Note from Angie: Transcript is AI, may contain errors.
I DGOF: Explaining Gain-of-Function Research
Hi there, everybody. I’m Angie Rasmussen.
I decided to have theme music today. It’s the Soviet National Anthem, because effectively, I feel like that’s what we should be listening to. I really like the Soviet National Anthem. Actually, I kind of miss it. Back when I was a kid in the 1980s, it was always great to see the Soviets at the Olympics. They always seemed so sinister, and they were such good bad guys to be against.
So anyways, my husband grew up in the Soviet Union, and he translated the lyrics for me one time. And it’s exactly what you’d expect. It’s all kinds of stuff about the glory of Leninist-Marxist thought and theory and practice and collective farming and all that stuff.
Why the Soviet anthem: Lysenko, Vavilov, and Stalin
I thought it was pretty fitting, given that the Soviet Union was in large part ruined — by the time my husband came around — by Joseph Stalin. And a big part of that was due to the impact Stalin had on science, and the way he centralized power in the Soviet Union.
One of those ways was by working with this dude named Trofim Lysenko, who basically came up with all this made-up bullshit about seeds. He claimed he could turn one type of plant into another. Mostly his idea was, like, if we refrigerate seeds, they’re going to grow all over Russia — which turned out not to be very true, or true at all.
The guy who was sort of his academic competitor was this dude named Nikolai Vavilov. And Vavilov came up with a plan for Stalin to address the huge food shortages that would be created by forcing everybody to join a collective farm and the move to collective farming across the country. Since Vavilov was a plant geneticist and a botanist — I don’t even know what they called it in the Soviet Union, but he was like a plant geneticist — he came up with a plan to breed hardier plants that would have a longer growing season and would be good to grow in more places in the Soviet Union. But it would take ten years.
And Stalin didn’t have time to wait, because he really wanted to get collectivism moving — that was key to centralizing power within the Soviet government. There were still splinter groups around who were into, like, Leon Trotsky. So Stalin wanted to get rid of all the dissenters and consolidate power within himself. So he got together with Lysenko. Lysenko was like, this dude Vavilov is taking forever, his plan is going to take ten freaking years. I can just refrigerate these seeds, and we’re going to be eating oranges in Siberia. I can’t wait. It’s going to be awesome.
And of course, that never happened. And Stalin didn’t really care, because he didn’t need it to. All he needed was to remove people like Nikolai Vavilov, who were actually going to use evidence to make decisions, going to use the scientific method. And so what happened to Vavilov was, he was accused of spying for the Americans or the British — I can’t remember which. He ended up being tortured in a gulag and died, was starved to death, essentially in prison after his execution was overturned. I can’t remember why it was overturned, but basically he was a geneticist who put forward a plan that would work, and for his trouble, he died after being tortured and starved in prison and in gulags.
So that’s what the Soviet Union was like, and that’s how science was used to further Stalinism and move Stalinism forward. And that’s why I thought it was a fitting theme song, now that we’re heading into America’s 250th year of being a fabulous, functioning democracy — because it’s probably going to be the last, at least that we’re a democracy on paper.
We’re doing exactly some of the same stuff that happened, except instead of Nikolai Vavilov being targeted, right now it’s Tony Fauci.
Now, in Soviet times, after Vavilov was targeted, that was pretty much putting away everybody who was a so-called Mendelist or Morganist — somebody who believed in genetics, Mendelian genetics, which is that traits are inherited and passed down. Lysenko was what we call a Lamarckist. He followed the beliefs of Lamarck, that the things you pass down to your children are not inherited, that they’re shaped by your environment. Now, that does actually turn out to be true for some things, like epigenetics. But genetically, the basis for heritability is our genes. So Mendel was right. The Mendelists were right — but they were politically wrong in Soviet times.
And that’s what’s happened, unfortunately, to Tony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH. Fauci ran NIAID for fifty years or something like that. He worked under both administrations. He was well regarded — in fact, lauded — for his entire career. And for his trouble, because unfortunately for him he was the director of NIAID and was relied upon, because of his excellent track record, to provide advice in times of trouble that have to do with infectious diseases (a pandemic qualifies)...
