2025 Year in Review: Good Company in the Gulag
Some reflections and my deepest gratitude to all of you. Plus: TAKE MY READER SURVEY! and return on investment for paid subscribers!
I started this Substack back in 2020, but didn’t post anything until this year. I think I briefly checked it out, then just kind of forgot about it. During the peak pandemic years, Twitter was the platform for exchanging information. Everyone was there: most of my colleagues, journalists, officials, and many members of the public, looking for information about the hugely traumatic pandemic in progress that was caused by an emerging virus. I am a virologist who studies emerging viruses and I am also quite direct, so a lot of people on Twitter wanted to know what I thought. I did a lot of conventional media too. I did interviews for print, TV, radio, and podcasts. I wrote op-eds in newspapers and commentaries for scientific journals. I learned that I was pretty good at communicating in a variety of ways about virology and public health to a general audience as well as a scientific one.
I did my best to use my knowledge about virology and pathogenesis to help people make sense of the insane COVID science news cycle. I didn’t always get it right, but I like to think I made a positive impact. People tell me I helped them and their families navigate a very disruptive and frightening time. In a couple of cases, people told me that I persuaded them to get vaccinated. It makes me really happy to hear that my efforts to inform empowered people by putting science into the context of their own experiences and priorities. If I can contribute expertise or skills where needed during a crisis, then I do it, especially if it improves people’s lives.
What use is my knowledge if it’s inaccessible to the taxpayers who supported me acquiring it? Sure, I can and do write grant proposals and academic papers that move the field ahead and that does make an impact. But the impact is amplified when science is accessible to the broader world. Because science literacy is generally quite low, even among highly educated non-scientists, scientists must learn how to explain complex concepts in accessible terms. It’s very difficult to do, but the lack of doing it is one reason why scientists are losing the information war.
Scientists in general—across all sectors—have done a bad job of explaining our work or its importance to the public. Bad actors can lie about scientists and our research, because we have not made enough of an effort to equip the public with the knowledge that they are lying. We have not done enough to put our work into the context of our current moment. Too many of our institutions and societies have failed to lead in this regard, choosing instead to cower silently behind the delusion that science and public health should be apolitical. I have come to view translating virology in the context of our reality as an essential part of my job as a virologist. And I remind myself that as an academic, I am expected to be an educator as well as a scholar and a scientist.
I have half a million followers on the hellsite and I still post there, but virologists—and everyone—are facing a different kind of crisis than we did with COVID. In 2020, I was a virologist facing a pandemic caused by a type of virus that I studied. In 2025, I am a virologist facing the complete destruction of virology, and all science, and our entire public health system, and American democracy. On January 1st, I became the co-Editor-in-Chief of a vaccinology journal called Vaccine right in time for the administration to declare war on vaccination. On January 20th, I watched as the President began to lay waste to the entire federal government, creating terrifying new vulnerabilities for our health, liberty, and security. I am still in disbelief that the American democratic values I was raised to believe were our greatest strength are no match for the most idiotic, puerile buffoons in the history of authoritarianism. I am enduring the indignity of my profession being dismantled by the comically inept, unquenchably thirsty bootlickers in senior positions throughout the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), most of whom I have been beefing with online since 2020. I am both horrified by what is happening and uniquely positioned to comment on it. It is simultaneously the worst and weirdest time in my life.
Although the hellsite is always reliable for antagonizing the upjumped contrarian clout chasers running things at CDC, FDA, and NIH and going back and forth about teen sperm counts with HHS Secretary Robert F. “I Am a River” Kennedy, Jr., it is no longer very useful for communicating effectively with an audience that is receptive to reading long threads about influenza subtypes, pathogenesis, pandemics, or evidence-based frameworks for making vaccination policy, at least not without finding yourself at the top of a mountain of MAHA and/or Nazi replies. So I dusted off this old Substack to see how it would go.
