With Dr. Vincent Racaniello. Recorded August 18, 2026. The video version of the column BREAKING: It Still Wasn’t a Lab Leak and I’m Not the Crazy One Here. Transcribed by Claude so as usual, forgive any errors.
VINCENT: From Microbe TV, this is Rasmussen Retorts, episode number 12, recorded on August 18th, 2026.
I’m Vincent Racaniello and joining me today is Angie Rasmussen. Hello, Angie.
ANGIE: Hi, Vincent. How are you doing?
VINCENT: How are things up in the north?
ANGIE: Well, they’re actually quite nice. We have actually had almost no smoke this year because it’s all been blowing down onto you guys. So it’s actually the only time of year that I like the weather in Saskatoon. So it’s nice. But I wasn’t here for most of last week. Actually, I was in Washington, D.C., where the weather’s ghastly because it’s incredibly humid and it’s full of mosquitoes. And it’s a swamp.
VINCENT: It’s a swamp. Yeah, I heard it’s a swamp.
ANGIE: It pretty much is.
VINCENT: This is the video version of Angie’s column on Substack. It’s called Rasmussen Retorts. We’ll put a link in the show notes. And today we’re going to talk about a recent column. It’s called Breaking: It still wasn’t a lab leak and I’m not the crazy one here. This is quite a stream of consciousness, Angie.
BREAKING: It Still Wasn't a Lab Leak and I'm Not the Crazy One Here
Last week started with me going to DC for work and ended with me learning over the weekend that I was mentioned positively in former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci’s diaries. Specifically, Fauci felt my research on COVID origins …
“It was just such a weird week”
ANGIE: It really wasn’t. It was just such a weird week that I had last week. On one hand, it was really professionally fulfilling because I went down to D.C. for this workshop that I was invited to be a panelist in. It was at the National Academy of Sciences. It was co-sponsored by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI. I just got a grant, a vaccine leadership award, that’s also in partnership with CEPI. So it was really, really terrific to actually go to a scientific meeting and talk to a lot of people, including some in the biosecurity field that I don’t always agree with. And really was able to find some common ground, had a lot of, I think, really productive discussions. So that was all great on one hand.
And then on the other hand, Michael Caputo, who was Trump’s HHS press comms guy during the pandemic and ended up leaving office after going on this absolutely insane, unhinged rant against CDC employees, tweeted that I was a demon prowling the world seeking souls to ruin. So it was a real back and forth kind of thing. And I felt like it was something that I should write about because it’s a very strange thing to have a former Trump administration official say that you’re literally possessed by the devil and trying to steal people’s souls.
VINCENT: Well, you can’t be. Your name is Angel, right?
ANGIE: Right. I know. That’s the irony, the whole situation. Although Lucifer was an angel as well.
And then at the end of the week, over the weekend, I got back home and I was just trying to decompress after all of this. And I see that some of the lab leak people on Twitter are complaining because I was mentioned positively in Tony Fauci’s diaries. So it brought it all full circle. And I just felt like this was something that I should talk about because it’s a really surreal experience to, on one hand, have one Trump official saying that you’re a demon, and on the other hand, Tony Fauci saying that he really likes your scientific work and he also likes you dunking on people on social media.
VINCENT: Okay, congratulations on being in Fauci Diaries.
ANGIE: Yeah, thank you.
VINCENT: You and Barbra Streisand.
ANGIE: And Vincent Racaniello, from what I understand.
VINCENT: Well, I have to admit that when I saw that you were in it, I did search. I found a copy and searched it. And I did show up twice. Once he cited a blog post where I wrote I didn’t think the first COVID booster was necessary. And he said, oh, Racaniello doesn’t think it’s necessary, but they already used it in Israel, so it must be good. I don’t get the logic there.
ANGIE: I mean, that was pretty typical, though, for that time, don’t you think?
VINCENT: Yes. And then he said, I had interviewed Eddie Holmes, who had said that Tony was unfairly vilified. That’s why he cited that, because he liked Holmes defending him. Anyway, so I’m in there as well, but not as many times as you.
Okay, so I picked a few things from this column, so let’s go through them. First of all, according to Senator Rand Paul, Republican, Kentucky, Fauci committed a crime by lying to Congress when he said he didn’t fund illegal gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that could have started the pandemic.
