The Ben and Emil Show - BAES 114: A New Pandemic May Already Be Here

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

If you thought covid was bad and are worried about another pandemic, then you need to watch this episode. Virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen joins us this week to tell us all about the risks, the characteristics, and what keeps her up at night when it comes to H5N1. Ben's new movies and tv podcast with Dillon is OUT NOW! GO WATCH the second episode on WAR OF THE WORLDS: https://youtu.be/uznBN3UKcDA?si=1a8fwnMtHCJcRVAM **CHECK OUT EMIL'S LIVESTREAMS HERE: https://www.youtube.com/emilderosa Give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it! And please leave us a comment! It helps us! That's Cringe of Cody Ko: https://youtu.be/dTbEk0pVh2w Our AUSTIN VIDEO IS OUT! https://youtu.be/yGSs56bFzRU Sign up to watch and support the show at https://benandemilshow.com ***LINK TO OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/CjujBt8g ***Subscribe to Emil's Substack: https://substack.com/@emilderosa ***Trade with Ben at https://tradertreehouse.com Our episode with *Kyla Scanlon*: https://youtu.be/cIHWkY35cuc Big Tech is out of ideas (ft. ED ZITRON): https://youtu.be/zBvVGHZBpMw Arguing with a millionaire (ft. Chris Camillo): https://youtu.be/1ZUWTkWV_MM We bought suits HERE: https://youtu.be/_cM1XqA9n2U __ GROUND NEWS: Go to https://ground.news/baes for a better way to stay informed. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access to worldwide coverage through our link. SHOPIFY: Sign up for your one dollar per month trial and start selling today at https://shopify.com/baes __ Follow us on instagram! @ benandemilshow @ bencahn @ emilderosa #podcast #comedypodcast #coffeezilla #robinhood #dailyshow #profg #scottgalloway Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's a ton of animals getting H5N1. It's all over the place. I mean, we have flocks in the U.S. that are, you know, large factory, like corporate agribusiness, like production sites that have millions of birds sometimes. And you go from a couple birds dropping dead in a pretty horrible way. And we're talking like bloody diarrhea, bomb, and seizures and, like, neck twisting. RFK Jr. has said that we shouldn't call as much anymore because if,

If we have surviving chickens from this, they're going to be like super chickens. Donald Trump and all of the people in his health and human services department have basically told people ad nauseum that we can't be trusted. It's that you get rid of the intellectuals, you get rid of the scientists, you get rid of the people who can credibly challenge the propaganda and the lies. Then you make the population more and more stupid so that they also don't know what to believe The idea of H5N1 becoming a pandemic in this particular political climate is terrifying, frankly. All right, everybody, welcome for you today on.

Oh, boy. Brace yourselves. buckle up because if you're at all like me and you've been paying attention to this H5N1 thing, she's going to be very important. H5N1 is bird flu for the uninitiated. Yeah. But we have Dr. Angela Rasmussen on. You know, you did it again.

RAS? It's not RAS. It's Rasmussen. That's acceptable. Don't do that. No, no. It's not. We have Dr. Angela Rasmussen on a virologist from the University of Saskatchewan.

I'm the resident can't pronounce things on this show. No, I am too. I can't pronounce squat. I don't know how many of those takes are going to be left in, but we'll leave them all in. It's fun. It's fun. Anyway, welcome to the show. The Saskatchewan versus Saskatchewan thing is something I didn't know until I moved here.

Like I always said Saskatchewan, but people here pronounce it's Saskatchewan. Oh, okay. Yeah, it took me some getting used to because, you know, I pronounce it like an American who's never been here until I moved here. Yes, my very limited time in Canada, I spent the whole time with people going, why do you say it like that? Apparently you're not supposed to pronounce the second T in Toronto. You're just supposed to say Toronto. Yeah, Toronto. And it's Montreal, not Montreal.

And, of course, who can forget, Quebec instead of Quebec. Yeah. I will not be pronouncing it Quebec. I'm going to pronounce it Quebec. Thank you very much. But, but anyway, enough about Canada. Enough about pronunciations. Longtime listeners of the show will have been paying attention to Ben's many, many calls for people to take caution when it comes to bird flu.

Also, Ben, to his credit, was pretty early calling a lot of COVID stuff. But I did, I was wondering if maybe before we even get into the bird flu, because I think when we first reached out to you, it was quite a while ago, but things were maybe not quite as dire as they are now. I'm wondering if maybe you could give us a lay of the land with kind of the political landscape with some of these defundings. So we have some context to where we are right now. Yeah, and maybe should we also just have her do a quick intro? of her background and stuff? Yeah. Sure. Yeah, all of that's great. So I'm Angie Rasmussen. I'm a virologist. My specialty is studying emerging viruses and how they infect different hosts and how they cause disease in those different hosts. So I work with a lot of viruses that people have

probably heard of. I've been working with MERS coronavirus since 2013. So when SARS-Coronavirus two or COVID caused a pandemic in 2020. I was all over that. I worked on Ebola. I still work on Ebola. I work on MPox and I work on H5N1 avian influenza. So I kind of work on whatever virus is creating a problem or could create a problem in the future and try to understand how those viruses can infect their hosts. And once they do infect their hosts, how do they carry out all of those virus things that they need to do to perpetuate themselves. So replicate, transmit to another host, cause disease, that sort of thing. I'm also the editor-in-chief or co-editor in chief of the journal vaccines. So I spend a lot of time also thinking about how we can come

up with countermeasures that can hopefully prevent some of these viruses from infecting us or causing disease in us. So I've been following the H5N1 stuff for quite a while. I've been working on avian flu actually since, also since 2013 when there was an outbreak of H7 and 9 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus or HPAI sometimes we call it. That refers to different strains of influenza viruses that primarily infect birds but can infect people and usually cause really severe disease. So H5N1 is one of those types of HPAIs or highly pathogenic bird flu viruses. So I have been following this, really since it emerged into North America, which was in

2021. So H5N1, for a lot of people who don't know this, has actually been causing what's called a panzoatic. So that's a pandemic except in animals around the world in every continent except for Australia, including Antarctica. Actually, there are penguins dying of avian flu in Antarctica. how the hell does it get down there it birds fly and so that's how it gets around to so many places are they like coughing on each other are they kissing each other what's going on well actually

that's a great question because in birds avian flu is is gastrointestinal as well as respiratory so they're probably shitting it all over each other as well as breathing it on each other as well as getting it on their feathers and, like, flapping. And, you know, birds like ducks, they're a real problem because wild ducks get it, but they don't get very sick from it. Ducks don't get very sick, but they're pretty social. So they like to go hang out with other birds, which is why they can introduce it to a lot of other bird populations.

