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COMMENT BY JULY 13

Here is Liz’s latest, as well as the link to the site for commenting: https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001

Thank you , , , , , and many others for joining us! See you Monday at 1 pm ET for another rant.

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Tulsi Gabbard dumped a bunch of documents designed to further the case for prosecuting dissident virologists but I took the opportunity to dunk on DRASTIC. I’m sure I unfortunately haven’t said my last words about this.

and I will be gathering at 5 pm ET for cocktails and the most hot middle aged woman summer conversation about the proposed changes to federal funding policy in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that you’ve ever experienced. This all comes down to OMB Director Russell Vought attempting to wrest control of the federal budget from Congress You need to comment by JULY 13. Liz and I are going to talk about why you should and how to do that.

Here’s the link: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my daily virology news update/therapy session! Join us at 5 pm ET for the Russell Vought Reflection Pool Party! And if you want to pre-funk:

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You have probably heard that the latest threat to American agriculture is the New World screwworm. People have been asking me about it, but I’m not sorry to say that I can’t offer much in the way of expertise. I’m a virologist and screwworms aren’t viruses. They aren’t even worms—they are insects. I don’t know much about screwworms besides they are gross. They lay their eggs in livestock mucosal surfaces (nostrils, eyes, etc) or wounds and the maggots then eat the surrounding flesh. This is a threat to the livestock industry, food security, and to human health. Screwworms are now in Texas cows, after the programs that prevented them were put into the DOGE woodchipper.

Viruses don’t come in larval form, they don’t have bodies, and they don’t eat anything, and I’m good with that. I’ll stick with my intracellular parasitism and leave the screwworm talk to my colleagues who know more about flesh-eating fly larvae. Parasitic entomologists, now is your time to shine! Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has announced the WAR ON SCREWWORM. This means the USDA will set aside some of its dwindling budget to programs that were cut and now have to hastily be reinstalled because…oops, cutting them is going to cause catastrophic economic, agricultural, and food security problems.

I’m glad that the administration is taking this seriously. Screwworm is a major threat to American agriculture. However, it’s hard to go to war without enough soldiers. Due to widespread cuts at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) lost more than 2000 employees since 2025. This eliminates nearly a quarter of the workforce that actually goes to farms and detects diseases. Rollins is putting a great deal of effort into presenting the USDA as though the agency is operationally competent to carry out its basic functions, which it no longer has the staff or funding to do.

That’s probably why USDA’s Instagram account is a mix of cheerful reels of Rollins visiting farmers and ranchers in politically prioritized districts, wearing a cowboy hat and rocking out to Jason Aldean or whatever, and getting scientifically serious about screwworm. Watch out, screwworms, the Secretary of Agriculture is threatening your kind with 10X visual magnification!

Unfortunately, Rollins hasn’t mastered the underlying science any more than she’s mastered looking into a microscope. That was clear when she fielded an inquiry from 92-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) about screwworm vaccines. Grassley said that he knows that vaccines aren’t super popular with the regime, but maybe Rollins can put in a word with the famously anti-vax Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. On one hand, Kennedy does like both beef and dairy and he knows a thing or two about fake wars on things to manipulate public opinion.

On the other, Kennedy has a concerning track record with parasitic worms and is intractable on the issue of vaccines. Grassley has experience with this, considering he asked Rollins to prioritize poultry vaccines against H5N1 last December (and was rebuffed, in part because Kennedy and Rollins are aligned). I strongly agree with Grassley on this issue, so I can understand his frustration at having to deal with a bunch of gold standard science bullshit instead of effectively addressing a massive agricultural threat. It’s not unreasonable to ask whether vaccination might control screwworm, given that we know it can control avian flu.

Although Rollins correctly told Grassley that screwworm is a “flesh-eating pest and not a virus” she went on to say that any hypothetical screwworm vaccine must not “cause the virus to mutate, to then jump to more dairy cattle, to beef cattle, to other livestock, etc.” The reporting is a little confusing, but it became apparent to me that she was saying that screwworm vaccines aren’t coming anytime soon because bird flu vaccines are bad. Also, screwworm is Biden’s fault.

You might wonder why they aren’t shouting about ivermectin from the rooftops, considering it’s presented by the top minds of MAHA science as the antimicrobial equivalent of a hydrogen bomb. For once, ivermectin works! Ivermectin actually has been proven to kill screwworm larvae and eggs. Ivermectin treats external parasites and it is demonstrably effective in controlling screwworm, at least as a component of a larger control effort. But there’s a catch: cows on ivermectin can’t be slaughtered for beef, since people don’t like to eat steaks and burgers infused with the aftertaste of bovine dewormer metabolites. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for screwworm ivermectin, with a mandatory 35 day withdrawal period before slaughter. This means that prophylactic ivermectin alone is not enough to contain screwworm, at least not if you are going to meet the current demand for American beef. So despite its magic elixir status with Kennedy and the MAHA crowd and despite it actually working against screwworm with some practical caveats, ivermectin isn’t USDA’s champion in the war on screwworm.

I couldn’t help but notice that ivermectin got its cursory mention in the context of a fabulist account of the USDA’s avian flu response, in which Rollins implied that vaccination would cause avian superflu mutants to emerge. We can’t have superscrewworm mutants, too! Never fear, the “biosecurity and…other options, therapeutics, etc” USDA has used to control H5N1 are doing a great job controlling this, even without vaccines!

Are they, though? Because this looks like 36 herds just tested positive across three states out of nowhere, despite the fact that testing is sporadic and variable from state to state, APHIS is down by thousands of inspectors, and USDA isn’t even mentioning it. The USDA dashboard only shows new detections the first time a farm is infected. H5N1 in cows doesn’t require culling, and outbreak management varies a lot from farm to farm. Cows usually don’t get very sick and are not tested individually, so it is not possible to accurately identify and isolate infected animals. Once one animal is infected, the herd is infected with no consistent standard for certifying them H5N1-free. So the dashboard doesn’t track subsequent detections on a farm, because it might still be the same outbreak.

I don’t think these herds tested positive out of nowhere. They tested positive because H5N1 has been spreading all along in Idaho and there just happened to be testing. And Utah. And Texas. And probably a lot of other states where they just aren’t testing at all. H5N1 is not under control. It’s everywhere. And we are acting like it’s not because this administration’s approach to preventing pandemics is ignoring the viruses that cause them.

Biosecurity Brooke invested a billion in endemic bird flu

You may recall that last year, the administration announced the USDA’s exciting new avian flu management plan. This involved devoting a billion dollars to bringing down the price of eggs due to American poultry operations getting hammered with outbreak after outbreak of H5N1. Unlike cows, H5N1 kills chickens and turkeys rapidly and horribly, which is why mandatory depopulation is used to control poultry outbreaks. Although USDA had just conditionally approved a vaccine for chickens, Rollins’ announcement of the grand new bird flu plan didn’t mention it. It didn’t mention the dairy cattle outbreak at all. It instead focused on “biosecurity,” which normally refers to keeping pathogens from getting in or getting out from agricultural production operations, but is a word that is used so many different ways by this administration that it’s effectively meaningless.

In the context of the avian flu plan, it meant beefing up poultry farms to prevent wild birds from getting in. This reduces outbreaks, but doesn’t prevent them entirely. Rollins’ plan included a squad of around 10-20 epidemiologists to audit farm biosecurity and recommend government-subsidized upgrades. While I have no problem with the government supporting producers, I wonder how these subsidies have been paid and whether they actually support significantly improved farm biosecurity.

I’m not a poultry producer, but it does seem to me that if you need to make major changes to the air-handling system in your 100,000+ broiler operation, you’re going to be on the hook for more than $25,000. A lot more. If cost is the barrier to better biosecurity for poultry production, then the USDA’s avian flu management plan is failing there, as well.

For dairy cattle, the USDA is even more negligent. Apart from the National Milk Testing Strategy (NMTS), an opt-in program that varies from state to state and I’m not sure is even funded anymore, there isn’t really any organized surveillance or reporting system. No biosecurity assessments have been offered to dairy producers, as far as I am aware, although they can be compensated for production losses caused by an H5N1 outbreak and personal protective equipment (PPE) for workers. I am not sure about how much funding that program has any more, either.

Any effort beyond the decaying remnants of a response that USDA is overseeing would require acknowledging that H5N1 in dairy cows is a problem at all. That interferes with the regime’s dual policies of encouraging steak and dairy consumption and ignoring pandemic risks unless they are politically useful to lie about. Currently H5N1 is being ignored, as it has been since the shadow of Trump fell upon the land. And there are also currently a lot of incentives for Americans to ignore it.

Last summer, I noticed that there seemed to be a large decline in testing and monitoring. That has not improved. Dairy and poultry workers are often immigrants, who are strongly disincentivized from reporting due to the possibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showing up at their workplace and detaining or deporting them. ICE detention facilities themselves are hellish private prisons where diseases spread unchecked and untreated. Reporting H5N1 symptoms to an employer or a local health official could be a matter of life and death.

But if I were an American who might be exposed to H5N1 for any reason—a backyard farmer, a hunter, a birder, or owner of an outdoor cat—I would still worry. Not only will ICE be weaponized against all Americans to suppress their civil rights, so will public health laws. Another use of the term “biosecurity” by this administration refers to imprisoning people without due process under the quarantine act for political reasons and going so far as to leverage foreign aid commitments to extort other countries into allowing us to build military field hospitals to incarcerate Americans in. The Department of Justice is doing its part by manufacturing charges against virologists because it’s also a “biosecurity” violation to bring in inactivated genetic material for testing and surveillance work that is directly involved in outbreak control. My colleagues are facing years in federal prison on a pretext, because they really committed the imaginary crime of being the villains in Rand Paul’s revenge fantasy.

Angela Perryman, who was exposed to Andes hantavirus on the M/V Hondius cruise ship, is currently confined against her will and without due process of law. She is imprisoned by Kennedy’s order in Nebraska because she was exposed to hantavirus and demanded that she be allowed to quarantine at home with symptom monitoring. As a result, Kennedy invoked the quarantine act to extend her stay in Omaha. Andes virus is not very transmissible and there is no scientific or medical justification for confining Perryman against her will. Kennedy, who famously opposed lockdowns and mandates of all sorts, is now abusing public health laws to literally lock up anyone who opposes him.