I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, including from people who find the information valuable, and from some professional colleagues who I admire and respect deeply. In particular I was so pleased to hear from my colleagues in government service that they like the Substack enough to share it with each other. I am very glad that my newsletter is resonating with people. It turns out it’s also pretty corrosive to my mental health and overall well-being to have a head full of thoughts about all the ways Kennedy and the Trump administration are going to raze my profession and cause mass preventable death, so purging them here is actually quite therapeutic. Overall, I think Rasmussen Retorts has been a pretty successful experiment!
If I wanted a place to just vent my thoughts, I’d keep a diary. I think now is the time for me to share my thoughts. People deserve to understand what is happening to science and public health, how this is being used to subvert democracy, who is doing it and why, and what the consequences will be. This needs to be documented clearly and transparently, because the results are going to be so severe. Dead children. Millions of dead children. This is not reasonable skepticism or a much-needed shaking up of the medical or academic status quo; it is enabling completely preventable mass death, economic ruin, and the end of American democracy in service of an authoritarian traitor.
Despite the dark reality we find ourselves in, it brightens my outlook that there are others who find my writing useful as they rise to meet this moment. I want to express my deepest gratitude to the more than 5,000 readers who have subscribed. I am humbled that so many of you find my newsletter to be sufficiently engaging that you are willing to tolerate additional emails in your inbox (I have more than 65,000 unread emails and it’s like the digital equivalent of the Augean stables; every addition is more shit on the pile). I have a terrible, lazy editor (it’s me) and an overburdened research assistant who works on a volunteer basis (it’s also me), so it means that much more that you find value in my work even in this imperfect form. I also assume it means some of you agree with me, and are working towards stopping the catastrophe that awaits us all if we don’t do something about it. This keeps me going.
2025 completely sucked and 2026 is probably going to be worse. But the growing community of people who are doing something about this gives me a lot of hope for the future. Many of my colleagues and I have made “at least we’ll have good company in the gulag”-type jokes. I hope that those remain jokes. We can still stop this. And if I can contribute to that effort in even a small way—by raising awareness, by raising my voice, or by raising my middle fingers—then I will do so. So thank you so much for giving me that opportunity.
And if you don’t already subscribe, I would be so grateful if you did. You don’t need to, and I won’t be putting paywalls up anytime soon, but subscriptions are one way that I can assess the impact of this work. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
Here’s to better years ahead!
XO
Angie
Take the Rasmussen Retorts Reader Survey!!!
Sometimes people think that because I’m extremely contemptuous of people who are participating in the rise of fascism and the preventable deaths of millions, I am also a giant bitch to everyone, all the time. That is not true! I am actually quite friendly and eager to please people that I like, and I like all of you a lot.
I don’t know who most of you are, why you’ve subscribed, what your specific interests are, what you find most useful, and where you think I could improve. I can certainly look at post stats and figure out which topics get traction and so forth, but I’d really like to hear from you directly about what you like, what you don’t, and what you’d like to see in the future. So please take a few minutes to complete my first ever reader survey!
Do you like learning about virology? Are you more interested in vaccines and how they work or in the mechanisms by which they are being taken away? Do you like policy analysis? Or do you prefer it when I go into my extensive receipts folder to dunk all over the clowns currently steering science and public health into the abyss?
I currently have around 50 partial essays incubating in my drafts folder. I could prioritize finishing one or another depending on interest. Or I could write something new, provided it is within my areas of expertise. As I do not use AI to write this and I have a day job, I have limited extracurricular time. I want to spend it writing about things that people also want to read. So take the survey and tell me what you want to see. Or what you hate and never want to see again. I aim to please.
Paid Subscriber Returns on Investment
I don’t like paywalls and I feel uncomfortable monetizing my media activities, because I have never done any of this for money. Everything I produce for my Substack is free for all to view, read, and share.
