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Dr. Angela Rasmussen Profile picture
Dr. Angela Rasmussen
@angie_rasmussen
Virologist. PI @VIDOInterVac @USask. Co-EIC @Els_Vaccine. Jeopardy! loser. "Disreputable vaccine cheerleader." 🇺🇸in🇨🇦. Opinions my own. she/her
70 subscribers
Mar 27 • 21 tweets • 9 min read
I’m not going to be able to tell you about the consequences of EVERY lost grant, but I’m going to try.

Let’s start with the Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) program for pathogens of pandemic concern! It just got unceremonially shitcanned. Image Here’s a list of all the funded research with links to NIH Reporter so you can dig through all the info about what your tax dollars have funded.

Do you think we need more antiviral medication? I do! AViDD research was developing new antivirals.

niaid.nih.gov/research/antiv…
Mar 20 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
I’ve now been asked about the USDA H5N1 action plan quite a few times, so maybe I should say a few things about it.

There are a few things I like about it, more things I don’t, and some things about it that are completely WTAF.

This is the 5 step plan: Image Basically this is the plan:
$500M for biosecurity improvements
$400M for indemnifying producer losses
Deregulation
$100M for vaccine research
Relax import controls to make it easier to buy flu-free eggs from abroad

Link here: usda.gov/about-usda/new…
Mar 7 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
RFK Jr is not a trustworthy source about vaccine efficacy or zoonosis, particularly for H5N1 in chickens.

His claim that poultry vaccination will "turn those birds into mutant factories" is incorrect & I've got receipts 👇

h/t @Alexander_Tin
cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-va… Most of the data on poultry vaccination comes from Mexico and China. Mexico has used vaccination successfully for 30 years to control bird flu in poultry. However, this did influence virus evolution since flu vaccines aren't sterilizing.
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jv…
Mar 6 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I found Bhattacharya’s hearing striking not because of what he promised to do, but what he wouldn’t commit to. For example, refusing to commit to not breaking the law if asked to do so. Image There’s a longer list of things he would not commit to, including:
-Not doing unnecessary studies on vaccine safety because someone might disagree with settled science
-Funding grants with the billions in appropriations being illegally impounded
-Rehiring fired federal workers
Mar 5 • 19 tweets • 7 min read
Well my old friend Jay Bhattacharya is having his Senate confirmation hearing today so time for a quick refresher on who this guy is.

A mass infection proponent who never met a contrarian position he wouldn’t take for personal gain. He first rose to national prominence with the Santa Clara study—a terribly executed serology study that couldn’t be validated & concluded the CFR of COVID-19 was much lower than it actually was.

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
Feb 27 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
Okay, so. I don’t know how much of a heads up this is when it’s just a notice about these 2 mutations. Do they really raise serious concerns about “increased transmission?”

Sort of. It’s more complex than D701N & E626K, omg pandemic bird flu.

What do these mutations do in H5N1? Flu is a segmented, negative sense RNA virus. This means its genome is divided into 8 pieces and they are negative coding sense and serve as a template for transcribing (copying) mRNA from each segment.

D701N and E672K are in a segment called PB2.
Feb 19 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
I have insomnia a lot lately so may as well share what’s literally keeping me up at night.

It’s a long list but tonight it’s flu. Yes, H5N1, but also seasonal flu. Firing federal scientists brings a flu-filled future.

Have you ever wondered how flu vaccine strains are chosen? Every year the flu vaccine changes to match the strains that are circulating around the world. Right now these are 3 main viruses: H1N1(pdm09) and H3N2 flu A and 1 from the flu B Victoria lineage.
Feb 18 • 25 tweets • 7 min read
This is going to be another rough week for our colleagues in government & for all of us. Vast cuts of govt scientists hurts everyone’s health.

Let’s talk about what this will do to vaccines.

This is the process. Here’s how they’re going to undermine it:
cdc.gov/vaccines/basic… So as @CDCgov helpfully describes, vaccine development is a long and complex process involving all the HHS agencies.

cdc.gov/vaccines/basic…
Feb 16 • 21 tweets • 6 min read
Here’s some positive H5N1 news for a change: conditional approval for poultry vaccines made by @Zoetis for chickens.

Why didn’t we do this sooner? The answer is more complex than you might think.

science.org/content/articl… For years, the standard approach in the US, Canada, and Europe has been to cull birds in flocks that get hit with HPAI (highly pathogenic avian influenza). A couple reasons for this:
1. HPAI kills chickens & turkeys (the HP refers to severity in birds)
2. No other alternatives
Feb 14 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
I wasn’t planning on discussing this publicly (it’s nobody’s business) but after this bullshit MAHA EO, fuck it, it’s personal story time. Let’s talk safe meds.

I lost ~75 pounds taking Ozempic. I don’t give a damn if I have to take it for the rest of my life, it fucking RULES. I started Ozempic in Feb 2023 after my annual checkup. I told my doctor I am dieting & riding my Peloton maniacally but I can’t lose weight. She said it’s age, my hypothyroid condition, stress, & lack of sleep. It’s not a matter of working harder or more. She prescribed Ozempic.
Feb 14 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
Giving infectious disease research a break, as promised by the MAHA agenda.

Let's break down what exactly this Executive Order is *really* saying. Fortunately, I speak fluent anti-vax grifterese & can translate.

whitehouse.gov/presidential-a… There's this background section about the terrible epidemic of chronic disease & they are VERY worried about children.