If it ever becomes politically expedient to do so, imagine how many people Kennedy could lock up on the pretext of their H5N1 risk. Have you ever seen a bird, cow, cat, various canids, or a rodent in person? Are you drinking raw milk, as Kennedy has previously encouraged? Congratulations, you are now subject to being declared a communicable disease risk by a man whose hobbies include recreational roadkill necropsy. Punishment is indefinite detainment under the Quarantine Act!

I don’t know about you, but I find the prospect of Kennedy being able to unilaterally throw political enemies into forcible quarantine to be pretty frightening. I really don’t think he should have that power and I do not expect him to wield it responsibly.

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Hot dead cat summer

Looking at the map of H5N1 detections in wild and captive mammals, it’s notable what type of other hosts are getting infected. Historically, most of these animals would get infected through contact with wild birds. Now these data tell a different story. Of the land animals being infected, there are a lot of cats and a lot of peridomestic carnivores like skunks and raccoons. Some rodents and “wild canines” (mostly coyotes). These are usually animals that are found dead or brought to animal health officials.

I’ve been worried about these H5N1 infections for a long time too. Last year I worried about the carnivores. This year, I am worried about the cats. All of these animals are species that live around humans. Many of these animals probably acquired H5N1 by scavenging or eating another species of animal. Recently evidence of cat-to-human zoonotic H5N1 transmission was reported by the CDC. There are multiple opportunities for cross-species H5N1 exposure and nobody thinks this is a risk.

When I overlaid USDA dairy production data that the Texas Comptroller helpfully mapped with herd sizes on the USDA dead mammal map, I noticed a concerning trend. All the dead animals seem concentrated around some of the largest dairy producers in the state.

This could be biased by the fact that animal health officials are more likely to look for and find infected animals near dairies with known outbreaks. There are anecdotal reports of H5N1 being detected in cows after the mysterious deaths or disappearances of all the barn cats. Cats are known to be highly susceptible to lethal disease from H5N1, so it makes sense to sample dead cats on dairy farms when you are looking for bird flu. But even though it is undoubtedly plagued by huge gaps in animal surveillance, it’s very clear that these dead animals are located in the vicinity of big dairy operations. That means that dairy outbreaks cause a lot of other animals to get H5N1.

Lots of cross-species transmission creates numerous opportunities for H5N1 to evolve in unpredictable ways. The more frequently it gets into domestic cats, the more opportunities it will have to infect humans. The more opportunities H5N1 has to infect humans, the more opportunities it has to adapt to human hosts.

And sure, most of the time it seems like it’s pretty mild. That’s great. But what happens if these mild infections spread from one person to another, slowly becoming more transmissible, until it starts infecting a lot of people by the respiratory route?

That is a virus that could become a pandemic. If we aren’t paying attention to it because we think it’s always going to be mild, we will learn what that looks like at global scale because we won’t detect it until it is too late for containment.

Even a virus that causes severe disease in 1-2% of all the people it infects would be a catastrophic pandemic at global scale, much worse than the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus alone would kill more than 100 million people worldwide. This would be compounded by disrupted agricultural production, possible food shortages, and overwhelmed health care systems, not to mention the US government’s complete inability to muster an effective response in any sector.

USDA is currently unable to control the dairy outbreak. What happens if it becomes so widespread that it leads to meaningful production losses? What happens if we can’t correct that before food shortages occur? Upbeat propaganda reels of Rollins in the process of getting her fingers sucked like an udder/possible high risk H5N1 exposure will not convince Americans that “biosecurity” is working when they can no longer afford the whole milk that the government wants everyone to drink.

H5N1 is not in the news anymore, but that doesn’t mean it has gone away. It’s been here all along in dairies, especially in states that aren’t doing much testing. It’s possibly very widespread. Every time the virus replicates, it acquires mutations. It can acquire genes from other influenza viruses (reassortment) during co-infections, which can allow the virus to switch hosts immediately. The more hosts are infected, the greater the risk of the virus adapting to them in ways that are hard to predict.

We don’t know if this virus can cause a pandemic. It might never make the jump. If we keep studying avian flu viruses, we might understand why it would gain that ability, or why it wouldn’t. We could make better vaccines and provide farmers with more options to control avian flu in their animals. We could improve production by improving animal health, while reducing risk to farm workers and the public. We could predict which viruses presented a pandemic risk and stop them from emerging altogether. There is so much valuable work that we could do, if the regime hadn’t decided to target my field—🥰 virology 🥰—to justify tearing apart the federal government and rebuilding it for another purpose.

We aren’t going to do a lot of that work now. Relevant grants are being cut in large numbers. Virologists are being imprisoned. Our federal agencies are depleted of expertise. They are slowly being repopulated with loyalist censors who will enact science and health policy that serves ideological interests rather than those of the American people. We are going to find out the hard way if H5N1 does make the jump at some point. We better hope we detect it early. We’re not on track for a good outcome, even in the best case scenario.

Imagine if Kennedy could use bird flu fan fiction and public health laws to put his political opponents in prison any time he wants with no more than his signature and some baseless fearmongering about “biosecurity.” Kennedy and Rollins and the entire milk-guzzling set are risking our lives and our liberties.

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All hail Queen Angela Perryman, my fellow 47-year-old Angela who refuses to be cowed by virological disinformation spread by US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., despite the Nebraska biocontainment unit she finds herself incarcerated in. Her crime was going on vacation and getting exposed to an emerging virus through no fault of her own. Actually, she also had the audacity to question whether the government had the right to detain her indefinitely with no due process based on invented risks that hantavirus somehow magically became pandemic flu overnight. As a result, Kennedy just extended her forced quarantine, where she has been confined since May.

I have never empathized as deeply with another Angela, who appears completely fed up with Kennedy’s outrageous government overreach, and rightfully so. She is being imprisoned by the federal government because she was exposed to a virus that is politically inconvenient to this administration. Her completing quarantine at home poses no risk to anyone.

If unelected officials like Kennedy can lock up Angela Perryman on the pretext of public health and incarcerate her based on Andes virus transmission risks cooked up by anti-vax quacks on X, they can do it to any of us. I am with Angela in my belief that you should not give up your civil liberties over some made-up politically-motivated horseshit about viruses.

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Bundibugyo ebolavirus still on track to be historically bad

In good news, no new cases in Uganda. In bad news, things are very bad in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In worse news, people are already forgetting that it’s even going on. This is already a catastrophe, but it can get exponentially worse.

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Biosecurity Brooke Rollins has totally defeated* H5N1

*Surrendered to by default, since there’s barely any testing

The war on screwworm got me thinking: how is the war on bird flu going? There are all these positive cows in Idaho! The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is celebrating National Dairy Month and they are celebrating by not mentioning this troublesome subtype at all. I wonder how much they are even monitoring it, considering the cuts to USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS). If APHIS isn’t around to inspect herds, they might not detect them. They might not do very much testing at all! And if they don’t test, well…you might not detect widespread H5N1 infection of mammals until it’s too late. I’m writing more about this but I think there’s H5N1 in a lot of the nation’s dairy farms. It makes me wonder how much H5N1 might have gotten into the nation’s dairy farm workers.

If I worked at a dairy or poultry farm with an H5N1 outbreak, I would certainly be strongly disincentivized to report it, considering one consequence would be having ICE show up and send everyone to detention or deport them. Given what has happened to Angela Perryman, I think at this point anyone should worry about the risk H5N1 presents to their civil rights as well as their health and food security.

Anyway, there are a whole lot of infected mammals besides cows and that’s concerning too. I am worried that Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’ biosecurity plan (in this sense, biosecurity means offer people money to make various upgrades that reduce but don’t prevent H5N1 and don’t test very much is creating a massive flu risk. She’s pretending this magically disappeared because USDA doesn’t have the capacity for detection any longer. She’s pretending she knows how to use a microscope. I know this is not anything anyone wants to talk about, so I go off about it for like 15 minutes. Just because a risk isn’t visible doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In this case, I think Rollins is pretending that USDA is better than ever, while in reality, its capacity is as destroyed as every other agency across the federal government. And this is a pretty goddamn catastrophic risk.

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Don’t forget to comment to OMB on Russell Vought’s attempts to seize control of federal spending by July 13!

I am celebrating Pride month by making daily (or sporadic, time will tell) to express my bisexual pride by being inclusive of diverse people and treating them and their ideas equitably. I am therefore living my DEI Catholic values by engaging this Christofascist white nationalist accountant, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. He is attempting to bestow vast powers to control trillions in taxpayer funds upon himself, in hopes of destroying federal funding for science, services like nutritional assistance, “DEI” things like hospitals and schools, and basic infrastructure like roads and power. He also plans to install political censors throughout the government to ensure that taxpayer funds only support the President’s political priorities, just like I predicted he would last year!

So we need to stop this and get Russell Vought out of a position to unilaterally assume control of the US federal budget and that is by sending a comment to the federal government before July 13!!! When you comment, the government is required by law to read and respond to it should any new policy be challenged in court. Enough comments might stop this from moving forward altogether, because every comment is an objection from an American taxpayer who deserves a say in how their money is spent. For example, it shouldn’t be taken away from them if they are not a political priority.

I’ll be providing more information on how to write a comment about this in the coming days but in the meantime, read ’s great piece about how this will impact your community.

COMMENT HERE:

https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001

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• US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. signed an order forcing Angela Perryman to remain imprisoned in Nebraska with no scientific justification whatsoever. I am extremely opposed to the retaliatory imprisonment of 47-year-old women named Angela who object to Bobby Biocontainment violating their constitutional rights

• Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Accountability Committee (HSGAC) is dragging former NIAID Director Tony Fauci in for a transcribed interview that will be used to manufacture evidence against him

• Tulsi Gabbard shared the breaking news that the US invested in foreign biolabs as a means of reducing biological threats on her way out the door, because her job is spreading Russian propaganda

• Where did all these new bird flu-infected dairy cows come from? Does anyone even still work at APHIS?

• Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought is coming for trillions in federal grants and you need to comment on how this will affect you! Do you like driving on roads? Do you think your kids should have schools to go to? What would happen if your local hospitals all closed? There are lots of things to comment about, but what is important is that you comment about how it affects YOU specifically. These comments will be used in lawsuits that will stop Vought from seizing power (and trillions in taxpayer money) with the stroke of a pen, so go do it here: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001. The deadline is JULY 13!!!! More from me at and coming soon. In the meantime, here’s our conversation about it last week (forgive my appearance, I was jet lagged in the opposite direction then and it was 5 am in Kuala Lumpur).

