The issue with modern science is that because of the economic incentives, scientists are rewarded on discoveries. This puts pressure on them to get the results they wanted. The methods sometimes are done in ignorance.
Example in physics:
Double slit experiment that says light is either a wave or a particle.
The detector that is used in the experiment influences the result because any detector uses energy to detect however infinitesimal.
Instead of acknowledging that, scientists got deeper and deeper into quantum theory where things can change without physical or energy interaction. It spawned a "religion" of physics but if they just realize detectors do influence things, the whole thing falls apart.
This is a good playlist on the issues of modern physics... Like medicine, the environment got scientists pushing out discoveries...
Thank you Betsy for your excellent historical description of how an unproven notion, favored by a few prominent individuals, became 'fact' despite lack of evidence or logical coherence. Virology is primitive subjectivism.
The destruction of objectivity and reason in 'science' has also destroyed other lines of inquiry. By the second half of the 19th century economists were ascribing mathematical 'measurement" to "observed phenomena" by nature not measurable nor observable. For example, GDP is presented as a measurement of 'economic growth', even though it misrepresents and misinterprets production, and even though an industrial economy produces a couple billion products and one can merely guess at whether the "economy" is shrinking or growing. The "phillips curve" supposedly observed a "mathematical function" between "inflation" (defined as the 'average rate' of price increases based on someone's guesswork) and the 'rate of unemployment' (defined as someone's guess as to the percentage of people out of work...skipping over 'do they actually want and intend to return to work?')
Each of these wholistic mental constructs are artificial, non-observable with accuracy, and are built around contradictions. Take 'inflation": When prices rise in response to inflating the supply of money, some prices rise a lot, or a little, or decline as individuals and hosueholds all adjust their spending and saving to new data. No one could keep track of prices and even if they could one minute later it would all change again. There is no "rate of inflation" whatever the official statistics. Yet such anti-concepts have long been regarded as objects of scientific observation, as economists sought to become "scientific".
The broad trend has been the abuse and neglect of reason, in 'science', economics, court history, and other fields. As reason has been abandoned and renounced, power--the threat and use of force in human relationships--has advanced. The 'economists', posturing as wise economic bedside doctors, want to command coercive means of "controlling the economy".
Similarly, 'virologists' are propaganda specialists pushing tyranny and poisoning for 'public health'.
I appreciate the intent here: calling out how inference can masquerade as evidence is a valuable warning in any field, and you’re right that creativity (hypothesis generation) is not the same thing as proof.
Where I think the essay goes off the rails is the leap from “science sometimes over-infers” to “viruses have never been shown to exist / are imaginary.” From a physician-scientist standpoint, that claim doesn’t fit the full evidentiary stack we have for viruses, which includes multiple independent modalities that converge on the same entities:
1. Visualization isn’t limited to “arrows on EM.” EM is one tool, but we also have cryo-EM, immunogold labeling, and in many cases live-cell imaging of viral proteins/replication complexes (for viruses that can be engineered/visualized). The idea that we “never see” viruses in biologic material isn’t accurate; we often see them as virions, and we also track them as replicating genomes and proteins inside cells.
2. Purification + infectivity + specificity: virology doesn’t rely on imagination as a substitute for experiments. Viruses are routinely isolated/enriched, used to infect susceptible cells/hosts, and produce reproducible cytopathic effects and specific immune responses, with controls that distinguish contamination, toxins, or culture artifacts from replication-competent virus.
3. Genetics is not “guesswork.” The strongest modern evidence is that viral genomes can be detected, sequenced, and tracked with predictable evolution and transmission chains; you can introduce targeted mutations and predictably change phenotype (attenuation, tropism, antigenicity), then reverse/restore it. That’s hard to explain as “cell debris” or microscope artifacts.
None of that means modern biomedicine is incentive-clean or epistemically perfect (your critique of incentives and groupthink is fair). But “incentives distort science” and “viruses don’t exist” are very different claims, and the latter requires dismissing a large, cross-validated body of experimental work.
If you want to keep the spirit of your argument while tightening it scientifically, a stronger version might be: “we should be explicit about which parts of infectious disease claims are direct observation, which are inference, and what would falsify our models.” That’s a conversation worth having without asking readers to accept a conclusion that conflicts with the broader evidence base.
I would like to see the papers that confirm what you are claiming. Did they isolate a virus by separating it from everything else (the dictionary meaning of isolate) in order to test whether it killed cells, or to determine its genetic composition? From what I've read, this has never happened. Virology has redefined "isolation" to mean a cell culture in controlled conditions in a laboratory. So right away, we're not even talking about what happens in a living body. But even assuming a cell culture can tell us anything about how a virus would behave in a body, cell cultures have many substances in them, more than one with genetic material. And without having an actual virus to test, there has never been evidence that they can cause illness, or show how they replicate and cause harm in living tissue. Killing cells in a culture is not evidence of that. The cells in the culture could have been killed in any number of ways. Even Enders, who invented the cell culture methodology, knew that and said so in 2 different papers.
Thanks for laying this out so clearly; you’re raising questions that sound technical, but they’re really about epistemology: what counts as evidence, and how much inference is acceptable in biology. That’s a fair thing to interrogate.
A few clarifications that may help move the discussion forward (without hand-waving or redefining terms mid-stream):
1. “Isolation” in biology has never meant “a thing existing in a vacuum.”