At the same time, I am an academic scientist with a lab to fund. I am responsible for people’s research and for their salaries. Because of what is happening in the US, as well as the economic impacts of Trump’s trade war, research funding everywhere is going to suffer. Long-term, we are going to need alternative ways of funding research. People have asked me if there is a way to help, but unfortunately nobody has an extra $50 billion laying around to pick up the slack for NIH. I wondered if perhaps people who want to contribute to research funding can contribute in other ways, so I decided to experiment with a subscription model that would offer completely optional paid subscriptions for people who would like to contribute to my lab’s research. It didn’t feel gross to monetize my social media for the sake of my lab, and it didn’t feel like begging. I figured that if people wanted to contribute, they could do so of their own accord with no pressure from me, and then I’d make use of it if it got anything. I also promised that I would provide a thorough accounting of the research that their subscriptions supported.
I am overwhelmed with gratitude to paid and founding subscribers. You contributed nearly $9000 that went toward projects on MERS coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, Ebola virus, and H5N1 bird flu. You enabled multiple trainee colleagues from my lab to attend conferences around the country and the world, to present their own work alongside some of the world’s most accomplished scientists, and to build relationships with their colleagues in virology that will sustain and advance their careers. The best way for science to fight back is to continue doing high quality, uncompromisingly rigorous, relevant scientific work.
This is what your paid subscriptions went towards:
Software licenses and pro subscriptions for different computational and cloud storage services. We used these resources to support research that has resulted in multiple manuscripts and conference presentations. This has supported everyone in the lab, but has recently been especially useful for my graduate students Amir RoodDehghan and Dr. Oluwaseyi (Seyi) Ajagbe in writing their theses and our team’s bioinformatician Dr. Reema Singh as she manages numerous computational tasks.
Yamamoto et al, Ebola virus matrix protein VP40 triggers inflammatory responses linked to the ebolavirus virulence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025. In collaboration with Hideki Ebihara, Satoko Yamamoto, and Michael Barry, we showed that VP40 triggers inflammatory signaling on its own and in cells infected with Ebola virus (which is pathogenic in humans) or Reston virus (which is not). This indicates a potential mechanism for the catastrophic inflammation that is a defining feature of lethal Ebola virus disease.
Habbick et al., Sex bias determines MERS-CoV infection outcomes in a mouse model of differential pathogenicity. bioRxiv, 2025. In collaboration with Vincent Munster and Neeltje van Doremalen, we showed that host gene expression profiles associated with survival in hDPP4-transgenic mice infected with two different doses of MERS-CoV. Furthermore we observed that these profiles were sex-biased. According to our observations, if you do get infected with MERS, you better hope you aren’t a man who isn’t producing much estrogen, because we found that to be associated with death! We are currently finishing up an experiment we added to address a reviewer comment and will submit a revised manuscript in the next couple of weeks.
On the strength of this preprint, we were invited to write a review on sex biases in coronavirus infection by the Journal of Virology. Graduate student Marin Habbick and postdoctoral fellow Helen Parrington are working on this with me now. Thank you for enabling the preprint that earned us this invitation!
Swan et al, MPXV Clade IIb virus infection in mice leads to prolonged viral replication, macrophage infiltration, and decreased spermatogenesis in the testes. bioRxiv, 2025. Alyson Kelvin invited us to collaborate with her to establish a model of mpox with clear replication, production of infectious virus, and pathology in the testes, bladder, and penis. This model will have a big impact on the field, because it will allow us to address a number of unanswered questions about sexual transmission and pathogenesis—I’ll have a post about it in the next day or two! In addition, Seyi is going to put together his findings on the very distinct host responses in humans and mice infected with mpox virus, so the Rasmussen lab mpox era is just getting started.
Postdoc travel to the Negative Strand Virus meeting in June in Montpellier, France, where Dr. Helen Parrington, a postdoctoral fellow in my lab, presented her work studying how different infection routes produce very different outcomes, host responses, and disease presentations during Ebola virus infection. We will preprint and submit this manuscript in January. We have further found sex biased phenotypes (including lethal outcome) in Ebola infection in multiple models, and we have another exciting paper in the works about this, as well. Some of this work is also contributing to what I hope will be a really cool predictive AI model for viral pathogenesis that can span different viruses and host species.
