Hi, everybody. Sorry that today there were no stirring sounds of the Soviet National Anthem to bring in the show — I had a busy morning. So, I’m Dr. Angie Rasmussen. Welcome to my daily rant show. I’m really happy to have you here. It’s Friday, and I have done a five out of five job this week on showing up every day at the same time, and I hope that’s been working out for you guys too.
I feel that there is so much going on right now in the world that is so important to talk about, and I’m really, really grateful for all of you who joined me here to hear me complain about it — and to also, hopefully, make you aware of it and galvanize you to do something.
Lab leak movie week, again
So today, once again, it’s lab leak week here. Lab leak movie week here. We’ve had a nonstop parade of people in the Trump orbit going on conservative show after conservative show to talk about how Tulsi Gabbard’s declassified documents — the ones she dumped on her way out of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — supposedly prove a lab leak. They don’t. They don’t show that there was a lab leak, they don’t show that Tony Fauci covered anything up, and they don’t show that he started the pandemic. They don’t really show anything other than Tony Fauci talking to the intelligence community about the possibility that it was a lab leak, talking to scientists who were looking into it, talking to everybody who was looking into it, and coming to the conclusion that — at least as far as Tony Fauci was concerned — it was not a lab leak.
I happen to agree with him, because part of his basis for thinking that are papers that I have co-authored. And that’s what the evidence shows.
So I feel that this is really important to keep talking about, because it’s very technical and it’s very boring. And unlike the other side, me and Tony Fauci and all of our colleagues are constrained by the fact that we don’t make shit up and tell lies. We are constrained by what the evidence shows us. That’s why we talk about the fact that there was no lab leak — because the evidence doesn’t support that there was a lab leak. The evidence really strongly supports that the virus emerged somehow around the Huanan seafood market, and that it most likely emerged from the wild animals that were being sold there. There’s a great deal of evidence about this. Sometime I’m just going to do an explainer where I go over all of it — maybe I’ll do an ask-me-anything kind of deal and answer all of your burning COVID origins questions.
But really, the stuff with Tony Fauci is not even about the origin of COVID. It’s about getting some payback for the pandemic. And it’s also about taking down, essentially, the federal government. Because if you can point at a public servant like Tony Fauci and say, “Look, they were doing things the old way, the democratic way — they were doing their job for the American people and not for the current political administration that’s in charge, and we think that’s bad, in fact we think that’s a crime, and so we’re going to prosecute them” — that’s what all of this lab leak stuff is about. It’s about creating a pretext to prosecute Fauci, despite the fact that he had a preemptive pardon from President Joe Biden, explicitly because Biden anticipated that Fauci might be persecuted like this as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to turn America from a democracy into a dictatorship.
Today it’s Peter Navarro’s turn
So let’s just take a look at what some of these folks are saying. Today it’s Peter Navarro’s turn.
Now, I was scrolling on the hell site — X, Twitter, whatever. Unfortunately, all of my enemies live there, and I still do have quite a few followers there too. Hi, everybody from X. I still go on that website. I still find it somewhat useful — at the very least, useful to keep track of all the terrible things my enemies are up to. And what did I stumble upon but Aaron Rupar from Public Notice, who does a wonderful service by watching all of this shit constantly and putting up the worst-but-best clips from this material.
So Peter Navarro went on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business. And boy, have I heard Maria Bartiromo say the words “gain of function research” more times in one week than I ever imagined I’d hear her say in my life. She sits there looking like a confused owl and just goes on and on about gain of function research. At what point will one of these people define what gain of function research actually is? I’m pretty sure none of them know. I’m pretty sure that if I asked Maria Bartiromo what her problem with gain of function research actually is, she wouldn’t be able to tell me anything other than “Tony Fauci did it, so it must be bad.”
No. The work that was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not gain-of-function research that wasn’t allowed under the contemporaneous oversight rules, the P3CO framework. Now, a lot of people will come back and say, “Well, Fauci designed P3CO and he was in charge of it, so it was written in such a way that nothing was gain-of-function research and it was a gain-of-function free-for-all.”