And here is a really excellent post by Liz explaining why this will impact every single American. It’s not just about science! It’s EVERYTHING.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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About a week and a half ago, the office of the US Attorney in the Eastern District of Michigan put out a press release bragging that they were charging a government virologist working at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) with smuggling clade I mpox (monkeypox) virus (MPXV) into the US and then lying about it.

Only one problem: this is demonstrably untrue.

The virologists being accused are my longtime friend and collaborator Vincent Munster and his postdoctoral colleague Claude Kwe. I’ve worked with Vincent since MERS-CoV emerged in 2012. My initial reaction was to wonder why he would need to smuggle clade I mpox when he literally works in a maximum containment Select Agent lab run by NIAID. He already has clade I mpox virus in his freezer. I then wondered how he could possibly be smuggling deadly viral pathogens into the country when Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials celebrating this historic bust said repeatedly in their press release that the samples were “deactivated.” That means non-infectious. You cannot make infectious MPXV from an inactivated sample that contains viral DNA. You cannot make infectious MPXV even if you have lots of viral DNA. It is not possible to reconstitute infectious orthopoxviruses from DNA alone.

They did not commit the crimes they are charged with. This is why.

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What actually happened?

This has been hard to figure out, because despite reading the complaint repeatedly, I am unable to find any evidence of a crime. I’m not a lawyer, but I have been working with Select Agents and high consequence pathogens for 15 years. I held Select Agent clearance from 2016-2022, and currently hold the Canadian equivalent under the Human Pathogens and Toxins Act (HPTA). I take the legal, biosafety, and biosecurity concerns extremely seriously, including my own obligations to ensure that I am not only compliant, but proactive about ensuring that I am following the law and maximizing safety. I know exactly how dangerous the viruses I study are, which is why I study them. I want to make them less dangerous. I want to give us better defenses against them. I want to eradicate them, if that is possible.

I assumed that laws and regulations governing biosafety were to protect researchers and society from the risks that these viruses present. The current regime believes that the viruses are not the risk to worry about. The virologists studying them are.

I haven’t spoken to Vincent about anything except our collaborative scientific work since Trump became president. I already knew he was being targeted by the administration and its allies. I have not heard his side of the story or even asked him about it. I haven’t heard his firsthand account. I have not asked any of my colleagues at NIAID about it. I don’t want to put anyone at risk of further retaliation, as the entire facility is being scrutinized by their own Senator. Rather than defend his constituents’ interests, he was inspired by sentient Mar-a-Lago edition Real Doll Laura Loomer and the far-right extremists who masquerade as animal rights activists at White Coat Waste to vomit up this letter to the Inspector General of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

According to the press release, the complaint, and Jon Cohen from Science’s reliably excellent reporting, Vincent and Kwe were called for secondary screening by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) when they landed in Detroit after a trip to the Republic of Congo (ROC). Vincent and Kwe separately told CBP officers that the samples were for diagnostics and genomic surveillance. They were. The complaint actually demonstrates that. But in the current regime, they are being charged anyway.

I’ll be even more clear about what I am saying: the government proved they did not commit the crimes listed here and charged and arrested them anyway. This should scare the hell out of every American.

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What are the charges?

Despite the dedicated detectives of Kash Patel’s FBI and Todd Blanche’s DOJ special counterterrorism unit patting each other’s backs for a job well done and pathogen smuggling averted, they didn’t actually charge them with that. There was clearly no pathogen smuggling, since these samples did not contain an infectious pathogen and there is no way to make a pathogen directly with this material. They didn’t even charge them with lying about pathogen smuggling, since they weren’t smuggling pathogens. Because they didn’t do either of those things.

There are two charges:

18 U.S.C. §§ 371 and 545. Conspiracy to Import Merchandise Contrary to Law (this is because they could not charge them with smuggling in MPXV because they didn’t)

18 U.S.C. § 1001. False Statements (supposedly lying about it to CBP officers that the samples were being used for diagnostics)

Munster Kwe Complaint Amended

489KB ∙ PDF file

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The problem here is that they are implying that Vincent was trying to sneak in new strains of mpox virus to the US for unauthorized dangerous gain of function (DGOF) research. DGOF is what the Trump regime calls research that makes a virus more transmissible, stable, pathogenic, drug resistant, or immune evasive.

In reality it is a pretext for punishing researchers they don’t like, mostly by cutting their funding or firing them, per last year’s Executive Order on Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research. In order to do DGOF you need to have the virus or a way to reconstitute the infectious virus from its genetic material (this is also called reverse genetics). You cannot do this with MPXV.

Vincent works in a federally-operated maximum containment lab that has plenty of clade I MPXV and has held a valid security clearance for at least 15 years. He wouldn’t need to smuggle the virus into the country and if he tried to do it this way, he would not actually be able to recover the virus from the genome, at least not without using a helper virus and going through a lot of technical trouble from a molecular virology perspective. Too much trouble to go through if you’ve already got the virus. It’s almost like they really were only planning on using the samples for diagnostics (PCR and genomic sequencing), just like they told the CBP inspectors.

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What is the evidence?

Clade I mpox virus is a Select Agent, which mean its handling and regulation is governed by federal law. This is detailed in the amended complaint. Select Agent exemptions are very clear: if a pathogen is inactivated and cannot be reconstituted directly from its genomic material (in the case of MPXV, its DNA). Once inactivated, it is exempt from Select Agent regulations. It is also not considered an agricultural pathogen, so it is not regulated by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The inactivation procedure that was used (QIAGEN AVL buffer plus ethanol; EtOH) is used extensively because it’s very effective at inactivating at pretty much every virus I’ve ever heard of. Inactivation is reproducible. Everyone’s results are the same.

Extensive validation experiments are required to prove that inactivation was successful. Every lab has to conduct documented validation studies, regardless of whether another lab has done so. They take forever, but it is important, and it is required. AVL+EtOH has been tested almost everywhere with the same results: it inactivates MPXV. Vincent showed that AVL+EtOH works to inactivate MPXV in 2022, because he published it. These samples were not infectious.

Furthermore, these samples were going to be used for diagnostics and genomic sequencing. They can’t be used for anything besides molecular diagnostics and sequencing because they are inactivated. The complaint describes that their collaborator had invited them to Congo to do diagnostics and sequencing. Vincent and Kwe have published multiple high impact papers using inactivated samples for this exact purpose with their Congolese collaborators. As Vincent and Kwe both told CBP officers consistently, they were there to help set up diagnostics and control the mpox outbreak.

To me, the biggest tell that these charges are pretextual bullshit is what they didn’t charge them with: violating Select Agent law or actually smuggling in a pathogen. They couldn’t charge them with that, so they instead cooked up this conspiracy and lying nonsense.

Vincent has a long history of this type of work. He deployed multiple times to West Africa during the largest Ebola outbreak in history to support diagnostics, which was a great need at the time. He wrote about the need for more in-country diagnostic capacity in outbreak control in the New England Journal of Medicine. He wrote about how delayed diagnosis and lack of surveillance prolonged Ebola outbreaks and their consequences.

In 2018, he deployed to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to assist with diagnostic testing in the second-largest Ebola outbreak in history. This was in North Kivu, in the same war-torn region that the current Bundibugyo virus (also an ebolavirus) outbreak is occurring. Working in this environment is incredibly dangerous for health workers, as there is a civil war, deep distrust of international aid and health workers, and a lack of resources that allow Ebola to spread like wildfire.

In crises, Vincent runs into the fire, bringing desperately needed diagnostic capacity, no matter the danger to himself. He would probably be responding to the current Bundibugyo virus outbreak. Colleagues like Vincent and Kwe are heroes for doing this courageous and necessary work. Their unjust arrest is yet another way that the US has actively hindered containment of what I suspect will become the largest ebolavirus outbreak in history due to delayed detection and a lack of diagnostics.

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Did they do anything wrong?

From what I can tell, Vincent may have broken one rule concerning the paperwork he was required to carry.

It’s unclear from the complaint if Vincent had the full set of paperwork on him. The sample manifest was clearly provided to the FBI, and they have wasted probably hundreds of thousands of tax dollars testing these samples to confirm they are inactivated in AVL+EtOH, which the crack science detectives at the FBI lab are slowly determining for all 113 samples. but I don’t know if he had a certification statement.

I’m not a lawyer but the charges are conspiracy to import inactivated samples, which suggests that Vincent and Kwe plotted how to sneak these samples past customs and then lied to CBP about it. It’s unclear why Vincent would do that, considering the requirements for transporting inactivated clade I MPXV are basically paperwork and the samples don’t present any kind of safety risk. They clearly did not lie about what the samples were. Vincent was cavalier in telling the CBP officers that he had everything on his laptop, and perhaps he didn’t have a certificate (that he would sign himself), but that doesn’t seem like it rises to the standard of the crime of “pathogen smuggling.” Nobody should face federal charges for failing to provide a piece of paper, when there was no demonstrable risk at any time.

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This isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last

I am aware of four other colleagues who have been questioned about whether they were transporting viruses or plasmids when entering the US. The last time I learned about this, I was in flight on the way home from the same conference which I had invited my colleague, an extremely well-respected, very senior virologist, to speak at. I have never been to a virology conference where people had actual viruses or plasmids. Despite the many misconceptions and outright lies about our professions, virologists actually leave viruses and other samples in the lab where they belong and don’t bring them to conferences to trade like baseball cards. At virology conferences, the only viruses present are depicted on PowerPoint slides.

Other scientists have been investigated, arrested, charged, and convicted for bringing biological samples into the US without authorization or proper paperwork. Most are foreign nationals. I can’t comment on the details of these cases, as I don’t know the accused and they are not in my field. It’s clear that scientists are being heavily scrutinized at the border, particularly if they are not from the US. While I believe that it is absolutely crucial to have robust laws and oversight controlling importation of biological materials into the country, I wonder how many of these charges are based on a good faith effort by DOJ to differentiate paperwork mistakes or human error from actual violations of the law. How many of these cases are legitimate and how many are the result of our government fabricating reasons to imprison (and deport, in many cases) scientists to achieve MAGA political goals?

A couple of months ago, my friend and colleague David Morens was indicted by DOJ. David did commit a crime by attempting to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by asking people to use his Gmail rather than his NIAID email in several email threads, one of which I was a part of.