...because extremist far-right people have radicalized and divided our conversations about science and public health. The anti-science lobby, essentially. Certainly they’re a big part of the Republican Party’s politics right now, but they’re actually separate from that. They are interests that want to push anything that has to do with science or public health as incredibly divisive — we have to fight about it, we can’t settle it with evidence, we settle it by debate, and expertise is unwelcome in these conversations. Because expertise would bring expertise, but experts have a way of telling people who are full of shit that they are in fact full of shit, and they are experts while doing it. Hence why I have a lot of big fans.
Anyways, this was a thing that happened in Stalin’s time with Lysenko. And it’s a thing that’s unfortunately happening now. And the person being targeted for it is, in fact, Tony Fauci.
Movie day
So I didn’t really want to do this, where we’re just going to watch a bunch of videos. But we are going to have a little movie day, because there has been no shortage of these annoying, obnoxious men basically calling for Tony Fauci’s prosecution nonstop on my Twitter feed. Every time I get onto the site now, you can tell what I use that website for, because the algorithm is serving me, like, here comes Rob Schneider — you know, Deuce Bigalow — who’s a wild anti-vaxxer. Here comes a Children’s Health Defense video — that’s the anti-vax organization RFK Jr. founded. Here comes Robert Malone, one of the craziest of all the anti-vaxxers in this whole group. Here come all of these people, and now here come all of these senators.
[Sen. Ron Johnson]: What you want a trial for is to have the discovery and get people under oath. I mean, personally, I doubt Fauci would testify in his own defense, because he’d either have to perjure himself or self-incriminate. He probably wouldn’t do that, so he’d probably take the Fifth all the time. But accountability starts with exposure. And exposure needs to occur across the media. It can’t just be confined to outlets like Newsmax and others who actually cover this. You need the legacy media to turn this into a story. Because until they do, it’s just not news.
Okay, so complaining that it’s too bad that only Newsmax — this crazy station I’m on right now; it’s not even a station, it’s like a website — only Newsmax will cover this story. A lot of people have been complaining about that, that the mainstream media isn’t covering this story.
And the story, by the way, is that Tulsi Gabbard, on her way out of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, dropped all these documents that supposedly show proof of Tony Fauci running this sort of shadowy network of bio labs — like bioweapons-making people in other countries, including China. And he gave an R01 sub-award to Zhengli Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and she worked with a bunch of NIAID-funded US people to make COVID. And the reason they did is because, for some reason, Tony Fauci was in with the military, and biodefense stuff is just so profitable. Because, according to these guys, there are so many of these biodefense companies around that go find viruses, juice them up, make vaccines to them, and then get rich selling them back to the government and big pharma.
So that doesn’t happen. If that happened, there would probably be a lot more virologists — it would be a lot more profitable to be in this line of work.
What gain-of-function research actually is
But yeah, we don’t actually invent viruses to make vaccines for. Sometimes we make viruses — chimeric viruses, for example, that you’re going to hear a lot about today. These are viruses where they’ve taken one virus, taken out a gene from it, and replaced it with a gene from another virus. We make vaccines this way, too. The Ebola vaccine, for example, is a chimeric virus made by taking vesicular stomatitis virus and taking out G — that’s its equivalent of spike, sorry, the G protein — and putting in GP from Ebola. That’s also Ebola’s equivalent of spike. That’s what your immune system responds to. So that’s a chimeric virus.
Sometimes, when people do this with coronaviruses — and what they were doing at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — is putting the spike protein from these bat coronaviruses that they found while looking for viruses into the backbone of another coronavirus, another SARS-related coronavirus. They had several that they had cloned and could do this with. And then they would look and see whether or not that virus could infect cells that expressed the human receptor for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. So if this chimeric virus could use that human receptor to get inside the cell and infect it, that means that particular virus, with that spike protein, might be a bigger risk for causing an epidemic or even a pandemic in people. It’s just one step we take to actually try to characterize some of these viruses and understand better which of them present a risk to us and which don’t.