And then other animals like mammals, wild animals, and sometimes people, if they come into contact with those infected birds, they can get it as well. well. And so it's been recognized as a big problem since it emerged in 1997 in Hong Kong and China. It spread through live bird markets where people would buy birds for food and you know, the birds would be flapping around and potentially stirring up a bunch of virus like as they're doing bird stuff and then getting slaughtered and butchered and sold. So we've known that it's a problem for a long time. But it's never been this much of a problem where it's been, birds like all over the world. So the particular strain that is a real problem in North America

is called Clayed 2344B and it was introduced by a migratory bird into Atlantic Canada at the very end of 2021. And it's been spreading around North America ever since. And in early 24, we learned that it was infecting dairy cows in the U.S. And so that was a real surprise to everybody because we didn't know that avian flu was really a risk for dairy cows. We know that it's a risk for pigs. I can talk about why that is a little later. But for dairy cows, we just didn't think they were that susceptible to it. We didn't really know what this was, but we knew that it's probably a very bad idea to have a species that's so important for food, getting widely infected with this disease that can potentially be really deadly in people and in a lot of other

animals and has big impacts on like food security and economic security and things like that. So the Biden administration organized these expert briefings that myself and about a hundred of my colleagues were invited to and they would keep us up to date on like what the response was. And so I wasn't, you know, I can go into some of the things that I disagreed with about the response, but at least there was a response. Right now, the situation. that you alluded to, Ben, like, is pretty bad because ever since President Trump was sworn into office, basically the entire government has been under assault and particularly parts of the government that are really, really important for both science, for epidemiology, for responding

to disease outbreaks, for managing our agricultural system, you name it. It has been affected by the Trump administration's policies and specifically the policies that are cutting huge amounts of the federal government. So there are no expert, there are no more expert briefings occurring. The last one of those occurred during the Biden administration. All of the officials from CDC and USDA who were running those calls are no longer at those agencies. Many of the people who are working on the response are no longer at those agencies because they've either been encouraged to retire, they've been laid off. They've been fired. They've been put on administrative leave indefinitely. And they're never coming back to their jobs. Their departments have been defunded. So we just don't have the

capacity to manage this any longer. It doesn't appear that we're doing very much testing anymore of people who are expected to have exposures, the population of people that are impacted by that. The farm workers are separately being impacted in a really terrible way by the immigration actions that this administration is taking. And overall, it's just creating a really, really scary situation. So right now, there's not a lot of human flu around, and there's actually not as many cases of bird flu occurring in like poultry outbreaks at chicken farms and turkey farms and things like that,

because it's not bird migration season. But in a couple months, it's going to be bird migration season. It's also going to be human seasonal flu season. And then we potentially could be in quite a lot of trouble if this virus acquires the ability to transmit efficiently from person to person. You mentioned that the last time they even had a briefing was the Biden administration, so we're not doing that at all. Can you just briefly explain what their response was, at least, and what your problems with it were maybe? Sure. I mean, that's not a brief conversation necessarily, but I will say that so these expert brief briefings were, of informal and they usually were followed directly by a press briefing. So it wasn't like we were

hearing top secret information. It was an opportunity though for people who are experts and also people like me who are experts who also talk to the press a lot could have a better understanding really of what the federal government was doing to respond. And some of their initiatives were good. So they initially were very slow to get testing off the ground. But they did manage to to get testing off the ground. They were working together. The CDC and the USDA were working together, which doesn't always happen, but needs to in this case because it's both a threat to livestock and a threat to the human population.

So you do need to have both the Department of Agriculture involved as well as CDC and potentially investigators at NIH too. There's a whole separate element to this where, and I think they did do a great job. of this. There is a system for developing flu vaccines for emerging flu viruses that relies on these WHO collaborating centers. So they were able to very quickly identify a strain that would be appropriate for a vaccine. And then the government made a deal with a vaccine manufacturer called CSL Sequaris to manufacture 10 million ready to go doses of that vaccine to put in our national stockpile. So that was really, it's really important to have.

those vaccines available. What I didn't agree with was the fact that they didn't actually make those vaccines available to people who were at high exposure risk. So veterinarians who are dealing with cows, people who are working to depopulate poultry houses, which is what happens if you have an avian flu outbreak at a poultry farm. You have to call the entire flock. So they were, you know, those people who do that and then clean up after it are at very high risk for exposure. and people working in dairies and dairy farms getting sprayed in the face with milk. It looks like those people, in many cases, were getting H5N1 that way, and we had many people test positive that way.

The CDC also did stuff that made access to testing faster. This didn't happen very quickly, and it didn't happen quickly enough for my liking, but they did manage to do it. Same thing with developing a compensation program for dairy farmers. So if they had to quarantine their farm, they were eligible to get some compensation for lost production from the U.S. government. This is something that the U.S. government has been providing for a long time for poultry farmers who end up having to depopulate their entire flocks with an avian flu outbreak. The government steps in so that basically they don't go out of business and helps them recoup some of those losses. So they put a system like that in place for dairy farmers.

And again, it was slow to get off the ground, but it was really important. Good, I think, that they did it. Having mechanisms like that also helps the dairy farmers, it helps incentivize them to actually report outbreaks and work with the local public health people and the federal public health people who are coming to help them contain the outbreak. Right. So they get their money. Exactly. Hey, gang, we want to take a quick break to talk about something very important, which is hair loss. You know, nobody wants to talk about hair loss.

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poultry farms and chicken farms and then it's just kind of out there and yeah so this is this is super complicated um but i'm going to do best to kind of get it get it across so there's really really complicated ways that this virus spreads because it infects so many species of wild birds and we can't always track them these birds migrate across these basically these roots that they all go around called flyways and so you can't can sort of trace like the path of migratory birds up and down or cross like oceans or up and down the continent via these flyways. And we have seen certainly avian flu as it spread via these flyways with with birds migrating. But yeah, they're they're, you know, doing wild bird

stuff. So the poultry farms get infected usually by independent introductions. And sometimes this is why you have to coal flocks. You can have it spread from one farm. to another. And what happens when a poultry farm gets infected, a chicken or a turkey farm is really, really horrific. And that's why you have to call. I mean, we have flocks in the U.S. that are, you know, large factory like corporate agribusiness, like production sites that have millions of birds sometimes. And you go from, you know, a couple birds dropping dead in a pretty horrible way. And we're talking like bloody diarrhea, vomit. They have these neurological symptoms that are characterized by like seizures and like neck twisting. And it's just a really, really horrible way for