In experimental biology, isolation has always meant operational separation sufficient to test causal properties, not philosophical purity. Bacteria are not studied in a vacuum either; they’re grown in media. Hormones aren’t tested “alone”; they’re studied in cells or organisms. The dictionary definition isn’t actually how causality has ever been established in living systems.
2. Viruses are not inferred from cell death alone.
You’re right that cytopathic effect by itself would be weak evidence. That’s why modern virology does not rely on “cells died, therefore virus.” Instead, it uses converging lines of evidence:
(1) reproducible infection of susceptible cells but not resistant controls
(2) detection of a novel, specific genome that is absent in uninfected cultures
(3) predictable replication kinetics of that genome over time
(4) expression of virus-specific proteins in infected cells (immunolabeling)
(5) loss of infectivity when the genome or structural proteins are disrupted
(6) transmission of the same agent to new cultures or hosts with the same signature
No single step proves causality. The stack does.
3. Genetic material in cultures is not a confound in the way implied.
Yes, cultures contain host DNA/RNA, but viral genomes are identified by:
(1) size and structure inconsistent with host transcripts
(2) absence in negative controls
(3) reproducible assembly into particles
(4) predictable mutation patterns and phylogeny across outbreaks
If “random debris” were being mistaken for viruses, we wouldn’t see the same genomes, structures, antigenicity, and evolutionary behavior repeat across labs, countries, and decades.
4. On Enders: Enders was cautious (as good scientists are) about over-interpreting cell culture findings. That caution is built into modern virology, not ignored by it. What Enders did not argue was that viruses were imaginary or that cell culture invalidated infectious causality; he argued that models have limits, which is still true. That’s why cell culture data are paired with animal models, human pathology, serology, epidemiology, and now molecular genetics.
5. Living-body evidence does exist.
Viruses are detected in vivo in tissues, blood, secretions; immune systems generate specific adaptive responses to them; and disrupting viral entry, replication, or assembly predictably alters disease course. Those observations are not explainable by “culture artifacts” alone.
So I think the real disagreement here isn’t “has anyone ever looked carefully?”, because they have, but whether you accept convergent experimental evidence as legitimate proof in complex biological systems. If the standard is “no inference at all”, then virtually all of modern physiology, microbiology, and pharmacology collapses with it.
Happy to keep this discussion grounded in specific experiments or papers if you’d like, but it helps to be clear about what standard of evidence we’re actually using, because biology has never operated at the level of philosophical isolation you’re proposing.
Epistemology matters. How we know what we know matters. This is not a philosophical issue--it is an issue of how we navigate reality. It is more important than ever for people not to be expected to accept received knowledge or rely on experts, but to be able to verify what they are told is true. Especially when the subject is a life or death matter. We've seen in recent years that "experts" have their own agenda and are not trustworthy.
I don't expect viruses to be isolated in a vacuum. But they need to be separated from other particles to be the subject of experiments. That is basic common sense. Without doing that, it is impossible to tell for sure what is causing the effect you see. Again, this seems as plain as day to me. This kind of isolation is not done for viruses, from what I have learned. If you have papers where the methods sections detail actual isolation of viruses, not "cell culture isolation," I would love to see them.
Bacteria can be seen through a microscope in the live state. Viruses can't. This is why the cell culture methodology exists, but it still doesn't show viruses in the live state. Inferring the existence of viruses is not good enough when the entire world can be locked down and people can be forced to wear masks and take vaccines and give up their rights to freedom of speech and movement because of a virus. There needs to be actual evidence that the virus exists and causes disease. And it needs to be understandable by ordinary people.
Just watch Nobel Prize winning scientist and virologist David Baltimore explain what isolating a virus means. He has no idea. They're clearly full of it.
That clip was the final nudge that tipped me off the "virus/no virus" cliff and I realized they really just don't exist (I was already teetering after reading how "virus 'isolation/identification'" was performed with polio and the tobacco mosaic virus). A lot of these scientists don't quite know what they're doing.
I actually agree with you on the core premise: epistemology matters, and “trust the experts” is not an adequate standard when decisions affect bodily autonomy, livelihoods, and civil liberties. Wanting claims to be verifiable, intelligible, and falsifiable is not anti-science, but it’s the engine of science. Where I think we’re talking past each other is what kind of separation and evidence is possible for different classes of biological entities, and what counts as verification in living systems.
A few clarifications:
1. Separation ≠ vacuum, but it also ≠ philosophical purity. You’re absolutely right that to establish causality, an agent must be separated enough to be the subject of experiment. In virology, that separation is done, just not in the way it’s done for bacteria, because viruses are obligate intracellular parasites. They literally do not exist as metabolically active entities outside cells.
What “isolation” means operationally (and has for ~100 years) is:
(1) physical enrichment of viral particles from clinical material (via filtration, density gradients, ultracentrifugation)
(2) demonstration that those particles contain a consistent genome and protein structure
(3) demonstration that only preparations containing those particles transmit a reproducible effect to susceptible systems, while matched controls do not
That’s not a definitional trick, but it’s adapting experimental design to the biology of the thing being studied.
2. “Cell culture isolation” isn’t the claim, it’s the testbed. You’re correct that cell cultures are artificial systems. But that doesn’t invalidate them any more than heart cells in a dish invalidate cardiac physiology.