RAND PAUL (clip): Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?
VINCENT: Can you talk a little bit about that? So tell us what’s going on there.
“I still don’t really know what evidence he’s basing his views on”
ANGIE: Yeah, so this was another sort of weird thing. It wasn’t weird, it was actually refreshingly great, that I did last week, but just in the context of all this crazy stuff happening. And that was that I went on Mehdi Hasan’s show, Mehdi Unfiltered, with the former COVID coordinator from the Biden administration, Ashish Jha. And Ashish — I’ve known him since during the pandemic, I’ve been in meetings and stuff with him when he was the Biden COVID coordinator. And he came out recently and said that he now thinks it’s a lab leak.
JHA (clip): Based on information I learned and based on information I’ve seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak.
ANGIE: And when he said that, I was really very curious what his evidence was. He said he’d seen things over the course of the prior administration that made him change his mind about that. So I really wanted to know what that was. And we ended up having a discussion. I still don’t really know what evidence he’s basing his views on. It seems that he just weighs the evidence that does exist differently than me and doesn’t find it as persuasive as I do. But we had this conversation about it, and it was really refreshing because even though I totally don’t agree with the way that he is parsing the body of evidence that exists for the origin of the pandemic, we did agree very strongly on a number of things, one of them being that Tony Fauci is actually innocent, pardon notwithstanding, of any crime that he’s being accused of.
JHA (clip): Let me be very clear. First of all, Tony Fauci, as best as I can tell, was not lying at all.
ANGIE: Because the regulations covering gain-of-function research at the time, which were not federal law — they were NIH policy — those regulations at the time did not cover the work that NIAID funded that was done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And more importantly, we both agree that there is no progenitor virus. There’s no virus that could have become SARS-2 that was at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And Tony Fauci didn’t know about any virus like that. And he wasn’t funding work that actually violated any policies. And there was nothing in the work that was funded that could have possibly resulted in the pandemic.
So it was really nice to actually talk to another academic colleague, because not all of them are so great on this topic, who disagrees with me and who — I don’t know what he thinks of my position, but we were respectful to one another and we respected each other’s position. And it’s just really nice to actually have a conversation like that about this particular topic because it’s usually such a toxic shit show, frankly.
VINCENT: Yeah, it always degrades, as you point out in the column, and you apparently had a better experience with him. But I’m really curious to know, what evidence is he talking about? Because as you and I have discussed, everything falls apart on what you just said. There is no progenitor to SARS-CoV-2. So what has he got?
ANGIE: His claim is basically not about the evidence that he has seen, but about the evidence that could hypothetically exist.
JHA (clip): Here’s the bottom line. No one in the United States knows for sure. The only people who know for sure are people, officials in China. And we still need transparency and accountability on that.
VINCENT: Oh, this is another Alina Chan business then, right?
ANGIE: Kind of, yeah. So I didn’t mention that in my column. But yesterday, I’m sure you’ve seen it, Alina Chan wrote another sort of, oh no, there’s virologists with labs around the world and the last pandemic could have started in a lab, so therefore put my new think tank that I’ve developed, my new nonprofit, in charge of regulating all these labs, is essentially what it’s all about.
VINCENT: Right.
ANGIE: And I think we’re going to be seeing more and more of this where people who have no interest scientifically in this topic, but who have financial or other business interests jumping into the space and trying to sort of hand wave at the evidence base and the fact that the evidence base is just technical. And right now, everybody is dealing with all of the many tire fires all over the world. And as I think we’re probably going to discuss today, it’s an intentional tactic to make people feel put upon and that it’s just overwhelming. And sometimes that’s personal attacks. And sometimes it’s just flooding people with virology word salad that sounds good but doesn’t actually really mean anything. Because the fact is the evidence base, I think, is pretty solid and pretty persuasive. But it is technical and you do have to have the patience to understand it. And many people just don’t have that bandwidth right now, which is also completely understandable, I think.
VINCENT: Well, I don’t know what Jha is, but he and Chan seem to think that you can just cook up stuff that might be, but that’s not how science works. Science works by getting data and then you make your conclusion and then you move on and you get more data and maybe you modify it. You don’t say, well, if this had happened, that would have happened. That’s not science.