Now, sometimes, if that spike protein enhances the ability of the virus to cause disease or to infect some kind of model organism — whether it be cells, mice, non-human primates, what have you — then that’s referred to as a gain of function. So I just want you to think about that while we’re talking about this. A gain of function is research that, in this context, makes a virus more transmissible or more pathogenic — meaning it makes disease more severe. So just keep that in mind, because you’re going to be hearing a whole lot about gain-of-function research from these dudes, and none of it’s true.
And by the way, Ron Johnson, who just did that little video — Ron Johnson has been all over the mainstream legacy media that he’s complaining doesn’t cover this stuff, talking about how vaccines cause turbo cancer and SIDS, and there’s an epidemic of vaccine injury from mRNA vaccines. He had a whole panel on the Senate Appropriations Committee with all his favorite anti-vax experts on turbo cancer, about how vaccines cause turbo cancer — when they don’t cause turbo cancer, or any other kind of cancer at all, as far as we are aware, especially not the mRNA vaccines. So Ron Johnson: not very credible. Spoke at the Children’s Health Defense conference last year. Again, Children’s Health Defense, big anti-vax organization. So Ron Johnson may not be the most credible person when he’s talking about whether or not Tony Fauci has a successful track record.
Tommy Tuberville is dumb
So let’s go now to former Division One college football coach and current governor candidate for Alabama, Senator Tommy Tuberville.
[Sen. Tommy Tuberville]: Let’s go back to Obama. The thing that Tulsi Gabbard said about Obama after he started his reign, and going into all the things he did with illegal migration, things that went on in Iran, and then if you turn around what he did in the Russia collusion — there are so many people that have broken the law. [...] Look at the thousands of people that he actually let die because of his lies on a state level. So let’s go after him on the state level. You can’t get a pardon for that. He’s a crook. Obama’s a crook. All these people broke the law. Let’s put them in jail.
Okay, well, that’s not true either. So Tony Fauci is not, in fact, a crook. Tony Fauci did not lie to the Senate.
Now, what I think Tommy Tuberville — and it’s hard to say, because Tommy Tuberville is not the sharpest scholar in the academy, that’s for sure, despite the fact that I’m sure he did have a university faculty position at some point, because they usually give some sort of faculty status to the college coaches. So perhaps I could call Tommy Tuberville my former colleague, as a fellow academic. But in any case, Tommy Tuberville was never impressing anybody with his astonishing intellectual discourse at any point in his life, I doubt. So I don’t really take him very seriously with this legal interpretation of what Tony Fauci did or did not do. But I will say that Tommy Tuberville is completely incorrect that Tony Fauci committed a crime at the state, federal, or any other level, because he certainly did not.
Now, Fauci did testify in front of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in the Senate. He testified in front of them multiple times, because he’s the NIAID director. Often they’ll ask NIH directors and NIH IC directors like Tony Fauci to come give them an update about how things are going with the money they’ve appropriated for high-priority research for the American people. So Fauci talked to them a lot. And unfortunately, one of the things Rand Paul likes to talk about on the HELP committee — because he’s on that too — is the lab leak, and how Tony Fauci caused it.
Now, Fauci denied causing it, and in fact said that Rand Paul was not the one telling the truth — that Rand Paul was in fact lying, and Rand Paul didn’t understand what he was talking about. As somebody who is an expert in this topic, who literally has a PhD in this topic, who has written papers on this topic in some top science journals, I can say that, in fact, having watched that clip many times, Rand Paul does not know what he’s talking about. And Tony Fauci was, in fact, not lying about the origins of the pandemic, and specifically what the evidence shows about it. Unfortunately, we are in a situation now where the evidence doesn’t really matter anymore. And that’s what concerns me so very much.