What matters is controls:
(1) mock-infected cultures processed identically
(2) cultures exposed to filtered vs unfiltered material
(3) neutralization experiments where antibodies block the effect
(4) serial passage showing increasing viral signal (which toxins and debris cannot do)
(5) loss of effect when the genome is disrupted or entry is blocked
If cells were “dying for any reason”, those patterns would not hold. They do, reproducibly, across labs and decades.
3. “Viruses can’t be seen live” is true and not unique. We also can’t see:
(1) neurotransmitters crossing synapses in real time
(2) hormones binding receptors in vivo
(3) ion channels opening in living humans
Yet we accept them because independent methods converge: structure, function, perturbation, prediction.
Viruses are directly visualized as particles (electron microscopy, cryo-EM), their proteins are resolved at atomic resolution, their genomes are sequenced, their replication can be halted predictably, and their transmission follows testable evolutionary rules. That’s not inference from vibes, but it’s inference from constrained, repeatable observations.
4. On understandability by ordinary people. This is the most important point you made, and I agree.
Science has failed when:
(1) methods are opaque
(2) definitions shift without explanation
(3) people are told “you wouldn’t understand”
(4) authority replaces demonstration
That failure doesn’t mean the underlying biology is fictional, but it means communication and governance broke down. Those are different problems, and conflating them makes it harder to fix either.
5. You’re asking for certainty before power is exercised. That’s a political and ethical demand, not just a scientific one.
But science does not (and never has) operated on absolute certainty. It operates on best current models under uncertainty, constantly revised. The real question is not “do viruses exist beyond all conceivable doubt?” but:
(1) What is the strength of evidence relative to alternatives?
(2) What predictions does the model make, and do they hold?
(3) What would falsify it, and has that been attempted?
Those are legitimate questions. They deserve real answers, not appeals to authority.
Here are a couple readings you might enjoy as good starting point: PMID: 32511316, PMID: 31978945, PMID: 25720475, PMID: 36146795, PMID: 13177653, PMID: 13403020, PMID: 6189183, PMID: 10430945
Ke, Z., Oton, J., Qu, K. et al. Structures and distributions of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins on intact virions. Nature 588, 498–502 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2665-2
Feel free to take a look, and if you already have a specific virus in mind, such as measles, influenza, polio, SARS-CoV-2, or HIV, let me know, and I’d be happy to help further.
None of what you write isolates a purified glob of a virus and so there can be no characterization. The average person will be confused by what you have written to think a virus has been found someplace.
A virus is defined as a particle about 150 nanometers in size, with genetic material inside a protein coat that uses the cells of infected organisms to reproduce and infects others.
👉The definition is only conceptual because no virus has ever been found, but let’s assume it could be found.
Because they are so small you cannot see these on a light microscope and cannot isolate just one particle to characterize. You would need to isolate a purified sample of the same particle and characterize the content and behavior of this as a whole that fits the definition above.
👉Isolation: The only way to do this would be to spin a suspected sample in a density gradient to find a purified batch of identical particles on electron microscopy (which tells you that you have found a purified object, but not yet a virus). You go back to the centrifuge and take out the sample and characterize the parts and their behavior.
A virus has never been found so investigators use indirect and invalid methods to claim there is a virus when there is not. These include
1. Genomes: These are just alphabets output from a computer software. They are fabrications of what a conceptual virus might have as genes but they are not obtained from an actual biologic object. They may relate to data in a Gene Bank, but that data is also not from an actual particle found nor has any prior virus been found to say it relates to. If you have believed that a computer print-out is related to a virus you have been hoodwinked.
2. Cell cultures. These are cells in a test tube from a monkey or other cell line, not the organism thought to be infected. They are starved and given antibiotics that make the cells disintegrate (cytopathic effect) regardless of whether patient fluid was put in the culture or not. Not to mention patient fluid is a mix of millions of things.
👉These cultures DO NOT ISOLATE a particle sample that can be studied as noted above. Does a mix of cells in a test tube isolate a particle? If you have believed that any step of a cell culture actually found a virus particle you have been hoodwinked.
3. Morphology: Images of round little objects on electron microscopy (EM) of a cell culture described above. Cell cultures disintegrate as I noted. Like soap bubbles or a lava lamp, dying cells break up into small fragments that are encapsulated in cell membrane material that can be elongated or round. Things seen on EM are dead shadows of fixed and stained material. They are not isolated objects and cannot be characterized. Investigators choose their favorite shapes and named this shape for the “virus” type they were said to study. Since there are so many shapes, each virus investigator gets to choose one as their own. Silly trick isn’t it? If you have believed that any step of looking at shadows on EM has actually characterized and found a virus particle you have been hoodwinked.
''Viruses are routinely isolated/enriched, used to infect susceptible cells/hosts, and produce reproducible cytopathic effects and specific immune responses, with controls that distinguish contamination, toxins, or culture artifacts from replication-competent virus.''
Have you got the studies for these claims?
''(for viruses that can be engineered/visualized).''
What's that called? Do you mean gain of function?
I could make some good dough if the papers are on the up and up.
When I said “engineered/visualized”, I meant reverse genetics and reporter systems; tools that let you:
1. build an infectious virus from cloned DNA/RNA (to test causality, mutations, neutralization, etc.)