“China doesn’t actually care if it was a lab leak”
ANGIE: Yeah, I mean, this is my whole problem with the lab leak theory and the way that even serious people sort of approach it these days. It’s, well, it would be a pretty simple explanation if it was a lab leak. And, well, China hid some stuff, so that must mean that they were hiding the evidence of the lab leak.
One thing I think about this that’s very interesting, and that actually wasn’t in my column today, but it really rarely gets talked about, and that is that China doesn’t actually care if it was a lab leak. Like in every conversation with the Chinese scientists, they get asked about lab leak and they’re kind of like, what? They don’t really care if it was a lab leak or not. They just don’t want it to have come from China at all. So it doesn’t matter if it was a lab leak. It doesn’t matter.
VINCENT: As long as it wasn’t their lab.
ANGIE: Right. Exactly. It could have come from anywhere. But the other thing is, even more so than not wanting it to be a lab leak, China doesn’t want it to have come from the market. Because after SARS-1, China said, we’re going to crack down on this wildlife trade thing that we’re doing. We’re going to make it safer. We’re going to make it more humane. We’re going to regulate it. We’re going to ban it for a little while, and then we’re going to bring it back in. And it was clear that the wildlife trade, as it was practiced at the Huanan seafood market, was definitely not within those “we’re going to reform the wildlife trade” things that China had said before. And oops, this time it didn’t just cause an epidemic, it caused a pandemic. And I think that China and the Chinese government really would like people to not talk about that a whole lot more than they’d like them to not talk about a potential lab leak.
VINCENT: Well, unfortunately, it did originate at the market. And in fact, as you know, China’s CDC published a paper early in 2020 concluding that.
ANGIE: Indeed.
VINCENT: Most likely came from the market, with George Gao on it.
ANGIE: I believe it was January 21st, 2020, in the China CDC Weekly.
“He suffers from the delusion that he knows what the F he is talking about”
VINCENT: Can’t change history. Anyway, I like some of Fauci’s comments in his diary. These are really good. This one, and you highlight these in your column, that’s why I’m— this is about Jeff Sachs, the economist who thinks he knows science. Here it is, quote, like many of his fellow economists with Ivy League credentials, but no specific expertise in biology, he suffers from the delusion that he knows what the F he is talking about. So Tony was not shy about cursing in his diary.
ANGIE: No. And so that must mean he had no problem with me cursing either on Twitter or—
VINCENT: That’s just exactly the way it is. Sachs doesn’t know anything and he spews nonsense about this all the time.
ANGIE: This is the thing that kills me about Jeff Sachs. And this is the problem that really is kind of at the heart of this column. It’s that sometimes there are some people, usually men, not always, but often men, who rise to these positions where it’s like they can just say anything and there are no consequences for it. Jeff Sachs has been saying really crazy shit about other things. He said that, for example, NATO blew up a pipeline, an oil pipeline, the Nord Stream pipeline, blamed NATO for it. It was probably not NATO. It was probably Russia. He blamed NATO and the U.S. for Russia invading Ukraine, which I don’t know how NATO and the U.S. caused Russia to aggressively invade Ukraine. But that’s his contention as well.
And so he just says this stuff that he’s completely unqualified to say. But because he’s been this celebrity economist for many years, he’s done all this stuff with Bono and Angelina Jolie, and he’s been involved in global health issues, he has all this prestige. And so he can kind of get up there and say this stuff. And people don’t question him because, A, he’s very powerful. And B, he’s so smart, he’s so credentialed, he’s so well regarded, he’s probably right. And that is a consistent problem in this space because people who are in that position often abuse that position and use it to force people who actually do know what they’re talking about out of the conversation.
VINCENT: Well, of course, if you question him, he’ll just insult you.
ANGIE: Well, there’s that, too. Now, Jeff Sachs has actually never insulted me because Jeff Sachs is far too important to even know who I am, even though we’ve appeared in documentaries together. I believe you were in one of those documentaries as well. Jeff Sachs has never even acknowledged my existence, which I’m also used to from this category of people.
