(Note from Angie: This is a transcript generated by Claude so let me know if you see any errors. Recorded 29 July 2026 from the American Society for Virology annual meeting, hours after Tony Fauci pled the Fifth before Rand Paul’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.)
ANGIE: Hi, everybody. I’m Dr. Angela Rasmussen, Science Chair for The Save America Movement. I am here with Dr. Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University, my PhD mentor, esteemed colleague, experienced virologist, and expert on this particular topic — not necessarily Fauci’s hearing, but on virology and the type of virology research that Fauci is being accused of doing, which is, by the way, not illegal and really important scientific work.
So we just wanted to pop by here with the Save America Movement to have a little discussion about what happened earlier today at Fauci’s hearing before the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee of the Senate.
So to give you a little bit of background — Vincent and I today are at the American Society for Virology annual meeting. This is the professional society for our entire field. My first ASV meeting was in 2005 when I was a graduate student in Vincent’s lab. It was in Wisconsin. This one’s in another Midwestern state very nearby. It’s really humid and miserable here, but it’s a lot of really good virology.
And we thought that it would be a really good chance to catch up, because I missed this morning’s sessions covering the Fauci hearing and Vincent was able to attend them. So I’m going to fill him in on the Fauci hearings and he’s going to fill me in on what I missed. And we’re both going to fill you in on what the context is for these hearings and what’s going on with Tony Fauci.
“The point of the hearing was for Rand Paul to continue the fiction”
ANGIE: So to give you a little bit of background, Tony Fauci was going to go in for a transcribed interview with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is the chair of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee of the Senate. Rand Paul has been after Fauci since 2021, when Fauci told him that he was a liar for misrepresenting the origins of the pandemic and what we know about that.
Now, in the intervening years, we’ve learned a lot more about the origins of the pandemic, including through some papers that I have contributed to. And we do not think that it came from a lab. In fact, almost all of the evidence — with the exception of the fact that the pandemic began in Wuhan — suggests the pandemic emerged from the live animal trade at the Huanan Seafood Market. And we can certainly talk about that, but that wasn’t really the point of the hearing.
The point of the hearing was for Rand Paul to go ahead and continue the fiction that it was in fact a lab leak, and that Tony Fauci funded the lab in China that made this, through a sub-award on an R01 NIH grant — which is a type of grant that NIH issues to people in the U.S. and in foreign countries. Or at least used to. They don’t anymore to the foreign countries, and not very many in the U.S. either these days.
But in any case, Fauci was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH. And these sub-awards had been issued, and it was for bat coronavirus research. And Rand Paul is incorrectly claiming that Fauci knew that this work would lead to the pandemic — which it is, as Fauci put it, molecularly impossible to do. That was in his hearing in 2021, because Fauci did not say anything today.
In fact, Fauci pled the Fifth. He cited his Fifth Amendment constitutional rights against self-incrimination, even though he was preemptively pardoned by President Joe Biden for fear of something like this happening.
And to be clear, what this hearing was today was a show trial, in which Fauci pled the Fifth and every single Senate Republican who is on that committee said lie after lie about the origins of the pandemic. We had lab leak stuff. We had insertion of furin cleavage sites, which we’ll get into. We had anti-vax stuff. We had Fauci as a malignant narcissist. We had all kinds of accusations, none of which actually suggest any kind of criminal activity.
So I just wanted to fill Vincent here in on what happened, and also make everybody else aware of what this was about, because Tony Fauci is a forty-year career public servant who is now basically being prosecuted — or at least they’re trying to — for being a forty-year career public servant and doing incredible research, funding research all over the world that has saved millions of lives.
VINCENT: Probably worth pointing out that there are 1,600 people at this meeting. And if you ask them, probably all of them would agree that this pandemic originated in nature.
ANGIE: Yes.
VINCENT: So it’s not just us that’s saying this.
ANGIE: No. And this is really a good point, because Vincent also has a podcast. He does a lot of media work and he talks to a lot of other people all about virology. And he talks to a lot of virologists — probably even more virologists than I talk to on a regular basis, even though we’re both professional virologists.
VINCENT: I would have to say that I’ve met very few people who disagree. At least who don’t feel — they may not be certain, but they don’t feel that the lab is very plausible in most cases.
“Certainty is hard in science”
VINCENT: Certainty is hard in science, right? All you can do is say, all the data we have, all the evidence points to this. You can never say yes or no for sure. And a lot of people don’t like that, right?
ANGIE: Yeah. Uncertainty came up at the hearing quite a lot. They’re really doing a lot of work to litigate emails and things that Fauci sent very early on. And I think this is something that’s really important to mention about the hearing too: a lot of the so-called evidence against Fauci and against some of our other colleagues and friends is really just people talking to each other over email and trying to grapple with that uncertainty.
I know you, Vincent, because you trained me. One of the first things I learned from you was that when I’m dealing with a scientific problem, I shouldn’t decide the hypothesis before I’ve tested it. I shouldn’t declare that something is true if I don’t know that it’s true and I don’t have evidence to demonstrate that it’s true.
VINCENT: So a great example is RFK Jr. saying, I’m going to look for evidence that vaccines cause problems. That’s not how science works. What you say is, let’s look at the record of vaccines and see what we find.
VAERS: “It just tells you maybe there’s something”
ANGIE: Exactly. So that came up a lot too today: vaccine safety. Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, who is a big-time anti-vaccine activist, said about what he called the experimental gene therapy shots, that there are all these vaccine safety signals in a database called VAERS that is operated by the CDC — which, by the way, Tony Fauci was not part of the CDC. But he claims that Tony Fauci ignored a lot of safety signals about the mRNA vaccines that had been submitted to VAERS.
Now, VAERS is a self-reported database. It’s not verifiable. And I think a lot of this is that people don’t really understand that scientists, as you said, will look at the entire body of evidence before deciding something. So if you do get a signal in VAERS — and I know about this because I’m also the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine — you get a safety signal in VAERS, the CDC and their experts and experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will do a deep dive to see if there’s anything to that. And they will do that by, as you said, looking at the data in an objective and unbiased way to see if the numbers actually add up to what people are seeing.
VINCENT: And of course, there have been signals in VAERS. So the rotavirus vaccine many years ago generated a signal, which led to it being —
ANGIE: That’s right.
VINCENT: — and fixed. But there are a lot of things there that just don’t mean anything. So you could get a COVID vaccine and a month later die. It doesn’t mean they’re connected.