Okay. Gain-of-function research at the time was defined as making a potential pandemic pathogen more transmissible or more pathogenic — meaning more severe — specifically in humans. Not in mice, not in monkeys, not in other species, other hosts, not in cells. It’s okay to make a virus grow to higher titers in cell culture, because that is not the same thing as what’s going to happen in a human. A virus growing to high titers — meaning there’s a lot of infectious virus per milliliter of culture fluid — is not the same thing as the virus becoming more transmissible. Whether a virus is transmitted from one host to another is a much more complicated process than just how much virus is there.
This is obviously not being discussed in a thoughtful or educated or at-all way on Maria Bartiromo’s show, especially not with senior economic or trade advisor — whatever he is — Peter Navarro. He’s an economist, right? Who is also a convicted felon, for his refusal to hand over documents related to January 6, because Peter Navarro is one of the biggest perpetrators of the big lie: that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. That is not true. Peter Navarro continues to repeat it. He continues to say all sorts of racist things, and — content warning — Peter Navarro is about to say some terrible things about China.
So without further ado, let me share with you this completely unhinged interview Peter Navarro did with Maria Bartiromo, in which he talks about the various consequences Tony Fauci should face for being a public servant for decades, running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, funding research that got us COVID vaccines within ten months instead of ten years, and generally saving millions of lives. That’s what Tony Fauci has done. And Peter Navarro is about to tell you why he should face all sorts of consequences for it.
Navarro: Look, I’m surprised people aren’t suing Fauci civilly for all the damages they did to their families and killing people and things like that.
People have tried to sue Fauci in civil court. The one case I’m aware of, they sued EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak, who was the PI on the grant that Fauci funded — the one that was the “gain-of-function research” everybody’s so worked up about. Peter Daszak was sued in New York State by a sort of famous anti-vax attorney who’s big into suing people for conspiracy-theory reasons, has represented a number of totally crazy people, and got a totally crazy expert witness for this case. And I believe it was dismissed or thrown out. It was basically saying: you created the pandemic, and we suffered injuries because of the pandemic, and therefore you have to pay. So this civil lawsuit has been tried. I don’t think it’s going to be very successful, especially since the idea that Tony Fauci or any virologist created the pandemic and caused the pandemic is itself not true. I don’t think these civil suits should go anywhere.
Navarro: I don’t think a pardon would prevent a class action suit against Fauci personally. He needs to be held accountable. I mean, think about it, Maria. The guy’s sitting in a mansion with millions of dollars and —
Wait — Tony Fauci, as a government employee... Now, I do realize he was a very high-up government employee, which I’d assume was the product of working at NIAID for almost fifty years. Eventually you get enough raises over that time, eventually your salary will be pretty high, and he did have a pretty important job. I actually don’t have a problem with Tony Fauci getting paid a lot. But I don’t think he’s sitting in a mansion with millions of dollars. Maybe? But is that even true? And also — where does Peter Navarro live? I’m pretty sure Peter Navarro is not living in some sort of efficiency apartment somewhere. Sitting in a mansion with millions of dollars. Look who’s talking, bud.
Navarro: And a lot of people in this country think this guy’s a hero. He was Dr. Frankenstein of the modern era.
Okay. Dr. Frankenstein was putting human body parts together in the Victorian era with electricity. I don’t think you suddenly become Frankenstein of the modern era by funding research into vaccines. But do go on, Peter Navarro — clearly you’re not familiar with the literature.
Navarro: This is indisputable fact right now. He created that virus using gain of function research. He did it for the express purpose — he thought it was like a good idea: let’s create —
Tony Fauci did not, quote, “create that virus” with gain of function research. There is no way that SARS-CoV-2 could have been created with the research Tony Fauci was funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
What that research actually was
Let’s be clear about what that research is. It was studying wild coronaviruses circulating in bats in China and in other parts of Southeast Asia — so also in Laos and Cambodia, I believe they were doing some sampling there.
In any case, there was a sub-award given on a grant. This is a common mechanism: if you get a grant and you have a collaborator on it, you pay for the research the collaborator is going to do with what’s called a sub-award. So a sub-award was given from the main grant — which went to EcoHealth Alliance — to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to find bat coronaviruses and evaluate whether or not they could pose a threat to humans.
