Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Angie Rasmussen

@angierasmussen.bsky.social

42K followers 3.7K following 2.6K posts

Virologist. PI at VIDO, University of Saskatchewan. Co-EiC of Vaccine. 🇺🇸 in 🇨🇦. Emerging viruses, pathogenesis, zoonosis, host responses, dogs, football, off-color language, transcriptomic chaos. Opinions my own.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · Apr 21

So this interview lasted 2 hours so this “you’re scaring me” part might seem like an overreaction or fearmongering to someone without that context.

There’s a lot of evidence to support my hypothesis that a potential H5N1 pandemic would be worse than COVID.

63 790 2K

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 3h

You have no idea how annoyed and tired I am of both influenza virus and SARS-CoV-2, so I decided to reduce my risk of dealing with them both.

Tired looking blonde skank in a black beater tank with two bandages on her arm from her awesome flu and Covid shots

14 4 180

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 5h

I spoke to @melodyschreiber.com @theguardian.com along with @pauloffit.bsky.social & @jasonlschwartz.bsky.social about the MMR going monovalent.

We all agree: following Andrew Wakefield's advice to "break up the vaccines" is unnecessary, pointless, & will only prevent kids from getting vaccinated

HELLody SchreiBOO @melodyschreiber.com · 6h

"If a vaccine is sitting on a shelf and not going into somebody’s arm, then it’s worthless, essentially," @angierasmussen.bsky.social said.

"I think anti-vaxxers love vaccines that sit on shelves.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Alarm as CDC calls for separate MMR vaccines despite measles outbreak

Concerns that three separate shots would be more costly and time-consuming, and keep kids from being vaccinated

www.theguardian.com

3 23 77

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 7h

Does he think all the MAHA moms in the movement ate their uteruses after giving birth?

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 12h

RFK Jr: "Somebody showed me a TikTok video of a pregnant woman at 8 months pregnant -- she's an associate professor at the Columbia Medical School -- and she is saying 'F Trump' and gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta. The level of Trump Derangement Syndrome is now a pathology."

7 4 31

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 7h

You heard it straight from Kennedy himself: Gold Standard Science is actually just data fabrication.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 12h

RFK Jr on Tylenol and autism: "It is not proof. We're doing the studies to make the proof."

52 200 850

Reposted by Angie Rasmussen

Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 1d

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

nyti.ms

140 1.7K 4.5K

Reposted by Angie Rasmussen

sarah jeong @sarahjeong.bsky.social · 10h

thinking about how fucked up it is to give kids measles on purpose and then withhold tylenol from them

35 440 2.3K

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 7h

Oh no, Roland, I'm so sorry to hear that the program is going away! What is next?

1 1

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

Once again this is an issue of national security: economic security, health security, & legal/governmental security. The desires of the few don’t supersede the rights of the many to health & security. Don’t buy arguments that use a veneer of science to put Canada at terrible risk

2 4 49

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

H5N1 is a huge threat. An H5N1 pandemic would make COVID look like a walk in the park. It keeps me up at night. H5N1 is a much more dangerous virus than SARS2. It will wreck agriculture as well as killing people. A deadlier pandemic, w/ added starvation & ecological devastation.

3 21 70

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

Claiming H5N1 is not a threat since we’re all seropositive using an unreliable test is wildly selfish & anti-scientific. It’s saying we should gamble on a potential pandemic based on unreliable evidence so these yokels can continue their ostrich scams.

rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/last-stand...

Last Stand in Bird Flu Ostrich Land

The BC ostrich convoy enters the "find out" stage of FAFO and so have we all

rasmussenretorts.substack.com

1 6 17

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

I take issue with this self-interested claim because H5N1 is a demonstrably lethal virus. Letting it rip at current mortality rate—despite preexisting N1 immunity—would cause almost a million deaths in Canada. It would devastate the poultry industry, food security, & the economy.

1 5 19

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

That is the same claim being made by the ostrich farm. I don’t know if they realize this doesn’t help their case. If false, they are laughably incompetent at basic flu immunology. If true, they were infected by the ostriches, so it’s more evidence they defied CFIA biosecurity orders.

