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Rasmussen Retorts · Aug 9, 2026

Rasmussen Retorts Episode 11: Fact checking RFK Jr and Dana Bash on CNN

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Dr. Angela Rasmussen · Rasmussen Retorts

RFK Jr Is Asking to Be Proven Wrong Again, So Here Are 40 Examples From Just One CNN Interview.

VINCENT: From Microbe TV, this is Rasmussen Retorts, episode 11, recorded on August 4th, 2026. I’m Vincent Racaniello, and joining me today is Dr. Angie Rasmussen. Hello, Angie.

ANGIE: Hi, Vincent.

VINCENT: I just saw Angie in Minnesota last week at the American Society for Virology annual meeting.

ANGIE: We’re getting spoiled by getting to see each other all the time. It’s nice.

VINCENT: This is the video version of Angie’s column on Substack called Rasmussen Retorts. And today we’re going to take a closer look at Angie’s column. It is now Tuesday, August 4th. It’s 4:07 p.m. when I hit record. I got this at five minutes to four. She just finished it. But it’s not so bad because we’re going to go through it with you. It’s called RFK Jr. is asking to be proven wrong again. So here are 40 examples from just one CNN interview. So tell us about this CNN interview. When did it happen and who was the interviewer?

ANGIE: Yeah, so this is a great example of what happens frequently with my Substack is that Sunday morning, this interview happened on State of the Union, which is normally a show anchored by Jake Tapper on CNN. But I don’t know where Jake Tapper was. Maybe it’s summer vacation for him. So Dana Bash was filling in and she interviewed Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about a whole bunch of different things. And the interview didn’t go very well. So I see this pretty much immediately when it happened because all of the people on social media who follow this stuff and clip things from Fox News and from cable news endlessly all had it up there because it was just such a crazy interview. And so I’m like, I’m going to write a quick fact check of this. It’s only a three minute clip. How long could it take? By yesterday, I was up to 40 things that were factually incorrect from the interview. And I don’t let AI write my Substack articles for me. So I have to go through and kind of do a lot of it myself. And it just took a really long time because my God, this man can really cram a lot of falsehoods into a very short period of time.

VINCENT: We should point out that as you write here, this is his typical approach. He just keeps throwing one thing after another, doesn’t let the interviewer actually say anything, speaks over them. And so it’s very hard to counter. And as soon as you start countering, he tells you why you’re wrong, right?

ANGIE: Yeah, these are tactics that I think we have not paid attention to as a scientific community for far too long, but they’re pretty well seasoned and people have been using them for a really long time, not just in the science misinformation space, but throughout the entire world of conspiracy theories and sort of making things up. If you don’t have truth on your side and you can’t produce evidence to prove something or to support your claims, you have to resort to other rhetorical tricks and manipulation to get things across. And one good way is to just not let really anybody get another word in edgewise.

VINCENT: Right. No, I watched most of this and I was just appalled at the nonsense he was saying. So let’s go through your 40 points. We’ll see how far we can get because I think people need to understand. A lot of people will watch this and say, oh, I didn’t know that happened. I didn’t know this. Because they assume he’s right. But that’s why this needs to be debunked. And not just by you, but by many people.

ANGIE: Yeah, I agree. And I think that what’s really important, too, is that people need to sort of put a lot of this stuff in context. Because some of the things that he says that are lies are based on a kernel of information that might be true. But the way that he presents it, the way that he frames it or selectively talks about it, makes it so that it’s actually something that’s true that he turns into a falsehood so that he can promote his anti-vaccine beliefs.

VINCENT: Okay, number one is very easy.

KENNEDY (clip): We have the highest death rate from COVID of any nation on earth.

ANGIE: Yeah, I ran these numbers myself just to confirm that that was incorrect. Although many other people have run them as well, including the World Health Organization. And in terms of COVID mortality, so this is cumulative deaths from COVID since the pandemic began, Peru is actually at number one. There are different ways of calculating this. You could also look at excess deaths and in any of these situations, the U.S. is not number one. Now, I didn’t talk about this in the Substack article, but this is a good example of where he takes something that’s true and manipulates it so that it’s actually false. And that is that the US does have the number one COVID death count in terms of actual absolute numbers. But the reason why that doesn’t work is that the United States is a much bigger country population wise than many other countries. So looking at the absolute number of counts doesn’t really tell you anything. You have to look at the rate of COVID cases or COVID deaths. And the rate that he has referred to in the past is rate per 1 million. So that was what I calculated. And the U.S. is number 16 on that list.

VINCENT: Although, to be fair, these countries are ones typically with poor health systems, right? We got Peru, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Hungary. I mean, they’re not scions of health care, right?

ANGIE: No, they’re not. And it’s also worth noting that there are probably other countries within that one to 16 band as well. But because only some countries report some information to the World Health Organization or that information might not have even been collected, we don’t really have an accurate mortality count from every single country.

VINCENT: All right. So clearly he lied when he said that.

ANGIE: Yes.

VINCENT: Number two.

KENNEDY (clip): He said lockdowns that shut down 3.5 million businesses in our country with no due process, no just compensation. All of our churches closed our schools and our children are still paying the price for that.

ANGIE: I mean, I don’t know where he was during the pandemic if he was in China, but we did not have federal lockdowns in the United States. There were business restrictions and that’s true. And there was a drop in businesses that were open or that were listed as open during like the second quarter of 2020, so February, March-ish through the summer, that was the real period of the peak restrictions in terms of business closures and things like that. So there was no due process, I guess, but also they weren’t forced in many cases and they weren’t federal. So any type of business restriction that mandated business closure was actually implemented by a governor or by some sort of local health official or local official and not actually the federal government. But it’s really worth noting here that the person who claimed credit for wanting to shut down businesses and wanting to actually impose some of these restrictions was President Trump. At the recommendation of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, which was actually like, it was a lot of different people, actually. It was more than 30 people. There were 10 or so of them who were frequently at these press conferences with the president. But the lockdowns and all the business restrictions were actually implemented very early on during the Trump presidency in the pandemic. And they continued into the Biden administration, but they were really started then and they peaked under President Trump.

VINCENT: You make the note here that he was very proud of the Paycheck Protection Plan and unemployment relief funds. That doesn’t sound like Trump, does it?

ANGIE: No, it doesn’t sound like Trump until you consider that those Paycheck Protection Plan, which was one of the relief programs that Trump implemented for business owners who were affected by these closures, was essentially looted by fraudsters. 10%, as much as 10%, of the PPP program has probably been lost to fraud, possibly even more than that. So Trump, of course, his friends and his family members are recipients of PPP funds and have benefited from this program that is basically a sort of magnet for people who want to commit fraud. So you can understand why he was really proud of a program like that. But it also discounts Kennedy’s claim that there was no compensation provided for people who were affected economically by the closures, because there was certainly unemployment relief as well as the PPP.

KENNEDY (clip): Number three, the president was trying to reopen the country when he left. The country was kept closed for another year, almost a year and a half after that.