ANGIE: Correct.
VINCENT: But if there are enough of those, you investigate them. And in fact, the CDC does that, and then they don’t come up with anything. Right? So people are misled about the VAERS database and its usefulness. It just tells you maybe there’s something and we need to investigate it. But on its own it’s not meaningful.
“Anything can be a gain of function if it gains function”
ANGIE: It’s not meaningful, and it also has nothing to do with the origins of the pandemic — and neither do the vaccines. This is another thing that just really drives me crazy.
The big accusation scientifically against Fauci and the WIV, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is that they were doing what is called gain-of-function research — or in other words, juicing up viruses so that they’re more transmissible or pathogenic in people. And the standard at the time was that it has to be in people.
VINCENT: Anything can be a gain of function if it gains function. You can put green fluorescent protein into a bacteria and it turns green, and now that’s a gain of function.
ANGIE: But the gain-of-function research that they’re talking about here is so-called dangerous gain-of-function research, which is virology research that changes things. So they said that they took a bat coronavirus, stuck in a spike from another bat coronavirus. The backbone was — Rand Paul said it was SARS. It was a SARS-like coronavirus. They actually had two, called WIV1 and SHC014, that they used for cloning viruses.
And one reason I was really excited to talk to Vincent about this, of course, is that Vincent is very famous for cloning viruses and was in fact the first person to develop an infectious clone of a virus, in 1981. So when people say that, oh, we can’t have these secrets of these viruses and these chimeric viruses, they’re so bad getting out — this is work that’s actually been going on for almost fifty years that you pioneered.
VINCENT: It’s been going on forever. Nobody paid any attention to it until the pandemic came along. And then suddenly politicians who really don’t know anything about science started to comment on it. This idea that the virus was made somewhere is just crazy absurd. It doesn’t make any sense, because if you were going to make SARS-CoV-2, you’d have to have something really close to it to start with. And as far as we know, nobody had anything. So everything about engineering falls apart right away.
ANGIE: It sure does. Same thing with serial passage. So the other theory that Rand Paul talked about today is that it was — and they’re never really clear about everything that’s going on. They’re never clear if it was cloned or engineered or serially passaged. They talk about them like they’re all the same thing.
Serial passage is when you take advantage of the fact that the enzymes that replicate the virus genomes are mistake-prone, and so they put in a lot of mutations. So if you add selection pressures to make a virus do something that you want it to do, like say grow in a mouse, you serially passage it through the mouse and eventually it will grow in mice better. That was my PhD project, by the way. I was only somewhat successful.
However, often when you serially passage it, then you might clone it. You might make chimeric viruses, as they were discussing. There’s all kinds of things that you can do.
But what I wanted to talk to you about, Vincent, too — this is something I think about all the time. There’s this assumption that because you’re doing these things with viruses, that your motivations are inherently bad or malicious, that you are doing this recklessly at the very least, or that this is something that we’re just kind of doing for kicks. Like, oh, you made a bad virus. I’m going to make one that’s worse.
And that’s absolutely not what any of this work has historically ever been for. The purpose of all of this work has been to develop new vaccines, to develop new antiviral drugs, to figure out how vaccines work. I don’t recall you ever once in all of my cloning conversations with you being like, what would be cool is if we made a rhinovirus that was like bird flu. Not that I think you could actually even do that.
VINCENT: We don’t do that. Virologists and scientists in general don’t do that. We are driven by curiosity to solve problems. And in doing so, maybe we help human health, right? We don’t want to impair human health. That’s absurd. And for anyone to accuse a scientist of doing that just doesn’t know how science works. I’ve never met anyone — I’ve been in virology for years, I never met anyone who wanted to do an experiment for nefarious purposes.
ANGIE: No.
VINCENT: And so these politicians would like you to think that that’s what we do all the time. But it’s not true. It’s never true.
“Safety is the top priority”
ANGIE: One thing, training people in the containment lab that I work in — when Vincent trained me to do experimental virology, safety is the top priority. We’re not planning, first of all, pointless experiments. But second of all, if you’re a virologist and you’re doing something with a dangerous virus, who do you think is going to be the first person to get infected if you screw that up?
VINCENT: You.
ANGIE: Probably you.
VINCENT: Yep. It’s called spitting into the wind, right?
ANGIE: Yeah. None of us wanted to do that. So we take various precautions. Like in Vincent’s lab at the time, you could still work with poliovirus at BSL-2. All of us have been vaccinated against poliovirus, so there was no danger of us getting poliovirus, so you could use it in those lower containment conditions. Now polio requires higher containment conditions and can only be used in specialized places because of the efforts to eradicate polio, which I fully support. And in fact, that was why I worked on rhinovirus in graduate school, because we thought we were going to have to destroy all of those old polio stocks.
I love polio. It’s a beautiful virus to work with. I bet Vincent loves it even more.
VINCENT: I do. It’s on my phone.
ANGIE: But yeah, it’s on his phone. He’s going to get a tattoo of it.
VINCENT: But we made a transgenic mouse that could be infected with polio. That’s a gain of function for the mouse, way back in the nineties.
ANGIE: Transgenic mice came up too today. They were humanized mice, as they like to call them.
VINCENT: Well, they’re not really humanized, because they just have one gene. Expressing the receptor is not making a mouse a human. But when we did it, the university said we should contain these mice. Maybe they’ll get out and be a new place for polio to grow in. And so people were thinking about this. And so we bred and kept these mice in containers where they couldn’t get out.
ANGIE: Yeah. So we don’t just do things willy-nilly. And in fact, you’ll be happy to know that your graduate student who trained me to work with the PVR transgenic mice — the first thing he told me was, we cannot let these mice get out because they could create a reservoir for polio in the natural world.
VINCENT: We’ve always done everything, I think, responsibly.
ANGIE: Most scientists are not trying to waste time and resources doing pointless experiments to begin with, but we’re also not trying to do unethical or dangerous experiments. We’re not trying to put ourselves in danger. We’re not trying to put our communities in danger, as you said. We’re curious. We’re trying to find out truths about the natural world. We’re trying to find out things that will help humanity, that will help our world be a better place.
And essentially what the Republicans and Rand Paul said today was that that’s not what any of us are doing. We’re all out to, I don’t know, damage people, to do research that’s going to hurt people.
