQUALIFIED.”

Residents of the US (Senate Switchboard): (202) 224-3121

Residents of ALASKA: (202) 224-6665

Residents of LOUISIANA: (202) 224-5824

Residents of MAINE: (202) 224-2523

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Lab Leak Lysenko Hosts the First Freedom from Science Lecture at NIH

Last Friday, Bhattacharya hosted his old pal Lord Matt Ridley at NIH to give a 90 minute, fact-free talk about their shared theory of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins: it was a lab leak and Fauci did it, with the help of several of our academic colleagues. As usual, he presented no data to support his conclusions besides a lot of hand-waving at things that Matt Ridley, a climate change-denying coal baron with an ancestral manor house and no qualifications whatsoever, finds suspicious. Again, Ridley’s doctorate concerns the mating habits of game fowl and he has never made, handled, or been in the same room as a chimeric coronavirus that was lab leaked. He hasn’t been in the same room even as a chimeric coronavirus that he’s imagined, since he seems to think a little cloning here and there can magically transform one completely unrelated virus into another as long as you suggest enough malfeasance and possibly involvement of the dreaded Chinese Communist Party.

Unlike Ridley, Angie actually is a virologist and has authored several papers on the origins of the pandemic. So she recruited a couple of her expert co-authors and teamed up with , Stand Up for Science, and to hold Ridley and Bhattacharya scientifically accountable. The best comeback the lab leakers have is asking Grok to conduct this extremely rigorous analysis of my Twitter engagement. The bank teller who authored this tweet considers himself a real data specialist with such a preternatural pattern-spotting ability he is like a human machine learning algorithm with a taste for garish prints.

Enjoy the nearly five hour debunking that Kristian Andersen, Gigi Gronvall, Anna Culbertson, and Angie gave that inspired this victory lap over my desperation to “bail out the sinking zoonotic certitudes.”

Another Record-Breaking Continuous Measles Outbreak Continues

Speaking of lack of capacity to respond to health emergencies, we are still on track to break measles records this year. Last year, there were around 2250 cases. That’s probably an undercount. This year, we are still in Q1 and we already have racked up more than 1500 cases. We are on track to at least triple the number of cases this year. We just didn’t want this to fall off the radar.

Up until 2025, the vast majority of those measles cases were imported by unvaccinated people (usually Americans returning from abroad). Since January 2025, we have had outbreaks pop up all over the country.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! See you next time!

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On Monday, Judge Brian Murphy ruled in AAP vs. Kennedy to stay the appointments of all 13 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, for being mostly unqualified anti-vax charlatans. This negates all their prior decisions and reverses all of the recommendations against vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal, the combined measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (chickenpox) vaccine, and for “shared clinical decision making.” Shared clinical decision making effectively removed six vaccines from the schedule by creating an unnecessary barrier to access. It’s a lot easier to just get a recommended vaccine on schedule than it is to make a doctor’s appointment to get individual recommendations, which are going to be “get this vaccine” most of the time.

Great news! Judge Murphy’s ruling reversed all of the All-Villain ACIP’s recommendations, since their appointments are stayed. Murphy went to great lengths to call out individual ACIP members’ lack of qualification, and his ruling made it clear that ACIP cannot convene without a cohort of voting members who are actually competent for the role.

Of course, there are other vaccines that are recommended more specifically, which is why ACIP’s role is extremely important. As we continue to get data about different vaccines, ACIP updates its data and reevaluates benefits and risks constantly. Despite claims to the contrary, people who study vaccines look for adverse events all the time. ACIP recommendations are extremely important, because they determine insurance coverage and inclusion in vaccination programs for low-income or uninsured kids.

But there are consequences to not having a functional ACIP as well. In the future, new vaccines (like updated flu or COVID shots, newly licensed vaccines, or existing vaccines with new data) will need to undergo ACIP review for voting recommendations. If there is no ACIP to vote, then there will be no more recommendations.

Although Kennedy has been reportedly directed by the White House to rein in the crazy leading up to the midterm elections, he will merely tone it down in terms of visibility. He’s clearly not discouraged from continuing to brand himself as America’s first AI-enhanced, cold-plunging, methylene blue-swigging, mitochondrial dysfunction-detecting, sperm-obsessed wellness quack to serve as HHS Secretary.

and I are proud to partner with to keep you informed about your health. This is a victorious battle in an ongoing war. Although it is encouraging, there is still a long road ahead. Kennedy has very successfully driven vaccination rates down through targeted propaganda. He is very, very skilled at exploiting public health emergencies and weaponizing scientific uncertainty. The reason measles is exploding now is not because of people losing access to vaccines, but to people being discouraged from taking them altogether. This ruling does reduce the harm of ACIP contributing to anti-vax propaganda, but it does nothing to address the massively degraded information landscape.