I was a witness to this crime, as I received one of the emails making this request (I did not reply or agree to this). The email thread was not related to “COVID-19 research grants.” The emails were expressing frustration about the discourse on the origins of the pandemic, some of which were conspiracies involving NIH grants. It was not anything sinister (the emails are all public and have been for years). We were shit-talking lab leak conspiracists.

The punishment should fit the crime, provided there is a crime. Was David such a threat that he required two SWAT teams to arrest, strip, and perp-walk a 78-year-old career public servant during his morning coffee? It was wrong for David to try and evade public records laws. But does it merit almost 60 years in federal prison, which is what David is facing?

In my opinion as both a scientist and an American, it does not.

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Consider the sources

Of course the luminaries of lab leak hellsite discourse have come out swinging. David Asher, whose career has ping-ponged back and forth between spreading conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID at the Hudson Institute and the State Department, once advanced one of my favorite deranged COVID-19 origin hypotheses: a bat fucked a pangolin bedbug-style and the baby that resulted was SARS-CoV-2.

Unsurprisingly, Asher has thoughts on this “bio-criminal conspiracy” and that virology research represents “an existential threat to US public health.” I’d argue that the regime’s attempts to eviscerate our national response capacity, steal the entire Congressionally appropriated budget for research, and lock up our nation’s most accomplished scientists for purely political reasons is the more significant threat to US public health. But hey, it’s a free country…or at least it used to be.

Indeed, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is a doctor. He is an ophthalmologist whose libertarian ways have precluded his membership in a conventional medical board, so he started his own. His own self-issued board certification can never be revoked for promoting anti-scientific conspiracy theories about the COVID pandemic and vaccines, as he routinely does at venues like last November’s Children’s Health Defense conference and the MAHA Action Zoom calls that you can join every Wednesday should you be a masochist like myself.

Paul believes the government should stay out of people’s business when it comes to their medical decisions and their private lives. He loathes government overreach and adores liberty. Except, of course, when government overreach serves his agenda and civil liberties get in the way of his political goals.

For a libertarian, Paul is unusually committed to abusing every ounce of government power at his disposal to prosecute his political foes and anyone who happens to be useful for achieving his political goals. He dropped this set of “NEW DOCUMENTS” (emails taken out of context) that supposedly prove that Vincent and his colleagues at NIAID and elsewhere played fast and loose with shipments for years. Note that these complaints specifically focus on a researcher from EcoHealth Alliance and University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric.

This supposed proof merely shows that, as the law, regulations, and institutional practices dictate, even inactivated pathogens must be shipped using specific protocols. We do not routinely drop samples in the mail. That means a lot of paperwork. It also means constant evaluation of the effectiveness of these practices when a mistake happens or a gap in safety, security, or oversight is identified, protocols are developed or revised to maximize risk mitigation. These documents show researchers navigating the complexities of shipping samples and making sure they complied with the law and with regulations. Yes, they show paperwork mistakes. They also show those mistakes being proactively corrected.

Paul is dragging Fauci in for a transcribed interview at the end of this month with the Senate Homeland Security and Government Accountability Committee (HSGAC). Ranking HSGAC member Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) wrote a letter protesting that Democrats had been entirely excluded from this process.

I guess it will be hard to harvest potentially incriminating quotes from Fauci to fabricate evidence of wrongdoing if there are Democrats around to ask questions at the same time. I know that the Republicans claim to want transparency and honesty. This doesn’t seem very transparent or honest, given that Peters notes it is completely unprecedented in HSGAC’s history.

20260609 Letter Tochairpaul Hsgacrulesandprecedent

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Paul hates Fauci, probably because Fauci is competent and honest and Paul is not. Paul demonstrably does not understand (or pretends not to understand) how virology works. This escalated after Fauci legendarily told Paul that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and called him a liar while testifying before the Senate Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions (HELP) committee in 2022.

Paul has a vendetta against Fauci, so he is alleging that Fauci is the biggest DGOF virologist in the game. This is likely to find a pretext to prosecute Fauci for a crime not covered by President Joseph Biden’s preemptive pardon (granted to Fauci because of anticipated unfair prosecution). Paul can’t nail Fauci on anything that happened in the past, but that pardon does not cover any new “crimes” Fauci might commit. The back and forth about who is lying in 2022 is instructive in this regard.

By forcing Fauci to give a transcribed interview about Vincent and Kwe (and likely Ralph and EcoHealth Alliance and their grants) in a closed door setting with nobody present from the minority party, Paul is setting Fauci up for charges of perjury. This is, for Rand Paul, about revenge. But it’s about more than that. A lot more.

It is about sticking a knife into the heart of American democracy.

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What is the endgame?

You might wonder why I’ve been avoiding having substantive conversations with my colleagues at NIAID, and especially Vincent. I believe that the administration is going to accuse Vincent and Ralph of starting the COVID-19 pandemic with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). As best as I can tell, Paul thinks that Vincent and Ralph, who is one of the most accomplished molecular coronavirologists in the world if not in history, DGOFed up the virus. After getting proto-SARS-CoV-2 from WIV via EcoHealth Alliance, Ralph cloned the virus and inserted a furin cleavage site to make it more transmissible and pathogenic and Vincent serially passaged it through Rousettus aegyptiacus (Egyptian fruit bats). This is based exclusively on imaginative interpretation of cherry-picked emails from early 2020 in which Vincent was discussing the possibility of experimentally infecting R. aegyptiacus to study pathogenesis in a bat host, not serial passage. There’s also no reason to think serial passage would somehow result in a pandemic virus. Last I checked, February 2020 is too late to have made SARS-CoV-2 since the pandemic had already started by then. There’s no explanation about how, if Ralph and Vincent did make SARS-CoV-2, the virus somehow found its way back to Wuhan from North Carolina and Montana. There is no evidence any of this happened.

It won’t stop there. My friends and colleagues Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry may be accused of covering it up at former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci’s request. I may be accused of aiding the cover-up as well, along with co-authors on our papers showing repeatedly that the pandemic began via two zoonotic spillovers at the Huanan Seafood Market due to the wildlife trade, not a “lab leak.” I’ve discussed this before, but I wrote an explainer of what the evidence actually shows.

What does any of this have to do with false charges about improperly shipping MPXV samples? Nothing, except it will be added to the pile of fake evidence against virology as a professional field: we are reckless “virus hunters” who disregard common sense safety regulations so that we can do our beloved DGOF at any cost, even if it means starting another pandemic. Except there won’t be a pandemic from inactivated MPXV samples (or a clade I MPXV outbreak), because these samples aren’t infectious and there is no way to reconstitute virus from them. Vincent and Kwe didn’t smuggle MPXV or any other virus into the US. These samples do not present an infectious threat. You could drink them and not get infected (although I don’t recommend that given that nucleic acid extraction buffers contain chemicals that could still poison you, even if they don’t cause infections).

If there were paperwork errors, that does not suggest a conspiracy. It is not the tip of the iceberg of a much larger effort by virologists to circumvent the rules so we can constantly endanger the public by playing god with reverse genetics and serial passage and all the other idiotic hypotheses the armchair biosecurity experts and self-interested posers comprising the lab leak community have offered. Vincent is not a “mad scientist.” He is an extraordinary scientist who has contributed immensely to controlling outbreaks of the worst viral pathogens imaginable. He has given American taxpayers a huge return on their investment. Vincent and Kwe should be celebrated for their efforts to make the world a safer and healthier place, not stripped of their civil rights, reputation, livelihood, and freedom.

This is what terrifies me. Not that lab leaks are happening all the time because reckless virologists just can’t quit the reckless virology, but because they are being charged for nothing in order to help justify Trump’s efforts to tighten his authoritarian grip on our nation. If virology research is so dangerous and causes lab leaks all the time, ban it. But other types of research are dangerous too. We should also ban that. Even if it’s not related to infectious disease at all…we can’t be too careful! Scientists are corrupt. They are criminals. They are engaged in a conspiracy to undermine Trump’s Golden Age or whatever the hell they are calling the nightmare that this administration has forced upon the world.

The lab leak itself is a pretext to defy the constitution, steal the entire federal Congressionally appropriated budget, consolidate power in the Executive Branch, and destroy American democracy. Vincent and Kwe are convenient scapegoats to help further this goal.

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Make your choice

I have worked with Vincent Munster for 15 years. I’ve been to his home. I have published multiple papers with Vincent. I’ve hung out with him and his wife, both of whom are my colleagues, collaborators, and friends, on multiple continents. I’ve seen Vincent wearing lederhosen (I know he’s Dutch, but he likes beer and celebrates Oktoberfest). He has told me I am entertaining, which is a big compliment because many of our colleagues are not. There are worse things than having a reputation for being both fun and funny at work meetings.

This all becomes a lot less fun and funny when you look at the evidence, as you are trained to do as a scientist, and you realize that the supposed evidence against Vincent is based on the fact that he was kind of a dick to the Customs guys at the airport and he’s—brace yourselves—a foreign national. In fact, he’s always made me laugh because he has this one blue suit that he has described multiple times in a very confident, feeling-myself sort of way as “very European.”

Vincent’s suit was the first thing I noticed when I saw that The Epoch Times, the media outlet for the far-right Falun Gong cult, uncritically reported baseless allegations that Vincent and Kwe are serial pathogen smugglers. It is strange, appalling, and deeply sad to me that my first knee-jerk reaction on seeing my friend Vincent in an image repurposed to imply that he is a criminal was my very human memory of him talking about his signature suit.

I’m not European. I’m a natural born American citizen. But the last time I checked, it is not a crime to be European. It is not a crime to be African. It is not a crime to be a foreign national. It is not a crime to be a foreign national who works for the US government. Both of these colleagues have done distinguished, demonstrably impactful work to both study and respond to emerging virus outbreaks, which is a service to the Americans whose tax dollars pay their salaries.

I haven’t met Kwe, but he is also a foreign national. Unlike Vincent, he is not from Europe and he is not white. I couldn’t help but notice the complaint flagged Kwe acting nervous when going into customs. Former head of ICE, Greg Bovino, gave a recent lecture at a far-right white nationalist "Remigration Summit" where he openly admired the Nazis whose style he imitates. ICE detention facilities are privately operated hellpits of disease and despair, and American immigration policy has devolved into openly racist, xenophobic, unbridled cruelty. I can hardly blame a Cameroonian passport holder for being nervous reentering a country that has demonstrated itself to be openly hostile to Black people, foreign citizens, and scientists (especially virologists). Especially since he is a postdoctoral fellow returning from providing support to his Congolese colleagues and continuing a collaboration that had already produced high-impact scientific findings with direct relevance to containing the outbreak and preventing further spread.

