Rasmussen Retorts: Episode 1
YOUR FAVORITE VIRUS AND VACCINE SUBSTACK IS NOW YOUR SECOND FAVORITE VIRUS AND VACCINE SHOW ON MICROBETV AFTER TWiV!
The rise of fascism hasn’t been all bad. Okay, yes it has, but there have been occasional silver linings. One is that it has given me a lot of reasons to spend time with my PhD mentor, Vincent Racaniello, Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University.
Vincent is a legend in virology. He made the first infectious clone of an animal virus (polio) in 1981. His lab discovered the poliovirus receptor shortly after that, and made the first receptor transgenic mouse model of polio pathogenesis in the 1990s. His lab also made fundamental discoveries about translational control that have transformed molecular virology and pathogenesis research. Less remarkably, he had a graduate student who managed to select for, clone, and characterize a mouse-adapted rhinovirus and get a solid Virology paper out of it. His knowledge about viruses and vaccines is so vast that he probably has forgotten things about virology that I have not yet learned.
Vincent is also a legend in communicating about viruses, vaccines, and virology. He started his podcast, This Week in Virology (TWiV), when I was in his lab. I was even a guest on an early episode. Since then, Vincent has grown into a microbiology/infectious disease media mogul, as the head of the Microbe TV podcasting empire. Along with his co-hosts and their many distinguished guests, he has taught so many people about virology, immunology, evolution, infectious diseases, microbiology, medicine, vaccines, epidemiology, and the list goes on. Vincent truly is “Earth’s virology professor.” I was thrilled when he agreed to join a group of our colleagues and The Save America Movement (SAM) to warn people about the catastrophic damage being done to our national immunization program.
So when Vincent asked me if I wanted to do a show with him, where he would ask me about a particular article on my Substack and I would just go off about it, I tried to sound really casual and cool when accepting his offer. In reality, having 20 minutes to engage in uncensored rants about the unscientific buffoons who are effecting preventable mass infection through the most idiotic subversion of our government imaginable to Earth’s virology professor is an automatic yes from me. Vincent suggested something similar to the Behind the Noise show he does with Paul Offit, and it was additionally flattering to be compared to an undisputed hero of vaccination who is living legend status as both a scientist and a communicator.
It was a lot of fun, though the subject of discussion was anything but: the epidemic tsunami of preventable disease that awaits us thanks to current US vaccine policy. We discussed the presidential memo in which Trump ordered US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to align the American childhood vaccine schedule with “peer, developed nations”. We also discussed the leadership phenotypes of most of the HHS officials currently doing everything possible to strip access to vaccination and the consequences of their actions. And, because it’s impossible to discuss this topic without bringing up the country that has bedeviled my Norwegian ancestors for more than a millenium: Denmark. I hope you will find it informative and useful! If you like it, we will do more, so please leave a comment if you do.
Vincent also once again demonstrated very clearly who is the student and who is the teacher, since he made incredible branding and design choices that far outstrip my own “draw a blonde white woman in a wrap dress surrounded by viruses” image generator prompting skills. I particularly like my avatar’s outfit, the art deco vibe, and the nightclub music, which makes me feel like we’re on our way to drink vespers at a W Hotel bar after the episode wraps. Even the font is incredible. I kind of stand like the legs on that cocky-looking R in this brand logo.
Please say that you want more of this, just so Vincent will still make me look good online.
Remedial hepadnavirology
Unfortunately, I am not perfect, so I made some mistakes this episode. I don’t mind making mistakes, because it lets me practice publicly correcting them. A good number of my “fans” have said that I am ALWAYS WRONG and I never correct myself or admit it, so I like to provide evidence countering this claim. The scientific method depends on trying to prove a hypothesis wrong, so any good scientist needs to be comfortable with being wrong. If I get something wrong in an academic paper, I submit a correction to the journal. If I get something wrong here or on social media, I will correct it or delete it, and if I delete it, I will usually explain why. And if I get something wrong in an interview or a podcast, I’ll admit it and correct my error. This is sometimes embarrassing.