One of the ways they did this was by going out and collecting samples from bats. Usually how you do this is you trap the bats using a net, and you take an anal swab and usually an oral swab too, depending on the bat. This is not what I do. I have done this once — maybe I’ll show you some videos of me not enjoying observing that work. I also went into a cave, and believe me, that was a zero out of ten experience for me. I have never so badly wanted to take off my PPE, because it was so fucking hot in there, and there were spores everywhere, and it was just so gross and humid, and there were apparently these whip scorpions, which I did not see — and fortunately, I did not see them. This is why I don’t like doing field work very much. I prefer to stay in the lab where it’s nice and safe and clean and there are no insects or creepy-crawlies or mud or spores in the air, and I can wear a nice comfortable PAPR and all of this.
So, I digress. But anyway — that’s what they were doing. They were going out and getting these bats, collecting genetic material from their anal and oral swabs, and taking them back to the lab to see if they could culture virus from them sometimes. But most of the time, I think they were just doing PCR on them to see if there were any coronaviruses in there. The way you do that is you design PCR primers — this tells the PCR test what to look for, something that will bind to a lot of different coronaviruses, so you can tell if one’s in there. Then you can sequence what you get out of it and see if you found a new virus. For some of these viruses they didn’t find a complete genome, but they found a lot of them. And for the ones where they did find a complete genome, or at least a complete spike protein, they would make what’s called a chimeric virus.
That might be what Navarro’s talking about with the Frankenstein stuff. Chimeric viruses are named after the Greek myth of the chimera, a monster made out of all sorts of different animal parts — a lion’s head and all this stuff. It’s just a bunch of different things all put together. So a chimeric virus is that, except with viruses. They take a normal SARS-related coronavirus — a virus that is either SARS-1 or related to SARS-1, a similar virus they’ve got cloned. (And this is another conversation, but cloning coronaviruses is very technically challenging, so people don’t just have a lot of these backbones lying around.) They put the spike protein in there, and then they infect cells or transgenic mice. Those are mice expressing the human receptor for SARS-related coronaviruses — the receptor for SARS-2, or COVID. It’s called ACE2.
They put those viruses into these mice and see if they get sick. Sometimes they get sick, sometimes they don’t. If they do get sick, you compare it to the wild-type virus — the backbone virus. And the backbone virus is very lethal. So if there’s death, if there’s mortality, the only time it’s a gain of function is if it’s more than the control, the original virus — not the chimera. In this case, it was actually a MERS-related coronavirus chimera, and they ended up still having a lot of lethality, but it was less lethal than wild type. So that’s actually a loss of function. It’s not gain of function. But in any case, that couldn’t have made SARS-2.
We’re getting into the weeds here, and that’s what these guys count on. They count on the fact that you don’t know there’s a huge diversity of coronaviruses out there. In order for SARS-CoV-2 to have been made in a lab by Tony Fauci — or by people funded by the institute he ran — you would have to have what’s called a progenitor virus. You have to have the virus that became SARS-CoV-2. So you either have to have that backbone I just described in a chimera, or you have to have something that would turn into it if you just passaged it enough under the right conditions. Let’s say you put it into a mouse, then into another mouse, and over time it got more lethal in mice because you’re passaging it through them, trying to select for that outcome. Viruses evolve very quickly, so you can do that — it’s called serial passage. It’s another favorite boogeyman of people like Peter Navarro, who, again, don’t understand this stuff themselves. They don’t care if it’s right. They don’t care if you understand it. The point is to say that Tony Fauci did something bad.
What I’m telling you is that the progenitor virus — the virus that would be required to make SARS-2, so proto-SARS-2 — would have to be in the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It would have to be somewhere. We’d have to have seen it before. We’ve never found the progenitor virus in nature, in a freezer — we’ve never found it. So it’s out there somewhere, but it’s probably not in a lab, because all the rest of the data we have about the origins of the pandemic are not consistent with the virus coming from a lab. You can’t prove a negative — we can’t prove that nobody had this progenitor virus — but Tony Fauci didn’t have it. The Wuhan Institute of Virology didn’t have it. If they did have it, they would have published on it, just like they did with SARS-2. They were out there publishing from day one, because they were getting Nature papers. And in China, you actually get financially rewarded a lot for getting big, high-profile papers, because the Chinese government has made a huge investment in their scientific research infrastructure. Their national research program is going to defeat America’s now, because we’ve essentially just decided to let Trump destroy ours. So that’s another bad side effect of all of this.