Note the diseases they focus on? Autism spectrum disorders, obesity, & ADD/ADHD = vaccines did it.

"increased prescriptions" = evidence-based medicine is bad Image
Feb 11 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Can’t say whether D1.1 H5N1 (new cow genotype) is more or less virulent than B3.13 (prior cow genotype), as @JenniferNuzzo correctly notes.

Viruses can be more or less virulent than others but the main determinant of pathogenicity is the host. That’s key for assessing H5N1 risk. So far most of the cases have been “mild” (an imprecise term I dislike, but good to convey “not severe”). That includes both B3.13 and D1.1 cases. But it’s probably not the virus primarily driving that. It’s more likely determined by how the host responds to infection.
Feb 9 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Editing scientific content for political purity is turning MMWR into a compromised propaganda organ.

And why are the propaganda squads at CDC replacing specifically H5N1 bird flu studies?

I’ve got some pretty serious fascism- and flu-related concerns about this. Over the last year, the CDC’s H5N1 response has left a lot to be desired. They fucked up testing—again, as with COVID, they failed to make functional PCR primer/probes—and did not take decisive action that IMO could reduce risk, such as offering vaccine to high risk workers.
Feb 2 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
On Data Purge Eve, many people stayed up late to save the CDC website. @charles_gaba downloaded the whole thing. 👑

A group of us are working to make these preserved data an accessible & publicly available resource. More to come, but get started here 👇🏻

acasignups.net/25/02/02/llink… Page 2. These data were generated with US taxpayer dollars. They belong to the American people. CDC made them available to the world.

Deleting these data is theft. Deletion disobedience is how we take back what is ours.

acasignups.net/25/02/02/links…
Jan 30 • 29 tweets • 8 min read
Out today in @ForeignPolicy: I wrote about what will happen if there is an H5N1 pandemic with Robert F Kennedy, Jr. in charge of safeguarding the health of Americans.

If RFK Jr is leading HHS & H5N1 begins spreading human to human, the deaths will be counted in millions.🧵👇 Image RFK Jr already has a sizable body count (in every sense of the term, but here I'm talking about counting corpses and not sexual partners).

If he has control over HHS in a flu pandemic, deaths attributable to him will increase by orders of magnitude.

foreignpolicy.com/2025/01/30/rfk…
Jan 28 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
@annamerlan asked me to go over the science around some of the claims about raw milk that Mark McAfee, Raw Farm owner and unpasteurized milk evangelist, has made and this shit is wild.

Buckle up for H5N1 denialism, anti-vax, magical antiviral compounds, McAfee calls H5N1 "a huge scam...by pharma to create fear & produce a new vaccine."

He doesn't think H5N1 is dangerous & says nobody has gotten sick from drinking raw milk or has anything to fear if they've got a "strong microbiome."

Except for all those dead cats, I guess. Image
Jan 27 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This is bad news. It suggests reassortment of circulating H5N1 viruses with viruses containing N9 NA.

Although this indicates reassortment with avian viruses, it's still bad. Reassortment makes pandemics. The last 3/4 flu pandemics (and maybe 1918 too) were reassortant viruses. Reassortment is what happens when 2 flu viruses infect the same host. Because influenza A viruses have segmented genomes divided into 8 pieces of RNA, these can be mixed up in new progeny viruses during replication in a co-infected host.

This leads to unpredictable new viruses.
Jan 5 • 36 tweets • 8 min read
Would we see a large outbreak in animals if the pandemic started by zoonosis (which it did) as opposed to a lab (which it didn’t)?

Not necessarily. We wouldn’t expect SARS-CoV-2 to impact all hosts equally. What is true for humans may not be true for an intermediate host. The idea that a big outbreak would occur among “intermediate-host(s)-du-jour” is based on multiple assumptions that the host and humans are:

-equally susceptible
-equally permissive
-same tissue tropism
-similar pathogenicity
-similar clinical disease
-same mode of transmission
Jan 1 • 24 tweets • 9 min read
New year, new fave conspiracy theory: the global shadow government is spraying infectious fog across the entire northern hemisphere with those possibly alien drones everyone was seeing a couple weeks back. The mystery virus has symptoms exactly like seasonal respiratory viruses. It doesn’t look like fog because it’s full of floating droplets of something that might be normal fog ingredients (aka water) or it might be carcinogens and/or viruses Image
Dec 28, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Has a NIH Director ever appeared in cult-funded propaganda claiming that ivermectin, a drug that doesn't work to treat COVID, was the victim of a conspiracy to obtain FDA authorization for vaccines that do actually work?

There's a first time for everything, I guess. Image Because in this Covid Collateral "documentary," Jay Bhattacharya implies that ivermectin was suppressed because it would prevent vaccines from getting regulatory approval.

Actually, FDA discouraged ivermectin use because it doesn't work!
importantcontext.news/p/trump-nih-pi…
Dec 27, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I spoke with @benjmueller @nytimes about the H5N1 sequences from the severely ill case in Louisiana (link in replies).

The specific mutations don't concern me as much as the increase in human cases around the country coupled with a surge in seasonal flu. Short thread on why 👇 Image Here's a gift link to the article.

nytimes.com/2024/12/27/hea…