Rand Paul is a
So, okay, we’ve still got more action and more celebrities to watch today. Let’s move on to the man himself, who is going after Fauci with a vengeance. And that would be Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
[Sen. Rand Paul]: Connect the dots between what’s been going on and what happened. That would have been very bad for him. And it is bad. Now he’s pardoned, and he’s got pardon going forward, pardon going backward. I don’t know whether those stand up, but — two years ago, David Sacks, I’m sure you know him, he said this explains exactly how he orchestrated the pandemic, or at least knew about gain-of-function research and then changed the story. And I tweeted at the time, what? Can someone explain to me why Dems line up to defend this guy? Can you explain why Democrats have lined up to defend Fauci when it was clear as the nose on your face what had happened? I think he represents a big brother in public health. The big brother that tells you what to do, doesn’t give you advice but commands you. And the left really is fine with an authoritarian approach to medicine.
We love authoritarianism. That’s why I’m right here right now.
[Sen. Rand Paul]: ...the degree of how much this dishonesty was. He knew in January that there were cases that did not come from the market — you know, the wet market with the exotic animals. He already knew that, and he was admitting it in private.
Now I can address this to Rand Paul, because this is one point he has perpetually refused to understand. And that is that there were many cases early on. Most of them were located geographically close to the wet market in Wuhan, China, where we think the pandemic did actually start. Many of those cases were associated with people who’d gone to the market — because guess what, we knew there were a lot of cases associated with the market, so they did an epi investigation on it. China did. And we know about some of that stuff.
There were also people who went to the hospital — who went to seek treatment for COVID — who had not been to the market. And this is what we found, my group of people, the Zoonati, as we were investigating this: we found that those people who hadn’t been to the market lived right by the market. That was one of the big pieces of evidence, actually, for the market. The fact that these people had not been to the market, but they lived right by the market. That’s probably how they got exposed to COVID — from somebody who had been at the market and lived in their neighborhood, or was walking around their neighborhood, or encountered them where they lived. And so that’s how we know it probably did start at the market.
Rand Paul is either being dishonest, or he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about — in which case, again, Tony Fauci has been vindicated. Okay, continue with your bullshit, Randy.
[Sen. Rand Paul]: But then for the next year or two, he kept saying, oh, look at this paper, it looks like it came from the market —
That would be the paper I was just referring to, which I am a co-author on, showing the evidence points toward the market.
[Sen. Rand Paul]: — but privately he was saying to others in January that they already knew that.
Okay, we need to do a little timeline checking here. The paper we were referring to came out in July of 2022. And I remember exactly what day it was preprinted and the rest of the world found out this paper existed — it was in February of 2022. We had to rush, and we spent the whole weekend basically putting it together, because we had just gotten the information that allowed us to put it out there. So I remember that pretty well. That was two years after January of 2020.
So I don’t know what Rand Paul is talking about when he’s saying, look at this paper, it shows it came from the market — because that paper didn’t come out for another two years after January 2020. And I can tell you from personal experience, it’s possible that one of my co-authors dropped him a line, but none of us actually talked about alerting Fauci to this paper. At this point, we actually would not have, because some of my co-authors were in trouble for showing Tony another paper, which they published in March of 2020. And that may also be what Rand Paul is talking about.
The paper that actually shows it came from the market is the one I was referring to in 2022. But a paper that hypothesized it probably came from the market — and, more importantly, showed, with what little data we had then, that it probably didn’t come from a lab — that was called The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, by four of my co-authors, and then on top of that, my former boss. So five guys wrote this paper. It came out March 17, 2020. And it was heavily cited and very influential, because it has actually held up pretty well. There are a couple of things they didn’t get quite right, but they got the central part of the paper right: that it’s not reasonable to think this virus, based on its sequence, was the product of gain-of-function research of any kind.
It wasn’t the product of serial passaging through animals or through cell culture. It wasn’t the product of genetic engineering. There was no known backbone. In order to make this from the most closely related virus, you’d have to insert more than 1,100 different point mutations across the entire genome. And as somebody who has actually cloned viruses, I can tell you there is no reason why you would do something like that to yourself, unless you really wanted to punish yourself badly with boredom and tedious cloning shit. I can’t even think about it. It sounds so terrible.