But Peter Navarro has different ideas. He thinks that somehow Tony Fauci was in cahoots with China, and that’s why it’s “indisputable,” according to him, that he created this virus. Well, it’s quite disputable, because it’s simply not true. And Peter Navarro is a convicted felon with other motivations.
Navarro: We need the virus in case something happens in the future, so then we can create a vaccine, so if something happens in the future we can deal with it. I mean, how did that work out, Anthony, you idiot? You are, you are —
It actually worked out extremely well, because it was this type of research that allowed us to develop vaccines for SARS-CoV-1 and for MERS. That is, in fact, how we knew that the pre-fusion stabilized spike protein — which is what’s used in all SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, COVID vaccines — is the best antigen to use. It’s the best thing to show your immune system to make sure you have the most protective immunity from that vaccine. So yeah, actually, the work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology did work out, Anthony. It worked out, Peter. It worked out pretty well, because all the work Tony Fauci funded — to people who have also been accused, by the way, alongside him of starting the pandemic — that work was the basis of Operation Warp Speed, ultimately, and of being able to get vaccines out that saved millions of American lives.
So how did that work out, Peter? As an economist, I’d think fewer Americans dying would be desirable. Usually that’s considered good for the economy. I don’t know — I’m not an economist. Just like you’re not a virologist, evidently.
Navarro: You need to come clean, Fauci. Fauci, you need to come clean, okay? Quit hiding behind your money and your laurels and your PBS documentaries. Come clean, because you killed people. All the kids that had to sit in their homes — my mom, I couldn’t see.
Okay, so Fauci killed people. And then all the people who had to sit in their homes — that’s who we killed with lockdowns. Which, by the way, weren’t his idea, and he did not implement them. That’s not even his job as director of NIAID — it’s not to enforce or even develop lockdowns. That happens at the CDC. So I don’t even know what you’re talking about, because we didn’t actually even have lockdowns. And I’m sorry that Peter Navarro is about to go into a big sob story about how his mom was alone, but, you know — tough shit. We didn’t do everything in the pandemic perfectly. But also, people didn’t die in huge numbers from lockdowns. They died from COVID. And to insinuate anything else — and to insinuate that it was Tony Fauci’s fault or idea — is just complete and total bullshit.
Navarro: See, my mom, where she was, she was holed up in her apartment, getting food under the door. I mean, it’s like a prison. Fauci did that.
You know where Peter Navarro’s mother’s apartment probably is? I’d imagine Park Avenue or something like that. Somehow, even though she was getting food delivered under the door, I doubt very much that it was, quote, “like prison.”
Navarro: Fauci did that, and the Chinese hit it too, okay? Let’s not forget the culpability of the Chinese Communist Party in this. They’re trying to drown us in a sea of virus if we dared say the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
That is honestly just my favorite part. They’ll drown us in a sea of virus if we ever say the virus came from the Wuhan lab. Have you been drowned in a sea of virus yet? I mean, it was a pandemic, so one could argue that’s what he’s metaphorically referring to, but... no. COVID was not a bioweapon, no matter what anybody says, no matter what kind of stupid ideas people come up with or mental gymnastics they’ve done to convince themselves that COVID was a bioweapon-slash-vaccine gone wrong. There’s just no evidence of that whatsoever.
I just think it’s hilarious that China is supposedly standing by, ready to unleash more COVID at us if we dare even say the words “lab leak.”
Why China would actually want to cover up natural origin
Now let me tell you something else before we move on. China does not care if anybody thinks it was a lab leak. Here’s why.
The prevailing theory is that the lab leak, if it happened, was accidental. I think everybody — except for the craziest of people — has more or less ruled out the idea that it was intentional, that it was a bioweapon. There are still a few of these theories going around, but for the most part the official line seems to be that it was an accidental lab leak. Maybe an accidental lab leak of a bioweapon, but not an intentional release or attack.
And some of this stuff is just so funny, even though it’s so terrible, because — why would something like that even matter? Why would China worry about an accident? Okay, maybe it was a bioweapon and they don’t want anybody to find out. Like in Sverdlovsk in 1979, where there was a leak at a facility manufacturing weaponized anthrax in the Soviet Union. That was a violation of the BWC. That was evidence of an offensive biological weapons program, and that’s pretty freaking clear, considering it was — again — weaponized anthrax. It was hard to investigate that one, because it was the Soviet Union and they weren’t eager to have an international team of investigators come in either, considering it actually was a biological weapon.