these birds to die. And you can wipe out a flock in a matter of a week because it kills them very quickly and it kills them very horribly. So depopulation is the thing that they do because if you don't depopulate, then basically you have millions of birds potentially just expelling huge amounts of infectious virus that creates a huge danger for the people who are on the site, other animals that might be on the site, and it certainly creates a big risk of spreading to other farms. But many of the poultry outbreaks are introductions from wild birds to these farms. And that's because again, the farms are really attractive to wild birds. There's like other birds there to hang out with. There's food. There's water. There's

shelter. So wild birds love to come and like visit their friends at like the chicken and and turkey farms. With cows, it was a much different story. My colleagues and I got to work pretty much as soon as we heard about this. Some of my colleagues are also on those expert calls with me. And so we started looking at virus sequences from the earliest cases that the USDA was putting out. And in May of 2024, we published basically a phylogenetic analysis that showed that this was the result of a single spillover from a bird to a cow in Texas in November, December of 2023. So this was allowed to spread basically for three months. And we thought that this must be pretty rare because for all of 2024, every single sequence that was

that was posted to these public databases where sequences are kept, was a derivative of this original virus that spilled over. So it's a particular genotype called genotype B3.13. And so all these B3.13 viruses were spreading from cows. In some cases, they infected other animals, so cats can get infected by drinking milk. There are anecdotal reports that cats are just like disappearing from these dairies. there have been cats found dead that have clearly drank like cow milk that was infected and die, you know, are found dead and they die of these horrible like neurological conditions.

It's gone back. There are cow sequences that have been found in bird carcasses. So this virus is definitely spreading into other people. And then there have been 70 confirmed human cases in the U.S. Many of those are in dairy workers. So clearly it's also getting back. to respect people. So we thought this was pretty rare until this past year in February, there were two more spillovers. And this time they were of a different genotype, genotype D1.1.

And they were in Arizona and Nevada. And they were actually different D1.1 viruses. So there were two instances of this going from birds to cows. And it also looked like that spillover probably happened in, like, December of 2024. So I don't know if it's the time of year or what. It still looks like a pretty rare event, but it's now happened a couple of times. So even if we managed to contain the outbreak that's occurring in cattle right now, it could happen again because there's still so many wild birds out there. And there's a lot of other animals getting infected, too, like wild animals.

There have been die-offs of marine mammals up and down, both the Pacific and Atlantic coast of North and South America. Jesus. So there's a ton of animals getting H5N1, and it's all over the place. Can I ask a quick question about, because you've described the symptoms that show up in birds and also cats and some mammals, they sound pretty horrific. I actually don't really know what happens to humans if they contract bird flu. Could you just describe that real quick? It's not as horrific as what you're describing in these animals, right?

Are you scared of a little bloody diarrhea, man? Having your neck twisted around? What's my head? When she was describing it, I don't know. I was like, is that what's going to happen to us? No, so it's, so we don't actually know a lot about what happens if we eat it. And that's something that I'm actually really worried about now that our secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has talked about deregulating milk

pasteurization. So if there's a, you know, a carton of raw milk in every fridge, I guess we'll find out how susceptible people are if they eat it but people have a really big range of disease severity from h5n1 my hypothesis and it's probably multiple factors that lead to it but my hypothesis is that at least some of this has to do with the root of transmission um so we've been hearing these sort of stories of these dairy workers who are like you know they're attaching like the claws, which is what they call the milking things on their milky machines. They're attaching the claws to the cows utters and they get like they get splashed in the face with milk. They get,

you know, they're exposed to a lot of raw milk. And in a dairy environment where it's kind of cool, it's very humid. It's not a really comfortable environment to wear like an N95 respirator. And so, and you know, initially people weren't sure like what the risk even was. So a lot of these guys are not wearing eye protection necessarily or a respirator. They're getting hit in the face with raw milk, but they're getting conjunctivitis. And we don't know if that's because they get hit directly in the eyes and the infection can't spread. And I'll explain why that would be in a minute. But we don't know if it's that they're younger usually and they're, I mean, they do physical job.

So they're generally under the age of 50 or 60. and they're in relatively good health. So that could explain it. But people who get it from being exposed to like backyard poultry, people who get it in a wet market, sometimes people who get it when they're depopulating poultry and they're not wearing any protective equipment, they get a very, very severe pneumonia.

And part of the reason for this, and this may be why it doesn't spread from the eyes to the lungs, is that there's a, I'm going to have to get scientific for a second. I hope that's okay. The receptor for flu viruses is a sugar molecule called siallic acid. So in your, if you imagine like your respiratory tract or whatever, the cells have proteins on the top of them and then the proteins have like this layer of sugar. And that's what the influenza virus particle binds to to get into the cell and cause an infection.

And there are basically two flavors. of this sugar for the intense and purposes of this conversation we'll call one the bird flavor and one the human flavor so bird flu viruses bind the bird flavor human flu viruses like seasonal flu binds the human flavor the human receptor is in the upper respiratory tract it's in the nose it's in the mouth like it's it's where you know we get seasonal flu it's also in the lower respiratory tract but not as much it's predominantly in the upper respiratory tract the bird version of the receptor is on the cornea of the eyes and it's deep in the lungs so if you get infected by the eyes it will infect your eye but it won't travel even though the eyes are connected to the respiratory

tract it can't really make it all the way down like into your lungs when you breathe in a whole bunch of H5N1, and you breathe enough of it, that enough of it gets down deep in the lungs, it's going to find a place where there's a lot of its receptor, it's going to find a lot of cells that it can infect. And that's basically what all viruses do. They just, they're programmed essentially to make more viruses. So if they find, you know, convenient host cells to infect, they will do that and make more viruses. And it's basically like boom, instant pneumonia. and so that's probably why the people who get exposed to poultry where they're going to be inhaling particulate virus

that the birds have shit out or that's on their feathers or whatever that's why you're getting people getting really, really sick because they basically start off with severe viral pneumonia. That's, you know, one hypothesis. Flu is very complicated because we've been exposed to so many flu viruses since basically we come into the world that we all have different immunity to different what are called subtypes

and I can explain that too but that's why we have like H5N1 and H7N9 and then the seasonal flus that we get are called H1N1 H3N2 for now and then there's influenza B sometimes H2N2 has also circulated

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Ground. Dot news slash bays. That's ground. dot news slash BAES. From what I've read about H5N1, we obviously know it's highly contagious as is evidenced by these poultry farms just getting decimated within a week. and we know that it has spread or it has the capability now to jump from cows, birds, poultry, to humans. Is it just some stroke of luck that it hasn't spread rapidly among the humans that have been infected? Yeah, this is a great question.