Anyways, Rand Paul, again, is completely misrepresenting how all this works, right down to the timeline. Because the fact is, what happened with the Proximal Origin paper — which you’re about to hear so much about, so I’m just going to very briefly go over it — Kristian Andersen looked at the sequence and was like, this looks weird, maybe it’s not natural, I better let my friends know, who are all also world-class evolutionary virologists. So they said, we should tell somebody. They all respectively told important people they know, and they told Tony Fauci. So they got this teleconference together of all these important people, plus a bunch of other experts in coronavirology. And they discussed it. Some of them thought it could come from a lab, some thought it was natural, and they had this whole conversation, and it was informal. It was colleagues talking to each other, trying to work through a problem. Some of them disagreed. Some of them changed their minds.
And this has been blown out of proportion into: they said this publicly, but privately they thought this. No. This is the normal process of people shooting ideas around together, going over different hypotheses and falsifying them. It’s actually an example of scientists working together. And — oh, hey, guess what — some of us are human beings. We’re all human beings, except for our AI research assistants. And those of us who are human beings tend to make jokes with each other. And sometimes we think things one day, and then we think about it a little bit more, and like — hmm, maybe I wasn’t right yesterday. Maybe I should change my hypothesis about this. Maybe the evidence shows I should change my hypothesis about this. And this is a normal thing for scientists to do.
It’s going to be made to look like all these people were conspiring, and Tony Fauci was sort of the puppet master ordering everybody around. That’s how it’s going to continue to be presented. And boy, do I apologize for my dogs. They are outraged about this too. But that’s how it’s going to be presented. So I really do want everybody to understand that when you see that, that is what it is. It’s made-up bullshit, because Rand Paul doesn’t understand virology, and he’s counting on you not understanding it either.
[Sen. Rand Paul / interviewer]: The original cases came not from the market, but from somewhere else. Wasn’t patient zero in the lab, wasn’t he?
There was no patient zero.
[Sen. Rand Paul]: Yeah, we think patient zero — there were three people sick in Dr. Shi’s lab.
This has been discredited. This was floated by the State Department long ago. It has long been debunked. There are no three patients.
[Sen. Rand Paul]: The rumor mills were out there. The doctors were talking about it. By the time you hit January, we’re probably talking tens of thousands of people. And everybody knew it was going human to human at that point.
No, they didn’t. Blood bank data indicates there were no cases of SARS-CoV-2, based on antibodies, until after the first of January. So there were not tens of thousands of cases. Guess what — we would have noticed tens of thousands of cases of COVID, even in China. They actually do have pretty world-class scientists in China, and they know how to do epidemiology there as well. It would have been obvious.
And one of the reasons my colleagues and I even started looking at the early cases around the market was because we noticed something about the timing. We noticed from the first WHO report from March of 2021, the first origins mission they had, that influenza-like illness, increased hospitalizations, and excess mortality didn’t start increasing until January throughout Wuhan. Early on, though, all of those different measures started increasing right around the market, too. And so that’s why we started looking at that — because that’s where we started to see the excess hospitalizations coming into the picture. And then we extracted the cases and found out where they lived and all of that stuff. And that’s how we actually tried to prove that these early cases were significantly linked to the market, at least where it was geographically.
So, you know, Rand Paul, once again, misrepresents this.
[Sen. Rand Paul]: His government was suppressing this. They felt their own guilt. But then Fauci felt his guilt, because he’d been an adamant and enthusiastic supporter of gain of function. You remember, he wrote in the Washington Post — he felt guilty about that. Yes, there’s some danger, but the danger is worth it. Even if a pandemic should occur from this type of research, the danger is worth it. I don’t think the danger was worth it. There’s been no great discoveries from gain of function, and he should be vilified throughout history and throughout all time for this unreasonable risk he took with all of our lives.
Tony Fauci saved millions of lives with the work that he did. (And for the record, the op-ed Rand Paul is gesturing at was a 2011 piece about H5N1 flu research, co-authored with Gary Nabel and Francis Collins — not a confession about COVID.)