But COVID was not a biological weapon. SARS-2 would be the stupidest biological weapon of all time, and I don’t care what anybody says. I think the theory that it’s a neurocognitive bioweapon — meaning it would disrupt society by causing long COVID everywhere — is really, really a terribly dumb idea, because it still would be a terrible bioweapon. You can’t protect against it fully with the vaccine, or with the vaccine technologies we currently have. And it doesn’t affect soldiers — it only affects old people and sick people. For the most part. I know it doesn’t only affect those people, but at population scale, that’s who’s most at risk, and that’s not going to harm your fighting forces in the future, in the theater of battle.
So I just don’t understand why China would even care that it was a lab leak. I mean, they’d care in the sense that it would be kind of embarrassing — but you could rectify that, and China was actually working with the US, with France, with Western partners to shore up their biosafety and biosecurity operations. Now those good old days of collaborative working-together are over. But at the time, there’s no reason to think China would have necessarily wanted to cover up a lab leak more than they would have wanted to cover up how the pandemic actually started.
And I think that’s why the market was sanitized so early — so we weren’t able to take any samples from the live animals being sold there. As soon as that market was identified, those animals disappeared. There was a huge crackdown on live animals. Even through 2021, when the WHO sent its first mission there, Chinese officials were denying — and witnesses at the market were denying — that live animals were sold there. And it was very clear: we found documentary evidence that animals were being sold there. Eventually there was genetic evidence too.
The fact is, SARS-CoV-1 emerged under the exact same circumstances, and there were multiple epidemics or surges of SARS-CoV-1 — which had a much higher mortality rate than SARS-CoV-2. There were huge surges of SARS-CoV-1 because the markets remained open, because people were continuing to be around these live animals: purchasing them, working with them, selling them, handling them. So there was a lot of back-and-forth transmission. After that outbreak, people were so concerned SARS-1 was going to cause a pandemic that China said, “We’re cracking down on the live animal trade. We’re going to make sure that when this happens, it’s happening safely and in a regulated way.” It was banned for a while. And you know what? Then it wasn’t banned.
And it’s much more embarrassing on the global stage for China to have basically let the same thing happen all over again — what happened with SARS-1 — despite all the investment they’ve made, despite all the collaborations (which were because of SARS-1) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with their Western partners to really upgrade their science and be part of the international scientific community, out of concern that a pandemic could happen the next time a SARS-related coronavirus emerged. And guess what? It did. Under the exact same circumstances.
So what’s worse for China — accidental lab leak, or that? I think that’s much worse for China, which is why we continue to hear from China that their prevailing origin theories have to do with, oh, it’s seafood, it was brought to China from somewhere else: from Europe, from the US, from Australia, wherever. It was brought to China; it didn’t come from China. And we all know it came from China, because guess what? That’s where SARS-related coronaviruses come from. That’s where they circulate. That’s where the bats they circulate in live.
So that is the motivation for China to cover up the origins. It’s not to cover up a lab leak. It’s to cover up natural origin, because it really makes them look bad. And it should. The live animal trade and the conditions those animals are kept in is what’s making pandemics like this — this kind of zoonotic spillover — much more likely. And in this case, it caused a pandemic. So there you go.
Housekeeping, and what’s coming next week
Okay — I had a whole bunch of other things, but we’re at thirty minutes already, so I’m just going to skip over those, and we can discuss all these other horrors next week.
There was a big drop of documents from CDC that I haven’t had a chance to go through yet. But from what I’ve seen so far, these are all from Debra Houry, the former chief medical officer, who quit along with her colleagues Demetre Daskalakis and Daniel Jernigan after Susan Monarez was fired as CDC director by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — for refusing, basically, to go along with all of his different anti-vax ideas for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. They’re the ones who make vaccine recommendations at CDC. So, a whole lot to get into there. And, you know, vaccines are kind of my lane, because I’m the co-editor-in-chief of Vaccine and I’m just a vaccine-enthusiast kind of gal — vaccine researcher as well. So we’ll chat about that, I’m sure.