ANGIE: I mean, again, I would like to remind Secretary Kennedy who was president when the pandemic started, it was not Joe Biden. In fact, it was Donald Trump. And he was the one who imposed all of those pandemic restrictions. So if you remember 15 days to slow the spread, which I certainly do, because almost everybody in America who was not an essential worker was probably parked in front of their TV watching those absolutely deranged press conferences that were occurring every day. And during those press conferences, President Trump — I mean, I watched the 15 Days to Slow the Spread press conference to just sort of remind myself what that time was like. Trump comes out and starts complimenting everybody on their social distancing skills.

TRUMP (clip): I’m glad to see that you’re practicing social distancing. That looks very nice.

ANGIE: And then he’s, great social distancing guys, like in the White House press pool. He’s surrounded by his advisers. And then he announces very proudly that Americans are going to have to make a sacrifice. And all good Americans are going to want to stay home if they can. And they’re going to voluntarily go with all these restrictions.

TRUMP (clip): This afternoon, we’re announcing new guidelines for every American to follow over the next 15 days.

ANGIE: And we all did because, I mean, to me at the time, I was thinking about how I felt about this at the time. And I was like, I guess this makes sense. I remember being skeptical that everybody was going to do it. But I remember thinking to myself, like, this is, I guess, the one way we could do it, like try to control this, get it under control, considering we had just found out at that point that there had been undetected community transmission for weeks, meaning we had no idea actually how widespread it was in the US. I guess it’s not perfect, but 15 days, like as many of us stay home as we can and try to avoid getting COVID, like that would reduce the number of new cases. It’s a crude way of doing it, but it might. I just think it’s crazy that this is being recast as if Donald Trump was not the president at the time that all of this happened because he literally called this the president’s coronavirus plan for America. I mean, everything was branded like the Trump lockdowns. And we’ve just conveniently forgotten that. And Kennedy, I think, would very much like us to, because the real plan here is to say that this was all Joe Biden’s fault. It was all the political opposition’s fault. And don’t worry about the calendar or time or who was president when all of this happened. These are Joe Biden’s lockdowns, not Donald Trump’s. And it was such an offense to all of our civil rights that we can never let this happen again. So we just let us do whatever we want.

KENNEDY (clip): Number four, there were ICUs that were empty all over the country, including in New York at the height.

ANGIE: I mean, to me, this is incredibly offensive just because I was at Columbia myself and you were — I mean, you are. In New York at the height, and even though I wasn’t physically in New York because I was with my family in Seattle, I was still talking with all of my colleagues, including our colleagues who are clinicians working at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, working at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. One of those people told me, and I quote, it’s the fucking apocalypse about what the hospital was like in April at Columbia. And that’s just the overall hospital, not just the ICU. So no, ICUs were not sitting empty in New York at the height of this. If you recall also, Trump sent a U.S. Navy medical ship to New York Harbor to potentially deal with the overflows. And I’ve talked to some of our colleagues, both at Columbia, at Mount Sinai, across town. One of our colleagues at Mount Sinai told me that they remember looking out their office window and seeing the morgue truck that was outside the hospital. So there was absolutely no truth whatsoever to say that there were empty ICUs in New York during COVID, peak COVID surge in 2020. That’s just absolutely not true. And it’s a real disservice to our colleagues who were actually working in those hospitals, taking care of those patients.

VINCENT: In fact, ICUs are rarely empty in New York City.

ANGIE: No, they’re not. When I was in graduate school, I had a peritonsillar abscess on January 2nd, or January 1st, actually. And it was after New Year’s. Nightmare in New York City. So I end up in the ER at Columbia Presbyterian on January 2nd. And it was quite possibly the worst experience of my life because I was in a ton of pain. If you’ve ever had a peritonsillar abscess, it’s basically a bacterial abscess in your throat. And it’s really painful, but it’s not really life threatening. So I remember sitting in that ER waiting room seeing tons and tons of people, people with like gunshot wounds and things going in before me, which makes sense because they’re going to die before I am. But it’s never a dull moment in a New York City hospital and certainly not in a New York City ICU, especially during a pandemic.

VINCENT: I’m sorry you had to go in on my birthday.

ANGIE: That’s right. It is your birthday. It’s also one of my stepson’s birthdays. Yeah, I’m sorry about it, too. That was grad school health insurance. So it wasn’t necessarily the greatest thing ever. I would have much preferred to go to Columbia Medical Services. However, they were closed for the holiday.

VINCENT: Number five.

KENNEDY (clip): Well, during COVID, we completely dismantled our constitutional rights.

ANGIE: I mean, that just didn’t happen at all. There’s just no other way to refute that besides to say that it did not happen. And if Kennedy can show evidence that it happened, then he should. But the few lawsuits that have happened, including one that for a while anyways, the current NIH director and acting CDC director, Jay Bhattacharya, was a plaintiff in, had suggested that they were censored and their First Amendment rights were taken away. The Supreme Court declined to hear that case or they ruled that their rights were not infringed upon. I think that case is still percolating through the federal court system. But so far, there is no evidence that anybody lost their constitutional rights, any of them, during the pandemic.

VINCENT: I mean, nobody was forced to stay home, right?

ANGIE: I mean, it wasn’t China. The thing is, we chose to stay home. I chose to stay at my house. I would have gone into work at the time that I made this decision. Our labs were closed down. I don’t know about your lab. I think you may have closed your lab down at that point. I don’t remember. But or maybe not.

VINCENT: No, so at Columbia, if you worked on COVID, you could keep your lab open, but also the number of people had to be restricted, but I only had one person, so she just kept working and we did a COVID project.

ANGIE: Right. And that was later, but I’m talking about very early on, like in March of 2020 or whatever. Our lab had been shut down at my center at Columbia because the center director got COVID and it was unclear if it was because of a lab leak. So Columbia had to do an investigation to determine that it was not a lab leak. And the center director probably just got COVID by going out to dinner like he always does.

VINCENT: Maybe it was going to get interviewed at CNN.

ANGIE: He may have gotten it from getting interviewed at CNN or potentially by going on the Dr. Oz show, which he also used to do quite frequently. In any case, the lab was shut down. And so when I made the decision to stay in Seattle during the pandemic, it was based on, I don’t know when the lab’s maybe going to open again. And I think initially some people were in that situation because there were a lot of questions too about even what containment level to work with SARS-2. There were people who suggested trying to get things up and running, especially for diagnostics. But they didn’t necessarily have like a BSL-3 lab that they could do it in. So there had to be all this stuff that was done at the time. And it ended up being, I think, for a lot of people that people just did whatever work that they could. But nobody was forced to stay home is what it comes down to. Everybody in the pandemic, whether you were a scientist or not [...] But people still chose to do that. Businesses chose to do that with their employees. It’s not like the government said, you must do this. And if you don’t do this, like if you go out to the store, you try to go out to dinner or something, you’re going to be arrested. None of that stuff ever, ever happened. We never had a zero COVID policy like even Australia or New Zealand. When I moved to Canada, the COVID restrictions were a lot tougher here than they were in the U.S. So the idea that we lost constitutional rights is ridiculous. The idea that we lived in this sort of tyrannical, like imposed lockdown society for a year and a half or whatever Kennedy has claimed is just completely false. And that never, ever happened.

VINCENT: All right. Number six.