“You want to talk about profiteering”
ANGIE: They’re never actually quite clear on what our motivations are. I mean, today they did go off on how Fauci has gotten a lot of cash awards and how he had people at NIH, quote, soliciting those awards, although —
VINCENT: People at very high levels like Tony Fauci will get these awards and there’s a huge process to get it. And if it comes with a $900,000 prize —
ANGIE: I’ve never gotten an award like that, by the way. I would imagine that you would need staff working on it. And to make Tony Fauci sound as though he’s been a profiteer for his entire career is also just a complete travesty, because Tony Fauci has literally spent trillions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer dollars funding research that has brought us to the point where we’ve cured so many diseases, we’ve developed so many vaccines, we’ve done all of this incredible work for fifty years.
And coming to this conference — even hearing from Vincent about the talks that I missed, and the good science, the amazing science that I missed, in this climate — is really what we should be talking about. Not all this made-up stuff.
VINCENT: I don’t think any Republican should talk about profiteering. They’re profiteering from the government right now.
ANGIE: Oh, I mean, Ron Johnson was talking about how — so there were so many complaints brought up by the Republicans. And I do want to give a shout out to the Democrats, though, because every single Democrat who was at that hearing — and they all showed up — came back at the Republicans with the questions that they had for Fauci. None of them were really questions. They were more speeches. But they called it out for what it was: effectively a show trial, and an attempt to convince Americans that science is bad, and that many of the things that have made Americans’ lives markedly better are bad and we shouldn’t fund them anymore. And in fact, we should criminally prosecute them if they are going to be politically opposed to the current administration — which is entirely different from any climate I think that we’ve ever been in in the U.S.
VINCENT: I’m sure they presented the data for these assertions, right?
ANGIE: Yeah, so Ron Johnson did bring up some VAERS data, a chart that I found the numbers on it. I would want to check them, that’s for sure. Wasn’t very well cited about how he did that analysis.
He did not provide anything to support his claims that Fauci helped cover up hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which are, according to him, very, very effective, much more so than vaccines for treating COVID. And millions of people died — except more than a million people did die from COVID. But in addition to that, I guess, Ron Johnson is claiming that more millions died because they didn’t get ivermectin or something. And that’s somehow Fauci’s fault.
And ivermectin, by the way, doesn’t work.
VINCENT: It doesn’t work.
ANGIE: And also, does hydroxychloroquine work?
Ron Johnson is part of a larger group of anti-vaxxers led by Peter McCullough, who sells telemedicine services that will prescribe you ivermectin for $600 — which is a considerable markup considering ivermectin is a generic drug. So you want to talk about profiteering. You don’t have to go very far in terms of degrees of separation to connect Ron Johnson, and probably Rand Paul too, to some of these anti-vax organizations.
VINCENT: The big problem is that because these are senators making these statements, many Americans believe what they’re saying is correct, right?
ANGIE: That’s absolutely right. And the Senate and Congress these days have become a forum in many ways for really just promoting some of these crazier conspiracy theories. The MK-Ultra hearing that I watched a couple of weeks ago about CIA mind control was completely unhinged. And I just could not believe that this was a discussion that was happening in Congress. Saying stuff like the CIA had MK-Ultra’d the Charlie Kirk shooter, and all of this stuff. It’s just deep state nonsense.
But the purpose is beyond silliness. The purpose is really to degrade our democratic institutions and to create precedents for much worse things, I think. And in Fauci’s case, I’m just very, very worried that he will set a precedent that will allow them to go after whatever political dissidents they don’t like, including many, many of our colleagues.
“Scientific inquisitions”
VINCENT: Yeah, I think everyone needs to be very careful about these scientific inquisitions, essentially, where there’s nothing behind them except accusations. And as you said before, they’re not even sure if it’s passage or engineering or whatever, because they don’t know.
ANGIE: Yeah, and they don’t even bother to read the literature which would say otherwise.
VINCENT: So I don’t think politicians asking about science is really a reliable forum to get the truth out.
ANGIE: No. And it shouldn’t be. And in the past — and maybe Vincent, I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with committees at NIH or policy stuff in the past. I don’t know that we’ve actually talked about that very much. I know that Tony Fauci and you are very familiar with NIH and all that.
But I just think a lot about how many of these mechanisms that they’re going at are really obscure. Most of the public isn’t paying attention to NIH sub-awards and sub-award rules. And they certainly aren’t paying attention to the latest in bat coronavirology. And so when you get all this stuff that comes up in a Senate hearing like this by somebody like Rand Paul, who is a doctor — he’s made up his own board to certify himself, but he isn’t, he is technically a board-certified ophthalmologist — saying things as a physician, coming at this with the authority of a physician and a senator, saying: we know that it was a lab leak. We know that there were these chimeric viruses being made. We know there was this furin cleavage site. We know that there was serial passage and there was all this stuff.
And the average person, who has never heard of what a furin cleavage site is, who is not getting people on Twitter tweeting the sequence of the furin cleavage site at them — which is something that’s happened to me now twice — most people don’t think about that kind of stuff. And so they don’t know what to think. And so what they hear is, this sounds sciencey, it sounds like a lab leak, and you know what, he’s an elected senator, they’re saying this in the Senate, Tony Fauci is under oath, he took the Fifth. That suggests that he’s guilty.
And they certainly like to talk about that, too. They made a big deal — Rand Paul loved to talk about how he brought half a dozen lawyers with him, and kicked out his lawyer who was objecting to the process, kicked him out and then said, don’t worry, you’ve got the rest of your half dozen lawyers with you. Why wouldn’t he have lawyers? I would certainly have as many lawyers as I could if I thought the government was trying to prosecute me for doing my job.
VINCENT: But I think we should talk about why they’re doing this. They want to get him to say something, which later they will say he was lying.
ANGIE: Right. That’s right. So at the very beginning of the hearing, Rand Paul asked Fauci to open up a copy of the U.S. code and read the statute on perjury, which then Rand Paul read for him, reminded him that he was under oath repeatedly.
And for me, I think what this is all about — much like the MK-Ultra hearing was meant to sort of mobilize anger against the government, against our standard democratic procedures — the purpose of this is really to set the precedent for prosecuting political dissidents. And by making it seem as though Tony Fauci is guilty whether he opens his mouth or not, that’s a good way for them to further undermine trust in Tony Fauci.