Everyone should feel nervous entering the US. I feel nervous entering the US, despite holding birthright citizenship and being a law-abiding, blonde-haired, blue-eyed white woman. I am also a virologist. I study the same viruses as Vincent and Kwe. I care about my colleagues and I care deeply about my profession. I am in a position to speak up for them and, as an American, it is my right to do so. And everything that has happened here is fundamentally wrong and antithetical to everything America stands for.

I love my country. I moved to Canada in 2021 for work, but my heart will always belong to America. Eighty years ago, my country stood up against fascism because our values as a nation demanded that we defend them. I never imagined that one day, my country would present an even greater fascist threat, fueled by technology, obscene wealth disparities, rank corruption, complacency, and moral rot. I could not have foreseen that, as a middle-aged academic virologist living in the Canadian prairies, this threat would impact me personally and professionally in so many ways. That my friends would be targeted by my own government despite committing no crime. That so many people, including many I previously respected, would remain silent. That some would be so eager to assist. That so many supposed leaders, including at my own institution, university, and at various professional organizations, would attempt to impose silence on their own people. That I should swallow the odious fiction that scientific objectivity must come at the expense of moral integrity . That scientists are not allowed to participate in a democracy. That I should shut up and pipet as these cowards and quislings first asked, then ordered, and then attempted to abusively enforce, because I have no standing to defend my colleagues and our work. That I have no stake or say in a free, healthy, secure world. They are wrong.

All I ever wanted was a peaceful life in a democratic society. All I ever wanted to do was make the world a better place through scientific research, by understanding viral pathogens and giving us new defenses against them. All I ever wanted to be was a virologist. Yet, in reality, I am sick, exhausted, heartbroken, and traumatized. My illness continues to be undiagnosed and has forced me to go on medical leave since early March, when I had such a severe episode of the issue I’m dealing with that I thought I was going to die. It has taken a profound toll on me. I grieve for my health and happiness, for my dreams of the life I thought I would have, for my profession, for my friends and colleagues, and for my country.

I didn’t choose any of this. But we all must make a choice how we respond. Each of us must decide what our values are, and whether or not we will live them.

I never served my country in the military, but I can still serve in other ways with one of the rights that has always made America great: free speech. I can use my voice and I have a platform to do it. There are many ways to protest that are less public and they all have value, especially because more and more people are not able to. Not everyone does it like me, but I am deeply grateful and forever indebted to everyone who does something, whatever they can, to stop the evil that is spreading like an infection. Anyone who chooses to do otherwise—to collaborate, to assist, to profit, to abuse their powers, to persecute others who show the courage they lack, or even to just be a pathetic coward and do nothing—is my enemy. There are a lot of pathetic cowards and I will not forget your actions or lack thereof.

We are all Vincent and Kwe. If the government can lock any of us up for any pretextual reason, they can do it to all of us. America is no longer a democracy. It is a dictatorship. Whether you are a scientist or not, whether you are outspoken or not, whether you are American or not, whether you consider yourself patriotic or not, whether you are political or not, you have to pick a side. Either resist fascism or be complicit.

I choose to resist.

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1. Cut all grants referencing diversity, equity, and inclusion

2. Extend his authority to have regulatory and enforcement power

3. Require grant decisions to be approved by political censors who will only fund grants that “demonstrably” advance President Donald Trump’s political priorities

These things are all un-American and illegal. They will impact EVERYTHING, whether you are a scientist or not. However, they are also incredibly boring for most people. Who cares about federal grantmaking policy, especially when these are health and science grants. Haven’t you heard? NOBODY TRUSTS US ANYMORE!

Nobody has covered this with more authority and more engagingly than , a former scientific program official at the National Institutes of Health. As Ginexi says in this video, she knew her time at NIH was done once “the DOGE boys” began roaming around Bethesda looking for programs to feed to the woodchipper.

Although DOGE has mercifully returned to their crypto and prediction markets, they were merely the harbingers of a far worse menace: Vought, the architect of Project 2025, whose life’s mission is to transform America from a thriving democracy into a fascist dictatorship with all taxpayer funds distributed to President Donald Trump and his fellow Christian nationalist oligarchs.

Ginexi described Vought’s methods as “death by a thousand paper cuts.” I have previously described him as the Adolf Eichmann of accountants when he attempted to fire most of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during last October’s government shutdown. Vought has thrown the kitchen sink at the entire federal budget to illegally claw back as many Congressionally appropriated funds as possible, including getting Trump to sign an Executive Order attempting to circumvent federal laws on awarding grants last summer:

Ginexi laid out comprehensively how Vought has systematically thrown the administrative kitchen sink at NIH and CDC, as well as a number of other federal agencies in other departments of the federal government. She has also raised the horrifying prospect that this will be extended to everything: grants to states for essential services and infrastructure like roads, bridges, schools, parks, libraries, police, firefighters, disaster response and recovery, nutritional support programs, as well as hospitals, ambulances, medical services, emergency responders, and health departments. This is trillions in taxpayer dollars, which normally go toward providing a return on Americans’ investment.

The prospect of the OMB Director, who is not empowered with regulatory authority, vastly overstepping the limitations of his office to illegally impound or destroy by relegation to eternal administrative purgatory is terrifying. At the same time, this is illegal. No OMB Director has ever attempted to extend his power to this extent.

You can do something about this and it’s pretty easy!

With and , we will be talking a lot more about how you can do something about this. Liz has written really helpful instructions for how YOU can get involved: leave a public comment! Federal law requires the government to collect and respond to comments. Therefore, personalized comments explaining how this would affect YOU and your family and community will have to be read. It gets harder for Vought to sneak this by Americans if thousands or millions of us object. It gets harder for our elected officials to enable or support it. Comments can be left anonymously, for those concerned about retaliation.

has great resources explaining the situation and guiding and empowering concerned Americans. You should also call your elected representative (regardless of their party) and let them know that it is unacceptable, unconstitutional, and antithetical to democracy for an unelected bureaucrat with a talent for consolidating authoritarian power via budget cuts and accounting trickery to override the interests of the Americans who pay his salary and whose money he is effectively stealing in defiance of the law. If they don’t do anything or support Vought’s efforts, vote them out of office.

27 UNIHTED

The Quiet Attack On Science: Subverting NIH Peer Review

The recent publication of OMB’s proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance (OMB-2026-0034) lays bare the administration’s goals of replacing scientific peer review with political decision-making; however, the dismantling of peer review at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began earlier. We present here the cumulative effect of a series …

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12 days ago · 22 likes · 27 UNIHTED

As Science Chair of , I will be doing my part to ensure that everyone who contributed to or enabled this disaster is recognized as the menace that they are, and removed from positions where they are ever being able to inflict this upon us again. That includes enablers in other countries. Including in Canada. Including at my own university and institution.

Vought depends on cowardice, complacence, and stupidity. There are far too many people who follow the path of least resistance. Even people who are supposed to be leaders, but have failed miserably. But with enough voices raised together, we can truly stand up for ourselves.

Nobody can help us but us. We are building a community and a coalition of Americans and people all around the world who will be harmed by this destructive administration. There is strength in numbers, and together we can build something better than what Vought is trying to destroy. Please join us.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Please watch and COMMENT on the proposed OMB rule changes!

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From what I can tell, that charge is the best that the FBI could muster, since there were very clearly no violations of Select Agent law. It appears that this whole “biological material” in the complaint (all versions) seems to elide the fact that this “biological material” is pretty much only good for diagnostic PCR or sequencing. For example, developing diagnostic tests (like they told CBP they were doing) or doing genomic surveillance (like they also told CBP they were doing and were invited to Congo to do).

Good thing they weren’t exporting Mpox samples! These were inactivated samples for diagnostic tests.

They are also not regulated in the same way that serum samples from livestock species like horses that may contain pathogens (as serum can, including pathogens that could be introduced to the US from other countries) and thus require a special permit from USDA because they pose a risk to agriculture. Those do need to be shipped by a commercial courier and they do have additional documentation requirements.

These are not those kind of samples. They do not need to go to the Quarantine Practices Safety Officer at NIH because they are not likely to contain pathogens. They were inactivated with a validated method. From the description in the complaint, these are inactivated clinical samples being used for diagnostic testing and genomic surveillance. Exactly like they told CBP.

But still, I wanted to see what CBP’s policy was, since they were the ones who were supposedly being lied to. The complaint describes oral declarations of samples for diagnostics. Seems to fit with CBP’s policy, if you insist on calling these samples “biological material” and implying they are infectious.

I wanted to know what the law says about permit requirements, so I looked it up: CFR 49. Look at that, samples like these are listed as exceptions to the requirements for special permitting!

So they didn’t import “merchandise” contrary to the law. Based on the evidence presented in the complaint, my experience with permit and regulatory requirements for dealing with Select Agents or other high consequence pathogens, federal law, best practices, and my own knowledge of what samples can and can’t be used for, they brought in diagnostic samples they identified as such and that according to the FBI’s own tests are exempt from regulations on samples that pose an infectious threat.

Both charges are unsupported.

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Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in!

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Thank you , , , , , and many others for joining me. See you tomorrow!

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I adjusted my protocols today and now everyone can hear my dulcet harpy screech. Enjoy!

Today I have multiple complaints:

Ebola DRC Case Numbers

Suspected case numbers have gone down substantially in the Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda, per official numbers released by the Congolese Ministry of Health.

This seems on the surface like good news. It might be. But it is more of an indicator of how messy and chaotic this entire situation is. My colleagues in response who are working in DRC have reported multiple possible reasons, ranging from data reconciliation (comparing confirmed cases with

US Quarantine Plan

The US is blazing ahead with with its plan to forcibly quarantine Americans for 21 days. A Kenyan court blocked the facility on Friday, but the US showed up anyway.

Today, Kenya’s high court extended this for another week and ordered Kenya’s government to provide more details about the deal. It seems there are some concerns that the US might be using the billions in aid that it provides to Kenya, including more than half of their ministry of health’s funding, to extort the Kenyan government

This followed massive protests from Kenyans, who understandably want to know why the US thinks it’s okay for them to have Americans exposed to Ebola in their country rather than in the US, especially given the vast superiority of American facilities for containment and care.