KENNEDY (clip): We began censoring people in violation of First Amendment.

ANGIE: I mean, here’s where he’s complaining. This is coded. You know that they’re going to be talking about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine whenever they mention the term early treatment. And so this all came up in the context of there were doctors who said, we need these early treatments. So there’s these treatments that work. And we didn’t listen to them and we silenced them. I mean, these people were absolutely not silent. So as I mentioned, Jay Bhattacharya has been part of this lawsuit claiming that his First Amendment rights have been taken away. This guy was on TV more than almost anybody I know. He was talking to Tucker Carlson all the time. He was not censored in any way. He just didn’t get to do all of the talking that he wanted to. He thought that he should be on mainstream media and he should be talking to Wolf Blitzer or Jake Tapper or whoever on CNN, not whatever pandemic expert who’s actually an expert was on there, not Tony Fauci. Should be all of these contrarian people who are all just trying to sell ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in many cases or sell something else like fascism. That’s really what all of this silencing and censorship comes down to. Kennedy’s another one to talk. Literally, this guy wrote four books in the last six years, claims that they’re all like runaway bestsellers. One of them is literally called The Real Anthony Fauci. And it’s basically he’s written two books, actually, about Fauci and the lab leak. The other one’s called The Wuhan Cover-Up. And in both of these books, it’s just basically 200 whatever pages of propaganda. He was making a lot of money off of this stuff. He also ran for president. I mean, he literally was on mainstream news all the time when he was a presidential candidate. Because in addition to that, his last name is Kennedy. Because he is literally Robert F. Kennedy’s son. I mean, he is JFK’s nephew. He is not censored in any way. He’s literally the closest thing we have to American royalty. And he’s been on the news and he’s a bestselling author and he makes a fortune doing this. And he’s literally famous for being the anti-vax Kennedy. And now he’s the HHS secretary. So I find that completely inconsistent with the idea that he’s ever been silenced or censored.

VINCENT: All right, number seven.

KENNEDY (clip): Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the COVID pandemic. He was doing it under the Biden administration. President Trump wanted to end the lockdowns.

ANGIE: I mean, again, the lockdowns were Trump’s idea and they were his recommendation, the recommendation of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, which was chaired by HHS Secretary Alex Azar. That was the predecessor of Kennedy during the first Trump administration. And it was coordinated by Dr. Deborah Birx, who was the former director of PEPFAR. So Fauci was on the White House task force, but he was not even in charge of coordinating it. He was a guy on the task force, which was composed of like the Surgeon General and the Assistant Secretary for Health and the FDA commissioner and all these other different people. Francis Collins, the NIH director, was on it. All these other different people that were all advising the president. But then when it came down to it and it was announced, it was the president’s idea and the president’s recommendation. So it was not that it carried through under big brother Biden. It was Trump’s idea. And some of these policies were still in effect when Biden became the president.

KENNEDY (clip): They were doing it because Anthony Fauci was telling them from the top, you need to lock down. And I remember him saying —

ANGIE: Yeah, Fauci didn’t have that type of authority. And I’m quite positive — and we know actually now from Tony Fauci’s diaries that have been released that, in fact, Tony Fauci was not screaming, lock it down from the top. Tony Fauci was making recommendations that gradually changed over time, which is what all of the different health officials did, whether they were under the Trump, the first Trump or the Biden administration. They don’t do that under the second Trump administration.

VINCENT: Number nine.

KENNEDY (clip): Now we know that Anthony Fauci, who was the expert, was lying about everything, about masks, about social distancing, about natural immunity, about the transmission from the vaccine, about the source of COVID. He was lying.

ANGIE: So I’m glad you highlighted that note that he was the expert because this is another favorite tactic of this administration is to basically suggest that expertise is a bad thing. That expertise is an indicator that somebody is about to lie to you, that somebody is about to give you information on a topic that they are an expert in that is, in fact, unreliable. Because I guess they’re such an expert that they know how to manipulate you so that they’re telling you something that’s not true. Yeah, that’s not actually true. Fauci said things that changed over time, which as we discussed when we were talking about Fauci’s hearing last week, is something that scientists do all the time. That is the mark of a competent scientist. As you get new information and new evidence, you don’t hold on to your old hypothesis just because you feel strongly attached to it. You are willing to change your hypothesis if it fails testing. And what failing testing means in this context is that there’s evidence that disproves it. So Fauci, in his position on any of this stuff, whether it be how likely are you to get infected with COVID after you’ve been vaccinated, whether it’s how durable or protective is natural or infection acquired immunity versus vaccine induced immunity, or where did COVID come from — on all of these topics, Fauci has had changing positions that reflect the changing evidence. They don’t reflect dishonesty. And I think that that is something that Kennedy and all of the people in this administration have really been harping on because it’s taking the public’s misunderstanding of how science works and making it seem as though it’s something sinister or dishonest. When in reality, it’s actually one of the most honest things that you can do because it’s making decisions purely based on evidence rather than on your personal opinion or your personal biases.

KENNEDY (clip): Number 10, there are 15 million frontline physicians around the world.

ANGIE: I mean, there are roughly 15 million people who have a degree that would enable them to call themselves a physician. That doesn’t mean that they’re frontline healthcare workers. It doesn’t mean that they’re even practicing medicine. It means that there’s 15 million physicians in the world. I don’t think that 15 million physicians agree as a group with Kennedy. And this is one thing that drives me crazy because he said this in the context of there’s 15 million physicians in the world and we just didn’t listen to them. And that’s why the pandemic went so badly. And that assumes that all 15 million physicians in the world agree with Kennedy, which I assure you they do not, including most of our major medical associations. Kennedy would also tell you in a different conversation that this represents the medical establishment. That’s the reason why everybody’s so sick, because they’re all pushing their drugs on you and their vaccines on you and blah, blah, blah. So he likes to talk about all the doctors in the world as if they’re this sort of imaginary group that isn’t 15 million literally different individuals from all sorts of different backgrounds with all sorts of objectives. But I can tell you that I think that 15 million physicians in the world probably don’t uniformly agree with Secretary Kennedy on most of these issues.

KENNEDY (clip): There were therapeutics out there that were working. There were doctors that were having no deaths from COVID and treating, in some cases, thousands of patients. And we weren’t listening to them. Instead, we were doing the opposite. We were shutting them down.

ANGIE: Yeah, he’s talking about people like Pierre Kory and Peter McCullough. These are all people who were cardiologists in both of their cases. There’s others, Mary Talley Bowden in Texas, who’s, I think, an internal medicine doctor. A lot of these doctors who got into selling ivermectin and these alternative early treatment type therapies have claimed that they were silenced or that they were somehow punished for their dissent. And in reality, they were seeing all these patients and curing people and it’s a miracle and all this stuff with ivermectin, which doesn’t work. In reality, they’re losing their medical licenses correctly for selling treatments that don’t work, which is against most medical boards’ ethical standards, certainly, and most states’ licensing requirements. So people who’ve lost their medical licenses for cause because they’re literally selling snake oil to people or selling ivermectin, which is a drug that does work for parasites and worms but doesn’t work for viruses. And if you do that, that’s medical malpractice and you lose your license for it. That’s called consequences. And basically what this is, is saying that people shouldn’t have to face consequences for quackery.