But the fact is, I think the fact that he took the Fifth was the smartest thing he could have done, because no matter what he says at this thing — Rand Paul started off by asking him if he wanted to apologize to the American people for lying to them. And so obviously he did not do that. And I don’t think he owes us any kind of apology. But whatever he would have said — if he would have said the scientific evidence doesn’t support that it was a lab leak, they would have said that he was lying, because Rand Paul is convinced that it’s a lab leak and has all this fake evidence that they just made up that says that it is.
The furin cleavage site
VINCENT: So what kinds of scientific questions did he ask him?
ANGIE: Well, he asked him about the furin cleavage site — which of course, again, Tony Fauci didn’t answer any of this, because back in 2021 Tony Fauci did actually answer some of these things.
And the fact is, the furin cleavage site is an element in the spike protein where a pair of molecular scissors, effectively called furin, comes along and snips the protein in half. In other sarbecoviruses — which is what Rand Paul called them today, although he called them “sar-bee-coviruses,” I think.
VINCENT: Okay, we’ll give him that.
ANGIE: Yeah, that’s okay. So there’s SARS-related betacoronaviruses, which is just a classification of these viruses, which includes SARS-CoV-2, right?
VINCENT: That’s correct. Yes. So betacoronaviruses include SARS-related coronaviruses, MERS-related coronaviruses.
ANGIE: And so that’s what he was talking about. So no other SARS-related coronavirus has ever been found with a furin cleavage site in it. However, MERS has multiple furin cleavage sites in the spike protein. In other SARS-related coronaviruses, other proteases, other molecular scissors will come along and make this cleavage. But the cleavage has to happen.
Many, many other viruses have evolved to have furin cleavage sites. High-path influenza, Ebola. What am I forgetting? You probably know them all.
VINCENT: I like the high-path influenza. That’s a great example of a furin cleavage site. And many other viruses do also.
ANGIE: And the high-path flu is actually very interesting with the furin cleavage site, because it is the acquisition — the natural acquisition — of a furin cleavage site that makes it go from low-path avian flu to high-path.
VINCENT: This is a good example. So in nature, we’ve seen low pathogenicity, which means they don’t cause a lot of disease in chickens, go from low to high by acquisition of a furin cleavage site. No one has ever accused anyone of putting it there for avian influenza. Why not?
ANGIE: They sort of have.
VINCENT: Oh, they have. Yeah. Who did it?
ANGIE: Peter McCullough. That anti-vaxxer, the profiteer that Ron Johnson works with. He wrote a paper called like the proximal origin of H5N1. And it suggests — this is an even crazier story. Sorry about the sidebar, guys, but this is how crazy this stuff is getting.
This guy wrote this paper that suggested that H5N1 is a lab leak, but from two labs: a USDA lab in Georgia, I think, and then a lab in — I want to say Ukraine.
Ukraine, biolabs, and what those labs actually did
ANGIE: Which actually is kind of relevant to this, because some of the evidence against Fauci are these documents about biolabs that were run in other countries, including Ukraine, by the Department of Defense. And the reason for this was — this program started decades ago to build international relationships with other countries, and especially former Soviet countries like Ukraine that might partner up with other people that are not so friendly to us if we don’t make friends with them first.
So we funded these labs where we could work with them and where we could support them in doing important work, like, for example, what Tulsi was all upset about, which was H5N1 avian influenza surveillance work in Ukraine, which was standard genomic sequencing and sampling. It was not any kind of gain of function, anything. And yet it’s being painted as some kind of gain-of-function work, when in reality this is really important for food safety and food security. Ukraine is the world’s sixth largest poultry producer. So it makes sense that the U.S. would invest money in avian flu control in Ukraine.
VINCENT: So we’re just trying to do things to protect human health and we get accused of nefarious things.
ANGIE: That’s right. And in the course of doing that, we’re also safeguarding American interests and national security, which I think is something that people also don’t talk about enough. Our community doesn’t always talk about that, except in the sense of what kind of grants we might be able to get, or biodefense grants.
But I think that people really do need to understand that this whole entire thing is designed to make good things that America used to do — like building multilateral relationships and making the world a safer place and doing important, high-impact research to save lives — making it seem like it was a waste of time or fraudulent or even malicious.
VINCENT: It’s very easy to be swayed if you listen to the senators throwing out all these terms, even though they don’t make any sense and there’s no continuity. The person on the street would say, yeah, this is really bad, we shouldn’t let this happen. But it’s not the senators you should listen to. You should be listening to the scientists who are doing the work and are doing it to protect you.
I mean, so this idea about this cleavage site — just the fact that it’s not present in the related viruses means nothing. In biology, that’s how things are. Some things are present and sometimes they’re not.
ANGIE: Right.
VINCENT: And so to accuse someone of putting it there is crazy.
ANGIE: So I was talking to a couple of our colleagues today — and I missed this talk, too, I don’t know if you saw it — but one of our colleagues had been doing a lot of deep sequencing, like really, really deep sequencing of bat samples, and found furin cleavage sites that basically you could see at a very, very low frequency. There are viruses emerging that have some, at least a furin motif.
VINCENT: Yeah, these were not in bats, they were in cells in culture.
ANGIE: Okay.
VINCENT: If you just grow the virus under certain conditions, you can see the generation of novel — these viruses do a lot of rearranging of their genome. And so it’s very likely that this happened in nature and that gave rise to this.
ANGIE: That’s incredible work.
VINCENT: It was very simple. And when you look at the science, you get answers. This is why this whole hearing is nonsense, because they don’t provide any evidence, just accusations.
The diaries: “It’s pseudo evidence”
ANGIE: The problem is they do provide evidence, but it’s not really evidence. It’s pseudo evidence. They provide this Tony Fauci’s diary kind of thing, where making it seem like it’s a crime to be impressed by the fact that you met celebrities.
I don’t know how I’d feel if I were Tony Fauci going through the pandemic and having people make candles about me and bobblehead dolls, and all kinds of St. Fauci and the Fauci ouchie and merchandise and stuff. I think it would be really weird to be in that situation. And I don’t think that there’s anything in Tony Fauci’s diaries that suggests wrongdoing or that suggests that he had some sort of secret nefarious plan. I also think that Tony Fauci is smart enough that if he did have a secret nefarious plan, he probably wouldn’t have written it out on his government laptop.
VINCENT: People do all kinds of things that are unrelated to their work. And you can, sure, you can dig all this out, and it doesn’t look good that you got awards, that you liked celebrities — but that’s not really relevant to the main question.
ANGIE: No.