Like when you say to the world-famous virology professor who trained you that hepatitis B virus (HBV) is non-enveloped and he corrects you that this isn’t true. HBV is enveloped. Vincent was, of course, right and I was wrong. I was also mortified.
I did a bunch of homework to ensure this does not happen again. I do not like to share inaccurate information, even inadvertently. And I don’t like to look like a rank amateur who skipped hepadnavirus day in Virology 101, especially in front of the guy who taught the class.
HBV particles (virions) are made up of an icosahedral nucleocapsid (20-sided shell) packaging the genome, which is surrounded by an envelope derived from the membrane of the host cell it budded from that contains the surface antigens. In fairness to me, the surface proteins are packed so closely together on the surface of the virion that it is practically encapsidated. It’s probably the hardiest enveloped virus I can think of off the top of my head, but it is indeed an enveloped virus.
I am really uncovering the secrets of virion structure in the course of my HBV research. HBV virions are called “Dane particles” (in honor of the British guy who discovered them, but still). It seems wherever HBV goes, Denmark follows. It is my cruel fate to be dogged by malign Danish influences throughout life, even when I am minding my own business trying to rectify my ignorance of structural and molecular hepadnavirology (which is also necessitated by malign Danish influences).
HBV is an interesting virus with a weird replication cycle. It is a DNA virus that replicates with a RNA intermediate that is generated through reverse transcription (copying DNA from an RNA template). Although retroviruses like HIV also have reverse transcriptases, they are RNA viruses with a very different replication cycle. HBV is the only virus in the family Hepadnaviridae that does this, and the only one that infects humans. HBV would be a very interesting virus to study: not much is known about its evolution, but its evolutionary history spans millions of years. Not much is known about the mechanisms by which it evades the immune system or establishes chronic infection. There are still a lot of unknowns regarding HBV pathogenesis, both in terms of how it causes progressive liver damage and causes cancer. But up until last year, I thought we would probably never fill most of those knowledge gaps. I didn’t even really think about them that much. I never thought we would need to know this, because the birth dose of the HBV vaccine had pushed HBV in the US to the brink of elimination. Studying HBV would still be scientifically valuable, but would not be relevant to public health.
So I never thought much about HBV, because I work on emerging viruses that are current or potential threats to public health. Thanks to vaccination, HBV was about to be a threat of the past in the US, until the US government was occupied with a cartel of crackpot eugenicist anti-vaxxers hell-bent on bringing it back. It never occurred to me to study HBV. It’s a pain in the ass to work with (it doesn’t grow in conventional cell culture, it doesn’t infect or cause disease in most established animal models except for chimps, there aren’t a ton of reagents available, etc). It is a virus that was not supposed to have a future.
However, “I didn’t think I’d need to know that much about HBV” is a very poor excuse for a reputedly knowledgeable virology professor whose uncle is a world-renowned HBV expert to make regarding such an elementary mistake about HBV virion structure. Because I know my HBV knowledge is shaky, I should have double-checked. A quick glance at any depiction of a HBV virion would have shown me my error. Thinking more deeply about the difference between the HBV surface (the envelope glycoprotein) and core (the nucleocapsid protein) antigens would have also allowed me to self-correct. But I am human and I make mistakes. When I do, it’s important to admit them, correct them, shake it off, and do what is needed to avoid making it again in the future. Especially when it’s as embarrassingly amateur hour as this. Maybe I need to retake Vincent’s virology course…
Undskyld til Dr. Hviid og Statens Serum Institut
Screwing up HBV virion morphology was not my only error in this episode. I also referred to Dr. Anders Hviid as “Hviik,” and mistakenly referred to the Statens Serum Institut (SSI), the Danish national immunology and infectious disease research institute, as the “Serum Statens Institut.” That latter one is more egregious, because I snakker enough Norwegian to know that that means “Serum State Institute” in Danish rather than “State Serum Institute,” it’s actual name, which refers to the fact that SSI also develops and produces vaccines and antibodies (“sera”—plural serum—is an old-timey name for antibodies as well as actual serum, the liquid component of blood). What the hell is a “serum state”? That sounds like some kind of spa treatment.