KENNEDY (clip): And one of the mistakes we made in the last time was suppressing those rights so people weren’t being heard. Doctors who were saying, you’re doing it wrong, were being marginalized and vilified.

ANGIE: Well, as I just mentioned, some of these people, marginalization and vilification means that they lost their medical licenses for cause. Others, like Simone Gold, for example, the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, she was pardoned by President Trump on January 20, 2025 for her participation in January 6, 2021. She’s also made a fortune selling telemedicine services, basically, that will prescribe ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and whatever other stuff that doesn’t work for COVID. She’s made a lot of money off of it. And on top of that, she’s a January Sixer. So that is what he’s talking about. People facing consequences for literally trying to, in her case, overthrow the government. That’s what he thinks is vilification. I don’t know how you feel about this, Vincent, but I think that’s one of the most infuriating things for me, being a virologist and listening to him talk about how the ivermectin grifters of the world were done wrong because nobody listened to them and let them sell their snake oil in peace when our colleagues are literally facing jail time for doing their jobs.

VINCENT: We had other antivirals that actually worked. As you know, there were plenty of clinical trials for ivermectin and none of them worked.

ANGIE: Yep. And in my Substack, I have a number of links to those articles for people who might doubt. There are still doubters despite the growing mountain of evidence that shows that, in fact, again, ivermectin, Nobel Prize winning discovery for helminthic infestations, but not very good for viruses and in fact doesn’t work at all.

VINCENT: Number 13, this is referring to the interviewer.

KENNEDY (clip): You were scaring people. Why are you saying that? Because that was the job of CNN.

ANGIE: Yeah, this is the current administration’s contention that the mainstream media is hostile towards them and is basically conspiring to scare people away from the true golden path of MAGA. This is absolutely absurd considering the mainstream media, in my opinion, is far too uncritical of this administration, particularly of their changes regarding science and health policy. So I think it’s just absolutely absurd that CNN is some sort of entertainment network that exists to scare people into cooperating. And this is this whole narrative that, again, Joe Biden is this sort of autocrat who is going to use public health law and manipulate it in order to sort of backdoor around the Constitution and take away all of our rights. And that’s just absolutely not true because the only person in this situation who’s actually done anything like that is Kennedy and Trump. Kennedy has basically ordered people, Americans, to be held indefinitely in quarantine facilities based on stuff that he made up about hantavirus and Ebola virus, or technically Bundibugyo virus, but an Ebola virus. I mean, they are using made up stuff about viruses to not only persecute and prosecute, in some cases, our colleagues, but they’re just like doing this to Americans with stuff that they’ve made up about viruses. You go on the wrong vacation and you might find yourself imprisoned in Nebraska for six weeks. And to me, that’s absolutely unprecedented. So the only people who are trying to scare people here are Kennedy. And it really brings up another thing that to me is one of the great inconsistencies of Kennedy’s entire attitude. It’s the simultaneous idea that COVID came from a lab and it might even be a bioweapon and it’s the worst thing ever. But at the same time, it’s no big deal. It didn’t put anybody in the hospital. There’s drugs that work for it. It’s fine. Like, don’t worry about it. We don’t really need to have pandemic preparedness or research on this stuff because it’s not a problem. It’s like, which is it? You can’t have it be this lab leaked bioweapon that’s the product of gain of function research. And also like everybody should get it. It’s healthy, natural immunity. It’s rugged and robust.

VINCENT: As you said above, inconsistency is a feature of conspiracy theories, right?

ANGIE: It is. And like when you get to that point, this is what I kind of hope that people think about when they are confronted with stuff like this. And it might be stuff where you’re just coming into learning about some of the terminology, some of the concepts because it’s very technical or whatever. If you get to a point where you’re like, hey, wait a second, that doesn’t really make sense, like with this other thing that they’re also on about all the time — that’s usually a good time to say, wait a second, could this be a conspiracy theory? Because oftentimes it is.

VINCENT: Then number 14.

BASH (clip): When it comes to the vaccine, there have been studies that show that because of vaccine disinformation, there could have been 100 to 200,000 lives in the U.S. saved. But because people didn’t get the vaccine, that’s why. I’m not saying that it entirely —

KENNEDY (clip): You are saying nonsense. You are saying something that you cannot show me a single study.

BASH (clip): I am not saying nonsense.

ANGIE: No, they do exist. And in fact, that’s exactly what they show. There was one study that was an academic study and another study that was done by — it was a sort of report from one of these like think tanks, like the Kaiser Family Foundation, Peterson, I think. And both of them, yes, show like essentially they’re modeling studies, of course, so they’re not exact, but they predict that you would see a range of around one to 200,000 preventable deaths from COVID disinformation.

VINCENT: All right, I’m going to skip around a little now, if it’s okay, because we’re —

ANGIE: I know, I was like, oh my God, it’s almost 40 minutes and we’re not even at 20 yet.

VINCENT: So she asked him about dangerous gain of function. She didn’t actually get the definition right either, but we’ll leave that. And he says —

KENNEDY (clip): People have been trying to put guardrails around it for generations and it hasn’t worked.

ANGIE: I mean, I’d like to know what a generation is. Are we talking about bacteria here? Are we talking about humans? I mean, this is like teen mom generation because — and you can correct me if I’m wrong, Vincent — but I mean, this did not really become a serious discussion about oversight specifically of gain-of-function research in virology until around 2009, 2010. I mean, biodefense, biosecurity, and biosafety regulation in general was a topic before that, but specifically regulating gain-of-function research or enhanced pathogen, all the different terms and definitions that they’ve come up with for it — they didn’t start trying to regulate this type of research until around 2010. And the reason for that was these bird flu studies that were done by two different researchers, one at Erasmus Medical Center, Ron Fouchier, and the other Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Tokyo. And what these studies — they were really important, I thought. They basically used two different approaches to enhance H5N1, older isolates of H5N1, so that they would be airborne transmissible in the ferret model. And the reason why this was important, the reason why this was alarming is that normally H5N1 can’t do that. And people thought, well, you guys just did this like without thinking about it. And people were alarmed by that. But it’s really important. Those studies were really important because now that we have H5N1 everywhere in birds, in cows, in poultry, it’s really important to be able to monitor those genomic sequences and to know how the virus could potentially make that jump in nature so that we can monitor it to make sure that it’s not actually making that jump. And that was what got the conversation started, though. And really, that was when it first, I think, started to be discussed in a way that was broader than just biosafety regulation. So I don’t know if that means generations for guardrails being put up, because by my count, that’s about 15 years.

VINCENT: And then he goes on to say —

KENNEDY (clip): And clearly COVID-19 pandemic and many other global pandemics that we have have come from gain-of-function research.