So some of this is probably, and this is like the big question. This is why H5N1 hasn't become a pandemic yet. And like many things with H5N1, the real answer to this question is we don't know what it would actually take for it to become efficiently transmitted from person to person. But that's why H5N1 can be so lethal because it causes such a severe disease, but the receptor for it is not in the upper respiratory tract. And when you want to spread or you don't want to spread, hopefully nobody wants to spread viruses to each other, but for a virus to spread efficiently between people by the respiratory

route, it needs to be able to infect the cells of the upper respiratory tract, because that's where, you know, we speak. So we need to shed viruses from there to have that be a viable transmission route. And then the viruses, you know, in order for, because a lot of times you breathe in virus in the air and you're not getting necessarily a ton of viruses. So you have to have enough of a shot that that virus is going to find a cell that it can infect and be able to make more viruses in order to establish full transmission. So bird flu can't do that because the receptor is deep in our lungs and in our eye, you know, our eyeballs, but it's not in our nostrils. So, however, bad news, flu is an RNA virus, which means that it can't basically

fixed mistakes that it makes when it doesn't have a spell checker essentially for making more copies of its genome, which means that if it gets a mutation, which it can do quite easily at random, then it can't fix it, which means that it has a faster rate of evolution and that it can acquire mutations more quickly. And in fact, it can acquire the ability to start using the human receptor. So that's one thing that would need to happen. and probably that would happen by by one of two ways. It would either happen by sort of getting a little bit better in like a person, getting transmitted to another person and then getting a little bit better at it in that person.

So selection, essentially, or flu can also do this thing called reassortment. And reassortment is actually one of the scarier things. So flu, the virus genome, is an eight piece. And if you get infected with two flu viruses at the same time, it's kind of like shuffling two decks of cards together, you can swap the eight pieces between those two viruses. So if you have H5N1 bird flu, co-infecting a person that has seasonal flu that's adapted to growing in humans, and they swap some of these viral genes, then basically it could pick up genes that are going to make it instantly more capable of growing in a human host.

And so all of the major pandemics, we think we don't have a ton of sequence data for 1918, as you can imagine, but it looks like all of the major flu pandemics that we're aware of were caused by a recent reassortment event. So the possibility of this reassortment occurring is really, really high risk. And that's what I'm most worried about when it it starts being both bird migration season as well as flu season. And when does bird migration season start, like a late fall or something? It's like the fall. Yeah.

I mean, it depends on where you are. Like, you know, in terms of your, I guess, latitude, you know, it depends. Like the birds will start moving depending on how cold it's getting. Do we just kill birds? Should we just like get our guns as Americans and shoot up those flyways? No, I don't think that's a good idea either. You know, usually the poultry depopulation is a different story, but usually, you know, eradicating a population of wild animals is never a good solution to responding to a virus outbreak. Noted. All right. So that's out.

Okay. So currently we're okay because it doesn't seem like we don't have any evidence that it is mutated in that way. It still needs to hit the respiratory. Lower respiratory system. and right now we just have to hope we have a decent bird migration season Wait, we have to hope we have a decent You mean like a... That this bird migration season does not end in mutations that should start...

That no birds flapping its shit around at the same time that some poor factory worker also has a flu. Well, so this is kind of the problem though. I mean, you know, the birds... There's another problem? Yeah, there's a lot of problems with this. There's endless problems. I'm sorry to say.

No, that's cool. It's fine. Throw another on the pie. The problem is not so much that we have a good bird migration season. The problem is more that, like, we're not testing anymore. We're not testing people who might be at risk. And the Department of Agriculture, so Secretary Brooke Rawlins of the USDA, has put out a new avian flu like management and control plan. This was $1 billion initiative to basically manage only the poultry outbreaks. And at the time, I mean, this came out, I think, in March, it was intended to really lower the price of eggs because that was when egg prices were like sky high.

So it really was not a very good strategy, in my opinion, because Secretary Kennedy and Secretary, Terry Rawlins have floated the idea that maybe we shouldn't depopulate poultry farms anymore. Maybe we should improve biosecurity, which means keeping wild birds out effectively and making sure that people who are coming in and out are using better practices so they're not potentially bringing virus in from elsewhere like another poultry farm. So there's this new biosecurity audit system to try to help people shore up their biosecurity. But again, RFK Jr. has said, and Secretary Rollins seems to agree with this, that we shouldn't call as much anymore because if we have surviving chickens from this,

they're going to be like super chickens. And they will, you know, repopulate the earth or repopulate America with like flu resistant super chickens. And also, so we have a vaccine for birds. that we could be using to vaccinate poultry. It has been conditionally approved by the USDA back in also March, I think. And as far as I know, it hasn't been used yet. Now, there are flu vaccines in birds is kind of complicated, but long story short, it's been used in Mexico and China for a while. It doesn't completely get rid of these viruses because just like our flu vaccines,

it's not sterilizing, meaning it doesn't completely prevent infection. but it stops like the birds from dying horrifically. And importantly, in China, it has completely ended H7N9 spillover to humans. So it's, there's still a lot of benefits to using these vaccines and we're not using them. Because it gives the birds autism? It's no, it's actually, it's more complicated because in some cases it has to do with trade agreements. other countries don't necessarily want you importing chickens, or they don't want to import chickens that might carry one of these flu strains and then infect their flocks.

So there does have to be some like renegotiation of some of these trade agreements, but actually I think it's worth pointing out that it would violate another trade agreement that we have signed with the World Organization for Animal Health. So Woa is kind of like WHO for animals. And Woa is the agency that has set up these agreements that people who want to have access to these export poultry markets will depopulate flocks in the event of an avian flu outbreak because it's safe and effective way to prevent spread to other farms. So if we decide to stop depopulating, then we'll be in violation of that trade agreement. And that's one of the problems here in Canada. We have people who are owners of a flock of ostriches that got H5N1,

and they are currently engaged in like sort of their wannabe January 6th, like trucker convoy people who are occupying this farm to prevent the Canadian Food Inspection Agency from culling their flock. And it's turned into a real mess because it's really messing with these trade agreements. So these ideas are all bad for a lot of reasons, not vaccinating despite the trade agreement issues, not culling, again, despite the trade agreement issues, like, would be a real problem. So it sounds like you're a little scared. What about the biosecurity element? Is there are, is it just because wild birds are just so hard to effectively keep out of

these flocks that that's just kind of like full, it's just not worth it? No, I think the biosecurity element is really important. And I actually think that's a good, that's a good part of the plan. Like, I think that, you know, these, these farms and farmers should be empowered and supported to improve biosecurity because it's better for everybody. And I mean, in general, like the fewer hosts that are infected with a dangerous virus, whether they be a bird or a human or a cow or whatever, like is a good thing. Like, so I'm all for biosecurity. Can we just, can you explain? what biosecurity is, just because for the layman here, I'm like, how do you even, how do you even,

it's like a bouncer at the, at the club, but with wild birds, all these people, how do you even Yeah, so biosecurity, I mean, this is, this is really annoying and this is like professional shit, but biosecurity in some context means like, how do I prevent people from getting into my containment lab and stealing my viruses? So that's one way of using biosecurity. In this case, So, biosecurity means how do you prevent the virus from getting in? Right. And, you know, I guess we also worry about preventing unknown viruses from getting into the containment lab, but it's not as big of a risk because wild birds can't fly in there.