2. insert a reporter (e.g., GFP/luciferase) to track infection/replication in cells/animals
3. create pseudoviruses that display a viral surface protein but can’t replicate (often used for entry/neutralization studies)
GOF is a narrower category where the intent is to increase a property like transmissibility/pathogenicity; most reverse-genetics work is basic mechanism, attenuation, or controlled mapping of function.
This one can be interesting for you too: Daniel Wrapp et al. ,Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation.Science367,1260-1263(2020).DOI:10.1126/science.abb2507
The best thing you can do is exactly what you’re asking for, read the Methods and look for:
1. mock-infected controls
2. filtration/antibiotics/contamination checks
3. plaque assays / titration showing increasing infectivity with passage
4. genome detection that rises over time (not just present)
5. neutralization with specific antibodies (should block infectivity)
And of course it’d be helpful if you knew which specific virus you care about (measles? polio? SARS-CoV-2? influenza?) and I can help point you to the cleanest chain for that pathogen so you don’t have to sift through a thousand papers
at no point in the methods was a virus isolated, even if they use the word isolation.
This is all they say, the only thing pure is the bullshit:
"Vero CCL-81 cells were used for isolation and initial passage. Vero E6, Vero CCL-81, HUH 7.0, 293T, A549, and EFKB3 cells were cultured in Dulbecco’s minimal essential medium (DMEM) supplemented with heat inactivated fetal bovine serum(5 or 10%) and antibiotic/antimyotic (GIBCO). Both NP an OP swabs were used for virus isolation. For the isolation, limiting dilution, and passage 1 of the virus, 50 μl serum free DMEM was pipetted into columns 2–12 of a 96-well tissue culture plate."
There is no sense wasting our time reading your other papers if your first one is abject intentional propaganda.
Betsy and Max have given you ample time to fess up a paper finding an isolated purified glob of particles in a density gradient characterized to fit the definition of a virus. Your writing is confusing indirect and inferred info circling the drain of viro-nonsense. I think you are now spamming Betsy's comment section to confuse readers who are not sure about viruses.
That virology is AS valid or possibly LESS valid than phrenology has been clear to me for some time. Of course how long an interval some time represents is undetermined.
"It thrives because we believe that germs cause disease, viruses exist, and contagion is real." Exactly, all lies, and the contagion one was the real power behind taking away our rights so successfully in 2020/21, especially. Without the contagion lie, they would not have gotten away with lockdowns, masking, "social" distancing, vaccines to save Granny, etc., etc. "Covid" was 100% a lie, and so is contagion of course - disproven in many studies of the past, most notably reported in books like Daniel Roytas' brilliant 'Can You Catch a Cold?', where he looked into 200 failed contagion studies.
"Suffice it to say that, in the ordinary sense of the word, there is no proof, such as would be admitted in any scientific inquiry, that there is any such thing as "contagion".
Whatever science was or has become, it goes where there is money at the end of the experiment. Research is done for money, not helpful results unless those results can further the prospect of yet another drug or vaccine coming to market.
They claim there are millions of virus particles and they could fit on the head of a pin. Why not a virus hive? In the same sense that a bee hive or hornet nest exist. That by tampering with it could cause the entire hive or nest to attack you and kill you...even by accident.
Couldn't viruses exist in the same manner? Be roaming around in giant hives or conglomerations whereby a human coming into contact with them could be attacked and be sufficiently overwhelmed and killed? Just making it up, like the virologists do.
How many virus particles would be enough to consume the body's immune system? Who knows? Not the silly doctors. Viruses do not exist and neither does the immune system. The body works just fine as long as it is not poisoned or invaded by overly-toxic substances. As long as it has decent food, water and sunshine, it survives quite well.
Modern medicine is quite the outlandish oxymoron. Its medicines are always toxic poisons. I don't see how medicines can exist as the optimum body needs no "medical" help, other than perhaps for the very short term in an emergency.
100%. Medicines only exist because people are convinced of their need for them. Weirdly, they don't even realize, usually, that those medicines are not only NOT helping them, but are killing them. The brainwashing is very deep.
Science such as the Royal Academy of Science was about control.
Pasteur recanted germ theory.
The sunspot cycle was linked to disease as far back as Hippocrates. The recent 11 year cycle began in 2019 (Covid?) And ends for UN Agenda 2030. It is peaking in 2025. It causes Influenza due to its influence on the body. Sadly Influenza disappeared and was labelled Covid. No vaccine prevents sunspot diseases, like Influenza. A good reference book is Invisible Rainbow by Firstenberg.
"Sadly Influenza disappeared and was labelled Covid." This didn't happen--the mortality data speaks for itself. This is one the false narratives invented to conceal the huge mass-casualties in 2020, make people think deaths were normal that year. A good reference book is The Illustrated US Mortality Guide: An objective and eye-opening overview of deaths in the United States from 1968 through 2024: Just the numbers.
The issue with modern science is that because of the economic incentives, scientists are rewarded on discoveries. This puts pressure on them to get the results they wanted. The methods sometimes are done in ignorance.
Example in physics:
Double slit experiment that says light is either a wave or a particle.
The detector that is used in the experiment influences the result because any detector uses energy to detect however infinitesimal.