VINCENT: Right? And he had nothing to do with the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID. There’s zero evidence that points to it. Yet you can cloud the issue by pulling in all this other stuff, which to some people is a little bit shady — isn’t he, because he took this money and so forth. But it’s not correct.
“Why would an honest person need to take the Fifth?”
ANGIE: Well, that’s what they started with at the very beginning. As soon as he pleaded the Fifth, it was like, why would you plead the Fifth if you haven’t done anything wrong? But he pled the Fifth for the same reason that he got the pardon — which Josh Hawley pointed out, Republican from Missouri, who made a big point to support the January 6 traitors, I should add.
Josh Hawley kept saying, why would an honest person need to take the Fifth? Why would you take the Fifth if you haven’t done anything wrong? It’s illegal for you to take the Fifth because you’ve been fully pardoned with this illegal pardon that Joe Biden gave you.
And I want to be really clear: the reason that Joe Biden pardoned Fauci in advance was not because he’d done anything wrong. The same reason he pardoned members of his family and members of the January 6 committee. It’s because he anticipated that this exact kind of political persecution would occur. And in fact, it has. So why else would Tony Fauci not take the Fifth, when he’s literally there so that they can entrap him with whatever he says?
VINCENT: Exactly. That’s the point. He took the Fifth because they would entrap him later. And there’s just no point in subjecting yourself to that.
ANGIE: And like I said, every single Democrat said that was the purpose. And I was really happy, because the Democrats have not always been covering themselves in glory in terms of their defense of science. Oftentimes, especially on this committee, Senator Peters has gone back and forth about how much he’s really stood up for scientists, I think. And I think some of that was that the Democrats just kind of didn’t want to make the scientific stuff an issue, because it’s very technical. And it really shouldn’t be a politically divisive issue. However, that’s what it is.
And Gary Peters in particular, the ranking member of the HSGAC, the Democratic minority leader of it, wrote a furious letter to Rand Paul a couple weeks ago when basically he found out that the Democrats were going to be excluded from this transcribed interview, before Rand Paul subpoenaed Fauci. And good for him. He talked about that today — how historically science has always been a bipartisan political pursuit and now it has become so divisive and weaponized. And it’s really one side weaponizing it against the other.
“Why is this work good?”
VINCENT: So what other science questions should we talk about?
ANGIE: So I think that one thing that was really important about this conversation that really isn’t discussed, because it’s kind of boring, I think, for the public — but I don’t know, what do you think is the most important thing about this research?
VINCENT: You know, I try to communicate why this research has benefits to people. And every gain-of-function experiment is different.
ANGIE: Most experiments, I should add, that virologists do are not even gain of function like what they’re talking about. Most of us are just doing various types of experiments with viruses, and sometimes they do result in a gain of function. But we’re designing those experiments usually to come up with something that will improve a vaccine.
For example — you want to talk about vaccine development. Sometimes you might not have a virus that grows well in the model system that you’re going to test your vaccine in. So you make a chimeric virus that has the antigen that you’re trying to target on a virus that’s already pathogenic, so you can conduct a challenge study that will allow you to tell if that vaccine works or not. That’s just one example of the type of research.
One thing I have a hard time communicating to people, I think, is just how important this type of research is — even looking at different bat coronaviruses, trying to understand the viral diversity in the world. And I know, Vincent, you’re probably the world’s best expert in communicating how wonderful virology is to people. What’s your response to that? How would you respond to that when it’s being presented in this context?
VINCENT: Yeah. Why is this work good? Well, look, in 2002 a virus emerged from bats and caused 8,000 infections globally. That was SARS, right? And that told us that bats can have viruses that can cause problems for humans. Then in 2020 we have a pandemic started from a virus that came originally from bats. So now we understand that this is a threat and we need to understand — in fact, between SARS and SARS-2, a lot of people were trying to understand what exactly is in bats and is it a threat.
Don’t you think we should know ahead of time what our enemies could be? And so that’s what the basis of this research is: to know what’s in bats, how dangerous it is to humans potentially. And to this day, we don’t have good answers. We need to do more work, but because of hearings like this, it’s being impeded. But it really is aimed at preventing pandemics that kill many, many millions of people. We as humans are brilliant. We have the capacity to do that. But you can’t do it in an atmosphere where everything you do is thought to be nefarious.
ANGIE: Yeah. And you can’t do it if they’re going to take away all of your funding and put you in jail. I mean, that’s the other thing. I just think about all of my other colleagues.
And this morning, one of our colleagues who has been targeted and dragged into all of this gave a keynote lecture, or a lecture in the plenary session. And so I had to miss his talk. Our colleague Ralph Baric, who’s probably one of the most exceptional coronavirologists in history, has done an incredible amount of work and contributed an incredible amount to the field.
One of the things that always kills me is that these guys are being accused of this. But the reason we were able to develop vaccines in ten months was because of work that Ralph and many of our other colleagues did to study SARS coronavirus 1 and to study MERS in the context of developing mRNA vaccines for those viruses. Because of that work, we already knew what antigen we should target for SARS coronavirus 2. We already knew that those vaccines were probably going to be safe and that they were going to be effective. We already knew how to — well, Jason McLellan already knew how to stabilize the pre-fusion spike protein. And so as soon as we got the sequence, vaccine development started that day.
And none of that work would have happened without the work that came before — again, from people who are being accused right now. So someone said this morning that Ralph probably contributed more to saving people during the pandemic than anyone. And here he is now being accused of helping create the virus, which is just as crazy as it sounds.
And they’ve never really explained how any of this works. It’s like it can’t be explained. Fauci funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with EcoHealth, and then somehow Ralph got his hands on it, and then somehow our other colleague Vincent Munster got his hands on it, and they were serially passaging it and gain-of-functioning, and Ralph supposedly inserted a furin cleavage site.
“We’ve never found a progenitor virus”
ANGIE: But you said it earlier, Vince, and I think one of the most important things to point out here is that we’ve never found a progenitor virus. We’ve never found the virus that became SARS coronavirus 2. Not in a bat and not in a freezer. We don’t know where it is.
VINCENT: Every lab leak idea fails on that. Every single one, because no one had anything close.
ANGIE: And then if you say that, do you know what their response is? Well, they lied about it. They had it, but they lied. And that is not science.
VINCENT: It’s not science. And you know what? What is science? If we found a progenitor virus in the freezer at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that’s it. I’m a lab leaker.
ANGIE: I, too, am a lab leaker if that happens, because that evidence overrides all of it. There’ll be a lot of other questions to figure out, I guess, if that ever happens. But that would be convincing to me.