But biosecurity means not just keeping wild birds out, though. It also means different procedures for the people who are coming in and out of the farm. So in some cases they have people shower in, shower out, or they'll have you, you know, use disinfectant on your boots or change your clothes. Like there's different biosecurity procedures depending on what you're what you're dealing with and what the risks are. But in the agricultural context, biosecurity largely means, you know, keeping your farm and where your animals are isolated from the outside world so that viruses can't go back and forth. Do you think that it's an inevitability that H5N1 mutates and becomes?

a pandemic, or is there also any hope that you have that it'll just kind of weaken over time among the non-human animal population? So it depends on what you mean by weaken, right? So if you look at my colleague and I wrote a review back in March about H5N1. And in the process of this, we were like, there have been like around 100 cases. we assumed that based on 70 known cases plus we know that there is at least some number of infections that haven't been reported right and yeah there's all those issues like i versus lung whatever like that we can't really we can't really disentangle but we look at how many people

like got infected in north america how many people died let's say a hundred and then one person died in Louisiana from infection from their backyard flock. A teenager in BC got infected. We don't really know how probably some kind of bird or animal exposure, I would assume, and would have died if like heroic measures were not taken. Like this kid was on an ecmo machine getting like daily plasma transfusions. And, you know, it was that that kid is lucky to be alive. Very glad that they are. but we said, okay, it's a mortality rate of about 2%. And then we looked at the number of people who had been in the hospital, and that was six people.

So we're like, all right, so it's a severity rate of about 6%, where you'd have people being severely ill. That's a lot lower than the historical number of 50% mortality, which was largely taken from these market outbreaks in China, where it was associated with a lot of live bird exposure. In those cases, we probably didn't actually recognize all of the less severe cases. So the mortality rate was probably grossly overestimated. Thank God, it's not 50% mortality, but 2% mortality. I mean, COVID's mortality rate in most populations is well below 1%. It's below half a percent. So if you're talking about something with a 2% mortality rate, and I should add that flu,

doesn't just kill old people like COVID does, flu kills babies and children. So you're talking about a virus with a much higher mortality rate than COVID that also kills kids that, you know, 2% of the global population is a lot of people. We figured that out in the U.S. and 2% of the U.S. population is 7 million people. So, you know, 1.4, 1.5 million people have died of COVID since the start of the pandemic in the U.S., so this mortality rate greatly would exceed that in terms of the number of millions of people dead. And then you'd have a lot more death as well that would be secondary to the fact that you'd have overwhelmed health care systems that our emergency response system is completely fucked, that we don't have an emergency response

system in the U.S. anymore because of the damage that's been done to the federal government. So I hope that it doesn't become a pandemic, but I can't say that it won't. I can't say that it will either. I mean, it could become a pandemic tomorrow or it could never become a pandemic. I hope it never becomes a pandemic and that I'm wrong and that the worst thing that happens is people tell me on Twitter for eternity, like how wrong I was. but um what what does some what does kind of the state of our uh preparedness look like just because i think pretty much all of those institutes you've named today all those agencies have been basically defunded or you know employees laid off or or some kind of state of disrepair at this

point so what what do we look like at this point it looks a lot worse than what happened during covid i mean the entire department of health and human services is apparently anti-vaxed now, thanks to our FK Jr.'s influence and the policies that he's imposing, I don't think we'll ever see those vaccines that are in the stockpile until it's potentially too late. Ideally, what you would want to do with those vaccines, because 10 million vaccines are not going to vaccinate the entire U.S. population, is that you would use those vaccines to prevent it from becoming entrenched in the U.S. population. You would vaccinate the people who are at the highest risk of exposure so that they don't ideally get infected and they don't potentially spread it

to other people stop this bill over basically before it happens by vaccinating the people who are most at risk. That's not going to happen. We have 10 million. We have 10 million vaccines right now, a stockpile of them. But sorry, did you say why we, we aren't using them? Well, so during the Biden administration, they made a decision not to use them that I still don't fully understand. There were multiple reasons given for it, including that it could promote vaccine hesitancy if people were getting a vaccine that they perceived was unnecessary. I thought that excuse was kind of bullshit, but that was at least some of the reasoning. I think that, I mean, my personal opinion is that it would have been a big lift, like politically, during an election year

to start talking about vaccinating people who were, who many, I mean, many dairy and poultry workers are undocumented, that people who were already sort of this, you know, the target of a lot of, you know, really intense political rhetoric and now are being targeted by the politician who won. But I think that, I think that my, my biggest problem with the expert briefings and the response during the Biden administration was just that it felt like they were kind of not going as all in as they needed to be in part because the public was fatigued by hearing about viruses and pandemics. And they just didn't want pandemics to be like an election issue. Well, so it sounds like if this were to happen during this administration, it would just

be another thing that they could conveniently and easily blame on Biden. So that's fun. It could But, you know, I mean, the thing is, like, if it happens, we're so fucked, so many people are going to die that they can blame it on Biden, whatever. Like, but it's going to, they're going to have way bigger problems than who to blame it on. What do you think that timeline, what would that look like since we don't have the infrastructure that we did before? We don't have the experts, the agencies. Would it be like, would you just be hearing about suddenly a lot of, upper respiratory style deaths and people like keeling over in the streets? And would that occur over the course of a couple weeks?

