just a quick heads up that there is some swearing in this episode.

Okay, here's the show.

One of the things I noticed this week when I was researching this episode is that very few

virologists want to talk publicly about the lab leak theory of COVID. So when I got Angie

Rasmussen on the line on Wednesday afternoon, I wanted to know why she was different.

Why are you willing to talk about it?

Because I shot my mouth off about it in February 2020.

In her day job, Angie studies emerging viruses at the vaccine and infectious disease

organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. In her off time on Twitter,

she's pretty famously blunt. I don't remember what I called Tom Cotton, but it was something

probably not very nice because he was at the time saying that for sure this was manufactured

and it may have been intentionally released. It may have been accidentally released, but this is

the product of so-called gain of function research and possibly a bio-weapons program.

And even back then, when we knew very, very little, that did not seem plausible to me at all.

It is definitely possible to get sick in a lab that handles pathogens.

Angie is the first person to admit that. It's something that I worry about every day right behind

me is a containment lab that I work in. Right now, there's nobody in there. Oh yeah.

And that's actually a tuberculosis lab. But I work in the lab right next door on the other side of

that wall. And maintaining proper biosafety protocols is something that means a lot to me because I

literally don't want there to be a lab leak in my own community with me as the index patient.

When I'm working with SARS coronavirus two or anything else, I think that most

virologists who are doing this work, it's something we're keenly aware of the possibility of

...