Instead of acknowledging that, scientists got deeper and deeper into quantum theory where things can change without physical or energy interaction. It spawned a "religion" of physics but if they just realize detectors do influence things, the whole thing falls apart.
This is a good playlist on the issues of modern physics... Like medicine, the environment got scientists pushing out discoveries...
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkdAkAC4ItcFyNFBywN0wiZ45pCnMr-Ay
Thank you Betsy for your excellent historical description of how an unproven notion, favored by a few prominent individuals, became 'fact' despite lack of evidence or logical coherence. Virology is primitive subjectivism.
The destruction of objectivity and reason in 'science' has also destroyed other lines of inquiry. By the second half of the 19th century economists were ascribing mathematical 'measurement" to "observed phenomena" by nature not measurable nor observable. For example, GDP is presented as a measurement of 'economic growth', even though it misrepresents and misinterprets production, and even though an industrial economy produces a couple billion products and one can merely guess at whether the "economy" is shrinking or growing. The "phillips curve" supposedly observed a "mathematical function" between "inflation" (defined as the 'average rate' of price increases based on someone's guesswork) and the 'rate of unemployment' (defined as someone's guess as to the percentage of people out of work...skipping over 'do they actually want and intend to return to work?')
Each of these wholistic mental constructs are artificial, non-observable with accuracy, and are built around contradictions. Take 'inflation": When prices rise in response to inflating the supply of money, some prices rise a lot, or a little, or decline as individuals and hosueholds all adjust their spending and saving to new data. No one could keep track of prices and even if they could one minute later it would all change again. There is no "rate of inflation" whatever the official statistics. Yet such anti-concepts have long been regarded as objects of scientific observation, as economists sought to become "scientific".
The broad trend has been the abuse and neglect of reason, in 'science', economics, court history, and other fields. As reason has been abandoned and renounced, power--the threat and use of force in human relationships--has advanced. The 'economists', posturing as wise economic bedside doctors, want to command coercive means of "controlling the economy".
Similarly, 'virologists' are propaganda specialists pushing tyranny and poisoning for 'public health'.
I appreciate the intent here: calling out how inference can masquerade as evidence is a valuable warning in any field, and you’re right that creativity (hypothesis generation) is not the same thing as proof.
Where I think the essay goes off the rails is the leap from “science sometimes over-infers” to “viruses have never been shown to exist / are imaginary.” From a physician-scientist standpoint, that claim doesn’t fit the full evidentiary stack we have for viruses, which includes multiple independent modalities that converge on the same entities:
1. Visualization isn’t limited to “arrows on EM.” EM is one tool, but we also have cryo-EM, immunogold labeling, and in many cases live-cell imaging of viral proteins/replication complexes (for viruses that can be engineered/visualized). The idea that we “never see” viruses in biologic material isn’t accurate; we often see them as virions, and we also track them as replicating genomes and proteins inside cells.
2. Purification + infectivity + specificity: virology doesn’t rely on imagination as a substitute for experiments. Viruses are routinely isolated/enriched, used to infect susceptible cells/hosts, and produce reproducible cytopathic effects and specific immune responses, with controls that distinguish contamination, toxins, or culture artifacts from replication-competent virus.
3. Genetics is not “guesswork.” The strongest modern evidence is that viral genomes can be detected, sequenced, and tracked with predictable evolution and transmission chains; you can introduce targeted mutations and predictably change phenotype (attenuation, tropism, antigenicity), then reverse/restore it. That’s hard to explain as “cell debris” or microscope artifacts.
None of that means modern biomedicine is incentive-clean or epistemically perfect (your critique of incentives and groupthink is fair). But “incentives distort science” and “viruses don’t exist” are very different claims, and the latter requires dismissing a large, cross-validated body of experimental work.
If you want to keep the spirit of your argument while tightening it scientifically, a stronger version might be: “we should be explicit about which parts of infectious disease claims are direct observation, which are inference, and what would falsify our models.” That’s a conversation worth having without asking readers to accept a conclusion that conflicts with the broader evidence base.
I would like to see the papers that confirm what you are claiming. Did they isolate a virus by separating it from everything else (the dictionary meaning of isolate) in order to test whether it killed cells, or to determine its genetic composition? From what I've read, this has never happened. Virology has redefined "isolation" to mean a cell culture in controlled conditions in a laboratory. So right away, we're not even talking about what happens in a living body. But even assuming a cell culture can tell us anything about how a virus would behave in a body, cell cultures have many substances in them, more than one with genetic material. And without having an actual virus to test, there has never been evidence that they can cause illness, or show how they replicate and cause harm in living tissue. Killing cells in a culture is not evidence of that. The cells in the culture could have been killed in any number of ways. Even Enders, who invented the cell culture methodology, knew that and said so in 2 different papers.
Thanks for laying this out so clearly; you’re raising questions that sound technical, but they’re really about epistemology: what counts as evidence, and how much inference is acceptable in biology. That’s a fair thing to interrogate.
A few clarifications that may help move the discussion forward (without hand-waving or redefining terms mid-stream):
1. “Isolation” in biology has never meant “a thing existing in a vacuum.”
In experimental biology, isolation has always meant operational separation sufficient to test causal properties, not philosophical purity. Bacteria are not studied in a vacuum either; they’re grown in media. Hormones aren’t tested “alone”; they’re studied in cells or organisms. The dictionary definition isn’t actually how causality has ever been established in living systems.