Or what do you think that that would look like exactly? So I don't know, but I mean, here's kind of my suspicion. And like I'm basing some of this on like what the experience was with COVID. So the CDC, I don't know what goes on in their like diagnostic test development like group or what has gone on, but they massively fucked up like the PCR diagnostic tests for COVID very early on. So some of my colleagues in Europe had developed a PCR test that was very effective. WHO distributed, but for whatever reason, CDC decided to make their own, which this is not rocket science, right? I have undergraduate students who design PCR primers and probes. Yeah, we do it all

the time at the studio. We just, it's... I could teach you how to do it. It's not very difficult. actually. There are computer programs that also can do it for you. But it's not that hard, but you have to then test it. And CDC's test didn't work, but FDA approved it and CDC used it. And CDC is a monopoly on testing for these kind of things for having a confirmed diagnosis of this. So they basically had a test that didn't work. And we had for a long time like 10 cases of COVID in the U.S. finally a group of my academic colleagues in the Seattle area said like this is ridiculous like we're just going to test our samples with our own test that does work anyways and like hopefully the CDC doesn't you know flip out um and they i mean i'll never forget like how i felt when i read

Trevor Bedford's tweet like so he's one of my colleagues working with the Seattle flu study on February 29th 2020 he tweeted that he had a sequence of the novel coronavirus that had clearly been spreading for three to six weeks in the community undetected. And that was like the moment where I was like, oh shit, like it's a pandemic. It's going to be like that with this except much worse because what will happen is if you think for every hundred people that are infected, 94 of them are like the wild ducks in this situation. They're not that sick. They're going around potentially breathing it on other people, transmitting it to other people, and they think they just have

like a cold. And they're flapping their shit all over the place. They're flapping their shit. In humans, it's not gastrointestinal. We don't think so. So in humans, you don't have to, I mean, I guess you can breathe in as much aerosolized shit as you want, human shit. Yeah, that's my right.

Awesome. That's my right as an American. Yeah, that's your right as an American. Yeah, so feel free to keep doing that. But yeah, the real risk will be transmission through either direct contact or breathing and direct contact with like, you know, saliva, snot, like whatever. Yeah. But breathing it in, you know, it's going to be transmitted like COVID. So you're going to have 94 people for every hundred that are infected, traveling, going to other places, you know, not realizing that they have this.

by the time you get enough people infected in one place for people to be showing up at the hospital altogether and we're like oh shit this is this is an outbreak there's a lot of infected people coming in by that point like it's not going to be containable it's going to be a pandemic if it's not already and that's much worse than the COVID situation because at least with the COVID situation you know, we did have a response, even though at that point it was out of control in the U.S., we already knew about COVID, we already had started to mobilize infrastructure, and we had these other mechanisms in place that we don't have anymore. So, for example, the day that the sequence for SARS coronavirus 2 came out, January 10th, 2020, the VRC, the Vaccine Research

Center at NIH, immediately started development of the MRNA vaccine. that's now the Moderna vaccine. They were able to separately get a bunch of funding out to people who are already NIH-funded investigators to start working on this. They redirected all the people in the NIH intramural program who were working on pathogens to start working on SARS-2. CDC mobilized like the entire agency to start dealing with this. I mean, CDC has an entire flu division.

that should be able to respond to this, but, you know, a bunch of people from that division just aren't there anymore. It doesn't have the same amount of funding. NIH is being destroyed. I mean, all of my colleagues in virology who are NIH funded are targets right now because there's a whole separate agenda to essentially defund NIAD or the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases because it was run by Tony Fauci. And now the entire COVID pandemic has, been politicized. So it's just like get rid of virology. The lab leak thing also is being used for this saying that, oh, basically COVID was started from a lab, which it wasn't, at least as far as the evidence and papers that I've written show. It wasn't, but the government is essentially

using that as an excuse to defund NIAD, to defund pathogen research, to defund pandemic research at NIH. And then we have the problem. Because I definitely have seen like a lot of reporting coming out that looks very legit, that it's almost confirmed that it's a lab leak. It's absolutely not. But this is an excuse to defund further pandemic or research, all of this stuff. I'm happy to come on another time. And I feel like that's a whole other episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. About the lab leak in the origin of SARS too. But that's exactly right. So it's like the media now has just parroted this disinformation that, oh, we're all sure that it's totally a lab league without actually showing any evidence to prove that we're all sure that it's totally a lab leak. A few intelligence agencies in the U.S. and in Germany have made assessments that they think, oh, probably it could have been a lab leak.

But we actually haven't seen any of that data. and we can only make a judgment right now on the data that we do have. Yeah, I think the last one I saw was the CIA. So the CIA changed their view. They were undecided until John Ratcliffe took over and then he took it upon himself to change their view that it came from gain of function research that was funded by Tony Fauci at the Wuhan Institute of Iraq.

Interesting. But all of the evidence that we have is consistent with emerging from the wide. wildlife trade at the Juan and seafood market in Wuhan in late November, early December of 2019. And at this point, there is so much evidence suggesting that that's at least how the virus got into the human population, that any sort of evidence for a lab leak is going to have to be consistent with that. So far, nothing has been produced.

And every bit of lab leak evidence that has been produced is along the lines of like, oh well what if this happened um i mean what if a lot of things happened what if covid never happened we probably wouldn't be sitting here having this podcast um you know it it it did happen and um right now like people are less concerned with understanding like what evidence there is for any of this stuff actually for lab leak or origins for the the h5 risk um because the government is actively interested in making people stupider and not giving them correct information about where the science stands.

How do we get, because my assessment, and correct me if I'm wrong here, from like start to finish with COVID, not finished, because it's obviously ongoing still out there, but it was like people assumed that people, like Fauci and all the,

people in positions of power and authority, people assumed that they had all of the information that they were acting on just like objective truth and that therefore every action that they took was somehow this form of manipulation or control when the reality was they were just kind of going with whatever information they had at the time for the six feet away thing, for lockdown for the vaccines and its efficacy. And they're using the skeptics in the people pushing back are using the benefit of hindsight to judge these people retroactively on their. Is that an accurate assessment?

That's completely accurate. I mean, the fact is, like, none of us knew what we were doing, like, when this happened. And the same with Fauci. Like, we'd never seen this virus before. Right. We knew it was a coronavirus. We knew it was a SARS-related coronavirus. We knew about SARS.

Some of the ways in which SARS-2 is different than SARS are really bad. Like, SARS didn't spread until you were symptomatic, fully symptomatic with SARS. So you could identify people who had SARS based on them having a fever, which they almost always got based on their symptoms. So it was actually quite easy to isolate and quarantine and stop that from becoming a pandemic. SARS 2 is more transmissible. It is, uh, it is transmitted before people have symptoms before they know that they're sick. And, uh, and that is what caused SARS 2 to become a pandemic where SARS 1 did not. And thank God, SARS 1 did not because it has a 10% mortality rate.

SARS 2 is a lot less lethal, but SARS 2 ended up killing millions more people than SARS 1 ever did because it infected so many of them. That's, that's probably my biggest concern with H5N1. If H5N1 had a mortality rate of 50%, that, I mean, that obviously would concern me because that would be a civilization ending pandemic. Right. That would destroy society.