Our Open Letter to President Trump

This entire situation is so untenable that I joined a group of colleagues and to send this open letter to President Trump on Monday, objecting to this terrible plan. Please read and share!

The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) wrote one too and I signed that too.

Danish vaccination is back

This has now graduated from a memo to an executive order, despite a federal court blocking it. I have covered this stupidity extensively:

Missed Opportunity for Puff Adder Legend Status

Kennedy has not yet responded to our open letter and, since we didn’t drop any bombs about or no reason except he’s really, really weird about animals,

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me almost every day for more.

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Based on this article:

Sorry I don’t have time to write more today! Gotta try to keep my friends out of prison for non-criminal virology and there’s a bunch of turbo cancer nonsense going down in the Senate today.

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I was in a rush to log on and as a result, I didn’t test my sound in advance. I actually reminded myself to look at the chat (I am getting better at that) and glad I did, because lots of lovely people were letting me know. Oh well. At least I figured it out in time to explain why I have entered my Brezhnev era when it comes to eyebrow aesthetic choices. Yesterday I wasn’t sure about the new look, but I’m starting to come around. After scanning the catalog of Brezhnev’s legendary caterpillars in action, I’m thinking I am going to get some serious frowning mileage out of it.

I would like to note that the link on the banner on the video is to the open letter we submitted to Trump et al regarding the plan to keep Ebola out of the US, and it does not indicate endorsement of comparative eyebrow studies in any way by my colleagues at the O’Neill Institute. Though I suspect they will be okay with it if you came for the eyebrow discourse and stayed for the open letter. It would be even better if you shared it or told your friends about it.

Here’s what you missed in what became my first silent film:

Read our open letter objecting to forcibly quarantining Americans in Kenya

I joined a team of experts, human rights advocates, and civil rights attorneys in sending an open letter to US President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. opposing the proposed quarantine facility in Kenya. This will confine Americans in a high-risk setting for three weeks with untrained staff in a facility far inferior to those we have here at home. It denies them their rights. We published the letter today at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law School. Please read and share. Americans should know the risk this presents to us all.

I wrote this longer piece with about it today.

and I also had our co-authors Kaci Hickox, a nurse and infection preventionist who was forcibly quarantined when returning from West Africa in 2014, and Lawrence Gostin, a professor and globally renowned expert on international health law, on TAKING SHOTS to discuss it on Friday.

I will go over everything again tomorrow, with updated numbers from DRC and Uganda (things are changing a lot, in confusing ways) and hopefully some clarity about what is actually happening in Kenya. And with sound!

Friday night Danish surprise

In their usual tradition of issuing Executive Orders they are particularly proud of, on Friday Trump issued this one making the Denmark Doctrine for knocking half of the vaccines for kids off the recommended vaccination schedule. I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow too, but it appears to be an attempt to find a way around the federal court order blocking the anti-vax Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) from meeting without undergoing the standard process for making sure ACIP is already qualified. Kennedy keeps trying to change the ACIP charter to get around it. This Executive Order extends a Presidential Memo from December 5th, 2025, in which he ordered Kennedy to align the US vaccine schedule with “peer nations” like Denmark.

I’m especially annoyed this part was muted, because I had missed it when it dropped due to Kenyan Ebola prison news. Denmark is not a peer of the US in terms of geography, demographics, the economy, resources, population health, health systems, government, security needs (in fact, the US is threatening Denmark on that front), and thus blindly accepting the Danish vaccine schedule in lieu of the prior evidence-based method used by both the US and Denmark makes no sense scientifically. But it doesn’t have to, because the point is to get as many vaccines off the schedule as possible. More on this tomorrow as well.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning in, especially those of you who stuck around for the final few minutes! Join me tomorrow at 11 am-ish ET for a repeat (with updates, since I expect the Ebola situation to be different as it is rapidly changing).

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Along with a coalition of experts on Ebola and global health, former government officials, human rights advocates, civil rights attorneys, and , we submitted an open letter to President Trump demanding that these plans be stopped. Besides being an egregious offense against our civil rights, this denies Americans access to the lifesaving medical care their tax dollars paid for and risks starting an outbreak in a foreign country that has never had an Ebola case. This is completely unsupported by science and is based purely on political fearmongering. We can’t have the World Cup and America’s 250th birthday marred by any inconvenient Americans infected with a deadly virus acquired in the course of helping to save lives during a historic Ebola outbreak.

Everyone needs to understand that the Trump administration’s “KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE” Ebola policies will only serve to put more Americans at risk of a horrific death, further cementing our global reputation as a force for evil, and potentially spreading even more Ebola courtesy of our American servicemembers. Americans should know this is a source of national shame that endangers us all. It’s plain to see when you compare this to the Ebola outbreaks of the past.

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Lessons learned and rejected

All indicators suggest that this will be the biggest Ebola outbreak in history. Numbers of suspected cases and deaths continue to grow. Confirmed cases doubled over the weekend (although diagnostic testing is still completely inadequate, test positivity is high, which suggests a lot of suspected cases are legitimate Bundibugyo virus infections). Although as of this morning, fewer suspected cases are now being investigated, it’s not clear that the number of suspected cases has actually decreased or if there is another more practical reason for that (samples unavailable for testing, samples degraded rather than negative, people lost to follow-up).

In any case, because the outbreak was detected so late and the situation is so complex—the outbreak is occurring in a war zone that was already hard to access and contains multiple vulnerable populations including people fleeing violence, migrant laborers, and thousands of refugees—it is on track to exceed the 2014-2016 West African Ebola virus epidemic.

A primary reason that Ebola in West Africa caused nearly 30,000 cases and more than 11,000 deaths was that it wasn’t detected early, because we didn’t expect Ebola to emerge in that part of Africa. Prior outbreaks had occurred thousands of miles away in the DRC. As a result, it smoldered for several months, quietly spreading in the way that Ebola does: through caregivers and funerals. But slow detection wasn’t the only reason this epidemic was able to spread.

In addition to the delayed detection, Ebola spread in West Africa because it wasn’t taken seriously enough. I gave a talk at the Filovirus Symposium in Galveston, Texas, in late March 2014. Marburg virus and ebolaviruses like Ebola virus and Bundibugyo virus are all filoviruses, so this meeting’s attendees included many of the global top tier of Ebola experts. At the meeting, everyone had just learned Ebola was in West Africa. A couple of the speakers had to cancel at the last minute and deploy to assist the response, but it felt more like a curiosity than a crisis. The general attitude was that this was an unusual place for Ebola to emerge, but nearly everyone assumed it would be contained using the same methods that had worked in all the other filovirus outbreaks that had occurred to that point.

West Africa was different and the entire field failed to acknowledge that. You can contain an Ebola outbreak through time-tested epidemiological techniques like contact tracing and isolation and quarantine. The two main drivers of Ebola outbreaks are patient care and burial practices. We know how to stop further transmission using personal protective equipment (PPE) and specialized facilities for providing health care, as well as safe burial protocols. These methods all work and are essential to containing the current epidemic in Central Africa now. But they only work when you can actually do them.

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Containment doesn’t just happen by itself

By the time the world learned that Ebola was in West Africa, the outbreak already spread to multiple communities of people who are hard to access and may have very good reasons to distrust outbreak responders or health officials. Ebola can go undiagnosed because it can appear similar to other diseases common to West Africa, including malaria, sepsis, and Lassa fever. This has been a huge problem in the current outbreak in DRC. The lack of molecular diagnostic testing, coupled with challenges in getting samples to the lab and violence in the region, have resulted in more than a thousand suspected cases. Initial tests were negative, because the lab used a PCR platform called the Cepheid GeneXpert that can only detect Ebola virus, not other ebolavirus species like Bundibugyo virus. This is a cartridge-based test that is pre-manufactured, so you can’t quickly make a new test for Bundibugyo. A new pan-filovirus test is now being used, but it takes time to bring in new instruments and reagents for that platform. So far only about 250 suspected cases have been officially confirmed.

The West African epidemic began in remote areas with few health care resources and little disease surveillance. People in border regions traveled between Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia to funerals of loved ones who they did not realize had died from Ebola virus disease and brought Ebola with them back to their own communities. As people got sick, the family members, traditional healers, and health care workers caring for them were infected. When international response teams finally arrived, the diverse social, cultural, and religious practices across the expanding outbreak area were not respected, particularly with regard to patient isolation and safe burial practices. There was no existing infrastructure for clinical care or molecular diagnostics and there was inadequate PPE for an outbreak of this size and magnitude.

Although there was a lot of experience with other hemorrhagic fever viruses such as Lassa virus, these viruses are very different in their capacity for transmission. Lassa virus is much, MUCH less likely to be transmitted between people, even in hospital settings. For example, experienced Lassa clinicians like Sheik Humarr Khan, the director of the Lassa program at Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, were infected while treating Ebola patients without access to Ebola-specific PPE and infection control. Many of them died. Repulsive conspiracy theories have popped up accusing them of being incompetent or malicious or causing a “lab leak.” Survivors have to face social stigmatization that can prevents them from getting jobs (including health care workers), access to education and other services, and excludes them from society. Ebola is not a passing difficulty but a lasting injury, both on the people it impacts and the communities they comprise.

Lassa fever is also much less lethal than Ebola virus disease, as serology (antibody) data suggests that as many as 80% of Lassa cases are so mild that they are undiagnosed. Although my own research shows that “mild Ebola” occurs in mouse and monkey pathogenesis models and there’s clinical evidence that there are people who test positive for Ebola but never get that sick. We don’t know how common this is or what kind of transmission risk this presents. I hypothesize that the transmission risk is not zero, because in every animal study I’ve ever done or read, susceptible hosts get productively infected with and shed infectious Ebola virus even when they aren’t that sick. It’s entirely possible that an outbreak could smolder through transmission between people who aren’t that sick, or aren’t displaying symptoms that people recognize as Ebola.

We also don’t know how the epidemic started. We don’t know what species of host it came from. We don’t know what kind of complex ecological drivers or unique set of circumstances led to the spillover. We don’t know this for a lot of emerging virus outbreaks, and often we can never find out. But we do know some things now about how our responses influence the outcome.