I don’t like making mistakes about people’s names or their places of work, especially when I have been previously been invited to go speak at those places of work like I was by a lovely colleague at SSI in 2022 (I had a schedule conflict, but now I fear I’ll never be invited back). I regret this so deeply that I started typing out the heading in Norwegian and then actually translated it to the language of my grandfather’s enemies (well, the non-Swedish enemies, anyway). I’m glad I did, because I was starting off with beklager, which Google Translate suggests connotes complaint rather than apology in Danish. I wanted something that would convey my sincere regret for the error, which is apparently undskyld (in Norwegian, unnskyld means “excuse me”). Now I am haunted by my grandfather’s ghost for the crime of going out of my way to apologize to a Dane (something he advised me never to do) and, in fact, an entire institute of them. Even worse, I consulted another Dane on Bluesky to make sure my tone was sufficiently apologetic (although he advised me to “just pop a potato in your mouth and continue to speak Norwegian. Congrats, you're now fully fluent in Danish. Want to translate it back? Spit it out. Så nemt!!”)
I’ll just have to face my grandfather’s wrath if I make it to the section of Valhalla that is reserved for pickled herring-gobbling octogenarian Sons of Norway members who died while napping through an Unsolved Mysteries episode in his girlfriend’s La-Z-Boy, because my colleagues at SSI and Anders Hviid in particular are great scientists who do really important research to track vaccine safety and understand how vaccines work. As Vincent and I discussed, there is a reason why the anti-vax luminaries who are currently occupying the US federal government never bring up Hviid’s papers. They are rigorous and they show that vaccines are safe and effective.
I’m glad that Hviid and his colleagues at SSI are continuing their work, despite the same disinformation being spread by some of the same people in Denmark as in the US. I especially admire that Hviid refused to let Kennedy misrepresent his research findings. His clapback was an ice-cold serving of restrained Nordic rebuke. I am sorry I screwed up your names! And tusen takk! I know that’s the Norwegian way of saying it (I put a potato in my mouth), but really: a thousand thanks for your excellent scientific work and for refusing to allow American officials to misrepresent it.
Virologists will be virologists
If you enjoyed watching us (mostly me) rant on Rasmussen Retorts: The Show, know that Vincent and I also will have a lot to talk about on future episodes. We have been subjected to the same professional criticism, specifically that we are both on the payroll of Big Reckless Virology and we want nothing more than to dismiss the concerns of non-virologist randos on the hellsite accusing us of being a pair of amoral, virology-promoting lunatics. Here is one example, in which a chemistry professor-turned-radical biosafety zealot offers his view that Vincent is a great oak tree, raining his virus-loving nutcase progeny across the academic landscape to cook up pandemics in our labs like the unaccountable, irrelevant sociopaths that we are (though I’d argue we’d be pretty relevant if that were true).
This was related to a lab leak documentary that Vincent and I were both in. Vincent is probably one of the best talker-about-viruses on the planet, so of course he was asked about virology and his four decades as a virologist. Vincent did say that he loves viruses more than anything else on the planet, including his family. Although the lab leakers will never read that as anything but an admission of sociopathy, I know exactly what he means. It’s a beautiful sentiment.
Viruses are incredible and fascinating. They never stop surprising and amazing me. They are infinitely interesting and never stop challenging me. I could talk about viruses until I stopped being able to talk, and then I would still think about viruses all the time. Although I am a scientist who studies them for a living, I never get tired of them. I love being a virologist. I also love my family, but they are not viruses. They are people that I have relationships with, not the fascinating object of my life’s intellectual work. I love them as people, not as things that I love to study.