On Friday, I will be hosting the first and hopefully only NIH Freedom from Science Lecture, with , (Stand Up for Science), and . National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya has invited lab leak conspiracy theorist Matt Ridley to deliver a lecture at NIH in which he will allege that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab that was funded by Tony Fauci through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He will present no evidence to support this, because no evidence exists. It will be entirely based on “what if” scenarios that were entirely imagined to sell Ridley’s book, and have now been appropriated by Bhattacharya to justify the obliteration of the NIAID research portfolio. And every other institute within NIH, because research in general is always risky. Better not do ANY of it. Better siphon as much of that money for politically motivated projects as possible and give the rest of it to President Trump.

The lab leak is being used to justify the continued theft of the Congressionally appropriated NIH budget by the Executive Branch. Join me and an incredible lineup of expert panelists (Kristian Andersen, Gigi Gronvall, and special guests from your favorite disintegrating national biomedical research agency). We are going to explain how we know that Bhattacharya and Ridley are wrong about where SARS-CoV-2 came from, and we are going to explain why Bhattacharya and Ridley are promoting conspiracy theories from within the government. SPOILER ALERT: the destruction of science in support of authoritarianism at the expense of our health, freedom, and liberty. Join us in getting the festivities started at 2 pm ET!

Resources:

Judge Murphy’s ruling

One of America’s preeminent scholars of vaccine law and policy, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, provides expert analysis.

Refreshed evidence-based vaccine schedules

Repository of ACIP recommendations circa June 2025

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into our video! Join us Friday for the NIH Freedom From Science Lecture!

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day, whether you celebrate the Catholic feast day of the man who drove all the snakes out of Ireland or just the excuse to take more shots. Herpesviruses are named after reptiles (which is named after the ancient Greek word ἕρπης, meaning “to creep”), so we’re willing to say that St. Patrick is more of a herpesvirologist than someone like Retsef Levi, who is like what would happen if Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons took Ozempic and put on a poorly fitted Men’s Wearhouse suit. Good thing Levi won’t have much to say about the varicella (chicken pox—despite the name, it’s a herpesvirus) vaccine!

We were gearing up for a rough time on the 18th, not because of hangovers since we are both long past the days of green beer and Irish Car Bombs, but because the 18th was the rescheduled meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). We anticipated two long, full days of fact-checking one lie about vaccination after another.

But there’s a little bit of good news for once! We always like it when the MMMWR has less MAHA-mediated morbidity and mortality to report.

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THE ACIP EPIDEMIC IS CONTAINED…for now

Huge news dropped yesterday that upended our week in the best possible way. We planned to cover every last bit of pseudoscientific quackery presented at the ACIP meeting, but Massachusetts District Court Judge Brian Murphy had other ideas with his latest ruling in the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) vs. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This was deeply gratifying, as we previously worked with our incredible partners at Defend Public Health to submit an amicus brief supporting AAP’s position. We talked about it last night. wrote a terrific analysis. We are going to unpack it all with the tomorrow!

In a ruling that was as elegant and poetic (quoting Carl Sagan drawing parallels between science and law in the pursuit of truth through evidence-based inquiry) as it was scathing, Murphy issued stays on the appointments of the 13 members of the current ACIP, who were all appointed after Kennedy fired the prior 17 actual experts last June. The stay wass issued on the grounds that they were not appointed to the committee by the standard process—which normally includes extensive vetting for both expertise and conflicts of interest—and are therefore in violation of the ACIP Charter as governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). FACA sets the statutory requirements for advisory committees like ACIP, which have generally been regarded as essential to ensuring public representation and comprehensive expertise in making policy decisions with life or death implications.

Judge Murphy found the current members mostly unqualified, appointed through procedures that failed to meet FACA requirements, and having performed exceptionally poorly since the clown car pulled up to CDC–all reasons to invalidate both their appointments and all their votes to date. Even the most qualified of them all, Cody Meissner, who previously sat on both ACIP and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s expert advisory panel, the Vaccines and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), was not properly vetted and was unable to institute acceptable evidence-based methods against the raging tide of anti-vaxxers.