2. Viruses are not inferred from cell death alone.
You’re right that cytopathic effect by itself would be weak evidence. That’s why modern virology does not rely on “cells died, therefore virus.” Instead, it uses converging lines of evidence:
(1) reproducible infection of susceptible cells but not resistant controls
(2) detection of a novel, specific genome that is absent in uninfected cultures
(3) predictable replication kinetics of that genome over time
(4) expression of virus-specific proteins in infected cells (immunolabeling)
(5) loss of infectivity when the genome or structural proteins are disrupted
(6) transmission of the same agent to new cultures or hosts with the same signature
No single step proves causality. The stack does.
3. Genetic material in cultures is not a confound in the way implied.
Yes, cultures contain host DNA/RNA, but viral genomes are identified by:
(1) size and structure inconsistent with host transcripts
(2) absence in negative controls
(3) reproducible assembly into particles
(4) predictable mutation patterns and phylogeny across outbreaks
If “random debris” were being mistaken for viruses, we wouldn’t see the same genomes, structures, antigenicity, and evolutionary behavior repeat across labs, countries, and decades.
4. On Enders: Enders was cautious (as good scientists are) about over-interpreting cell culture findings. That caution is built into modern virology, not ignored by it. What Enders did not argue was that viruses were imaginary or that cell culture invalidated infectious causality; he argued that models have limits, which is still true. That’s why cell culture data are paired with animal models, human pathology, serology, epidemiology, and now molecular genetics.
5. Living-body evidence does exist.
Viruses are detected in vivo in tissues, blood, secretions; immune systems generate specific adaptive responses to them; and disrupting viral entry, replication, or assembly predictably alters disease course. Those observations are not explainable by “culture artifacts” alone.
So I think the real disagreement here isn’t “has anyone ever looked carefully?”, because they have, but whether you accept convergent experimental evidence as legitimate proof in complex biological systems. If the standard is “no inference at all”, then virtually all of modern physiology, microbiology, and pharmacology collapses with it.
Happy to keep this discussion grounded in specific experiments or papers if you’d like, but it helps to be clear about what standard of evidence we’re actually using, because biology has never operated at the level of philosophical isolation you’re proposing.
Epistemology matters. How we know what we know matters. This is not a philosophical issue--it is an issue of how we navigate reality. It is more important than ever for people not to be expected to accept received knowledge or rely on experts, but to be able to verify what they are told is true. Especially when the subject is a life or death matter. We've seen in recent years that "experts" have their own agenda and are not trustworthy.
I don't expect viruses to be isolated in a vacuum. But they need to be separated from other particles to be the subject of experiments. That is basic common sense. Without doing that, it is impossible to tell for sure what is causing the effect you see. Again, this seems as plain as day to me. This kind of isolation is not done for viruses, from what I have learned. If you have papers where the methods sections detail actual isolation of viruses, not "cell culture isolation," I would love to see them.
Bacteria can be seen through a microscope in the live state. Viruses can't. This is why the cell culture methodology exists, but it still doesn't show viruses in the live state. Inferring the existence of viruses is not good enough when the entire world can be locked down and people can be forced to wear masks and take vaccines and give up their rights to freedom of speech and movement because of a virus. There needs to be actual evidence that the virus exists and causes disease. And it needs to be understandable by ordinary people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTZWv-Xb-uI
Just watch Nobel Prize winning scientist and virologist David Baltimore explain what isolating a virus means. He has no idea. They're clearly full of it.
I’ve seen that. It's excruciating! I felt embarrassed at his cringy response.
That clip was the final nudge that tipped me off the "virus/no virus" cliff and I realized they really just don't exist (I was already teetering after reading how "virus 'isolation/identification'" was performed with polio and the tobacco mosaic virus). A lot of these scientists don't quite know what they're doing.
I actually agree with you on the core premise: epistemology matters, and “trust the experts” is not an adequate standard when decisions affect bodily autonomy, livelihoods, and civil liberties. Wanting claims to be verifiable, intelligible, and falsifiable is not anti-science, but it’s the engine of science. Where I think we’re talking past each other is what kind of separation and evidence is possible for different classes of biological entities, and what counts as verification in living systems.
A few clarifications:
1. Separation ≠ vacuum, but it also ≠ philosophical purity. You’re absolutely right that to establish causality, an agent must be separated enough to be the subject of experiment. In virology, that separation is done, just not in the way it’s done for bacteria, because viruses are obligate intracellular parasites. They literally do not exist as metabolically active entities outside cells.
What “isolation” means operationally (and has for ~100 years) is:
(1) physical enrichment of viral particles from clinical material (via filtration, density gradients, ultracentrifugation)
(2) demonstration that those particles contain a consistent genome and protein structure
(3) demonstration that only preparations containing those particles transmit a reproducible effect to susceptible systems, while matched controls do not
That’s not a definitional trick, but it’s adapting experimental design to the biology of the thing being studied.
2. “Cell culture isolation” isn’t the claim, it’s the testbed. You’re correct that cell cultures are artificial systems. But that doesn’t invalidate them any more than heart cells in a dish invalidate cardiac physiology.