1 4 16

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

But this claim is one of the oldest baseless claims in the book. It was how Jay Bhattacharya rose to fame during COVID. Use unreliable antibody binding assays to claim widespread immunity, then use that to say a major public health threat is no big deal. Let it rip.

www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

Bhattacharya To Decide the Fate of Medical Research

An economist turned pandemic celebrity, who loudly and repeatedly advocated for mass infections with the coronavirus, has been nominated by Donald Trump as the new director of the National Institutes ...

www.mcgill.ca

1 7 16

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

In fairness, I don’t think anyone at the ostrich farm gets the many, many caveats, nuances, complexities, & technical specifics of flu immunology. I can see why they like the SPOT peptide array results, since this bolsters the “everyone had it, it’s totally safe!” claim.

1 5 13

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

So Ostrich Katie’s claim that she has H5N1 antibodies and so do we all is true when you’re talking about Pelech’s SPOT peptide array. Binding assays like this just cannot distinguish between antibodies specific to certain subtypes. Cross-reactivity causes lots of false positives.

1 3 10

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

…sort of, because with flu you can still get cross-reactivity from other HA subtypes. To be really sure you need to deplete other subtypes’ antibodies from your sample before testing. Otherwise you STILL have cross-reactivity. Best to validate results by another method.

1 2 9

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

To do an HAI assay you mix virus with a series of dilutions of serum, egg yolk, etc as well as some red blood cells. Then you look for the dilution where it clumps. If it’s much higher than your controls then you’ve got HA-specific neutralizing antibodies.

1 2 7

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

HAI stands for hemagglutination inhibition, because the H in H5 is hemagglutinin (HA). It’s called this because it binds red blood cells & makes them clump, so HAIs are specific to HA. The H5 component is one thing most people don’t have antibodies to.

www.cdc.gov/flu/php/viru...

1 4 17

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

Since cross-reactive antibodies to N1 are so cross-reactive that they impact disease severity, they will show up as positive on even the functional assays that go beyond binding to look at virus neutralization—microneutralization & HAI. For H5N1 I think HAI is better.

1 3 14

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

Here, LeSage, Lakdawala and colleagues showed that ferrets that had previously been infected with H1N1 controlled spread of H5N1 within the host due to anti-N1 antibodies. T cells also likely play a role.

wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/...

Influenza A(H5N1) Immune Response among Ferrets with Influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 Immunity

H5N1 Response among Ferrets with H1N1 Immunity

wwwnc.cdc.gov

1 2 12

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

Multiple groups have shown this. Here Restori, Sutton and colleagues showed that immunity against prior infection with currently circulating H1N1 (2009 pandemic-derived) reduces disease after a high dose H5N1 challenge

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Preexisting immunity to the 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus reduces susceptibility to H5N1 infection and disease in ferrets

Prior infection with the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus confers protection against H5N1 infection and disease in ferrets.

www.science.org

1 3 19

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

To complicate things further, we’ve all had H1N1, so almost everyone has antibodies to N1. The bird flu N1 is different from human N1, but not so different that it won’t cross-react. It will & it does—to the point that residual N1 immunity protects ferrets from H5N1.

1 4 18

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

Even if, as Pelech claims, you computationally select peptides that are not conserved across flu subtypes, you will likely have cross-reactivity. Peptides are not always structurally like the full protein so you get off-target binding & flu is notoriously cross-reactive.

1 3 18

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

SPOT peptide arrays & anything that measures binding alone is not good for flu. Why? When you are measuring antibodies binding to flu antigens, you are dealing with a lifetime of anti-flu antibodies as background. These are called subtypes. HsomethingNwhatever.

1 5 20

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 17h

Here’s an example of how it works with antibodies from people who had malaria. For some things they can be useful for screening to identify key epitopes (antibody binding sites). The findings still need to be validated, though, because cross-reactivity.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

High-density Peptide Arrays Help to Identify Linear Immunogenic B-cell Epitopes in Individuals Naturally Exposed to Malaria Infection

High-density peptide arrays are an excellent means to profile anti-plasmodial antibody responses. Different protein intrinsic epitopes can be distingu…

www.sciencedirect.com

1 2 18