ANGIE: There’s never been a pandemic that has been the result of gain-of-function research, including the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. That has never happened, literally. I guess you could potentially make an argument that the anthrax outbreak in 1979 in Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union, which was an accidental release of weaponized anthrax from a facility that was illegally violating the Biological Weapons Convention — that could be argued that it was an outbreak of something that was caused by gain of function research, maybe. But there’s never been a pandemic caused by it. There’s been one pandemic that is probably research-related, and that was 1977 H1N1. That virus was genetically identical to a virus that had been circulating 20 years earlier, or 25 years earlier. It was not the result of gain-of-function research. We don’t really know the circumstances, again, Soviet Union. It was probably either a failed vaccine trial or it was a human challenge study that was inadequately secured.

KENNEDY (clip): The RSV epidemic that we have that is the biggest killer of kids in this country today.

ANGIE: No, that would be gun violence. And RSV kills a couple hundred children every year, which is terrible. But gun violence kills thousands of kids. So RSV is not the number one killer of children. And I think I could be wrong and it probably varies from year to year. But I’d say that it’s probably not even the biggest virus killer of children. And I would imagine that that’s influenza.

VINCENT: You know, the RSV vaccine has done a good job at reducing deaths. Then he says —

KENNEDY (clip): The RSV came from these kind of experiments.

ANGIE: When I heard that — so this is the new thing that Kennedy brought up that I never heard him say before — I was just flummoxed. I had to go back in the old literature, which I do like doing. But I didn’t actually know how RSV had been isolated. It was isolated in 1956 from chimps in a research colony that had gotten sick. One of the chimp technicians had also gotten sick. I’m not sure who gave it to the chimps or who gave it to who, whether it was chimp to human or human to chimp. But in any case, that was when it was first isolated. It was chimpanzee coryza virus. This is like an old timey term that’s so old timey. I’m not even sure how to actually pronounce it correctly.

VINCENT: Coryza.

ANGIE: Coryza. Okay. So yeah, so that’s what they found it. And then the next year they did some serology testing and they found, oh, looks like everybody’s got antibodies to it, must be circulating in the human population for quite a long time. And sure enough, turns out it’s a human endemic pathogen. So I don’t see how it possibly could have been the result of gain of function research, given that it was already around in the 1950s, and that was before they discovered the central dogma of molecular biology, which I think is kind of essential for cloning. So they couldn’t have made it by cloning it anyways, and I guess maybe they’re saying it was passaged in chimps or something. I don’t see how any of that works or makes sense.

VINCENT: Well, they’re saying it was made from nothing, from scratch, and this is not even possible today. These people don’t understand anything.

ANGIE: Well, are you going to talk about the Lyme disease next? Because that one’s even crazier.

VINCENT: Yeah, let’s do Lyme disease. So he also said Lyme disease came from gain-of-function research also.

KENNEDY (clip): The Lyme disease almost certainly came from this kind of research.

ANGIE: Yeah, so this is something that actually has been going around for quite a while. And it’s almost too stupid to be believed when you first hear it. It is based in a slight bit of truth. So there was this thing called Operation Paperclip at the end of World War II that was basically recruiting Nazi scientists to bring their technologies to the U.S. instead of the Soviets after the end of the war. And some of these people were — these were the guys who were not put to death at Nuremberg. So I don’t think any of those guys came over in Operation Paperclip, but these were like lesser Nazis that were still tried at Nuremberg, but like not, you know, death penalty Nuremberg Nazis. So, not great, but the U.S. did it, whatever. Some of these guys did go work at Plum Island, which is an animal disease research facility off the coast of Long Island in Long Island Sound. And the theory here is that one of those Nazis made Borrelia burgdorferi. It might have even been Willy Burgdorfer, who is one of — I don’t know if he was a Nazi, but he’s a German guy or Austrian guy who came over after the war. He gave an interview to a woman who wrote a book claiming that basically Lyme disease was gain of function, when he had advanced Parkinson’s disease and was not well, and that has been inflated into this, they made Lyme disease at Plum Island. Now, to be clear, they are saying that they made a bacteria from scratch, a bacteria that is notoriously difficult to grow. And I’m not a bacteriologist, but boy, Borrelia burgdorferi is one of the reasons why I’m not a bacteriologist. I heard enough of what I needed to hear about how difficult that organism was to work with that I wanted no part of it.

VINCENT: Willy was born in Switzerland, by the way. He’s Swiss.

ANGIE: Okay, he’s Swiss. Got it.

VINCENT: All right, so then Kennedy, number 21, he says —

KENNEDY (clip): The scientists, who you say are experts, are making the argument that this is necessary for pandemic response cannot point to one instance in history where research that came out of this kind of experimentation has actually provided us something beneficial.

ANGIE: I’d point to — I mean, he probably doesn’t think it’s beneficial. In fact, I know he doesn’t think it’s beneficial, but I’d point to the COVID vaccine. When we were at ASV, I gave a talk in the satellite symposium on virus ecology. And I don’t really work on virus ecology, so that means that I’m giving a talk on COVID origins, kind of, because I do work on zoonotic spillover and transfer between animal and human hosts. And it just kind of came up, like, at the end of this, like, what’s going on, basically? And I was talking — I think it’s really important to tell our colleagues, like, you’re not crazy. Like, yes, we are under attack and we all need to stand up and support our colleagues who are the ones who are being targeted right now. But I said, the reason that we were able to develop COVID vaccines in 10 months is because of the so-called gain of function research that was done by our colleagues and that our colleagues are being accused of and that is potentially going to be used to try to send more of them to prison. That work is the reason why we have COVID vaccines. If people hadn’t been doing gain of function research to understand the importance of the spike protein as the major antigenic target for developing vaccines, if we didn’t understand how that impacted viral pathogenesis or viral infection or susceptibility, all of which involved experiments that could be classified as gain of function, depending on what definition’s being used — that work was essential to us being able to develop those vaccines so quickly. That’s why we got the sequence and we were able to begin vaccine development immediately because of that work. So I would say there’s plenty more examples. But the one I think that everybody can relate to is how did we do that? How did President Trump do that? Because I’m more than happy to give President Trump the credit for Operation Warp Speed. They did that because of our colleagues’ existing work.

VINCENT: So then there’s a big part on measles now. And the first thing he said —

KENNEDY (clip): First of all, this is an international outbreak.

ANGIE: He likes to say this, and you know what? Racists love to say this, too. Every time I talk about measles on social media, my replies fill up with, oh, all those dirty immigrants bringing measles over. That’s absolutely not true, and it’s demonstrably not true with the data on the current measles outbreak in the U.S. So we have already surpassed last year’s entire total of measles, which was the highest number of measles cases we’ve had in 25 years in the U.S., and the reason that we have is not because of imported cases. We’re not letting a bunch of foreigners in anyways these days in the U.S., but we’re certainly not letting a bunch of people in with measles. There have been 16 imported cases of measles so far this year. There have been more than 2,300 cases of locally transmitted measles. Yes, there are measles outbreaks occurring all around the world right now. There’s a lot of measles everywhere because vaccination’s down. But in America, it’s not an international outbreak. It’s an American outbreak.

VINCENT: One thing that annoys me about his talking about measles, he’s always saying, we’re doing a great job. There are more cases in other countries. Yeah, but there were no cases in the U.S. until recently. So that’s the main point.