[Sen. Rand Paul]: You do it in a P3 or P4 setting, and they’re saying it’s dangerous, there are things like that — but then to know full well what happened, and then to sort of connect the dots. Wow.
He doesn’t know full well what happened. Okay? Because nobody knows full well what happened. We know what the evidence indicates, and the evidence indicates it wasn’t a lab leak — that it had emerged at the Huanan seafood market, probably through interactions with live animals being sold there, just like SARS-CoV-1 emerged in the markets of Guangzhou and Foshan. We don’t know full well what happened, but Tony Fauci didn’t lie because he was covering up a secret lab leak that he knew secretly happened. No lab leak happened. All of the evidence — which is why Tony Fauci was promoting it, or whatever — points to a natural origin in the Huanan seafood market.
Okay, so enough of Rand. I mean, that Squawk Box episode — he just really hates Tony Fauci, the “big brother of public health,” whatever. These guys have been threatening that public health officials are going to go all authoritarian on their asses, when really they’re the ones propping up a dictator.
Joe Rogan and the Yellowstone guy
And speaking of propping up dictators, let’s look at everybody’s favorite court jester for this dictatorship. This is why Tulsi — sorry, let’s try that again.
[Joe Rogan]: ...act as director of national intelligence as she’s leaving. She gave that press conference about Fauci, and she talked about how he lied in front of Congress, and that he absolutely used American tax funds to fund gain-of-function research through EcoHealth Alliance, and —
Okay, so Joe Rogan mentioning gain-of-function research. Has anybody ever asked Joe Rogan what gain-of-function research is?
Now, as I mentioned, gain-of-function research, in this context, refers to any kind of research that makes a pathogen more transmissible or more pathogenic — more virulent, causes worse disease, makes it worse. How do you do that? Well, you can do it a number of different ways. Sometimes you can just do it the good old-fashioned way: you can passage it through different hosts, in the case of viruses. And if you passage it through a host where maybe it’s not very pathogenic, and you keep passaging it at high titers where you actually get the host to start developing some symptoms of disease, and you keep doing that over and over again — allowing the virus to adapt to the host and to a situation in which it will cause more severe disease — then you could get a virus that was more pathogenic coming out of the end of that.
Now, I did this in graduate school. It took me two years to make a rhinovirus that could at least replicate better in mouse cells. And I was so excited. I thought it was finally going to give mice the common cold, and I was going to get my Nature paper, and I’d be able to get my PhD and graduate. And guess what — it did infect mice, but not very well, and it didn’t make them sick at all. So I did all of that gain-of-function work, hoping for a gain of function, planning for a gain of function, trying to make mice more sick with the common cold — but I failed. I’m a bad gain-of-function virologist, despite my reputation.
This really brings up an important point in the whole gain-of-function discussion. Is anybody worried that I tried to mouse-adapt rhinovirus 1A? Rhinoviruses cause common colds. If you have cystic fibrosis or you’re severely immunosuppressed, it might be a problem. But for most people, it’s annoying. If I’m making it better at infecting and causing disease in mice, is that a threat? Is that a threat to anybody, except maybe life is going to be more annoying for a couple of days for the mice — who I’m going to kill anyways? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to be saying that everything is gain-of-function research, especially when you don’t know what it is, like Joe Rogan doesn’t know what it is.
And you’re about to get some flaming-hot takes, too, from Taylor Sheridan, who’s the showrunner for Yellowstone, who was Joe Rogan’s guest on this episode. These guys are constantly talking about stuff, using these phrases they don’t know the meaning of. And so they’re burning into your mind that gain-of-function research is something evil and bad. And gain-of-function research is really, really dependent on the type of gain-of-function research and the experiment you’re actually doing. And we do have mechanisms in place to make sure people aren’t doing insane gain-of-function experiments — like they say we’re just dying to do, and we make so much money doing.
So let’s hear some of the rest of what Einstein here has to say.