Some viruses that I love can kill a lot of people. They can cause famines and environmental destruction. They can completely transform society, and not for the better (for example, you can thank SARS-CoV-2 for MAHA). They can destroy civilizations. Just because I love viruses doesn’t mean I’m on their side. Virology research is not important because virologists love studying viruses for anyone but virologists; virology research is important for everyone because it has the power to save millions of lives. We would not have vaccines if it weren’t for virology. Vaccines are named after vaccinia virus, the first vaccine. They have always been inextricably linked to viruses. There are no vaccines without virology.
To love viruses is to love preventing the diseases they cause, improving the health they ruin, and saving lives that they would otherwise take. It is not wrong to love viruses; I would argue that it is wrong to casually accuse virologists of sociopathy based on a comment deliberately taken out of context by people who hate virology due to ideology and/or self-interest. To love viruses is to love people, including your family. To love viruses is to learn how to destroy them.
We are about to witness firsthand what happens when virology and vaccine research—and the scientists working in these fields—are directly attacked and shut down. To prevent viruses from killing or hurting people, we need to prevent them from infecting people. To prevent viruses from infecting people, we have to understand how they work. To understand how viruses work, we need to study them. Vincent is standing up for our field, as he always has, because he not only loves it, he knows how important it is. Without virology, we are defenseless against some of the most consequential health and security threats out there. I’m more than happy to be the acorn to Vincent’s oak—as a virologist, a communicator, and now, a defender of our profession—and I only hope that I grow into such a stately and stalwart tree.
Scientists really need to speak up and take action. A lot more of us do, and we need to do it soon. Many cannot because of the very real threat of retaliation from US funding agencies. But for those of us who can, there are a lot of ways to do this. One way is to just talk frankly from our expert perspectives about everything that’s happening and what the consequences are going to be. From my expert perspective, those consequences include mass death of children and vastly increased risk of numerous terrible health and security outcomes. With vaccination, these terrible consequences will be years off in some cases, but that will not make them less terrible. To prevent this, intervention needs to happen now. The public needs to know about this with no bullshit. We need to keep talking about it. If we don’t talk about why virology, vaccines, or public health are important, then the public will only hear from liars who are ideologically opposed to all of those things. The public also needs to hear who those liars are, and why they are lying.
I’m very grateful to Vincent for giving me this opportunity to speak up, and for having the idea in the first place and then basically doing everything. My only contribution was showing up. It reminds me of old times—I was not naturally an acorn off the old Racaniello oak when it came to making infectious clones, so he gave me some tips, including cloning my toxic ex-virus (human rhinovirus 1A) into a low copy plasmid that had to be isolated by ultracentrifugation on a cesium chloride (CsCl) gradient because mid-oughts maxi-preps were trash. I was nervous about death via unbalanced ultracentrifuge, so Vincent offered to cesium band a couple plasmids himself so I could watch and learn.
Like most vintage molecular and biochemical methods, the whole procedure seemed like a hazard-strewn pain in the ass; besides the potentially deadly ultra, it took three days, involved huge volumes of ethidium bromide (mutagen), even bigger volumes of saturated salt and cesium waste containing ethidium bromide, and UV lights (also a mutagen), and required bizarre prep steps like boiling dialysis tubing in sodium bicarbonate. But he showed me how to do it correctly and safely and I both learned how to do it and to appreciate the results. You get a lot of plasmid DNA from those preps (GRAM quantities!) and it’s incredibly pure. I started doing CsCl preps even when I didn’t need to because you got such clean DNA from them. I probably did so many CsCl preps by the time I left grad school that I forgot I had ever been hesitant. As a result, I finally cloned that goddamn virus. Inserted mutations into it too, rescued all my viruses, and did enough experiments to publish it (a couple years after I defended, but still, IT’S A CLASSIC). I’ve really learned a lot over the years from just showing up to watch Vincent and talk to him about viruses. And it was so generous of him to invite me to do that here.
Vincent is a great teacher who has created a lot of opportunities for me and the public to watch and learn. Thank you to Vincent Racaniello and MicrobeTV!
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Eugenics was greatly en vogue in the US in the 20’s and 30’s. It appears that these HHS initiatives are inspired by these malign ideas.