“That may be the best tweet that I’ve ever tweeted”
VINCENT: So then there’s another quote about Richard Ebright, the Rutgers professor who— It says, Fauci says, he is the human manifestation of Pepe the Frog who spends his days squatting on his Twitter lily pad, croaking at everyone who disagrees with his uninformed views on biosafety, virology, and evolution, and that they are shills and stooges and thralls of the CCP. You know, Fauci is pretty creative.
ANGIE: Well, that was me, actually. That was Fauci quoting me.
VINCENT: Oh, that’s right. He quoted you. Yes. Yes.
ANGIE: That may be the best tweet that I’ve ever tweeted. That one was— I had given this talk at ESCMID, the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. It’s a big conference in Europe. And I was invited to give a talk called Twitter is the New ID Textbook. And so I was on a panel with all these people who are big Twitter people, but also ID people. So I think Neil Stone, who’s this doctor from the UK, was on it. And Carlos del Rio, who’s my colleague, he’s at Emory University, was on it. He’s my colleague and editor at Vaccine as well.
So it was all these people talking about Twitter and stuff. So I gave a presentation about all of the harassment and the lab leak stuff and tried to talk about some of the techniques that are often used. For example, just asking questions, which is sometimes known as JAQing off, is when you just make accusations in the form of a question. It’s like accusation Jeopardy. Or there’s Gish galloping, where you just overload people with questions and information so that they can’t respond, things like that.
And I had a bunch of examples of Richard Ebright’s tweets, because this guy is a professor of chemistry at Rutgers University who, by all accounts, and I don’t know because this is not my field, does good structural research, work on bacterial RNA polymerases. He’s done work to discover new antibiotics, which is very much needed and important work. I can’t really criticize him as a scientist because it’s not my field. If only he would extend the same courtesy to me. And to you, for that matter.
But that’s who Richard Ebright is. And he has been essentially doing exactly what I said, sitting on his Twitter lily pad and croaking out to everybody that they are stupid, that they are bad scientists, that they are taking money from China, that they are corrupt fraudsters. In my case, I’m the worst virologist, Vincent, that has ever picked up a pipette, unless—
VINCENT: Actually, he called you a failed science trainee. And of course, that also cast aspersions on me, because I trained you, right?
ANGIE: That’s correct. And as you know, he has tweeted other things which I didn’t feature in this. I believe in one he said that you were the oak and I was the acorn, and you were the tree and I was the nut. Yeah. So I learned how to be an incompetent virologist from my incompetent mentor. And except for one thing, and I guess I’m glad he did get this right about your scientific legacy, Vincent, he has a much higher opinion of my cloning skills than I do. But I suck at virology unless I’m going to do some bioterrorism. Then I’m a really good virologist who learned all about cloning viruses at the knee of my teacher who invented it.
VINCENT: I hear you. He said your BSL-3/4 rating should be taken away.
ANGIE: Yes, he did. And that was because I made a comment about World War II saying that whether peaceful or through armed resistance, the only time that fascism falls is when all of society is united against it. That was meant to refer to all of the circumstances in the past, whether the recent elections in Hungary or World War II, when society has said no thank you to fascism. And that was what I was talking about. And he interpreted that as a call to arms to my fellow, I guess, violent civil war mongerers, to overthrow the government with bioweapons and therefore take away my keys to the containment lab.
VINCENT: I mean, the reason I’m bringing this up, just to let people know what kind of diatribe these individuals engage in, which they do because they can’t counter the science.
ANGIE: No, and they have to suggest that you’re actually a criminal for having a differing opinion and a differing scientific opinion. That’s what kills me about all of this. It’s not just that Richard Ebright disagrees with me. He says that my papers are fraudulent. He says that our work is fraudulent. And in fact, he thinks our entire professional field is dangerous, unnecessary, and potentially fraudulent.
So it’s incredibly disrespectful to— but it’s also really abusive. I mean, it has been going on that Richard Ebright has literally been copy-pasting hateful tweets to me, to you, to all of our colleagues for years. As soon as I learned about this guy, back in 2020, he started tweeting mean things at me and he has not stopped ever since.