What matters is controls:
(1) mock-infected cultures processed identically
(2) cultures exposed to filtered vs unfiltered material
(3) neutralization experiments where antibodies block the effect
(4) serial passage showing increasing viral signal (which toxins and debris cannot do)
(5) loss of effect when the genome is disrupted or entry is blocked
If cells were “dying for any reason”, those patterns would not hold. They do, reproducibly, across labs and decades.
3. “Viruses can’t be seen live” is true and not unique. We also can’t see:
(1) neurotransmitters crossing synapses in real time
(2) hormones binding receptors in vivo
(3) ion channels opening in living humans
Yet we accept them because independent methods converge: structure, function, perturbation, prediction.
Viruses are directly visualized as particles (electron microscopy, cryo-EM), their proteins are resolved at atomic resolution, their genomes are sequenced, their replication can be halted predictably, and their transmission follows testable evolutionary rules. That’s not inference from vibes, but it’s inference from constrained, repeatable observations.
4. On understandability by ordinary people. This is the most important point you made, and I agree.
Science has failed when:
(1) methods are opaque
(2) definitions shift without explanation
(3) people are told “you wouldn’t understand”
(4) authority replaces demonstration
That failure doesn’t mean the underlying biology is fictional, but it means communication and governance broke down. Those are different problems, and conflating them makes it harder to fix either.
5. You’re asking for certainty before power is exercised. That’s a political and ethical demand, not just a scientific one.
But science does not (and never has) operated on absolute certainty. It operates on best current models under uncertainty, constantly revised. The real question is not “do viruses exist beyond all conceivable doubt?” but:
(1) What is the strength of evidence relative to alternatives?
(2) What predictions does the model make, and do they hold?
(3) What would falsify it, and has that been attempted?
Those are legitimate questions. They deserve real answers, not appeals to authority.
Here are a couple readings you might enjoy as good starting point: PMID: 32511316, PMID: 31978945, PMID: 25720475, PMID: 36146795, PMID: 13177653, PMID: 13403020, PMID: 6189183, PMID: 10430945
Ke, Z., Oton, J., Qu, K. et al. Structures and distributions of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins on intact virions. Nature 588, 498–502 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2665-2
https://doi.org/10.1016/0042-6822(61)90274-4
Feel free to take a look, and if you already have a specific virus in mind, such as measles, influenza, polio, SARS-CoV-2, or HIV, let me know, and I’d be happy to help further.
None of what you write isolates a purified glob of a virus and so there can be no characterization. The average person will be confused by what you have written to think a virus has been found someplace.
A virus is defined as a particle about 150 nanometers in size, with genetic material inside a protein coat that uses the cells of infected organisms to reproduce and infects others.
👉The definition is only conceptual because no virus has ever been found, but let’s assume it could be found.
Because they are so small you cannot see these on a light microscope and cannot isolate just one particle to characterize. You would need to isolate a purified sample of the same particle and characterize the content and behavior of this as a whole that fits the definition above.
👉Isolation: The only way to do this would be to spin a suspected sample in a density gradient to find a purified batch of identical particles on electron microscopy (which tells you that you have found a purified object, but not yet a virus). You go back to the centrifuge and take out the sample and characterize the parts and their behavior.
A virus has never been found so investigators use indirect and invalid methods to claim there is a virus when there is not. These include
1. Genomes: These are just alphabets output from a computer software. They are fabrications of what a conceptual virus might have as genes but they are not obtained from an actual biologic object. They may relate to data in a Gene Bank, but that data is also not from an actual particle found nor has any prior virus been found to say it relates to. If you have believed that a computer print-out is related to a virus you have been hoodwinked.
2. Cell cultures. These are cells in a test tube from a monkey or other cell line, not the organism thought to be infected. They are starved and given antibiotics that make the cells disintegrate (cytopathic effect) regardless of whether patient fluid was put in the culture or not. Not to mention patient fluid is a mix of millions of things.
👉These cultures DO NOT ISOLATE a particle sample that can be studied as noted above. Does a mix of cells in a test tube isolate a particle? If you have believed that any step of a cell culture actually found a virus particle you have been hoodwinked.
3. Morphology: Images of round little objects on electron microscopy (EM) of a cell culture described above. Cell cultures disintegrate as I noted. Like soap bubbles or a lava lamp, dying cells break up into small fragments that are encapsulated in cell membrane material that can be elongated or round. Things seen on EM are dead shadows of fixed and stained material. They are not isolated objects and cannot be characterized. Investigators choose their favorite shapes and named this shape for the “virus” type they were said to study. Since there are so many shapes, each virus investigator gets to choose one as their own. Silly trick isn’t it? If you have believed that any step of looking at shadows on EM has actually characterized and found a virus particle you have been hoodwinked.
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''Purification + infectivity + specificity''
''Viruses are routinely isolated/enriched, used to infect susceptible cells/hosts, and produce reproducible cytopathic effects and specific immune responses, with controls that distinguish contamination, toxins, or culture artifacts from replication-competent virus.''
Have you got the studies for these claims?
''(for viruses that can be engineered/visualized).''
What's that called? Do you mean gain of function?
I could make some good dough if the papers are on the up and up.
Totally fair to ask. Here are a few starting points:
PMID: 32511316, CDC ISSN 1080-6059, PMID: 32568027, PMID: 10430945
When I said “engineered/visualized”, I meant reverse genetics and reporter systems; tools that let you:
1. build an infectious virus from cloned DNA/RNA (to test causality, mutations, neutralization, etc.)