ANGIE: There were no cases. And you know what? In Mexico and Canada and the UK, the other countries that he cited, those countries do have more cases because they had a bigger caseload to begin with for a variety of different reasons, some of which are different than the U.S.’s reasons. But they’re all going down because all of those governments in those countries have launched aggressive immunization campaigns to contain those outbreaks. In the U.S., we have not.

KENNEDY (clip): The reason we’re having a measles outbreak is because of the COVID lockdowns, because people didn’t — like children during that period did not get vaccinated.

ANGIE: Yeah, the numbers, again, prove him wrong because about a fifth of the people who are getting measles now are children under the age of five. Your first measles booster, your first MMR shot is recommended at the age 12 to 15 months. So all of the people who are getting measles now in that baby range are people who were not alive during the lockdown because they’re babies under the age of five. And the lockdowns happened in 2020, which was six years ago. Now, a third of the people who are getting measles are unvaccinated adults. So which I thought was very interesting, actually. So they weren’t babies and they weren’t the age where they should be getting an MMR shot either during the pandemic. So while in some countries it’s true that the MMR rate was substantially affected by the pandemic and in the U.S. it was as well — that’s not who is getting measles right now. And that’s not the only reason why measles is spreading.

VINCENT: So I’m skipping to number 28. This one really got me.

KENNEDY (clip): We have stopped the outbreaks at record speed in South Carolina and Texas and Utah and Virginia.

ANGIE: I mean, we haven’t stopped the outbreaks for the most part. So these big outbreaks that happened, including the one — I mean, it’s so perfect because the one in Texas started literally on January 20th, 2025, the day that Trump was inaugurated. So you could literally say that the measles epidemic in America that’s occurring right now began the day that Trump began his second term as president. It’s incredible. But in Texas, guess what? I put a map on the Substack that I got off the CDC’s measles dashboard. It shows cumulative cases in 2026. Texas has a whole bunch. That outbreak was supposedly ended in August of last year. And I don’t know about you, Vincent, but I don’t consider eight months to stop an outbreak — it ended in August of last year — to be, quote, record time. The South Carolina outbreak took six months for that outbreak to be over. The Utah outbreak, he cites, is still going on after more than a year. And the Virginia outbreak is not under control. And according to Virginia’s health director, there is no end in sight. So I don’t see how any of this is like record time or measles outbreak response that’s covering itself in glory. I spoke to one of my journalist colleagues, Amy Maxmen, who had done a report on what the Texas outbreak was like in 2025. And there were actually situations where the CDC did not answer the phone when Texas state health officials were calling them asking for help. So I think that Kennedy’s discussion of what a great job like his HHS is doing in responding to the measles outbreak is just absurd. We’ve had to actually push back the elimination meeting of PAHO, the Pan American Health Organization, which decides measles elimination status, to November because the U.S. doesn’t have its genomic data in order that will prove that we’ve lost elimination status.

VINCENT: He also claims —

KENNEDY (clip): I dispatch immediately the Epidemic Intelligence Services.

ANGIE: Yeah, I love how he’s like, yes, I always send the EIS right away, like immediately. The first thing he did on taking office — I call it the Valentine’s Day massacre. He was confirmed on February 13th by the U.S. Senate. On February 14th, reductions in force notifications started going out, including to a significant chunk of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, as well as the laboratory service that supports their work. So I don’t know who exactly he’s sending, because while some of these people were reinstated, being reinstated after a RIF in this particular administration doesn’t necessarily mean that you have your job back. So I wonder how many EIS officers there actually are to rapidly dispatch whenever a measles outbreak occurs.

KENNEDY (clip): I’ve never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine.

ANGIE: He questions the efficacy of the MMR vaccine at every opportunity. I mean, I’ll give it to him. In this interview, he did say that the MMR vaccine works. These days, I think he’s just been told, like, this is non-negotiable. You have to say that the vaccine works. You have to just say it. So he’s looking for the most unenthusiastic ways possible that he can say that the MMR vaccine works.

BASH (clip): As we’re getting close to back to school, are you willing to say to parents who have not vaccinated their kids that they should vaccinate their kids for measles because it is safe and it will help save their children’s lives?

ANGIE: And in this case, he’s like, we all know the vaccine works. Show me a time that I’ve ever questioned that it does. And it’s like, you literally questioned it for two weeks until they forced you to say that the MMR vaccine works after the Texas outbreak, right when he first became HHS secretary. It’s really unreal. It’s like, well, show me where I’ve ever done this. And it’s like, we could literally show you a hundred examples of where you’ve done this, but he just doesn’t care. And he just continues to plow right on.

VINCENT: Okay. Now we get into autism and vaccines.

KENNEDY (clip): There’s 73 studies out there that linked Tylenol exposure during later pregnancy and during the perinatal period to autism.

ANGIE: Well, this is a review that was written by our former Columbia colleague, Andrea Baccarelli, who I believe is at Harvard Medical School now. Now, he has written all of these reviews that supposedly show associations, not causal links, but associations between Tylenol and autism. And if you recall, and viewers might recall, the absolutely deranged Tylenol Autism press conference that occurred last September in which Trump was talking about babies frying and, you know, break it up. He was talking about making the MMR monovalent based on this information. This was all based on these reviews written by this guy, Andrea Baccarelli. And as it turns out, Baccarelli was working as an expert witness for people who were suing the manufacturer of Tylenol for autism in their babies. Now, Tylenol is the only pain reliever that pregnant people can take safely during pregnancy. So by saying that it causes autism, which it doesn’t, actually denies pregnant people the only pain reliever that they have access to. So it’s actually quite bad, and it increases people’s suffering because it doesn’t cause autism. And when the conflicts of interest with Baccarelli’s testimony in these cases came out, it also came out that in one of these cases, the judge judged his testimony to be, quote, unreliable because it was cherry-picked and included a lot of study misrepresentations. So essentially the 73 studies, which are actually 27 studies that show some kind of link, and the paper only covers 46 studies, so I don’t know where the 73 number came from. But in any case, it doesn’t show that. And as I mentioned, the senior author has had all of these issues raised about his financial conflicts of interest and his undeclared conflicts of interest and his reliability in general on this topic.

KENNEDY (clip): The Institute of Medicine says none of the eight vaccines that are administered during the first six months of life have ever been studied for a relationship to autism.

ANGIE: This is one of those things that every time he says it, I just want to ask the average person: do you honestly think that’s true? I mean, literally, how long have you been hearing about vaccines and autism? Just any vaccine. Do you think that people have literally not looked at this? I mean, there are so many papers where people have looked at this. And he continues to say this and say this over and over again. But I would just ask people listening to him say this: do you think this could possibly be true? That us pharma shills, us vaccine loving people, are just going to be like, you know what? I hope nobody ever does that study. It would be so difficult to do — because it’s not like the recommended childhood vaccine schedule isn’t vaccinating most children. So you would be able to actually look at this in millions of people. Oh, and guess what? People have already done that. I mean, all over the place. It just drives me crazy that Kennedy can say this stuff. And it’s like, yeah, why would you guys look at that? Because it’s not hard to do. There’s tons of data about it. Literally, you could look at your own children, your own community, your own families, and make a judgment about whether this might even be true. And people just don’t. They take him at his word. And I truly don’t understand why. Because to me, it seems so dumb. Of course, if you were worried about this, the first thing you would do is look at every vaccine.