[Taylor Sheridan / Joe Rogan]: The Wuhan lab in Wuhan, China. And no one’s covering it. — And by the way, didn’t we all know that already? — No, we knew it, but my parents didn’t. People that just read the newspapers and watch TV, they don’t know. I’ve never seen anything as flagrantly obvious as COVID coming from the Wuhan lab studying COVID. And you’ve got fucking news anchors keeping a straight face saying it came from the wet market. — Did you ever see Jon Stewart’s bit on it that he did on the Colbert show? — No. — You never saw it? Oh, we need to play it. [...] It came from a lab in Wuhan, China, and was somehow conflated with racism. Remember that? If you said it came from Wuhan, China, from a lab, you’re racist. How did you pull that off? — It’s from fucking China, and it seems like EcoHealth Alliance funded it, and it seems like we funded EcoHealth Alliance. There’s a lot of fucking paperwork. And by the way, there are studies on the disease that they’ve been doing that are posted on the CDC website.
My favorite —
[Taylor Sheridan]: My favorite was when you catch all the shit about ivermectin. And literally when that happened — a study pops up on the CDC website while people are telling us not to take that shit. And it talks about the efficacy of ivermectin and antiviral properties, specifically COVID-19. So it’s on the government website that the fucking drug works, while they’re telling everyone not to take it.
It doesn’t work, Taylor. That’s why. Because you haven’t actually read those papers, and you don’t know how to interpret them, and you haven’t actually bothered to ask anybody to help you with that.
[Joe Rogan / Taylor Sheridan]: Whatever trust they had in the news just got severely eroded. — Yeah. — And then you get locked into conspiracy theories and echo chambers online, and you can get trapped in them too. That’s not good either.
Okay — good news: if we don’t have trust in the news, then we’re kind of adrift. Okay, Joe, so yours is the biggest echo chamber, right? And at least that’s how I understand you pronounce that word. Yours is the biggest echo chamber, and you are, like, the biggest conspiracy-theory guy of them all. You just literally had the Yellowstone dude on here talking about how it was a conspiracy that people told people not to take ivermectin, even though they secretly know it works, for some reason. That’s not true.
And we didn’t tell people not to take ivermectin because Tony Fauci told us to. We told people not to take ivermectin for COVID because it doesn’t fucking work. And all of those papers they just trashed — like, it’s not being covered by the mainstream media that we have good papers here showing it doesn’t work, and we don’t like those because they’re boring, so we’re going to go with these Children’s Health Defense or whatever papers that are in journals you’ve never heard of, or just on a blog or something, and it’s like, oh yeah, well, here’s the stuff they don’t want you to see, my parents wouldn’t know about this, they were too busy watching 60 Minutes and reading the New York Times, who don’t report any of this secret shit that’s happening —
You know what that sounds like? It sounds like a conspiracy theory. Because it is. Joe Rogan is part of this extremist pro-MAGA, pro-MAHA network that is telling you not to listen to reliable news sources and to listen to them instead, because they’re coming up with all this dumb bullshit, and they’re going to use it to do things like, say, prosecute Tony Fauci.
The “68% raise” / bioweapons clip
Now I have just one more video, and I’m sorry I’ve gone so far over time. I really do need to get going. But let me just share this.
[Clip]: Take a wild virus, and we’re going to make it more pathogenic, more virulent, more deadly. And then we’re going to develop a vaccine for that. And that’s classic gain-of-function research.
“Classic gain-of-function research.” Juice up the pathogen, make it more deadly. That would be considered a gain-of-function experiment — sort of, depending.
[Clip]: Juice up the pathogen, make a vaccine for this new pathogen you just made, and then get rich, and repeat. [...] The only real rationality about it is to develop bioweapons, and then develop a defense to those bioweapons. So that’s what they were doing. And Anthony Fauci was given a 68% raise by the military because of the new military responsibilities. He continued to do that to 2014. That year, three of the bugs escaped — high-profile escapes from three different labs.
They were high-profile escapes. There were three “lab leaks” that didn’t turn into lab leaks, because nobody got infected. There were improperly inactivated samples of Ebola and anthrax removed from containment at the CDC. And they found a very old vial of smallpox virus — variola virus — deep in a freezer somewhere at FDA. So that’s what he’s actually talking about.
