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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
69 subscribers
Oct 5 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
As the accursed ostrich situation continues to get simultaneously more stupid and gravely serious, I decided to write up a very long analysis of many of the key issues. Bottom line: so long as this flock lives, it is a threat to Canada's national security. 🧵 Image 5 months ago I was scrolling & came across some tweets from @sisuvanhell that was my first exposure to the far-right extremist ostrich convoyers. They accused CFIA of sending "murder drones" to covertly cull their flock of ostriches after a H5N1 outbreak
open.substack.com/pub/rasmussenr…
Oct 2 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
Last year I gave expert testimony to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food (AGRI). The topic?

H5N1 avian flu in the US

It may not seem obvious, but this is highly relevant to the ostrich situation in Canada.

ourcommons.ca/documentviewer… x.com/ostrichfarmbc/… I was asked to brief AGRI on the H5N1 situation in the US, specifically the dairy cow outbreak that remains uncontrolled more than a year later.

Look who else was there: top officials from CFIA.

AGRI wanted to assess how to best protect Canadian agriculture & food security Image
Sep 29 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
This is interesting. The BC ostrich farmers have consistently misrepresented the “scientific research” they were conducting, but it seems they also may have not been entirely truthful about their ostrich meat, oil, & leather business, as well 👇🏻 The ostrich farm claims they are a scientific research facility to study ostrich antibodies. Birds have antibodies in their egg yolks & ostrich eggs are huge, so you can get a lot of antibodies from them. The farmers implied they were studying antibodies to COVID & flu.
Sep 28 • 25 tweets • 9 min read
I am always happy to talk to reporters like Nancy MacDonald @globeandmail covering the BC bird flu ostrich story with objectivity & a focus on the evidence.

I hope this clarifies why I think the cull of these birds should proceed whether they are tested or not. Short thread 🧵 The thing people need to realize is that, although the ostriches were infected 10 mo ago, they still pose a health risk & a HUGE economic risk. If CFIA spares them, Canada will violate trade agreements, jeopardizing the entire $2B poultry export market.
Sep 25 • 26 tweets • 7 min read
I'm not uncomfortable with an interview. I don't wish to contribute to anti-government extremist propaganda that imposes the will of a few on Canada's health, food security, economy, & $2B poultry export market. I believe in upholding the law.

But I will answer your questions🧵 1. You can test these ostriches for antibodies. To do it reliably you need to do either a microneutralization or a hemagglutinin inhibition (HAI) assay. These require a high containment lab & trained personnel with HPTA security clearance because they use live virus. Image
Sep 4 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
I take Ozempic, a GLP-1 agonist, for weight loss. I lost 80 lbs. It has completely transformed my life and health, both physical & mental. But it is not without cost.

Microdosing without evidence is a bad idea. Here are a few reasons why👇🏻

washingtonpost.com/health/2025/09… I wrote about this about 6 months ago, when the MAHA Executive Order came out hinting that these drugs are bad. I’ll never stop Ozempic unless forced to. It has improved my life immeasurably.

But I knew the risks & benefits because it had been tested extensively for weight loss
Jun 25 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Very disappointing from @janeqiuchina, since she is well aware that scientists haven’t shut down legitimate inquiry into a “lab leak.” There is no evidence to support it.

Trust is lost not by scientists publishing evidence, but by dishonest actors misrepresenting the evidence. Image Here’s a link to the entire odious piece. It reads like it was ghostwritten by Alina Chan:
-scientists silenced dissenting opinion
-virology is dangerous
-virologists are arrogant
-some people think it was lab leak
-trust is gone!

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Jun 10 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Gonna fact check Jay B on his lies to the Senate in real time. Follow along for what promises to be a deeply annoying time.
appropriations.senate.gov/hearings/a-rev… Breaking news: Susan Collins is concerned about the effects of cutting $18B from the NIH budget, especially about Alzheimer's.

Jay's response is that we need more advances and the budget is collaborative. So...the first of many non-answers.
May 14 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
In case you you were wondering what’s going on in Canadian medical freedom/anti-vax news, the embarrassing off-brand J6ers of the True North convoyed out to BC to prevent 400 H5N1-infected ostriches from being culled.

This got me thinking about H5N1 in ostrich hosts 🧵👇🏻 When I came across this bright idea that these ostriches are somehow now H5N1 cure factories. I blame the movie Outbreak for giving people the idea that you can cure highly pathogenic viruses with serum or whatever. But H5N1 pathogenicity exists across a range of severity.
May 7 • 26 tweets • 9 min read
New EO banning “dangerous gain-of-function” experiments dropped Monday.

Allow me to break out my deranged anti-vax kakistocrat translator.

Will this improve the safety & security of biological research?

Hell yes, because biological research won’t exist anymore! Image I do kind of love the idea that Trump’s path to dictatorship includes a proclamation on his political position on mouse adaptation, unregulated DNA synthesis, & whatever else is deemed subjectively dangerous by authors who obviously know fuck all about it.
whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…
May 2 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
I am often challenged to provide an example of a vaccine that could not have been developed without doing gain-of-function virology research.

Thanks to HHS @SecKennedy and former @BiosafetyNow board member @DrJBhattacharya, I now have an answer:

Generation Gold Standard Image Can't complain about half a billion for a "next-generation universal vaccine platform"! What is this amazingly innovative new vaccine technology? Tell me more, because this says "BPL-inactivated, whole virus platform". That describes current flu vaccines.
hhs.gov/press-room/hhs…
Apr 22 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I am the co-Editor-in-Chief of @Els_Vaccine & I’ll be the first to say that a lot about academic publishing needs reform.

But replacing peer review with ideologically-driven censorship or shutting journals down in the name of “free speech” is not reform. Image FYI to the NIH Director: having your paper rejected because peer reviewers found it lacked scientific merit is not censorship or gatekeeping. It means your work didn’t pass muster & wasn’t up to scientific standards. Expert peer review is what distinguishes a journal from a blog. Image
Apr 21 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
So this interview lasted 2 hours so this “you’re scaring me” part might seem like an overreaction or fearmongering to someone without that context.

There’s a lot of evidence to support my hypothesis that a potential H5N1 pandemic would be worse than COVID. The clade 2.3.4.4.b viruses circulating in the US have infected many different mammalian species. In the course of this, we are seeing many opportunities for these viruses to adapt to mammalian hosts, including switching receptor usage & increasing virus fitness.
Apr 8 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
One thing I’ve been wondering about: why is H5N1 so quiet? It’s everywhere & exposure risk remains high.

No news on new cases. Is this because there are no new cases or just less testing? So I took a look at some numbers.

Spoiler: it’s bad policy & sabotaged response capacity. Over at @CDCgov, they maintain an updated H5N1 situation report so I thought I’d see if that gave any indication of what’s going on.

cdc.gov/bird-flu/situa…
Apr 3 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Hardly a surprise that Tracy Beth Høeg is now in at FDA as the Grima Wormtongue to Commissioner Marty Makary.

Høeg’s only “extensive experience working in vaccine science” is making up imaginary risks about vaccination to further monetize her various anti-vax platforms. Like her fellow contrarians in the HHS conman clown car, she’s been persecuted & censored by the public health industrial complex for her dissenting views.

Evidently LinkedIn removing false info—like this omg plasmids with a SV40 origin in Pfizer vaccines thing—is proof of truth
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.