How the meme that 'viruses' are fiction can free both humanity and this word

'Virus' and 'contagion' have had their identities stolen by the medical establishment

May 07, 2024

Hi there, welcome back!

In last week’s post, I explored the concept of a “viral meme,” and concluded that even though it is nonsense to call anything “viral” since viruses don’t exist, viral may be a useful word anyway. A meme is an idea or a bit of information that spreads through the population in the way that “viruses” supposedly spread (according to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who coined the term “meme” in 1976—I’m not a fan of most of his thinking, but this word seems appropriate and useful).

Some prefer the word “rhizomatic,” using the way plants, especially trees, communicate via their roots, as a metaphor. And there is something very organic about that, as well as appealing. As one who loves trees, I was totally charmed when I learned that they do communicate across miles via root systems, warning each other when, say, a certain insect or a drought was on the way, as well as sharing nutrients and water. (I actually was the beneficiary of this kind of communication among oaks along the Mississippi River where I live, a story I will tell you sometime.)

brown forest during daytime — Photo by Kristijan Arsov on Unsplash

Somehow, though, the word “viral” has a certain charge, for me, that makes it more descriptive of the way ideas spread. I’m still not entirely sure about this, so this article will be on the order of an exploration. The word has a sharpness to it, a bit of a sting, almost. Something that catches attention, that causes the hearer to think, to consider, to wonder. I’ll pick up this idea again later, when we have looked more closely at the words “virus” and “contagion.”

Medical establishment definitions

The word “virus” as it is used by modern medical science is the entity which has never been found:

Any of a large group of submicroscopic infectious agents that are usually regarded as nonliving extremely complex molecules, that typically contain a protein coat surrounding an RNA or DNA core of genetic material but no semipermeable membrane, that are capable of growth and multiplication only in living cells, and that cause various important diseases in humans, animals, and plants. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

“Contagion” as it is used by medical science also has to do with disease and is connected to “virus”: “the transmission of a disease by direct or indirect contact,” according to Merriam-Webster, which also includes this definition: “a disease-producing agent (such as a virus)” and, under the subheading “poison,” “corrupting influence or contact.” In the mind of modern medical science, these two words, virus and contagion, are linked together—they are even, sometimes, the same thing.

These two words, however, did not always have these meanings. They were in use with different meetings before the modern era when the disproven germ hypothesis took over as the explanation for why people get sick. We can find those original meanings by looking at the etymology section for each in the dictionary.

Pre-19th century definitions

The word “virus” originally meant “poison.” According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “virus” is from the Latin word, spelled the same, meaning “venom, poisonous fluid, acrid element in a substance, secretion with medical or magical properties,” and its etymology goes back to an Indo-European base meaning "poison, venom." Merriam-Webster also tells us that it was a Dutch microbiologist named Martinus Beijerinck who first used this word to mean a submicroscopic infectious agent in 1898. That was right around the time when previous understandings of what caused people to become ill, and how to treat it, were being replaced by the disproven germ hypothesis (commonly known as “the germ theory”).

“Contagion” has a longer history of a meaning that connects with the disproven germ hypothesis. Its definition as “contact resulting in disease, infection, pollution” goes back to the 14^th century, according to Merriam-Webster. The dictionary also tells us, however, that the stem of the word simply means “to be in contact with, arrive at, affect, fall to one’s lot.”

The 14^th century was the era of the “Black Plague” in Europe, supposedly caused by a highly infectious bacteria that spread to humans from rats. The debunking of this story is a sidetrack from this post today, though if you’re interested, you could check out Sam Bailey’s video on it. I bring it up only to suggest that the word “contagion” seems to have taken on its present-day meaning at the same time as millions of people were dying from something that they couldn’t explain and that may have appeared to be spread by coming in contact with those who were ill (but that is not what was going on—see Sam’s video).

Cold, weather changes, exposure to toxins

In his recently published book Can You Catch a Cold? Daniel Roytas explains that prior to the era of Louis Pasteur (mid to late 19th century), who with his supporters and popularizers was mainly responsible for the disproven germ hypothesis becoming the accepted explanation of disease genesis, the predominant understanding was that environmental factors were the causes of disease. Such factors included exposure to cold and changes in humidity and barometric pressure, as well as internal and external conditions, including exposure to toxins.

According to Roytas’ heavily researched book, changes in weather, mainly exposure to low temperatures, were widely accepted by doctors and scientists as the main cause of illnesses like colds and flu up until the early 1900s (p. 35). That’s why they have those names—“flu” is short for “influenza di freddo,” influence of the cold. Even though there were those who argued for contagious particles passing between people, research regarding various 19^th-century epidemics could not turn up any evidence of this (p.36). Contagion was falling out of use as an explanation for the way illnesses sometimes seemed to spread among people.

In addition, the Industrial Revolution was well underway by the late 19^th century, bringing with it an increasing number of poisonous substances that workers were being exposed to in the course of their jobs in factories, and people in general were being exposed to the pollution in the air and water from those factories and from the burning of coal to run them. Although there was little knowledge about these substances and their effects on the body, it is my extrapolation that this was the era when exposure to industrial toxins began in earnest, and it has only increased exponentially since then as the number of industrial poisons to which both workers and the general public are exposed multiplies every year. It seems logical to me that doctors in the late 19^th century were already seeing the results of these exposures as the bodies of their sick patients were attempting to cleanse themselves of these substances.