[Clip]: ...really deadly bugs escaped, or were found in unsafe circumstances. And 300 scientists sent a letter to President Obama asking him to shut down Anthony Fauci’s research on —
That’s not what they asked him to do. The Cambridge Working Group, which is what he’s referring to, sent a letter asking for a moratorium, which was granted. President Obama issued a moratorium.
[Clip]: ...and shut down eighteen of the worst projects by Anthony Fauci, or ordered them shut. In the end, he really didn’t shut them. He instead moved the research offshore, where he’d be out of the oversight.
It is completely not true about Tony Fauci. He did not make bioweapons. He was not running some sort of secret bioweapons program. All of this stuff is slanderous, it’s defamatory, and it’s completely made up. And that is the basis on which everybody is saying Tony Fauci needs to be prosecuted.
The actual point
So yeah, the mainstream media isn’t covering this because Tony Fauci literally did not commit a crime. And reliable news sources are not going to cover a story that is fake. And that is what this story is. Tony Fauci did not do anything criminal. They’re trying to prosecute him anyway by manufacturing a crime against him for doing his job in the federal government. And if you guys can’t think through the implications of that, that’s really, really scary. You really need to think about what that means for you.
Because Tony Fauci was completely public. He was a completely public figure. All of his emails are available. People know everything Tony Fauci was up to during his time as NIAID director. They know what he was up to during the pandemic. That’s why Tulsi has all of these emails and all of these documents — because they were documented. And even if they were classified, they’ve eventually all been released. They contain no evidence whatsoever of a lab leak. They contain evidence of people talking to each other and investigating whether or not there was a lab leak, and talking about whether it could have been a lab leak. But what the evidence shows is that it was not a lab leak. It came from the market. And that’s what the evidence — that Tony Fauci had nothing to do with — shows. He only repeated what other scientists had found. That’s what the evidence shows. That’s not anybody’s opinion. That is a fact.
And so what all of these guys are saying is that you shouldn’t listen to facts. You should listen to their opinions that this was actually a crime. And you should put Tony Fauci in jail for the rest of his life on state and federal charges — he should be locked up, and throw away the key. I’m not so cavalier about demanding that my fellow Americans have their freedoms taken away for doing their jobs as public servants for years, for decades, as part of the federal government.
So I really do want everybody to sit with that and think about it. Think about what the implications are. If we lock up Tony Fauci for a crime that is completely invented for political reasons, what does that say about our country? And what does that say about any of our chances, should we end up in a situation where politically we’re caught in the crossfire?
One last thing: COMMENT TO OMB
Comment to the Office of Management and Budget that you don’t like Russell Vought’s plan — their director’s plan to seize power by seizing control of the entire congressionally appropriated budget. You have until July 13 to leave a comment about how you like basic infrastructure, how you like basic government services, and how you like everything that more than $1.1 trillion in government grants goes to pay for — that makes your life better, and that you probably don’t even notice because it’s always been there, but you’re going to notice it when it’s gone. So please comment before it is gone. And again, that’s at this link right here. You can also find that link anywhere you can find me, and that’s going to be on my exit slide.
See you later, guys. See you tomorrow.
Links from this episode
The 2022 market paper (Worobey et al., Science) — The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 (Andersen et al., Nature Medicine, 2020): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Fauci, Nabel & Collins, A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking (Washington Post op-ed, Dec. 30, 2011): https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-worth-taking/2011/12/30/gIQAM9sNRP_story.html
WHO-convened Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part (joint report, March 2021): https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part
The Cambridge Working Group (2014 statement calling for a moratorium): https://www.cambridgeworkinggroup.org/
OMB “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance” proposed rule (comment by July 13): https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/29/2026-10817/regulation-for-federal-financial-assistance
Public comment portal (OMB rule, Docket OMB-2026-0034): https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001
Thank you Maura, Chris McKinney, Lynn Germiller, Bart Emry, K. Jarvis, and many others for joining me See you tomorrow at 1 pm ET.