Murphy specifically called out the complete and total lack of qualifications of most of Meissner’s fellow panelists, particularly that of ACIP De Facto Circus Ringmaster Robert Malone, who presided over what may have been one of the craziest ACIP meetings in history. As a result of the stay, Malone has been particularly out of sorts at having his anti-vax globalist mind control grift exposed disapprovingly by a federal judge, so naturally he is tweeting and Substacking up a storm, enlisting ChatGPT to un-besmirch his illustrious academic reputation and threatening dire unspecified consequences. I’d expect nothing less from a man who probably has named his beard and whose prostate ought to have its own social media platform, given how frequently it interrupts Robert Malone’s typical professional workflow.

But here’s the best part: since the appointments were stayed, that means every recommendation the All-Bad Guy ACIP has made is now nullified. Multi-dose flu shot vials are back on the public health menu (they are really useful for vaccinating a lot of people all at once, like during an outbreak). So is the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella vaccine. Best of all, the Great Denmarkification (descheduling 6 vaccines including flu and COVID by making them subject to shared clinical decision making) has been reversed. The CDC’s vaccine schedule is as it was in June 2025. Parents, go get your kids vaccinated now, because this could change. And there are more vaccine-preventable pathogens around than ever before.

There are also some longer-term implications that aren’t so great. Without an ACIP, new vaccines can’t be recommended, which can severely impact access. Kennedy may appeal to the 1st Circuit. MAHA will take other shots at vaccination through other administrative mechanisms, such as challenging the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP; “vaccine court”). Rand Paul just introduced a bill to abolish it. They will continue to screw around with vaccine access behind the scenes at FDA. Over at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Administrator Mehmet Oz could also limit access, though it’s unlikely any of them will be very open about it prior to the midterms. And they will all certainly continue to undermine public confidence and hide the evidence of what they have done to American health and our capacity to preserve and sustain it. We won a battle here, but the war is far from over.

Still we won, and that’s worth celebrating. Join us and for a discussion Thursday morning!

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The Podcast Jay Freedom From Science Lecture Series Begins!

If there’s one thing National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director and Acting CDC Director “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya loves, it’s civil and respectful academic dissent. Unfortunately, Bhattacharya’s definitions of “civil and respectful” evidently differ from ours, since it’s not very civil to suggest that disagreement is censorship and calling out lies is an affront to collegial discourse that our esteemed academy simply cannot abide. Podcast Jay will not let the haters hold him back, so he decided to take his Director’s Desk podcast and academically jack it up beyond belief by founding a taxpayer-funded lecture series in which he brings in his favorite conspiracy theorists to bolster his lies and unscientific arguments.

For the first lecture, he has invited the Fifth Viscount Matthew Ridley, a member of the ancient, inbred British aristocracy that apparently people in Commonwealth countries think have any relevance whatsoever to the United States, to give a talk on his theory of how the pandemic started: it was a lab leak and Fauci did it. This is going to be an incredible lecture, since Ridley as a rhetorician gives the impression of a man who furtively farted and is desperately hoping people will blame it on Richard Dawkins or Jordan Peterson or whatever knuckle-dragging prick’s podcast he’s using to amp his latest scholarship in the opinion pages of The Spectator. Ridley once watched and our colleague Gigi Gronvall be screamed at and menaced by a male colleague who disagreed with us about pandemic origins. Rather than tell his male ally that it is unacceptable to scream at female colleagues that they are destroying society while advancing on them physically in an extremely threatening way, he responded by fleeing the scene. Why bother defending women—especially women he doesn’t like—when there will be no consequences for any of the men involved? When you are an unprincipled coward, declining to do the right thing in favor of a plastic Solo cup of the finest boxed wine that Reason magazine is willing to shell out for is always the way.

Ridley’s ancestor, the second Baronet Matthew White Ridley and the first with the Ridley name, would have made an incredible MAGA Republican today. He was a member of Parliament and in the late 1700s, he expressed concern about the war in the colonies. Like many concerned men, he proceeded to do absolutely nothing about it and just played his role as a good little functionary for the tyrant King George. Looks like the family tradition is still going strong!