VINCENT: So then he contradicts himself and says the Institute of Medicine found two studies —

KENNEDY (clip): One on the DTP vaccine, that showed that it does cause autism, and one on the hepatitis B vaccine that again suggests that it does cause autism.

VINCENT: Hep B is given at birth, which as far as I know is during the first six months of life. So what’s going on there?

ANGIE: I mean, so it’s totally not true. First of all, they only found one study, and it was about not DTP — he likes to talk about DTP and there is actually a difference here. So the diphtheria tetanus pertussis vaccine actually had a terrible safety record. There were a lot of side effects to it. And it’s the reason why we have the so-called vaccine court or the vaccine injury compensation program, because there was a pretty bad side effect profile for the original DTP vaccine. So they changed the vaccine. So now it’s DTaP. And the reason why it’s DTaP instead of DTP is that the “a” in the pertussis component stands for acellular. So that means that instead of having whole killed pertussis bacteria, you have just some of the components of the bacteria. And that means that there are fewer side effects. So he’s talking about DTP and we don’t even use that vaccine any longer and we haven’t for years or decades. But there’s one study by Geier and Geier that used VAERS, which is this self-reported database that the CDC maintains for detecting safety signals, not for verifying them. And that’s very important. Geier and Geier are a father-son duo — the father’s dead now, but they both have been charged with practicing medicine without a license. The elder Geier was a doctor who lost his — no, actually, I think he was a PhD and he was pretending to be a medical doctor. And they were prescribing puberty blockers and hormone blockers to treat vaccine injuries based on a bunch of cockamamie anti-vaccine science. Currently, the younger Geier is a special employee at CDC who is investigating vaccine injuries. So that was the one study they found on the DTaP. That was discarded because it was considered unreliable. The hepatitis B study that was located was retracted earlier this year. Kennedy did not like that very much, so he attacked the editor-in-chief of the journal and the journal itself, which is something that I think all academic journal editors — take note, colleagues — will probably need to expect going forward.

VINCENT: All right, we’re almost done. We are on 35.

BASH (clip): There have been more than 40 studies involving 5.6 million people to conclude there is no link between vaccines and autism.

KENNEDY (clip): The studies that you’re referring to are all from one vaccine, the MMR vaccine, or one ingredient, thimerosal.

ANGIE: Yeah, that’s just plainly not true. So he says that we’ve only ever looked at MMR, and I think he also says we looked at thimerosal a little bit, which is a mercury-based vaccine additive that is not really used that much and is also shown to be safe. That’s not true. So they’ve looked at aluminum adjuvants. They’ve looked at all sorts of different vaccine components, all sorts of different vaccine platforms, mRNA, inactivated, live attenuated, recombinant, whatever. They’ve looked at all of this stuff, at all of the vaccines that are part of the childhood schedule. And there is no association whatsoever with autism or any sort of neurodivergent condition, neurodevelopmental defects, for any of the vaccines, no matter what they are. So the idea that, oh, we’ve only looked at this narrow series of vaccines, if only we would do those studies, if only the government would stop covering this up — but the fact is we’ve done those studies and we’ve not found any sort of association. And he definitely knows that because last summer he attacked the lead author of one of these studies on aluminum adjuvants that didn’t show this. It was looking at more than 2 million children from Denmark over the course of almost 30 years. And it got so stupid and so bad that the author had to write a counter blog entry to just point out how bad Kennedy was at statistics and how much he was misinterpreting this paper, which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. And of course, Kennedy wanted it retracted.

VINCENT: Another one.

KENNEDY (clip): Show me one of the studies that’s been done on the first eight vaccines during the first six months of life. You will not find them.

ANGIE: Yeah, I mean, I just put some links in there. There’s a lot of them.

VINCENT: Yeah, you found them really quickly, right?

ANGIE: Yeah. I mean, to tell you the truth, 315 results in the PubMed search that I did, and there’s probably some false positives in there. But the point is that if you search vaccines, autism, and infants, you get 315 results. The few that I scanned on just the first page of hits were all showing no association between vaccines and autism in infants, which again, first six months of life.

VINCENT: And then another one that I heard him say —

KENNEDY (clip): Genes don’t cause epidemics.

ANGIE: I understand. I mean, this is stupid because first of all, autism isn’t an epidemic. Second of all, autism isn’t one thing. Autism is a whole bunch of different things, and neurodivergence, the neurodivergent spectrum, is huge. So autism isn’t an epidemic. It’s a feature of humanity, I guess. But genes definitely do cause epidemics. I mean, we study viruses, right? What does a virus need to do the most basic thing it needs to cause disease in a person? That’s infect a host. It needs a receptor. Guess what encodes the receptor? A gene. Even if it’s like a sugar, like on flu, a gene encodes like the enzyme that makes that sugar and that attaches it to the cell. There’s genes responsible for everything. So genes definitely do cause epidemics. And you know what else they cause? Autism.

VINCENT: Should we do two examples of MAHA misogyny?

ANGIE: Sure. I love doing that. I mean, this is my favorite because I frequently am told that I am too emotional.

BASH (clip): Do you want people to get the MMR vaccine?

KENNEDY (clip): Yeah, I said that already. I know you’re flustered now.

ANGIE: Do as I say, I guess, not as I do — or perhaps every accusation is a confession in this case, because if anybody seemed flustered, it was him. I mean, he was fluttering and he was getting redder and redder. And Dana Bash definitely looked — she looked frustrated. I don’t think she seemed flustered. She was trying her best to keep up. And like I said, I think she could have been more prepared for the interview. But of the two of them, if there was a most flustered trophy being given out, it would have definitely gone to Kennedy. And I think this is one of the things that just drives me nuts is when men in particular get emotional sometimes — and present company excluded, of course, Vincent, you’re a consummate professional. But sometimes when men get upset or they are challenged and they get upset about that, the first thing they like to do is project, especially if their interlocutor is a woman. And one of their favorite tactics is to say, I wish you weren’t so upset about this. You seem so flustered. You just seem like you’re out of control. And it’s infuriating. And I think it’s meant to be. But Dana Bash, I bet, has probably experienced some of that before and she wasn’t taking the bait.

VINCENT: And then last —

KENNEDY (clip): But Dana, you probably don’t understand this because you’re not a scientist.