VINCENT: So I ran into a colleague of his at Rutgers in the airport not long ago. And I said, can’t you do something about him? And he said, Vincent, he believes everything he says.
“We work in a land of gods and monsters”
ANGIE: I think that’s true. He really does truly believe, because he’s convinced himself over many, many years that our field is essentially designed for people like Tony Fauci to funnel money to us so that we can do dangerous things for the deep state, or just generally be reckless because Fauci made it rain money on us to do so. This is a completely invalid and unrealistic and wildly fictional account of what virology research is like. But he has been saying this for 20 years, and I think it’s an example of somebody who has literally said the same thing to himself for so long and nobody has said you’re wrong. He’s never faced consequences for it. He continues to be referred to as Distinguished Professor Richard Ebright. And he continues to have quite a lot of traction with people who have a political interest in his point of view. So I have no doubt that he probably believes everything that he’s saying, but that doesn’t make it right.
VINCENT: Yeah, I think after a while when you start saying things and then people pat you on the back, then you start to believe it.
ANGIE: Yeah. I think our field in academia in general, and I think this is where the problem comes from, it comes from, we work in a land of gods and monsters. People get tenure and they get a scientific reputation and then it’s like they can’t be wrong. And yet we have so many examples of people in our field, not just virology, but throughout science, who have been at that level and then they fabricate data, they do something and it all goes away, because that’s how it should be. There should be consequences for misconduct.
And it’s just really striking to me, and I think probably a lot of other women in science, that with these guys, with people like Richard Ebright, I already know what the excuse is. He’s always been like that. Oh, that’s just Richard. Because they can’t do anything about it because he has tenure. Now they could do something about it. They could bring him up on disciplinary charges. Most universities have a mechanism for doing that. But it depends on whether or not the university actually cares enough to do it. And in my experience, universities never care. There are rare exceptions, as you know.
VINCENT: There are. That’s very true.
So Ebright is a lab leaker. So is Sachs. So is Alina Chan. And I just wanted to put that in context of a figure you have in your column, which I like. It’s a scale with the evidence for natural origin versus lab leak. And it’s a nice graphic representation of the balance in favor of natural origin. So if people go to the column, they should take a look at this. I think instead of listening to a lot of words, you can look at this graphic and maybe get a better sense of what’s going on.
ANGIE: You know, Vincent, I think one of these days I might take a page out of your book and actually give like a sort of public facing lecture on that. Try to make it short and publicly accessible, but try to actually do the Professor Rasmussen kind of thing for the public’s benefit, because I know not everybody wants to read the whole— I have a separate lab leak post, and I know not everybody wants to read all of that. But sometimes it is a little bit easier if you just get to look at something like that, which is why I like presenting that figure in scientific talks.
VINCENT: I mean, it’s a scale with the two pans. And you have evidence for natural origin and then evidence for lab leak and also lack thereof. And the lab leak, the only evidence, which in my view is not really evidence, but that the lab in Wuhan was doing coronavirus research, and then everything else is lacking. And then on the other side, you have preponderance of evidence in favor of a natural origin. It’s just very visually striking. And it may be for people who don’t want to listen to a lot of words, that might help.
ANGIE: I try to also do things with not so many words. And in fact, I think it was your advice about presentations, Vincent, in graduate school. There was one professor in our first year of classes who had extremely texty slides and they were about bacteriophage. And oh boy, was it hard for me to follow because I’m not really that into phage. I know they’re viruses, but I don’t really care about them. And it was like reading a wall of text. And at one point you told me, you’re like, I put as little text on my slides as possible so that I can explain. And ever since then, I’ve been doing that. And even though that slide does have quite a lot of text on it, what I like that you can take home from it is it’s about the weight of the evidence on either side.
VINCENT: Yeah. I think if you can just have an image, it’s always better.
ANGIE: Yeah.
VINCENT: And then you can just talk about it.
“He wouldn’t know a furin cleavage site if it came up and cleaved him in the consensus site”
ANGIE: Yeah, exactly. Because people have so many different questions. That’s the trouble with talking about the origins, is that people have heard a million different things about the lab leak. Like, what is it?