It took a while before people realized that there was actually a lot of Ebola all over the place, breaking out in one community at a time as it was introduced. When Ebola found its way into major cities like Freetown, Sierra Leone (1.3 million people), Conakry, Guinea (3.4 million people), and Monrovia, Liberia (1.7 million people), it exploded. So many people died in Monrovia that bodies were left in the streets. There are a lot of pictures like the one below online, in case you need further proof of how Ebola outbreaks rob people of connection to their communities and their human dignity even in death.

When we fail to adequately prepare for the horrors that emerging, highly pathogenic viruses like Ebola virus and Bundibugyo virus inflict, we are always going to be so far behind them that we pay an unbearable cost in human suffering. We were not adequately prepared for Ebola virus to emerge in West Africa.

The situation in DRC is worse. Systems in place that did prepare DRC for this—and as this is their 17th ebolavirus outbreak since the virus originally emerged 50 years ago in Yambuku, they have a lot of experience with Ebola preparedness and response—have been defunded by the US, which has aggressively been doing as much as possible to cancel out decades of good faith leadership in global health by being as self-defeatingly isolationist as possible. The systems that remain have been terribly disrupted by the ongoing civil war in that region of DRC. DRC wasn’t unprepared. The DRC was forsaken.

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Why is this America’s problem?

The US isn’t responsible for any other country, except that we chose to be. We chose to be a nation of people whose values dictated that we should use our power to make people’s lives better around the world. That hasn’t worked out well when we’ve used those values to justify colonialist exploitation, regime change, and war. However, American investments in health and science have demonstrably saved millions of lives, both at home and abroad. Foreign aid programs like USAID and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) did more than just give money to the health systems they supported. They built basic infrastructure, including roads and clinics and electrical systems. They trained people and invested in education and job training programs. They supplied medical equipment, supplies, vaccinations, and medications. They invested in community programs that would allow for sustainable development of global health. Millions of HIV infections were prevented. Millions of children lived who would have died from vaccine-preventable diseases. These programs weren’t perfect but they made the world more prosperous, healthy, and secure for around $40 per year for most American taxpayers.

The US strategy is now the opposite. By withdrawing aid, we created conditions that made a bad situation worse. Bundibugyo virus caused two prior outbreaks, totaling fewer than 300 cases. We’ve never found the reservoir. It’s probably a bat. We have no idea what kind. We won’t find out anytime soon because research has been cut across the board and virus discovery research has been incorrectly blamed by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director and acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya for starting the pandemic.

Because ebolaviruses cause a really broad range of disease presentations that can be mistaken for other diseases, they won’t be detected if supply chains are broken and samples can’t get to testing sites for diagnostics. If there is only one type of test available and it doesn’t detect this virus, the virus won’t be detected. If trained responders don’t have funds or supplies to do their work, they can’t do it. If it isn’t safe for health workers to do their jobs, they can’t do it. Contact tracers can’t follow people into a war zone and they can’t force people to talk to them. If people are fleeing violence, they can’t be expected to drop everything and wait for a contact tracer to find them.

The people on the ground in DRC actually doing the extraordinarily difficult and dangerous response work at great personal risk are severely limited in their ability to do any of these things, because of the Trump administration’s decisions to just let a lot of people suffer and die even more. America no longer fights Ebola. Trump’s America enables it.

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America against Americans

America decided decades ago to invest in health and science, both domestically and around the world. And as much as we pursued this strategy globally, our priority was always the safety and security of Americans. If an American got into trouble abroad, we could count on our government to come through for us. We could count on our leaders prioritizing Americans’ safety over politics or appearances.

Not anymore. Not if you might carry even an imagined taint of Ebola, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Because that might ruin the World Cup. It might ruin America’s 250th birthday worse than half the roster of the 1992 edition of Now That’s What I Call Music! dropping out of Trump’s Great American State Fair concert. Bad enough that Young MC—whose brand is woefully dated unless “young” is defined by ineligibility for social security—won’t fall and break a hip performing the traditional Fourth of July hymn “Bust a Move”. Trump prioritizes celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation’s independence and liberation from the tyranny of kings with the authoritarian decree that Bret Michaels must dry hump his mic stand in one of his ill-advised Steelers animal print Stetsons in a completely Ebola-free context.

This is because Trump knows that people are scared of getting Ebola and he can use that to further erode Americans’ stake in their own democratic government. Americans shouldn’t be scared of getting Ebola. We should be scared of how Trump is using Ebola to manipulate us into giving away our rights and putting Americans at greater risk in the process.

If an American were to return from responding to the outbreak in DRC, underwent home symptom monitoring and testing, and tested positive for Ebola, they would go to a biocontainment unit (BCU). These purpose-built hospital facilities were designed to provide Americans infected with a lethal, highly pathogenic emerging virus like Bundibugyo virus with the best treatment in the world, coupled with maximum containment of the pathogen. The BCU network’s record is exemplary at saving Americans’ lives and keeping Americans safe from pathogens like Ebola virus and Bundibugyo virus.

Multiple Americans who were infected with Ebola virus in West Africa were treated in multiple BCUs around the country: NIH, Nebraska, Emory, and Bellevue. There was no transmission from any patient treated in a BCU. Every single American Ebola patient treated in a BCU survived. The only patient who died in a BCU was Martin Salia, a physician from Sierra Leone who was unresponsive, struggling to breathe, and whose kidneys had failed even before his plane touched down in Nebraska.

Ebola in America would not spread the way it is spreading in DRC because we can mitigate transmission risks with the investments we made in Ebola preparedness. This is not just having facilities like the BCUs, but due to the investments we made in filovirus research and global health. We can respond very effectively to real risks based on evidence, rather than fear or hype. We know that Ebola is not transmitted person to person by the respiratory route. A World Cup game is not going to become a superspreader event. I previously explained why.

The US government plan to move ahead with forcibly quarantining Americans in a makeshift tent on a Kenyan air force base despite a Kenyan court order prohibiting it is scientifically unjustified and egregiously wasteful, as well as shamefully unethical. Worse, an honest risk assessment of the proposed quarantine facility compared to the BCUs that we invested more than a billion dollars building is horrifying: the Trump administration is proposing to place Americans in a congregate facility that would facilitate spread to other detainees and the health care workers caring for them. These would be PHS officers and active duty service members with completely inadequate training.

The plans to build maximum containment isolation units were described as “TBD.” Not only does this risk an outbreak in the facility, it risks spread to the community in a foreign country with no prior Ebola outbreaks and no experience treating Ebola patients. In this scenario, the US government would be using the US military to expand the Ebola outbreak to more countries and cause more Ebola cases. They think this is acceptable, even if Americans die in the process, because it’s happening on foreign soil. The only reason is to allow Trump to continue whitewashing the appalling inhumanity of his regime.

This is unacceptable to me as both an American and a virologist who has studied Ebola virus disease for the past 15 years. It should be unacceptable to everyone. It undermines our Constitutional rights, puts us in danger, puts brave humanitarian and medical responders and our service members at lethal risk, and degrades our humanity. That’s why we wrote this letter demanding that Americans not be forcibly quarantined in a foreign country in a way that massively increases Ebola risk for everyone. and I also discussed this at length with our colleagues and co-authors Lawrence Gostin and Kaci Hickox on Friday:

Please share this and spread the word: our government’s Ebola response policy is not just a different direction or a new approach. It is illegal, grossly unethical, and antithetical to American values. Americans helping to mitigate a disaster that our own government willfully caused should not be abandoned by America too. None of us should.

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We were privileged to be joined tonight by Professor Lawrence Gostin, Director of the O’Neill Institute for Global Health Law at Georgetown University, and Kaci Hickox, a nurse epidemiologist and infection preventionist who found herself forcibly quarantined for political reasons when she returned from Ebola response in West Africa in 2014.

We had a fantastic conversation that went by far too fast, so we will hope they will come back very soon. We will undoubtedly have more to discuss regarding the open letter we are sending to President Trump and his Cabinet members objecting strongly to this policy. For a very timely and insightful analysis, check out Larry’s great piece in MedPage today!

And I feel like the temporary setback of Kenya’s court ruling that it’s against Kenyan law for Americans to detain Americans in Kenya and possibly import an Ebola outbreak to a country that is nowhere near the outbreak zone and hasn’t ever had an Ebola outbreak. So we haven’t finished discussing this topic.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into our episode today! Join me Monday morning for Angie’s Daily Rant and both of us Tuesday for our next show!

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Here’s what I went off about today:

• Kenyan Ebola prison is illegal and violates Americans’ due process and citizenship rights

• Kenyan Ebola prison is incredibly dangerous in terms of the risks of ebolavirus transmission because there is no way they can achieve adequate containment

• Kenyan Ebola prison risks exposing US military personnel (both armed forces and Public Health Service Commissioned Corps) to massive transmission risk and starting an outbreak in another country with no Bundibugyo virus cases

• Kenyan Ebola prison deprives Americans of state-of-the-art facilities and access to care that their tax dollars paid for in favor of incarcerating them in an Ebola death trap in violation of their Constitutional rights

• There is no scientific, medical, or legal justification for Kenyan Ebola prison; it is purely political

• A Kenyan court ruled that this is also illegal in Kenya (and dangerous to Kenyans)

• Let by civil rights attorneys, myself and some other experts have contributed to an open letter to President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. opposing the plan to detain people in Kenya as part of our Ebola quarantine protocol

• and I will host three of our co-authors on TAKING SHOTS this afternoon to discuss: Lawrence Gostin (Director of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for Global Health), Kaci Hickox (nurse and epidemiologist who was forcibly quarantined in New Jersey on the tarmac at Newark in 2014), and (ID physician, Ebola responder, former WHO)

• I’m also writing a newsletter with about this!

• In more local news, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought is bringing his evil plan to install political censors into the US grantmaking process to fruition

• Vought dropped new rules installing Soviet-style kommisars throughout the federal funding process to ensure no politically undesirable research gets funded! Subscribe to to learn everything there is to know about this.

• Politically undesirable research means anything that doesn’t manufacture evidence to support the continued consolidation of authoritarian power within the regime

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my first daily rant! Join us at 5 pm ET for additional discussion about the terribly flawed US Ebola plan and our open letter responding to it.

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Programming note: I know I don’t look like it, but I’m still having a lot of medical issues and also am affected by a lot of other personal and professional challenges in my life that result from—waves at the state of the world—all of this. The other day before our show I was running late and complaining bitterly about my aptitude. gently advised me to stop beating myself up all the time. Stop apologizing and saying you’re dumb, it’s not like anyone else even knows what Streamyard is, much less how to use it to seamlessly produce a show across six platforms!