VINCENT: Zhengli Shi, the head of the lab, sequenced everything in her freezer. She published it. There’s no evidence. Tested everybody for serology too. Anything close to SARS-CoV-2. And you could say she lied and she hid, but that is not evidence. You have to prove it.
ANGIE: Yeah. And you know what? I think that there’s actually quite poor evidence that she’s a liar, because — I have to say, I can’t think of anything that she said about her work that has been proved to be incorrect.
VINCENT: It’s correct.
ANGIE: I don’t think that we should not give people the benefit of the doubt just because they’re from China. And I think that she’s — I don’t know her well, but by all accounts, she’s a very good scientist. And she said that she sequenced all her viruses and she doesn’t have anything like SARS-CoV-2 there. She said that she serology tested everybody in her group and nobody had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. That to me suggests pretty strongly that if it was a lab leak, it didn’t come from her lab.
VINCENT: And if we want to get a little more detailed, right, the early cases were all around the market in Wuhan.
ANGIE: That’s right.
VINCENT: If it came in from the lab, they would be around the lab.
ANGIE: That’s right. And the cases around the market, I should add, that’s not like the hospitals that people went to. That’s where they lived. So when we wrote that paper, we extracted their place of residence, their addresses, and geolocated that around the market — well, just around Wuhan. And they happened to all fall around the market. So it wasn’t just like they all went to the hospital that’s next to the market because, I don’t know, that was the place to go or something. It wasn’t like the market was the big hot spot in Wuhan. There were many other places to shop and stuff.
VINCENT: It doesn’t sound — there’s wildlife trade, but it’s not like everybody’s going to pick up a raccoon dog on Friday night. It’s not necessarily the most popular place in Wuhan. So while it is a busy market, you’re not expecting to see the whole city going there.
ANGIE: So cases that occur in the immediate vicinity — including the cases that had no link whatsoever to the market and were even more statistically significantly associated with the market — all around the market and not around the lab, which is ten miles away on the other side of the Yangtze River, by the way. So none of the evidence really adds up.
The other thing is — and I always have trouble talking about this, Vincent, because some of the modeling that my evolutionary virology colleagues do is so sophisticated that it’s hard to explain it sometimes. But Jonathan Pekar’s paper, which was a companion to our paper showing the spatial relationship between those early cases, shows that essentially one lineage of the virus jumped into humans, and then a week later there was a separate independent spillover of the other lineage of the virus.
Now, not to get too deep into the weeds about all of that, but that means that there were two spillovers that happened a week apart. So if it was a lab leak, you have to have two independent lab leaks happening a week apart. And you also have to explain how they got from the lab to the market and only infected people around there.
VINCENT: Right. There’s no infections at the lab, which makes no sense if it’s coming from the lab.
“Molecularly impossible”
ANGIE: Right. So none of it stands up. It makes no sense. And that makes it even more incredulous that they’re blaming Tony Fauci and Ralph Baric for starting this when it’s impossible. Scientifically — what did you say before? Molecularly impossible? Tony Fauci said that. Molecularly impossible. I like that. It’s true.
He was talking about RaTG13. So the earliest virus that we knew of that was the most closely related — more closely related viruses have been found since then, but the earliest one to SARS-CoV-2 that first came out in 2020 that we knew of was called RaTG13. And over the course of its entire genome, it has more than 1,100 different nucleotide substitutions. And there is absolutely no reason why anybody, unless they really were a masochist or something, would want to just for no reason put a bunch of point mutations —
VINCENT: Well, they wouldn’t know what to change it to.
ANGIE: No, you wouldn’t know what to change it to. It doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not a precursor.
VINCENT: But the other thing that’s interesting is that they had this sequence, but they were never able to recover virus from that sequence.
ANGIE: That’s right. There was something wrong with it.
VINCENT: So to think it was a precursor fails on multiple levels.
ANGIE: And that’s just because if you look at this issue on the surface, you don’t get deep enough to understand why it doesn’t make any sense. So Rand Paul can say that Fauci facilitated it being made, but it doesn’t make any sense molecularly.
And this is the trouble — to explain this to people. And I am so grateful to all 917 of you who are watching us on Twitter and all the other platforms. I’m bad at checking all of these things all at once. But thank you all for joining us. I’m so glad that you’re hanging out here listening to us talk about science, because this is one of the hardest things to communicate about all of this. You get thirty seconds into the conversation and it sounds like science class to a lot of people and they just kind of check out. There’s a lot of other tire fires happening all around you. And so it’s hard to pay attention to stuff like Rand Paul going off about furin cleavage sites. On top of that, he doesn’t make any sense with what he’s saying. So there’s that problem, too.
But really — it seems ridiculous, but what bothers me about it is it really is so Orwellian. It is saying stuff that is not true and saying that that’s the truth. It’s revisionist history. It is ignoring things that are true to make things that are false true. It is essentially repeating lies over and over again until people believe them.
“It’s an icon of democracy they’re taking out”
VINCENT: So what’s the motivation of Rand Paul and his ilk? Why are they doing this?
ANGIE: So I think Rand Paul in particular hates Fauci and has a personal vendetta against him. But I think the larger reason that they’re all doing this, and why Rand Paul is clearly getting lots and lots of support from his colleagues to do this, is that again — if you set the precedent that you can take down a public servant of Fauci’s stature on nothing, on made-up charges, you could put anybody in prison.
And also, if you take down somebody like that, who is an icon of the American government, public service, then you are taking out essentially an icon of democracy. And that is what they’ve been doing throughout the government: eroding our trust in the Biden administration — but they don’t really mean the Biden administration. They mean democratic norms and processes and our Constitution.
And the fact that nearly all the Republicans today attacked Fauci for pleading the Fifth and asserting his Fifth Amendment constitutional rights — constitutional rights, asserting them is not evidence of guilt of anything. It’s evidence that you’re an American and you can assert your constitutional rights. I think that the whole purpose of this is to take that all apart, because they’re trying to replace it with the authoritarianism of the Trump administration.
“So what happens next in this fiasco?”
VINCENT: So what happens next in this fiasco?
ANGIE: That’s a very good question, and I honestly don’t know. Because I think there’s a possibility that — depending on how much traction this all gets and how I guess it all plays out with the public — they certainly will probably try to bring some of our other colleagues in in the meantime and try to get evidence from them. Probably starting with like Kristian Andersen, who is a colleague of mine, good friend of mine, and Vincent’s, who is an evolutionary virologist who first — I don’t know if he’s the first, but he first noticed that the sequence of SARS-2 back in January was kind of weird. And so he wrote to Tony Fauci and told him about his observations.