One of the reasons why Michael Caputo got mad at me was that Matt Taibbi, who is this independent journalist on Substack — he used to be sort of a legit journalist for like Rolling Stone, he covered like this financial corruption stuff in the 2000s, but then he sort of became this right wing operative. He claims to not be right wing, but he was like one of the original guys who reported on the Twitter files that Elon Musk gave to him and stuff. He’s not a great guy. And of course, he thinks it’s a lab leak.
So he was going off on Twitter about the furin cleavage site. And I said that he wouldn’t know a furin cleavage site if it came up and cleaved him right in like the consensus site. And that was what made Michael Caputo say that I was— first say, because he said it now multiple times, that I’m a demon prowling for souls to ruin. Because I basically told Matt Taibbi that he’s wrong about the furin cleavage site. And the fact that I’m even talking about furin at all, or any protease for that matter, or any sort of step in any sort of viral entry process, with random dudes that work for Russia on the internet, really speaks to where this whole discussion has ended up.
“So that’s who Michael Caputo is”
VINCENT: So let’s talk about Michael Caputo a bit. Who is he actually?
ANGIE: So Michael Caputo was the assistant secretary in the HHS, the Health and Human Services Department, for press and comms during the pandemic. So he was like HHS’s spokesperson. Now, Alex Azar was Trump’s HHS secretary back then. And everybody who was in the U.S. and watched all that stuff may remember all of those COVID press conferences with all those people. So Michael Caputo was the guy, theoretically, that was coordinating Alex Azar’s and everybody who worked within HHS’s press appearances. And that includes Tony Fauci, because NIAID, part of NIH, is part of HHS. So he was the press guy.
And at first, from reading Tony Fauci’s diary, it seems like they got along pretty well. But then he hired this guy, this Canadian guy named Paul Alexander, who was billed as this Oxford-educated genius who’s a professor at McMaster University, which is a very good school here in Canada. He was actually like an unpaid sort of adjunct professor at McMaster and had just gotten like a master’s degree there. He did have a PhD from Oxford, but sorry, a master’s degree from Oxford. I don’t think he has a PhD. He’s not at all— he might be a genius, I don’t know. But he doesn’t seem to actually be qualified to be HHS’s main science advisor for the COVID pandemic. And so that’s what he became.
And all these guys are anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration proponents, which means that they wanted pandemic policy to be something called focused protection, which means that all of the old and sick people stay home indefinitely forever and everybody else goes out and gets COVID, basically.
And so he actually said on July 2nd, 2020 — a day I should add that I was involved in a Twitter fight with Elon Musk, and that’s why I remember that day specifically — but on July 2nd, Fauci was involved in a different fight with Michael Caputo to go on TV so that he could tell Americans how to protect themselves, since he knew everybody was going to be getting together for the 4th of July and COVID was surging. Now, keep in mind, again, this is July of 2020. This is still in like the thick of the pandemic. Right? So Michael Caputo doesn’t want him to go on TV.
Two days later, Paul Alexander, this Canadian guy, sends a text or email to Michael Caputo saying “we want them infected,” meaning Americans. Like, we don’t want people to avoid infection. Fauci cannot go on TV and tell people how to avoid infection because we want them infected. So that’s who Michael Caputo is. He was this guy’s boss. He loves this guy.
Things kept getting worse and worse around HHS and the comms department, because by September, Michael Caputo was accusing CDC scientists of conspiring with Joe Biden, who was then a presidential candidate, to essentially rig the election and steal it from Donald Trump. And when Trump inevitably won anyways, Joe Biden would refuse to allow Trump to become the president. And that’s when, quote, the shooting would start. So I guess the idea is that Biden would try to use violence to overturn the results of a free and fair election, which... hmm. I remember January 6th, 2021, and it sure wasn’t Biden fans who were doing that.
And so that’s why Michael Caputo ended up leaving the administration in September of 2020, because he basically said Joe Biden’s going to January 6th everybody before we knew what January 6th was. When in actuality, he was helping with January 6th, because the other thing Michael Caputo is famous for is colluding with Russian spies, essentially, who are trying to disrupt our elections, with Roger Stone, who is a convicted felon for doing just that. So Michael Caputo, in addition to being a pro-infection, anti-vax lunatic, is also in bed with the Kremlin.