ANGIE: I yelped when I heard that because I am a scientist and neither is he. And neither of them are scientists. Dana Bash at least had producers who were giving her information. She was looking at her notes, trying to find examples of citations that she could use to refute him. She did manage to get off a couple facts. But if there was anybody who was being unscientific about all of this, it’s Kennedy. And I think this is one of the things that drives me the craziest, too. Apart from the sort of implied idea that women can’t be scientists or that they’re inherently less good at science than non-scientist men, I think it’s really irritating when somebody like Kennedy, who is not only not a scientist, but is completely anti-scientific, sort of weaponizes scientific mastery against other people. And I really want people to understand that science is not something that is exclusive. It’s not something that we are trying to keep from the public. In fact, I think most scientists wish that they were better at communicating science because nobody ever trains us to do this. I guess I sort of arguably was trained a little bit by you, Vincent, because you were really pioneering science communication when I was finishing up my PhD and I was on your podcast before. But I think most people get zero experience with any kind of science communication and there’s not necessarily a lot of encouragement to contribute in that space. Aside from writing papers or maybe promoting yourself via social media or something, there’s not necessarily lessons in how to communicate about science. But I think that the fact that we might not be trained very well in it doesn’t mean that we’re not enthusiastic about doing it and doesn’t mean that we don’t want to participate with the public in a discussion about it. And I think that’s one of the things that annoys me the most about somebody like Kennedy saying, well, you’re not a scientist. Neither are you. And that shouldn’t exclude anybody from being able to talk about this stuff. It’s really important. And I think by trying to sort of pseudo gatekeep like that, what Kennedy is really saying is that he doesn’t think anybody but him and the people that he decides are scientific should be part of the conversation.

VINCENT: Yeah, I mean, she often mentioned studies by experts, and he would poo-poo that. He said, oh, they’re not really experts. I have my own experts.

ANGIE: Yeah. They’re experts like Fauci who are lying about everything. That’s his answer for everything. I’m so glad that we talk about this so often, even though it’s so infuriating to talk about it. Because I really do want people to understand what we’re really up against here. This is just consistent lying over and over again to get people to believe that reality is other than what it is. And when you think about it, that’s a really, really scary prospect.

VINCENT: [...] people to be sick. But do you think that’s true or does he really believe that his solution will keep people healthy?

ANGIE: I believe that that’s true. And the reason I believe that that’s true is because of what he did in Samoa in 2019. So in 2019, two children died because a clinical worker incorrectly mixed the MMR vaccine, which comes as a lyophilized — it comes as a powder. You have to mix it with a diluent and they accidentally mixed it with a muscle relaxant instead of the saline that it’s supposed to be reconstituted in. And so two children died as a result. And as a result of that, measles vaccination plummeted in Samoa. Kennedy came to Samoa, met with a bunch of anti-vax people in Samoa, just as an outbreak was beginning because the vaccination rate had fallen to, I think, something like 30%. It was really, really low. You need to have 95% vaccination uptake at population level to prevent measles outbreaks. So this measles outbreak was just getting started. And basically Kennedy said that he wanted to discourage vaccination as much as possible so that he could do what he called a, quote, natural experiment to see what would happen if measles just tore up through an unvaccinated population. And as a result of that, I mean, there were thousands of measles cases and more than 83 people died, most of them children under the age of five. So when you say I want to do a natural experiment to see what will happen and the consequences of that are 83 dead children under the age of five — to me, that’s somebody who probably wants people to get sick. And you know what? It really is, I think, in the best interest of the Trump administration for that to happen, because as the administration continues to take liberties, they are the ones who are taking away our constitutional rights. It makes it a lot harder for the American people to fight back if we’re all sick.

VINCENT: This is sick on the level of Stalin and Hitler, Angie.

ANGIE: It is exactly what happened, in fact, with Stalin. So this is something I have really done a lot of reading about just because I’m trying to understand what’s happening now. And the only thing I can think to do is look at the evidence and what it says. So I go to where this has happened in history, and one great example is Stalinism. So Trofim Lysenko, who was an agronomist, Stalin’s favorite agronomist, basically made up a bunch of stuff about how he could refrigerate seeds and they would grow all over Russia. And he claimed he could do all kinds of stuff. He could grow pineapples in Siberia and stuff like that. He could turn potatoes into cabbage and things like this. All by like refrigerating seeds and stuff because he didn’t believe in genes. He was a Lamarckist. So he believed that heredity was based on environmental exposure, which is not actually that different from some of Kennedy’s beliefs. But in any case, he told Stalin what he wanted to hear. And that is that you can go ahead and force collective farming on the Soviet people, steal their land from them, force them all onto these collective farms. They’ll starve, but it’s cool because I’ve got this seed method and we’re going to be living large. And that never happened because his techniques did not work. But millions and millions of Soviets died, including the Kulaks, who were basically landowning peasants that Stalin was trying to take their land so he could turn it into collective farms. All the people who would have opposed Stalin throughout all of this — a lot of them died of starvation. So they were not able to put up the resistance to basically Stalin’s attempts to centralize power. And everything that Kennedy’s doing, everything that’s happening with vaccination, everything that’s happening with H5N1, which people aren’t paying attention to — they’re worried about the flu pandemic and I am too. But I’m really worried about the impact that it could also have on food security. All of these things are things that will make it more difficult for the American people to even show up at the polls in November to vote. And it is like Stalin. It is like the Nazis. And I think that that’s what I’m really struggling with right now, Vincent, because I think a lot of our colleagues are really catching on to this. But I think a lot of other people are just not. They don’t see what the purpose of all of this is because most decent, normal human American people who value democracy and value each other don’t want to do stuff like this. And we need to grapple with the fact that our leadership right now is composed of people who do want to do stuff like this.

VINCENT: Well, let’s hope a new pandemic strain doesn’t arise before the November midterms. Otherwise, he’ll lock down the nation. How about that?

ANGIE: I mean, he may not have to. One of the things that I think about a lot is this, and I’m so resentful that I have to learn about Kingdom Protista, but this cyclospora epidemic that’s occurring. I don’t like these parasites that come with cells. I like nice little viruses that I can — I don’t like it if it’s got like a merozoite stage or something.

VINCENT: Well, it’s actually alive, Angie. It’s living.

ANGIE: I know, I know. Oh God, I hate that debate too. We’ll have another whole session on that. Back in the — when we get to the point where we can start talking about virologic, academic stuff again. But, oh God, yeah, the cyclospora outbreak. I just think about this all the time, not because I’m so worried about getting cyclospora, even though I don’t love the idea of explosive diarrhea, but the reason that this is happening is because we just can’t respond to it anymore. We can’t prevent it anymore. The systems are not in place to do anything about it. And I think that’s why they’re like, oh God, no Ebola. Got to stay in a foreign country — because they know that if anything starts spreading here, we are completely screwed. We don’t have the capacity to respond at all anymore. And the second there’s an outbreak of anything more major than cyclospora, it’s going to become immediately apparent.

VINCENT: Well, on that encouraging note, this has been Rasmussen Retorts. You can find the column over on Substack. You should go and read it because all the 40 points are there with links to references that disprove everything that he says. That’s Rasmussen Retorts with Angie Rasmussen. Thank you, Angie.

ANGIE: Thank you so much, Vincent.

The companion piece to this episode

Fauci, the hearings, and pandemic origins

Quackery, Tylenol, and the MMR

Ebola, quarantine, and the Nebraska detentions

The interview itself

COVID mortality, lockdowns, and business closures

Constitutional rights and “censorship”

Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and the “early treatment” doctors

Vaccine uptake and preventable deaths

Gain-of-function research and the H5N1 ferret studies

RSV, Lyme disease, and childhood mortality

Measles

The Epidemic Intelligence Service

Tylenol, autism, and vaccine safety

Lysenko and the closing

Read the original on rasmussenretorts.substack.com ↗

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