In addition to this, we are wrapping up papers on SARS-CoV-2 origins, COVID-19 and MERS-CoV susceptibility and pathogenesis across species in the context of the host response, and host responses to mpox infection across species, as well as some policy-focused pieces on vaccination. 2026 is going to be a busy year for the Rasmussen lab and you have helped us get to that point.
Student and postdoc travel to the American Society for Virology meeting in Montréal, where Marin gave a flash talk on her work on sex bias in coronavirus infection and pathogenesis.
Meeting my PhD mentor Vincent Racaniello after a live recording of This Week in Virology (TWiV) with Nobel laureate Charlie Rice was a particular highlight. I’ve known both Vincent and Charlie for a long time, so it was extra cool for me to introduce them to (and brag about) my colleagues in my lab.
This was also really special because Vincent is one of the most excellent science communicators out there. My lab, particularly Amir, are big fans of his podcast TWiV. I was so pleased he and all our wonderful colleagues had the opportunity to meet him.
We also had the opportunity to go out for drinks with other colleagues. Your support allows me to follow what I consider a cardinal rule for all academics: the PI (the person in charge of the lab, in this case, me) always, ALWAYS pays.
Building relationships with other colleagues in your field, including people at all stages of their careers, is critical to young scientists’ developing careers. Socializing at professional meetings is a great way to establish these relationships. In this uncertain climate, my trainee colleagues are understandably anxious about the impact of America shutting off its training pipeline along with its research funding pipeline. Forming a strong, supportive, unified community across labs and institutions will be essential for science to persevere. Without our early career colleagues to take our training and ideally eclipse our own contributions to the field, science has no future. That community begins with relationships that develop through social events like this.
And your support also helped us build our relationships with each other. The lab decided that they wanted to go to an escape room for our holiday party. So thank you for supporting the Rasmussen Lab Holiday Party 2025: Santa’s Secret at Escape Manor in Saskatoon. I am very pleased to say we discovered Santa’s secret and escaped with like 15 minutes to go. Basically Santa’s secret was that he was burned out from workaholism, insomnia, and stress and so turned his workshop into a Rube Goldberg device-powered physical riddle intended to torture his replacement, then quit. Since I was mostly useless in uncovering Santa’s secret and because perhaps Santa and I had too many unhealthy traits in common, I was unfortunate enough to be appointed the new Santa by a unanimous lab vote that excluded me. Whatever, I wore the hat.
Finally, your support provides Tim Horton’s for my lab meetings, which are at 8:30 am because we’d all rather start early than stay late. It’s always dark then at this time of year, which in Saskatoon is profoundly dreadful anyway, so I always bring donuts.
I am so, so deeply grateful for your support. Even a few thousand dollars can purchase resources and professional opportunities that have really made a difference for my talented colleagues in my lab, during what is an extraordinarily difficult time for scientists. Many of my colleagues in the US have already lost their grants and their labs. Many of my early career colleagues have seen promising careers hit a brick wall for reasons that are unfair, arbitrary, and illegal. But it’s happening anyway, and the effects will impact every single scientist, whether they get funding from the US or not. Every little bit of support counts. It means so much to us.
I think what means the most to me is that you chose to extend this support. This experiment has been so successful that I’ve included a question about paid subscriptions in the reader survey. If you are supporting our work, I assume that’s because you think it’s important and makes a difference. I would like to know what kind of research is important to you. I have asked what kind of virology or vaccine research that paid subscribers would like to support.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Happy New Year! We can make this new year better than the last.
I loved reading this, including the updates from your lab! THANK YOU for all you do on both the research and public communication fronts... and for always keeping it real :)
you are needed right now more than ever, you're the best