As Americans, we find the idea of consulting landed gentry for their considered and decidedly completely clueless opinion on the basis of having gone to Oxford and having a child who is like the twelfth dude in a row to be named Matthew White Ridley. Ridley is an effete British dude who probably chides people on their teacup-holding technique, cares far more about courtesy than truth, and seems like the type of some kind of obscure clotting factor deficiency that is particular to limited European aristocratic gene pools. Recessive traits can be a real bitch for spineless libertarians who have invested considerable effort in implying the superiority of their pedigree, since it always works out poorly for eugenicists to learn the truth about their own Mendelian imperfections. It is always a sad thing when the runt of the litter thinks they are the alpha. Who is going to tell him?

Angie is. So is Kristian Andersen and Gigi Gronvall. Ridley has lied and defamed all of us for having more expertise on this topic than he does, just as he has lied and defamed our colleagues that he has wrongly accused of cooking up SARS-CoV-2 with “dangerous gain-of-function” (DGOF) research. Ridley prefers to phrase his conspiratorial allegations in the form of a question or a rebuke for churlish and uncivil behavior. He said that Angie was Hamas-level “emotional, extreme and nasty rather than rational and polite”, accused Kristian of covering up the pandemic’s origins by writing a scientific paper, and bravely abandoned Gigi and Angie when his colleague screamed that we were destroying society with our insatiable compulsion to do ever more reckless DGOF. We’ve since been accused of carrying out a sinister agenda for every evildoer on the planet, as the soulless DGOF junkies of the reckless virology movement that we are.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t be rational and polite! We are all professors, unlike Ridley. We are scholars as well as scientists, unlike Ridley. We think the best way to respect the scientific enterprise and our colleagues is to be honest about what the evidence actually shows. Together, the three of us have written more than ten peer-reviewed papers in journals like Science, Cell, Nature Medicine, and the New England Journal of Medicine addressing the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. (By the way, Happy Proximal Origin Day to all who celebrate! Over on Twitter, Team Lab Leak is really demonstrating the civility that Ridley champions)

.Matt Ridley has written one non-peer-reviewed okay-selling paperback from 2022, and his talk is going to be an infomercial for it and the many tedious columns he has written about it since. So we are going to watch Ridley’s lecture and fact check it from start to finish.

That’s because Ridley isn’t only trying to sell his book. He’s trying to help Bhattacharya sell the lie that the pandemic started in a lab, so…no more labs, no more pandemics.

No more labs, no more research, but who needs things like vaccines or revolutionary medicines when you can eat “real food”, take ivermectin, and obsess over meaningless testosterone and blood glucose labs? Actually, we need those things a lot, but that is not satisfactory to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought. Although his own beloved daughter’s life was saved from cystic fibrosis using a revolutionary gene therapy developed by NIH-funded researchers, not even that can supersede his deepest passion in life: Christofascist consolidation of power and illegal impoundment of Congressionally appropriated funds. Vought would like to take as much of the NIH budget as possible to centralize power within the Executive Branch. Ridley helps Bhattacharya launder lab leak as a reasonable hypothesis to justify the slow theft of taxpayer money and the slow, painful death by starvation of American biomedical science.

Max Kozlov at Nature reports that funding calls from different institutes have cratered. That’s because the institutes and centers are mostly leaderless after directors were removed at NIH and replaced with powerless acting leaders or permanent political loyalists, just as they were at CDC and FDA. Specialized calls, which included large calls that included things like major infrastructure, clinical studies, or training programs for physicians, nurses, and scientists, have all tanked.

Former NIH Program Officer Elizabeth Ginexi is even more pointed about these impacts, noting that reducing the number of funding calls will make NIH a passive funding agency. A few grants will get funded, but they will be unfocused. There will be ample opportunity for funds meant to support extramural (external) researchers to find their way into Bhattacharya and his friends’ research coffers, as they already have. I have discussed the rank corruption of Bhattacharya and his deputy, Matthew Memoli, at length.

Just this morning, Podcast Jay was in front of the House Appropriations Committee, where he admitted they’ve been slow to put grants out, but they’re going to pick up any minute now. Just as soon as they start hiring some full time institute and center directors. They did hire a director for the National Cancer Institute (NCI). So far he has issued one grant this fiscal year, although they are just about ready to get spending. Any day now, the dollars are going to start flowing outward and the research train will get back to chugging along.

“This is not a temporary slowdown. It is a structural collapse.”