If one out of every two people who got the virus died from it, I mean, that would be catastrophic. We'd be beyond fucked in every way. But 2%, that's bad. That's like 1918. level mortality. That's still incredibly bad and disruptive. And when you say that 2%, and you talk about, what was it, the 94 or 92 people who are wild ducks just kind of spreading it around, flapping their shit around? That doesn't mean, that doesn't mean if you're one of those wild ducks,

you're just good, right? Because then it could mutate and then you're at risk again, right? It could just keep. Well, yeah, if you're one of those, if you're one of those wild ducks, like, you know, I assume that most people, like, love their families and stuff. Not me. I hate my family. What if you, like, you're a wild duck and you'd go home to have dinner with your lovely young toddler children and, like, you infect both of them and kill them? Like, I mean, you know, not that you're intentionally doing that, you don't know if you're sick.

I mean, that's kind of what we're dealing with. And so the way that flu is diagnosed and the way that that high path bird flu is diagnosed in people is a couple different ways. So the targeted testing and monitoring program is identifying people who have had high risk exposures and then monitoring them for symptoms and testing them. That's how we've identified most of the cases and that's also what we're not doing anymore. The other way is through our national flu surveillance system, which does still work, but it takes a longer time to get some results back. And it's not necessarily the most flexible or rapid or even good at finding cases. Basically, what happens with that is if you go in and get a flu test, any kind of

flu test, it's usually these, they often run these panel tests that come back with influenza A. And if it's H5, it'll say non-subtyped, which means that it wasn't a seasonal subtype, so you got to send it out for additional testing. Then they'll send it out for subtype testing. Actually, this is another good thing the Biden administration did. They set up commercial diagnosis. labs around the country that we're capable of doing this type of testing. So they do have more options for diagnostics. But it still takes a while because if you're like some rural hospital that probably is going to close because there's no more federal funding to support it. But let's say that you're in some rural like local community hospital somewhere, you know, where nobody's talking

about bird flu. Nobody's thinking about that. And then you get people coming in during flu season. and you're like, I don't know what they have. So I'll just run a biofire panel on them and see what kind of seasonal flu they have. Maybe I can give them some Tamiflu or something if you're a doctor. And then it comes back, you know, a few days later and it's like non-subtyped and oh, shit, like, oh, it's H5N1. And then you start noticing that that's happening a lot in your hospital. By the time that happens, like that's probably happening in hospitals and other places or it's about to. And when that happens and there's enough.

people in all of these hospitals that are already understaffed and depleted from COVID and from the federal government cuts. And I should add that the CDC is also cut $11 billion in grants to state and local public health agencies. So state and local public health capacity is also decreased. What do you do with that? Like when that happens, like buy a lot of canned food and toilet paper, I guess. Well, I have a bidet, so I don't have to worry about that. But I, so post COVID and post Trump getting elected, there seems to be this virulent anti-intellectualism, anti-exists, you know, the whole trust the experts, trust the experts, trust the science. There is this innate distrust among a certain, a big part of the population. and they view anyone who's got higher education as some kind of elite who should be scorned

because their beliefs are tainted by their politics and so forth. How do you think we're going to get, is it even possible, to get back to a place where experts are trusted and not scorned and shunned as being just part of some liberal elite that can't be trusted? because of their politics or perceived politics. Yeah. I mean, I think a big part of the problem is that like the people running the country right now and their media apparatus just is constantly bombarding people in lies, like nonstop. I mean, a lot of the reason that people don't trust scientists is that Donald Trump and all of the people in his health and human services department have been.

basically told people ad nauseum that we can't be trusted. You know, RFK Jr. wrote an entire book called The Truth About Anthony Fauci. He accused him of making bio weapons. I mean, which is obviously Tony Fauci did not make bio weapons. I do not make bio weapons either. And I have also been accused of that. You know, it's, I mean, I'm a virologist, so I'm a. reckless virologist, which means that basically all of us virologists are sitting around making

viruses more dangerous for funzies. So basically we can outgain and function each other and like get sick papers from it or something. And like this has been, this about the lab leak has been said over and over and over again that we are part of a conspiracy. We're financially conflicted because we get grants for working on virology topics. And we work in. containment labs. We work on dangerous viruses, not because the real reason that we work on them. They're important and they're a big fucking threat to public health, but because we, you know, have these sinister sort of ulterior motives. Either we somehow personally profit from it. In my case, people say that I got famous from it. So I'm like, I'm being like a famous,

reckless virologist. And the reality is every single one of these accusations is a confession. Our FK Jr. is an anti-vaxxer who doesn't know shit about science or virology. He doesn't know shit about biodefense research. He doesn't know shit about pathogenesis and he doesn't know shit about vaccines, but he hates them. And so the people who shouldn't be trusted are the ones telling the public that scientists can't be trusted because our vaccines aren't safe because we were wrong about things sometimes because we didn't know everything about COVID when a completely novel virus emerged because, you know, X, Y, and Z, mercury in vaccines, autism, lab leak, you know, all this stuff, lockdowns, like the laptop class, all of this

crap has been basically made up and it's been a very effective propaganda campaign to decrease the credibility of scientists. And some of that, yes, is like the anti-vax movement, but a bigger part of it is essentially fascism. I mean, that's exactly what has happened in every single fascist regime that's ever that I can think of anyways that has taken power. It's that you get rid of the intellectuals, you get rid of the scientists, you get rid of the people who can credibly challenge the propaganda and the lies. And then you make the population more and more stupid so that they also don't know what to

leave. You don't give them the critical thinking skills that they need to say, hey, wait a second, like, I don't know. This whole alligator alcatraz thing doesn't seem like it's very constitutional. You know, people aren't going to ask those questions if they see that the people who are asking those questions are getting purged, essentially, and they are being encouraged and incentivized not to really pay attention to what's true or not. And that concerns me. just as much as H5N1 and the possibility of a pandemic, the idea of H5N1 becoming a pandemic in this particular political climate is terrifying, frankly. Do you think there's any credence to, I think, as you were talking, it kind of reminded me,