And Tony Fauci got this teleconference together of all these big, important virologists, our colleagues from all over the world who are experts in the field, to discuss whether or not it might be from a lab or not. And this is really one of the big issues in their argument: that, oh, some of them agreed, some of them didn’t. This was February 1, 2020. Some of them agreed that it might be from a lab and some of them weren’t sure and some of them disagreed. And there’s no consensus.
And then there were emails sent back and forth. And I think Francis Collins called China the Wild West in terms of lab regulation or something. And all these things that are just things that people said to each other in emails. They’re evidence of absolutely nothing. They’re evidence of friends joking around with each other, coworkers joking around with each other in most cases.
But basically, Kristian ended up going from this meeting and writing a paper that Fauci and other people on the call encouraged him to. They encouraged him and other colleagues who are also experts in viral evolution to look at this more carefully. And in the course of doing that over the next month and a half, they realized, you know, maybe this does look natural after all. They observed that there’s no other virus known that’s close enough to this, that there would be a backbone that you could clone anything into; the mutations compared to other SARS-related viruses are not consistent with serial passage in a lab. Like, it’s weird, but nature’s full of weird stuff.
And so that was basically the conclusion of this paper they wrote, which is called Proximal Origin — the Proximal Origin of SARS-Coronavirus-2. Sorry, I call it Proximal Origin for short.
But Proximal Origin came out, and now that’s being used as: Fauci conspired with Kristian to cover up the pandemic, because then Kristian received a large grant from NIAID, which he had been awarded before the pandemic started. So what people also need to understand is that NIH is not super fast moving. And when you apply for a multimillion dollar award that has multiple collaborator groups and multiple projects within it, you get that award, but you don’t get it for like six months. And so this had gone through the study section. It had been peer reviewed before the pandemic started. So that award was given before Kristian or Fauci or anybody even knew what SARS coronavirus 2 was. So it wasn’t a payoff.
But I think that’s exactly what they’re going to do. They’re going to accuse Kristian of conspiring with Fauci. They might expand the network too, Vincent. I mean, you and I could get dragged into that too. Somebody on Twitter the other day called us giant DGOF advocates. We’re dangerous gain-of-function research. We are the DGOF masters.
VINCENT: I see. Well, that paper, Proximal Origins, is just thought process on what might have happened, right? There’s no coercion. Tony Fauci didn’t convince anyone to write anything. Scientists don’t let anyone convince them of that, right? I mean, if you were co-authoring an article and your co-author said, no, you have to say this, you’d get rid of them, right?
ANGIE: And the five authors of Proximal Origins are all men, and good luck telling any of them what to do. They’re all smart people who know what they’re talking about.
“All I’m doing is asking. I want information.”
VINCENT: I remember early in the pandemic, I’d heard about this furin cleavage site. And like everyone else, I had no idea what it meant. And I didn’t know anything about it in the context of coronaviruses. And that’s the problem. You hear this and then, without putting it into context, you have some kind of reaction. So I actually wrote to Vincent Munster and asked him about this site and what it meant. And that email has been now discovered.
ANGIE: Oh, I’ve read it.
VINCENT: And people are now saying that I thought it was a lab leak in the beginning — which, all I’m doing is asking. I want information.
ANGIE: Yeah.
VINCENT: But that’s how these things are warped, right? Because you have a Rand Paul who has an agenda, so he will warp anything that anyone says.
ANGIE: No, and there’s a whole propaganda network effectively that does it, because I’ve also gotten a lot of stuff on Twitter about those emails that you sent to Vincent Munster. And it’s like, hey, Angie, look at what your mentor is saying to your friends, you know, kind of thing. It’s just really stupid. And it’s evidence of absolutely nothing. It’s evidence of scientists talking to each other and asking each other questions.
And that’s literally what we do. If I have a question about the coronaviruses, I would reach out to Vincent first. If I had a question about influenza, I would reach out to Alyson Kelvin or Florian or somebody who is an influenza expert. Even I work on influenza and I used to work on the coronaviruses, and I still would reach out to people who have greater expertise than me.
VINCENT: So Munster had started to work on the spike of SARS-CoV-2. So I thought — I had read a preprint of his and I thought this would be the person to ask. And so I asked. Of course, he never answered.
ANGIE: Smartly. Vincent was always bad at answering emails, though.
VINCENT: But he didn’t know. He wouldn’t have an answer. He would probably say it’s most likely natural origin, that they all are, and there’s no evidence otherwise. And eventually I came to that conclusion. Once you go into the literature and you read about furin cleavage sites, you realize that, of course, it’s natural.
ANGIE: Yeah, to me, just because it was weird — there’s another detail about it that’s way too technical, but if it was cloned, it was cloned very badly. I’ll put it that way.
VINCENT: Yes, that’s a good way to put it. Nobody would do that.
ANGIE: And that’s something that nature would do, because in my view, nature is the most dangerous gain-of-function virologist of them all, since nature doesn’t really care about being reckless, and nature is everywhere around us.
VINCENT: Oh, it does it all the time.
ANGIE: Does it all the time?
VINCENT: Yes. This is just an example of people jumping on this without any knowledge. And it’s illustrated by the scientists initially who didn’t have knowledge, and then when they got it, they realized that this was natural. And if people don’t have the ability to acquire that knowledge, so they’re okay with saying it must have been put there. But again, it all fails because you don’t have anything to put the furin cleavage site into.
ANGIE: No. Nothing. No progenitor virus, and there’s no lab leak. I mean, we can assume it took — how long did it take to find the SARS progenitor? Like —
VINCENT: Oh, twelve years. A long time.
ANGIE: Yes. Fifteen years. Something like that. A long time. So even — obviously there is a progenitor virus out there somewhere. If it’s flying around in a bat, then by the time we find it, it’s going to look like a different virus.
VINCENT: Totally different now, because it’s been continually evolving in the bats that it’s in.
ANGIE: So it’s going to be totally different. But if we ever find that virus, there are methods to trace it back and we can find it out.
The fact is, though, you’re absolutely right: no progenitor virus. No matter what the AI people say, we are not at the point where — you certainly weren’t, where you’re typing in sequences and just getting brand new viruses to work with. We’re not doing that type of thing. And why would anybody? Vincent and I know, and anybody who’s ever tried to clone anything, especially a virus, knows that it is not very easy to do many times.