-Elizabeth Ginexi, who probably knows this better than most considering she funded NIH grants for 22 years

Please join us for the inaugural, and we hope only, NIH Freedom From Science Lecture. , (Stand Up For Science), and 27 Unihted are banding together to let Ridley and Podcast Jay know that this is an unacceptable use of taxpayer money to spread disinformation in the service of destroying science and our democracy. If Bhattacharya really wants to combat waste at NIH, he could start by not spending tax dollars to have an unqualified British buffoon swoop in to lie about a topic he has no expertise in to NIH employees and all Americans about NIH, an organization he has never had any relevant experience with. But Bhattacharya wants to serve his masters, and so here we are.

Join us on Friday at ~2 pm ET for pre-game coverage. We’ll lay out the basics before moving on to 90 minutes of Ridley hoping that toxic civility will make him seem like a proper scholar instead of a crooked-faced consanguine liar following through on his progenitors’ efforts to secure the American colonies for the tyranny of the British crown.

We like to think that Americans will be unswayed by the exclusively confidence-based scientific assertions of a dude with a doctorate in pheasant sex who once drove the first run on a British bank in more than a century, thinks HIV came from polio vaccine research, thinks climate change is good because it’s profitable (we don’t call him Matt King Coal for nothing), and built an earthen sculpture of a naked woman that is visible from space and was constructed with the tailings from the open pit coal mine on his family’s ancient estate.

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4 Weeks Since Cassidy, Collins, and Murkowski Have Remained Concerned Yet Undecided on Surgeon General Casey Means

Can you believe that people are still on the fence about unqualified root cause grifter Casey Means? Call your Senators, especially if they are on the HELP Committee! ESPECIALLY call them if they are Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), or Susan Collins (R-ME).

Residents of the US (Senate Switchboard): (202) 224-3121

Residents of ALASKA: (202) 224-6665

Residents of LOUISIANA: (202) 224-5824

Residents of MAINE: (202) 224-2523

It’s always a good day to let them know you haven’t forgotten about this! NO TO CASEY MEANS!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day and Apologies For This

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Even better, this decision reverses every one of Kennedy’s spectacularly shitty vaccine decisions including the move to clinical decision making, as well as ACIP’s descheduling of thimerosal, the MMRV, and the HBV birth dose. The vaccine schedule was just instantly reversed to June 2025, which was when it was untouched by Bobby Morbillivirus and his putrescent roadkill-smeared fingers.

Though ACIP is mercifully postponed for now, there is a strong possibility these clowns won’t stay silent for long. Robert Malone has been unravelling for the past 8 hours on Substack and the hellsite. It was fun to join an update call from the American Academy of Pediatrics’ attorneys and watch the evidence of Malone’s degraded grasp on reality accumulate in real time in the form of dissociative tweets and ChatGPT legal analysis of his status as greatest incremental 1990s transfection experiment doer ever (what he calls “inventing mRNA vaccines”).

There are also long-term issues with vaccine access because of ACIP’s normal function. ACIP is critical for determining insurance coverage of vaccines. Insurers have pledged to cover vaccines through 2026, but after? Any new vaccine—including updated flu and COVID shots and new uses for existing vaccines like RSV expanding to a new age group—requires an ACIP recommendation to be eligible for reimbursement and programs like Vaccines for Children (VFC), which provides vaccines for low income or uninsured kids. If ACIP is unable to recommend anything because it doesn’t meet or is too incompetent to do anything, then millions will still lose access to vaccines. The future of ACIP is still critically important, and unfortunately this ruling doesn’t reverse the damage that has already been done.

I’ve been a bit under the weather as of late and have been advised by my doctors that sleep and rest are mandatory for defeating anti-science fascists without incurring a potentially lethal injury. I’ve started to think of this as the Rasmussen Protocol (hey, all the anti-vaxxers call taking ivermectin an eponymous “protocol” so I might as well do the same) for preventing anti-vaccine injury. So as a result I have to call this for tonight and get my mandatory cardiovascular beauty rest, but we have a lot more to tell you.

Our newsletter, the MAHA Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMMWR), is out tomorrow and WEDNESDAY we will have a more organized and comprehensive show unpacking everything you need to know about this. We’ve got you covered!

Also we are deeply sorry to disappoint everyone who expects us to competently produce our own show! Wednesday we will have it together, we promise!

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