Maybe there’ll be some more information in the GLP-1 agonist mystery-patient story — the patient who is probably Donald Trump. My only question about that is: why was he taking this experimental one? Did Ozempic and Mounjaro not work for him? Because, again, I feel like he has bigger problems to worry about than just weight loss. His report said he had sleep apnea and all this stuff, which I have no doubt about — I’m sure he does. He sleeps all the time, and he does seem like he struggles to breathe occasionally. So I think we could all probably make that diagnosis at this point, even though none of us are supposed to. Anyhow, maybe there’ll be more news on that. So maybe we’ll talk about it on Monday.
One more thing: tell OMB to keep its hands off your grants
Two more last pieces of housekeeping — how could I forget this? Every day until July 13th I’m going to be talking about it, because Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is going to try to steal more than a trillion dollars in taxpayer money and use it for further centralization of fascist power within the federal government, further erosion of democracy, and cutting off as many of your services as he possibly can — particularly if you live in a blue state that Trump doesn’t like and that won’t cooperate with the regime.
To stop that, what you need to do is leave a comment at this URL. If we’re on Instagram, it’s there at the top of the screen. Please comment and tell OMB how much you like having state block grants for the things they provide — like supplemental nutrition assistance, and roads, and electricity, and libraries, and schools, and hospitals, and police departments, and fire departments, and parks, and all kinds of rural services, and farm subsidies, and small business loans, and all kinds of things that make your life easier in your community that you probably don’t think about as being related to a grant from the federal government. But guess what? It is. And that’s what Russell Vought is trying to steal.
So Save America Movement (SAM) and I got together and made a little video, and Save America Movement also posted about it on their Substack. I’ll have those links for you. Please go check that out and learn more about how you can help in this situation and do your part. In this case it’s quite easy, because all you have to do is submit this comment. You can do it anonymously, but it’s better if you don’t.
Anyway — have a nice weekend, everybody. If you’re enjoying this, please do let me know what you think. I’m easy to find on all the various platforms, and I do actually read things even if I don’t respond. I’m bad at responding sometimes — my apologies — but I really do care a lot about making sure I’m getting accurate, useful information out and making you aware of these things I think are so important for everybody to know about. So if there’s a scientific topic I can help with, I’d love to do that for everybody who’s taking the time out of their day to watch.
And if you don’t already, please subscribe to my Substack — because I’m bad at asking for this, but I’ve been told I should encourage people to do so. It’s really true that things can get lost in the Substack algorithm, but if you subscribe to me, you’ll get a notification. And while these do sometimes get annoying — because I’m subscribed to a bunch of people and I get email from all of them — it really does remind me of their Substack, just in case it doesn’t show up in my feed, or I’m having a day where I’m not scrolling that much. It also reminds me of Substacks where the authors don’t post very frequently or on a regular schedule. So it’s really better to subscribe. I’d appreciate it if people who like this would please subscribe and recommend it to your friends, and let me know what I could do better.
With that note — have a great weekend, everybody. Take care of yourselves and each other. And take care of your mental health too, because I spend all of my time worrying about all of this stuff, and also worrying about the fact that I’m having these health problems on top of it, which really sucks. I spend a lot of time not feeling great. So I’ve made a point to take weekends where I can do nice stuff for myself that makes me feel great — spend time with my family, go get my nails done, just relax. Make sure you’re doing some of that stuff for yourself too. Just be kind to yourself, because these are really difficult times, and it’s hard sometimes to find joy in life and to find hope in things. I find that sometimes just taking a little bit of time to appreciate Angie is what I need to keep plugging along.
So on that note — have a great weekend, everybody, and take care.
Links from this episode
Aaron Rupar, Public Notice — https://www.publicnotice.co/
OMB “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance” — public comment portal (Docket OMB-2026-0034; comments close ~July 13, 2026) — https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001
Federal Register text of the proposed rule — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/29/2026-10817/regulation-for-federal-financial-assistance
The Save America Movement, “Sometimes the Fascism Is in the Fine Print” — https://saveamericamovement.substack.com/p/the-bridge-wont-get-built
Worobey et al. (2022), “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Science — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
Thank you Deborah J., Kathryn Wallenstein, Wendy R 🇨🇦, SkyBlueEyes, and many others for joining me! I’ll be back on Monday. One more piece of housekeeping: no Taking Shots this week, because Jessica Malaty Rivera, MS was at the Aspen Ideas Festival! We’ll be back next week!