“I don’t think that any virologist is going to argue for a policy that involves mass infection”
VINCENT: This let it rip philosophy is so flawed on many levels, but the big one is long COVID, which we didn’t know about in the beginning. And these people had no clue. And so letting people get infected just leads to long COVID. And it’s just an example. When you have a new virus, you do not do things like that until you understand it much better.
ANGIE: You know, I don’t think that any virologist is going to argue for a policy that involves mass infection unless mass infection is inevitable. So like, for example, the way that we manage seasonal flu, mass infection is inevitable. So we get seasonal flu shots to prevent the impact that that would have at population scale, because we don’t have the tools to actually prevent mass infection.
VINCENT: Mm-hmm.
ANGIE: We could keep people home all we wanted. And I mean, that did actually work for seasonal flu during COVID. It really reduced spread a lot. Didn’t get rid of it, though, because now we have seasonal flu all over again. And those are human strains. So we can do things about that. We can have policies that account for inevitable mass infection, which is essentially now what our COVID policies are as well.
But you’re absolutely right. You can’t say, oh, well, based on a couple months worth of data, we think that this is totally not going to be a problem for most of the population. I mean, modeling studies that have looked at what would have happened had Great Barrington Declaration, let it rip style policies been in place, predicted that at minimum there would be one million more deaths in the U.S. in addition to all the long COVID cases that you mentioned. I mean, we can’t take the risk of making policy — I don’t think that that risks that. And this is me speaking as a reckless virologist. I think that if there is a chance that your policy is going to kill people by the hundreds of thousands or millions, that policy is off the table.
VINCENT: Well, the point is that you don’t know this in the beginning of a new virus. So you err on the side of caution.
ANGIE: Exactly.
VINCENT: And these people were just malevolent, essentially.
ANGIE: They still are doing it. And we talked about this in our last episode, Vincent, but I think it’s on purpose. I mean, they want us to be sick, partly for the upcoming midterms. But in general, if the American people are sick, they can’t participate in their own government and they can’t resist losing control of their own government. And I think this is really by design.
VINCENT: Fauci had a nice quote about Caputo in his diary. He said he’s a con man who is completely full of shit.
ANGIE: Yep. Accurate.
VINCENT: I like that very much. All right. That’s all I have for now. Do you have anything else you want to talk about, Angie?
“The only reason that they’re able to do this is because we effectively allow them to”
ANGIE: I don’t think so. You know, the reason I wanted to talk about this today, Vincent, is just the larger issue to me, apart from the fact that it makes my life really, really weird sometimes. The larger issue to me is what the real problem is with the situation that we’re facing right now. And it is because we have a lot of these people who seem to be somewhat immune to consequences, who are being allowed to spread their lies and then on top of that to abuse any critics into submission effectively.
Now, there’s — I mean, good luck with that with me, I’m not very prone to bullying — but it’s still really damaging. And it’s one of the mechanisms, I think, that this regime is using quite effectively to attack science and also to undermine our democracy. And I just really think that people need to know about it, because you and I both know who all these people are, right? But most of the public has no idea who they are. They just see somebody who has credibility, who is sitting up in front of everybody repeating lies and then saying that their critics are bad people or they’re incompetent, trying to effectively disqualify them and remove them from the situation.
In some ways, having Michael Caputo call me a demon was really awesome, because it means that the stuff that I’m saying and the stuff that I’m putting out there is actually having an impact, because it’s making these people want me to shut up. So I just really want people to be aware of that, though, that this is not just Trump and the people that you know. There’s this entire network of people who are willing to participate in this and who are doing it in really terrible ways. And the only reason that they’re able to do this is because we effectively allow them to.
And I think that there’s a lot of ways that we can intervene in this and stop allowing them to do it. And one way is to just not tolerate it anymore. I mean, it would be very easy for Richard Ebright to stop harassing everybody that disagrees with him if Rutgers University said, like, we’re actually gonna impose some consequences if you don’t adhere to our faculty code of conduct, which they do have, I’ve checked. I think that there are things that we can do. The problem has been a lack of will.