She’s right and that’s very good advice. I am so grateful for her and my other friends and family who have shared similar things because these days, I sometimes really need the reminder. However, sometimes I also really do need to apologize because this didn’t stream to Substack for some reason and I do think it was a technical error on my part. I’m not going to dwell on it, but nonetheless I am sorry it occurred. I posted the video here.

Here’s what I didn’t beat myself up about today:

Seems like Rubio’s opinions have shifted over the years

Jessica also dug this classic out of the archives: an opinion piece by Secretary of State Marco Rubio from October 2014.

Rubio lays out a five point plan to combat the outbreak in West Africa, which at the time was completely out of control. His plan was:

1. Appoint an Ebola czar to coordinate global responses

2. Stop the outbreak “at its source”—in other words, send an effective response

3. Travel bans (he’s always been a fan of those…too bad they don’t work)

4. Build more biocontainment units for treating Ebola patients in the US

5. Make more vaccines!

I agree with 1, 2, 4, and 5. However, Rubio doesn’t seem to anymore, considering his 2026 stance can be summarized by his statement at yesterday’s Cabinet meeting: “we cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States.”

That’s also very clear from the White House and State Department’s VERY poorly developed Kenyan Ebola prison plan, which was announced shortly after I ended the video this morning.

I’ll see you tomorrow to discuss that bullshit. and I will both see you tomorrow afternoon for TAKING SHOTS.

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Here’s what you need to know today:

Ebola response is going great! Here’s the plan to imprison Americans in a foreign country

The White House really, really doesn’t want any Ebola in the country. The World Cup is coming up and, more importantly, America’s 250th birthday is set to throw a military parade so obnoxiously Extra Dictator-y that Stalin would have been envious. No Ebola allowed!

Unfortunately, Americans—especially doctors who work for Christian missionary organizations—are getting Ebola. Probably more will get exposed, since everyone is criticizing the US accurately for massively increasing the scale of death from outbreaks like this one by withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) and letting Elon Musk and his posse of pimply, barely legal dipshits DOGE USAID into oblivion.

Now, perhaps stung by criticism that the US has retooled its entire outbreak response capacity and commitments to and leadership in global health to shrugging, antagonizing WHO, and continuing their usual corrupt fascist hijinks while millions of deaths occur that the US once prevented. Don’t get me wrong, the US is still not responding. But we’re saying that we are, when what we mean is infringing on Americans’ constitutional rights and abandoning them when they need the US most.

Kenyan Ebola prison

They already forced three American doctors to quarantine and get treatment in Germany and Czechia because HELL NO, AMERICA WANTS LIBERTY, NOT SICK AMERICANS. Never mind that we have purpose-built biocontainment units (BCUs) across the country for the exact reason of providing Americans with exceptional medical care when they are infected with dangerous pathogens like Ebola. This allows them to not only be treated in a state of the art medical facility, it protects all Americans by keeping pathogens in. The US has invested billions to expand this network as part of our pandemic preparedness network.

But we’re going to waste it! The US is so determined to keep Americans who have undefined “high risk exposure” to Ebola out that they are going to build a field hospital in Kenya where they will force Americans to quarantine for 3 weeks. And if they do test positive for Ebola, they will be treated there too.

It is a joint deployment between the Public Health Service and the Department of War. They plan to expand to 250 beds (!!!), indicating they have big plans for imprisoning Americans without due process or any kind of scientific justification. They will refuse entry to American citizens and force them to get treatment for an absolutely horrible, possibly lethal disease in substandard containment. BCUs take years to build and certify. They are putting this slapdash Ebola treatment unit together in a week. Personnel deploying will have three days of training.

This not only prevents Americans who deployed to help Ebola patients in the midst of a historically devastating epidemic from accessing the best standard of care—which their tax dollars paid for—it also puts the health care workers at greater risk because of substandard containment conditions compared to the BCUs.

This INCREASES the risk of Americans getting Ebola. Including our brave military servicepeople, who are also being deployed and may be ordered to enforce the unlawful and unconstitutional imprisonment of their fellow Americans on foreign soil. And if they do it because OH SHIT, EBOLA!!!!!!!! they can do it for any made-up pretextual reason at all. They are already forcibly quarantining passengers from the M/V Hondius at the BCU in Omaha, Nebraska. Now they want to do this outside of a BCU, in a foreign country, with American citizens who they are endangering. America used to care about bringing Americans home in an emergency, not incarcerating them trampling all over their Constitutional rights in the process.

First Secretary of State to endorse “Lock ‘Em Up Abroad” infection control policy

Despite screaming KEEP ‘EM OUT about the prospect of Ebola patients sullying our disease-free shores for more than a decade, these concerns sure don’t seem to be keeping President Donald Trump awake at night, or during the day, or at his own Cabinet meetings. He had one of those today and it did not inspire confidence about the US approach to Ebola outbreak containment.

Here’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio explaining that, look, America’s policy is that we are just not feeling Ebola and we can’t have it here to ruin the World Cup and America’s 250th Birthday throwdown in the UFC Octagon currently being constructed on the White House South Lawn. Perhaps the uselessness of this earnest, slightly desperate nine seconds of bullshit from Lil’ Marco is what put Trump to sleep, but it certainly wasn’t Rubio’s dense technical breakdown of the evidence to date and an accounting of the US doing…anything, because all we’ve done is issue useless travel bans.

As usual, Rubio probably got all his talking points from ideas Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Joe Rogan passed on about public health policy. Surprised he didn’t announce that Kenyan Ebola prison won’t be equipped with a full selection of fruit-flavored vapes newly approved by our Commissioner-less Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Maybe Zyns cure Bundibugyo virus! Won’t know until we try!

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into today’s update. See you tomorrow at 11 am ET!

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Things have devolved into a show where it’s a show about the destruction of global health capacity with two increasingly haggard subject matter experts who are into sobriety, despair, and…still dunking on our enemies. I have resolved to have a cocktail for our show on Friday. At least it will take the sting off the remaining despair.

Today, as ever, the topic is the extraordinarily bad situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda concerning the Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak. There are now more than 900 cases and 220 deaths, which is almost certainly an undercount. The outbreak is an epidemic now. It is on track to exceed the West African epidemic, which infected nearly 30,000 and took more than 11,000 lives.

This is, once again, entirely due to the American government cutting USAID foreign aid, withdrawing from WHO, and pursuing infectious disease policies like travel bans. Today we learned the US government plans to deploy the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps with the US military to Kenya, where they will screen Americans for Ebola before allowing them to return home.

Oh, you think the US will allow you to use the state-of-the-art biocontainment units for managing Ebola patients and saving their lives while protecting the community that your tax dollars paid for? NOPE! You thought your country would keep its promise to do everything in its power to bring you home if you are infected with a horrible lethal disease that we have specialized expertise and capacity to contain and treat? LOL this is Ebola we’re talking about here. You thought that it was your Constitutional right to return home as a US citizen? Not if acting CDC Director Lockdown Jay Bhattacharya and other Trump administration officials decide to apply the same unsupported policies for this Ebola outbreak that they applied to hantavirus: enforced quarantine because we don’t have emerging viruses here in MAHA-land. If we pretend they aren’t a danger, and we use our military to force our own citizens to suffer and die in another country, and we allow them to gaslight the world into thinking this is a meaningful outbreak response rather than a simulacrum meant to deflect accountability for the thousands of preventable deaths these policies will demonstrably cause.

To add insult to injury, there was so much serious talk about impending (and unfortunately supported by evidence) Ebola-related disaster, we didn’t even get to the more important and fun conversation: what the hell was US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. doing to these poor snakes??? We’ll try to rectify this with more commentary on the clownery.

To bring things back to the serious stuff, watch ’s excellent summary of this whole terrible situation on CNN last Friday.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in! Join us tomorrow morning for another update.

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Here’s what you need to know:

Lots more cases, but they need to be confirmed

There are now more than 900 cases and 220 deaths (suspected). Because of lagging molecular diagnostics, these numbers could change. There are a lot of diseases that share features with Ebola virus disease (EVD) in the region: malaria, gastroenteritis, sepsis, etc. Understanding the scale and scope of the outbreak requires confirmation using a molecular diagnostic (PCR) to distinguish EVD patients from those with malaria or something else. This is important for treating patients appropriately and it is critical to controlling the outbreak using the time-tested epidemiological methods that we know work. The problem is that there is violence and instability, challenges with mobility, and social and cultural barriers in place. Because this very large geographic area has been devastated by war and loss of foreign aid from the US, there is also a great deal of distrust of international health officials. And it’s not like the US has covered itself in glory with these dumbass travel bans.

Serious issues with outbreak control

was on CNN talking about how this terrible situation has been greatly exacerbated by the US government’s cuts to USAID and withdrawal from the WHO. I highly recommend watching the whole thing. The US abandonment of its obligations has deepened existing distrust and that couldn’t be worse for doing what is needed to control this outbreak: contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine. Because there is no vaccine or treatment for Bundibugyo virus and there won’t be one anytime soon, contact tracing and molecular tests are essential to outbreak containment. Response workers are so far behind, at this rate it will take months or years to contain.

I didn’t do slides but I did go off on pathogenesis

A word of caution about calculating case fatality rates with the current data: there are not enough confirmed cases and deaths to do this accurately. Yes, it is true that the two previous Bundibugyo virus outbreaks had lower mortality (30-50%) than good old original recipe Ebola virus (90%). However, these outbreaks were tiny in comparison to this one. Furthermore, now that there have been repeated Ebola outbreak, we know that it’s mortality rate isn’t really 90%. In most outbreaks, it’s closer to 50%. This is still unacceptably high, but my point is that this is hard to estimate and it’s more complex than this virus is totally mega pathogenic but this one is only a little bit extra pathogenic. Even if you did the crudest possible calculation (disclaimer that I am very obviously not an epidemiologist):

221 suspected deaths (220 in DRC, 1 in Uganda) / 913 suspected cases (906 in DRC, 7 in Uganda) = 24.2%. That’s one out of every four cases dying.

I covered this here. Different hosts develop different disease severity based on their response to the virus.

Thanks , , , , , and many others for joining me today! See you tomorrow!

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