People congregating in cities as the Industrial Revolution got going also led to increases in unsanitary conditions, especially in the poorer parts of town. People were increasingly exposed to various kinds of filth in the appalling living conditions in some of these places.

Terrain theory vs. zymotic theory

Roytas explains that at this time, there were two schools of thought about disease: the terrain school and the zymotic theory. Those supporting the terrain view argued that “disease” was the body’s process of clearing itself of unwanted influences or substances, usually by breaking them down along with breaking down dead and dying tissue so they could be eliminated via vomiting, diarrhea, coughing, sneezing, skin rashes, etc. A person’s terrain was also conceived as the larger environment of their life—“the soil upon which people live plays a role in disease as much as the internal ‘soil’ of their body” (p. 60).

Alongside ideas of terrain was the zymotic theory, which held that each named disease, such as typhoid, tuberculosis, or cholera, was caused by a specific chemical toxin or poison, called a zyma. These poisons were defined as the fermenting or putrefying waste products of microorganisms breaking down damaged tissue. When this putrefying waste started to damage healthy tissue, the disease was present. Zymas could originate within the body as part of its efforts to eliminate metabolic waste products, or they could be from the external environment, when microbes would go to work on various kinds of filth and waste such as what was often present in unclean, crowded cities like London where outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever happened.

Both the terrain view and zymotic theory rejected the notion of contagion, and studies of various epidemics in the 19^th century found no evidence for it.

Zymotic theory echoed the terrain model in arguing that bacteria do not attack healthy tissue. However, as the “germ theory” began to gain traction in the latter part of the 19th century, the zymotic idea that each disease has a specific toxin as its cause was similar enough to the “germ theory” idea that each disease had a specific microorganism as its cause, that ultimately the “germ theory” absorbed zymotic theory and superseded it. As of 1898, “viruses” were included with bacteria as the germs that caused disease. And, because contagion was an essential aspect of the “germ theory,” contagion in its “spreading of disease” meaning also came back into prominence after being nearly dropped for several centuries previously. Terrain was marginalized, though there were, and have always been, doctors who supported it and outspokenly criticized the unproven germ hypothesis.

Word identity theft

So the meanings of the words “virus” and “contagion” have changed over time, though perhaps not exactly organically. Veronika Bond, who writes about language, among other things, calls changes like those undergone by “contagion” and “virus” “verboklepsy,” or word identity theft. Both of these terms had their identities hijacked by the medical hierarchy in the 19^th century, which seems to be a time when the single narrative for illness that we know today was being solidified into a club that could batter other views into quiescence.

This was the time when what are now called “alternative” health approaches such as homeopathy and herbalism were having their identities crushed by a medical establishment set on framing all health in terms of the unproven germ hypothesis. These two modalities, along with chiropractic, never entirely lost their credibility with people, fortunately, and they have come back strongly over the second half of the 20^th century and the first part of the 21^st.

So, since reclaiming the word “virus” in its original meaning is unlikely, and I am firmly committed to the nonexistence of viruses (until actual evidence of their reality shows up), the question remains whether “viral” can legitimately be used to describe the spread of ideas through a population. I’ll have to admit I am of two minds. There’s an energy in the word “viral” that is not present in the word “rhizomatic.” It has to do with the fact that “virus” did originally mean poison.

But it is also true that memes which spread virally can be either positive or negative—some are poison, but many are not. Case in point: the “meme” that “viruses” are tiny particles that cause disease is a poisonous meme. And I would like to replace it with a non-poisonous meme—perhaps an antidote meme to neutralize the venom. That would be the meme that “viruses” have never been proven to exist—they are fictional. This Substack column is my contribution to pushing that meme out into the public discourse.

What is really poisonous, though, is how this meme of “deadly virus” has been used for many decades, and especially in the past four years, to frighten people, keep them dependent on the medical industrial complex, and as we’ve seen in the plandemic, as the basis of an effort to control, reduce, and genetically alter the entire population of the world. Now that is truly poisonous. It’s not so much the “virus” itself that is the true poison, even though that is the real meaning of the word! It is the narrative that has been forced into place around it and the vicious use to which it has been put that are highly poisonous. Highly toxic. Absolutely opposed to human freedom and wholeness.

I find myself at this point feeling that this little word, which used to have a descriptive meaning, has had its identity so altered that it has been turned into something quite horrible. If words have fairies, as Veronika Bond argues, the “virus” fairy has been dismally abused.

And I come around once again to the fundamental, absolute, and urgent importance that the truth about “viruses” be understood. This, I am firmly convinced, is the thread which, when we start pulling it, can unravel all the control narratives of the past and present and free humanity from eons of captivity by fraudulent and poisonous memes. We are in a moment when that momentous outcome is possible. And we might even free this little word from its bondage.

Thanks for reading. Hope to see you next week.

Some worthwhile reading

Gratitude to Veronika for writing about word fairies! Her Substack is full of intriguing thoughts, including an entire theory of consciousness called the Noctarine.