I think it was probably peak pandemic. There was articles talking about how a lack of robust healthcare systems in America kind of led to this do your own research anti-expert sentiment because I think part of the studies they were doing were that people who had more and better access to doctors were more willing to trust medical advice and experts and that kind of thing and I know you live in Canada now but you're American and I'm sure you're aware it can be very difficult to access doctors in this country and so that can that can lead to you being like, well, I'm on my own. I might as well do my research. These people don't want to help me. No one,

no one wants to help me. I have no access to anything. So do you think, like, obviously we need to throw out fascists in power, but I think even before Trump, we didn't have very robust systems. Do you think like that is a necessity if we're going to move towards a place where people can regain trust in these systems? Oh, yeah, I do. I mean, I think that it, you know, the old system was imperfect. Like I said, you know, I thought that the Biden administration response to H5 in dairy cows was okay. Like I said, at least we had a response. But it, you know, there was still a lot that needed to be fixed. And that's true of the entire system, whether it's the health care system, how we fund and support research, how we train scientists. Like there are lots of

issues within the whole system. And certainly access to health care is one of the biggest ones. Also, just the impact that disinformation has had on all of that, I think that some of it is exactly like what you describe, that people are encouraged to do their own research because they have to sort of to avoid, like, potentially a life-destroying medical debt, like, that they could incur potentially in the U.S. And, you know, certainly, like you said, I am American and I've always been fortunate enough to have pretty good health insurance, but even then I know how hard it can be to access health care sometimes in the U.S. So without question, I mean, not just the health insurance system,

but also the health care system itself, like the basic infrastructure, having hospitals that are intact functioning places, funding, even funding, like some of the university hospitals and things, I don't think people realize how many hospitals are probably going to close because of the cuts to NIH and CDC. Some of the funds going to those agencies go directly to support things like teaching hospitals and these community hospitals that are often the only resources that people have for health care. So I think that, you know, people are not able to access the health care that they need. And that already puts people in a position, I think, where they might be less likely to trust people that, you know, are offering services that they feel excluded from.

But I think really one of the biggest problems is that people are also being primed and groomed and essentially educated to hate the scientific and medical establishment by people who are exceptionally effective at spreading disinformation. and lying about it. And they are doing so for one of two reasons, either to get political power and or to make money off of it. That's fun. In the case of RFK Jr., for example, it's both. Yeah. As we're wrapping up here, I'd like to go out on a positive note.

And just this is fun. How about what's your, do you have a favorite, like, pandemic or kind of sickness movie be it like 28 days later contagion anything like that and are they accurate at all contagion's pretty accurate i mean 28 days later is not only because i mean when i was i've never seen a virus that has onset of of disease that that rapid um i actually don't think that's physically possible like you can't have a virus actually actually enter a cell uncoat, like start replicating like fast enough so that in 10 seconds you become like rage virus. My friend and I in graduate school always used to joke about how we

wish we worked on rage virus because it would grow so fast and we wouldn't have to take 12-hour time points. So I mean, I like 28 days later, but it's, you know, I don't actually see that movie as much about the virus. The virology shit in the white. Walking Dead was absurd. The one I like the best, though, is, um, is outbreak because it's actually so, it's, yeah, with Dustin Hoffman, it's so ridiculous. Like, it is so dumb. Um, like none of the science is any good, but it's a really fun movie to watch.

That is a fun movie. That is a fun movie. That is a fun movie who sucks like dies of Ebola. Wait, but so contagion is actually pretty accurate. It is pretty accurate. Um, you know, I mean, contagion was mom. modeled after like a real virus, like so it was modeled after NEPA virus, which is a virus that is a very scary virus that causes encephalitis and there are outbreaks of it. It's spread by bats

and sometimes it can be spread by pigs as well. It's it causes outbreaks in Malaysia and Bangladesh and India. And let's hope also NEPA doesn't acquire the ability to spread by the aerosol root or the respiratory route, because that would also be very, very bad. It has a very high mortality rate. Shit. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything you'd like to plug or where can people find you and follow along with the developments of H5N1 as it, how do people stay informed? Yeah, so this is really annoying, but like I have a substack.

it's it's rasmussen retorts that substack.com I named it after like the political polling firm Rasmussen reports. So it's just one letter different. I started it like during the COVID pandemic but I didn't write anything until this year although I just felt that there's so much going on and Twitter has turned into basically a Nazi hellscape. So and I also So, like, I have a lot of Twitter followers, but I think I'm being, like, just permanently throttled because my tweets don't get a lot of engagement. I have a blue check, but I don't pay for it. Like, I, it's a legacy check that they decided to give back to me and I keep expecting them to take it away. But it doesn't seem to help boost my engagement.

So I do, I'm still on Twitter. So it's Angie underscore Rasmussen. I'm on blue sky too at Angie Rasmussen. dot B-sky. dot social. But I'm trying to focus a lot on the substack just because I can include references there and it's like more long-form writing.

And it helps me do what I'm really good at, which is busting on the actions of people who I think are actively contributing to the terrible situation that we're in. So I do a lot of like takedowns and stuff. So yeah, come see me get pissed at people who think are enabling. fascists and killing people with a with terrible vaccine and public health policy and

taking morality right on well uh doctor thank you so much for joining us it's been very informative i don't feel better but i feel more informed which is um half the battle which is half the battle yeah that's the idea i think that you know one of the things i'm most concerned about is just like the in stupidifying of like America, but that I see happening, like, you know, all the lies and stuff and the de-emphasis and defunding of education and training, like, really concerns me. So I think one of the most useful things I can do is try to give people reliable information. I know that's what people appreciated that I did during the COVID pandemic.

And, you know, I can't really keep my opinions to myself. I think that sometimes keeps people interested, but that's the thing I think is most important. So I'm really grateful for the opportunity to come on here and chat with your audience. I'm sorry if I depressed anybody. No, no, no, it's good. But I'd rather have people be depressed than uninformed. Same. Yeah.

All right. Thank you so much for joining us again. And folks, we'll see you in the bonus episode at Ben and Emile Show.com. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Ben and Emile. Bye. coming up this week on ben and amylshow.com

even with people I see like I'm like I'm like we don't know let me get the thing all my I and I have like five bag bags hanging from my shoulders I gotta go I got too many tomatoes and it's melon season and I'm just

they're just digging into my shoulder promise he doesn't understand English No, the problem is he doesn't, he's... You should put him down, honestly. He's truly a moron. Doug, you're too stupid to live. Oh, God, dude, can you not do that? I'm looking at, I see a little couple of dingo berries getting caught in the hair.

I'm like, great, I got to remember to wipe his ass. You do have one of the all-time dumb, dumb dogs. Yeah, he's pretty stupid. He's kind of like lobotomized. All babu-frike moments. Go to the end. I like that he just pops up like that. Well, you know, it's really...

I looked it up at the end. because i got worried i was like because that their planet gets destroyed and i was like what the fuck happened to babu frick you know um and uh apparently that happened at when they screened it for people one of the guys went up to j j abrams or something and they they were they were like did bob frick die on fucking and he was like oh my god and they they re put him in the in the end that's good that's Hey!