“Cloning is challenging”
VINCENT: No. As you said before, we made the first DNA copy of an animal virus, poliovirus. Every time we changed something, it would lose infectivity. So the idea that you could just throw a site into it with no effect is crazy. In fact, people have thrown furin cleavage sites into other coronaviruses and usually it’s detrimental.
ANGIE: Yeah, usually it’s attenuating, or it kills the virus altogether.
And one thing I learned — Vincent’s PhD mentor one time made the mistake of telling me and my friend who was also in his lab that he had golden hands when it came to cloning. And I assuredly did not have golden hands. So it’s actually kind of nice to hear that Vincent had some trouble cloning, too. But this is really why I thought I didn’t have golden hands anyways, because I’m trying to clone this virus and things are getting kicked out of it — cloning is challenging. But any little change that would get made, you’re right, it would usually screw up my virus and I wouldn’t have any virus most of the time.
VINCENT: So the big idea that someone could design a virus in any way is laughable, if you have any knowledge of virology, really.
ANGIE: Or clone a coronavirus. Boy, I’m not sure that I could do that. Coronaviruses also, for other reasons, are very challenging to clone. So the idea that somebody’s just like, oh, I might try to whip that up.
VINCENT: So that’s what Ralph Baric was very good at.
ANGIE: Probably the best in the world. xAnd they’re saying that he gave that technology to Wuhan and they used it to make a virus, which is crazy. Also, they don’t seem to know very much about virologists, because while we do share our work freely, we’re not just like, oh, yes, we’re giving technology to adversarial nations just because.
VINCENT: Yes.
ANGIE: Most of us aren’t giving our best work to our competitors either, even if they are collaborators. So there’s that.
“If you have a scientific issue, the scientists should talk about it”
ANGIE: Wow, we’ve been recapping this for an hour. We’ve had a lot to talk about, but I think it’s really important. I’m really glad that we did this, Vincent.
VINCENT: Yeah. I think that if you have a scientific issue, the scientists should talk about it. It would be nice if Rand Paul could sit here and have a conversation with us, but he would never do it, because he would know that he would be wrong.
ANGIE: Yeah. And he doesn’t want to be shown wrong because he has an agenda, obviously. Gosh, next thing you know, if we did that, he’d probably have us in HSGAC, because his whole problem with Fauci seems to be the fact that Fauci told him he was full of it when he tried to explain to Fauci how the lab leak happened, incorrectly.
VINCENT: Yeah. Rand Paul knows nothing about science, folks. He may know a lot about eyes.
ANGIE: Yeah. I’m not sure he does, though.
VINCENT: He doesn’t know anything about viruses. And I don’t think you should hang on anything that he says about viruses, and particularly SARS-CoV-2. It’s very easy for you to be convinced. But just ask us and we’ll give you the answer. He’s wrong.
ANGIE: It’s true. And we have a lot of platforms that we’re going to continue telling you about all of this stuff on. Vincent is the media mogul of MicrobeTV. He hosts a podcast called This Week in Virology. So if you like all of that virology discussion that we just had, you should tune into TWiV, because there’s a lot more of it. And also these days I’m liking TWiV — not to say that I didn’t like it before, but I like that there’s so much more spicy discussion on TWiV.
VINCENT: Yeah, we feel our mission is to provide virology information to everybody. And so we take the data and discuss it. We don’t make stuff up. You can rely on us for giving you the truth. So if you like that, just go to microbe.tv and you can find it, and also a lot of other science podcasts as well.
ANGIE: And make sure you follow Vincent on Instagram and YouTube and all the platforms. And I’m going to get him on Substack too.
But I also would like to tell you that for science, as well as the spicier political opinions, you are more than welcome to continue coming to Rasmussen Retorts as well, and watch our show, Rasmussen Retorts, on MicrobeTV, in fact. And you can also find me with The Save America Movement. They are a nonpartisan organization that says it’s not about left and right, but about wrong and right. And that’s why I’m involved as the science chair, and we are determined to keep our foot on the necks of the people who are going to use science to take apart our American democracy and to make the world a less safe, less healthy, less happy and less free place.
So with that, thanks so much for joining us. Please feel free to ask either one of us if you have any questions about the origins of the pandemic, about the lab leak, about any of this stuff. I’m at Rasmussen Retorts. I’m all over the social media world. You can find me easily. Thanks so much. And please join us again next time. Take care. And thank you, Vincent.
Related from Rasmussen Retorts
On the hearing and the show trials
On gain of function and pandemic origins
Links from this episode
The hearing
Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment in Rand Paul Senate hearing — NPR
Fauci invokes 5th Amendment right during GOP-led hearing on COVID origins — PBS NewsHour
Fauci, citing senator’s “unhinged obsession,” pleads the Fifth — STAT
Fauci foils the GOP’s plans to use his private diaries against him
Sen. Gary Peters’ June 9, 2026 letter to Chairman Rand Paul on HSGAC rules and precedent (PDF)
Gary Peters blasts Rand Paul’s hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci — The Hill
Biden offers preemptive pardons to Jan. 6 committee, Milley, Fauci — NPR
Pandemic origins
Worobey et al., The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, Science (2022)
Pekar et al., The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2, Science (2022)
Andersen et al., The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, Nature Medicine (2020)
Zhou et al., A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin (RaTG13), Nature (2020)
Wu et al., SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered, PNAS (2022)
Virology cited in the conversation
Racaniello & Baltimore, Cloned poliovirus complementary DNA is infectious in mammalian cells, Science (1981)
Ren et al., Transgenic mice expressing a human poliovirus receptor: a new model for poliomyelitis, Cell (1990)
Menachery et al., A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence (WIV1/SHC014), Nature Medicine (2015)
Wrapp et al., Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation, Science (2020)
Vaccine safety, ivermectin, and the anti-vax network
ACTIV-6: Study confirms no benefit to taking ivermectin for COVID-19 symptoms — Duke Clinical Research Institute
McCullough et al., Proximal Origin of Epidemic Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b and Spread by Migratory Waterfowl
Ukraine biolabs
Where to find us
Thank you Julie, Nancy Connell, ilibee, Judith Simmons, Shirley Figueroa, and many others for tuning into my live video with The Save America Movement! Join me for my next live video in the app.