2. insert a reporter (e.g., GFP/luciferase) to track infection/replication in cells/animals
3. create pseudoviruses that display a viral surface protein but can’t replicate (often used for entry/neutralization studies)
GOF is a narrower category where the intent is to increase a property like transmissibility/pathogenicity; most reverse-genetics work is basic mechanism, attenuation, or controlled mapping of function.
This one can be interesting for you too: Daniel Wrapp et al. ,Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation.Science367,1260-1263(2020).DOI:10.1126/science.abb2507
The best thing you can do is exactly what you’re asking for, read the Methods and look for:
1. mock-infected controls
2. filtration/antibiotics/contamination checks
3. plaque assays / titration showing increasing infectivity with passage
4. genome detection that rises over time (not just present)
5. neutralization with specific antibodies (should block infectivity)
And of course it’d be helpful if you knew which specific virus you care about (measles? polio? SARS-CoV-2? influenza?) and I can help point you to the cleanest chain for that pathogen so you don’t have to sift through a thousand papers
The first paper you link is here
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7239045/
at no point in the methods was a virus isolated, even if they use the word isolation.
This is all they say, the only thing pure is the bullshit:
"Vero CCL-81 cells were used for isolation and initial passage. Vero E6, Vero CCL-81, HUH 7.0, 293T, A549, and EFKB3 cells were cultured in Dulbecco’s minimal essential medium (DMEM) supplemented with heat inactivated fetal bovine serum(5 or 10%) and antibiotic/antimyotic (GIBCO). Both NP an OP swabs were used for virus isolation. For the isolation, limiting dilution, and passage 1 of the virus, 50 μl serum free DMEM was pipetted into columns 2–12 of a 96-well tissue culture plate."
There is no sense wasting our time reading your other papers if your first one is abject intentional propaganda.
Where is the link?
For virus isolation, transmission and causation.
I don't want the starting points, I want methodology and results. Plain to see.
Stop messing about.
You're costing me money.
Please read the response carefully and we’ll be able to help further
Betsy and Max have given you ample time to fess up a paper finding an isolated purified glob of particles in a density gradient characterized to fit the definition of a virus. Your writing is confusing indirect and inferred info circling the drain of viro-nonsense. I think you are now spamming Betsy's comment section to confuse readers who are not sure about viruses.
That virology is AS valid or possibly LESS valid than phrenology has been clear to me for some time. Of course how long an interval some time represents is undetermined.
"It thrives because we believe that germs cause disease, viruses exist, and contagion is real." Exactly, all lies, and the contagion one was the real power behind taking away our rights so successfully in 2020/21, especially. Without the contagion lie, they would not have gotten away with lockdowns, masking, "social" distancing, vaccines to save Granny, etc., etc. "Covid" was 100% a lie, and so is contagion of course - disproven in many studies of the past, most notably reported in books like Daniel Roytas' brilliant 'Can You Catch a Cold?', where he looked into 200 failed contagion studies.
"Suffice it to say that, in the ordinary sense of the word, there is no proof, such as would be admitted in any scientific inquiry, that there is any such thing as "contagion".
- Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals, 1858.
Whatever science was or has become, it goes where there is money at the end of the experiment. Research is done for money, not helpful results unless those results can further the prospect of yet another drug or vaccine coming to market.
They claim there are millions of virus particles and they could fit on the head of a pin. Why not a virus hive? In the same sense that a bee hive or hornet nest exist. That by tampering with it could cause the entire hive or nest to attack you and kill you...even by accident.
Couldn't viruses exist in the same manner? Be roaming around in giant hives or conglomerations whereby a human coming into contact with them could be attacked and be sufficiently overwhelmed and killed? Just making it up, like the virologists do.
How many virus particles would be enough to consume the body's immune system? Who knows? Not the silly doctors. Viruses do not exist and neither does the immune system. The body works just fine as long as it is not poisoned or invaded by overly-toxic substances. As long as it has decent food, water and sunshine, it survives quite well.
Modern medicine is quite the outlandish oxymoron. Its medicines are always toxic poisons. I don't see how medicines can exist as the optimum body needs no "medical" help, other than perhaps for the very short term in an emergency.
100%. Medicines only exist because people are convinced of their need for them. Weirdly, they don't even realize, usually, that those medicines are not only NOT helping them, but are killing them. The brainwashing is very deep.
Science such as the Royal Academy of Science was about control.
Pasteur recanted germ theory.
The sunspot cycle was linked to disease as far back as Hippocrates. The recent 11 year cycle began in 2019 (Covid?) And ends for UN Agenda 2030. It is peaking in 2025. It causes Influenza due to its influence on the body. Sadly Influenza disappeared and was labelled Covid. No vaccine prevents sunspot diseases, like Influenza. A good reference book is Invisible Rainbow by Firstenberg.
"Sadly Influenza disappeared and was labelled Covid." This didn't happen--the mortality data speaks for itself. This is one the false narratives invented to conceal the huge mass-casualties in 2020, make people think deaths were normal that year. A good reference book is The Illustrated US Mortality Guide: An objective and eye-opening overview of deaths in the United States from 1968 through 2024: Just the numbers.