And so what I really wanted people to get out of this was not like, oh, Angie’s life is so crazy, look at all these terrible dudes that she has to deal with. It’s the fact that people should really not tolerate this in our society and this in our discussion about all of these issues right now. We should not tolerate people who lie to us routinely. We should not say that it’s acceptable professional behavior for that to happen. And we shouldn’t excuse people who do just because they’re prestigious academics or they’re important government officials or they have a good reputation or whatever. We have to call out lies where we see them. We have to move forward based on the evidence, like real scientists.
And that’s just really what I wanted, what I was hoping people would get out of this. Because the thing that meant the most to me about being mentioned in Fauci’s diaries was not just when he was talking about my awesome tweets, like dunking on Richard Ebright, but it was the part actually where he was at a party talking to Bret Baier from Fox News, who’s their chief political anchor. And Bret Baier said to Fauci that our papers convinced him that there wasn’t that much to the lab leak theory. Now, of course, Bret Baier, as of last week, was saying that Fauci is a criminal who needs to go to jail. So this is still a problem of people saying something in private that they’re not saying publicly, like Bret Baier is doing, which is what he’s accusing Fauci of.
But I think that it meant so much to me when Fauci mentioned this. That not only was our scientific research convincing to somebody from Fox News, but that he mentioned my name with two of my co-authors and I was a middle author for that paper. So it really meant a lot to me that Fauci recognized me as a scientist based on the evidence of the work that I’ve done and not just like my ability to dunk on people on Twitter. And I think we’d be in a much better place if we focused on the evidence and what people have actually done to contribute rather than these political considerations that are really destroying us and I think are very harmful to all of us going forward.
VINCENT: Next time someone says this person is poorly trained, just think about it. They don’t have a response to the evidence. That’s why they’re saying that.
ANGIE: And I don’t think anybody would say that of anybody who trained in your lab, Vincent. You taught me how to cesium band a plasmid. I mean, what—
VINCENT: I did.
ANGIE: What person of any age below like 65 can say that about their PhD mentor?
VINCENT: Not anymore. I probably showed it to you myself also.
ANGIE: You did. You did. You showed me how to do the dialysis tubing. I about fell over when you pulled out that thing of like saturated ethidium bromide and you’re like, here we go. Like titrate it out.
VINCENT: It’s good stuff.
ANGIE: For everybody watching, no infectious virus is involved in this part of the process, by the way.
VINCENT: So this discussion is based on Angie’s column on Substack. It’s called Rasmussen Retorts. We’ll put a link in the show notes. That’s Rasmussen Retorts with Angie Rasmussen. Thank you, Angie.
ANGIE: Thank you so much, Vincent.
Related from Rasmussen Retorts
BREAKING: It Still Wasn’t a Lab Leak and I’m Not the Crazy One Here — the column this episode walks through
Five Reasons Why It Still Wasn’t a Lab Leak — the standalone origins post
Rasmussen Retorts Episode 11: Fact checking RFK Jr and Dana Bash — the previous episode
LIVE COVERAGE: Tony Fauci Faces Off With Rand Paul on Pandemic Origins — the hearing the Rand Paul clip is from
RECAP: Fauci Fiasco with Drs. Angela Rasmussen and Vincent Racaniello
Links from this episode
Zeteo: “Did COVID-19 Actually Come From a Lab? Two Top Scientists Debate Its Origins” — the Mehdi Unfiltered debate with Ashish Jha
China CDC Weekly, “An Outbreak of NCIP (2019-nCoV) Infection in China — Wuhan, Hubei Province, 2019−2020” — published January 21, 2020
ESCMID — European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases
Rasmussen et al., Science 2014, “Host genetic diversity enables Ebola hemorrhagic fever pathogenesis and resistance”
Price et al., Cell Reports, “Transcriptional correlates of tolerance and lethality in mice predict Ebola virus disease patient outcomes”
Science: “Lab-leak proponents at Rutgers accused of defaming and intimidating COVID-19 origin researchers”
Politico: “We want them infected” — Trump appointee demanded herd immunity strategy
New York Times, September 14, 2020: Caputo’s Facebook Live and the “shooting will start” remarks
Modeling study: focused-protection strategies and excess US deaths
Worobey et al., Science 2022, “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic” — background on the market origin
