Virus Denialism, By Brian Simpson

Being a Covid vax sceptic, then a general vax sceptic, I have been aware of the position of viral denialism for some time, but never got down to researching it. The following is my initial investigation. I do not claim to have a decided position as I am still thinking things through, but I thought thinking out loud in a blog piece may be interesting, maybe to write as a Wikipedia style piece, with lots of headings.So, here goes:

Virus denialism refers to the belief that viruses, as submicroscopic infectious agents that cause disease, do not exist or are not the primary cause of diseases attributed to them. Proponents of this view, often found in alternative health communities or among sceptics of mainstream medical science, like many of us at the blog, argue that diseases typically linked to viruses are instead caused by factors such as environmental toxins, stress, or imbalances in the body's internal "terrain." Virus denialism is a controversial stance, widely rejected by the mainstream scientific community, and that alone is good reason for social critics to examine it, given how corrupt main stream science is, from mathematical logic, right through to the so-called social sciences (which are really postmodern sorcery).

Historical Context

The concept of viruses as disease-causing agents emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, building on earlier uses of the term "virus" in its Latin sense, meaning a "poison" or contagious fluid, as used by Edward Jenner for smallpox and Louis Pasteur for rabies. Advances in bacteriology and microscopy led researchers to hypothesise the existence of "filterable agents" smaller than bacteria, capable of passing through porcelain filters and causing disease when injected into healthy animals. By the 1920s, scientists like Thomas M. Rivers formalised the modern concept of viruses as obligate intracellular parasites requiring living cells to replicate.

Virus denialism gained traction in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, particularly during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the Covid-19 plandemic, as some individuals questioned the scientific consensus on viral causation. The movement draws on historical scepticism of medical science, including the terrain theory of Antoine Béchamp, which posits that microbes are a consequence, not a cause, of disease.

Core Arguments

Virus denialists present several arguments to challenge the existence of viruses. The main claims include:

1. Inability to Directly Observe or Isolate Viruses

Denialists argue that viruses cannot be seen undermicroscopes and that their isolation in laboratories is flawed. They claim that what scientists identify as viruses may be cellular debris, exosomes (vesicles released by cells), or laboratory artifacts. They often demand "pure isolation" of a virus, free from other biological material, as proof of its existence. That seems to be very difficult to achieve so this is taken as a lack of proof.

2. Alternative Causes of Disease

Proponents assert that diseases attributed to viruses are caused by environmental toxins, poor nutrition, stress, or imbalances in the body's terrain. They argue that the correlation between viral detection and disease is coincidental, and that terrain theory better explains illness. For example, some claim that conditions like influenza or herpes result from lifestyle factors rather than infectious agents.

3. Historical Misattribution

Denialists contend that the development of virology was based on flawed assumptions by early researchers like Pasteur and Rivers. They argue that the original use of "virus" as a generic term for a contagious poison led to the erroneous modern concept of viruses as distinct entities. Some suggest virology emerged to justify vaccines and pharmaceutical interventions, a conspiracy by Big Pharma. Who would think, after the Covid plandemic, that Big Pharma would engage in conspiracies!!

4. Failure to Meet Koch's Postulates

Virus denialists claim that no virus fully satisfies Koch's postulates, a set of 19th-century criteria for establishing a microbe as the cause of a disease. These postulates require that the microbe be found in all cases of the disease, isolated, and capable of causing the disease in a healthy host. Denialists argue that viruses, which require host cells to replicate, fail these criteria. Defenders argue, that Koch's postulates only apply to bacteria, not viruses, which begs the question at issue. If a virus is a cause of a disease say disease X, then basic principles of causation require that the virus be found in all cases of the disease, otherwise there is another cause.

5. Pharmaceutical Conspiracy

Some denialists allege that viruses are a construct of the pharmaceutical industry, Big Pharma, to promote vaccines and antiviral drugs. They view virology as a pseudoscience perpetuated by institutional bias and financial interests, particularly during pandemics like Covid-19, which they claim was fabricated to justify control measures. I go along with this even if viruses exist.

Virus denialism has been associated with several individuals and groups. Notable figures include:

Antoine Béchamp (1816–1908): A French scientist whose terrain theory, emphasising the body's internal environment over external microbes, is often cited by denialists.

Peter Duesberg: A molecular biologist who argued that HIV does not cause AIDS, attributing the disease to lifestyle factors like drug use. While Duesberg's hypothesis questions viral causation for a specific disease, it is distinct from categorical virus denialism.

Stefan Lanka: A German biologist who denies the existence of viruses, including measles, and has offered financial rewards for proof of their existence, apparently unmet.

Terrain Theory Advocates: Modern proponents of terrain theory, such as Andrew Kaufman and Thomas Cowan, argue that viruses are misidentified cellular particles and that disease stems from internal imbalances. Their views gained attention during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Online communities, particularly on platforms like X, have amplified virus denialism, often framing it as resistance to medical orthodoxy or pharmaceutical profiteering by corrupt Big Pharma. These discussions frequently cite the complexity of disease causation and historical shifts in medical understanding to question virology.

Virus denialism has influenced public discourse, particularly during pandemics, by fostering scepticism of public health measures like vaccination and masking. The movement highlights broader epistemological questions about how scientific knowledge is established, as noted by philosophers and medical historians who emphasise the complexity and uncertainty in understanding disease causation. There is further discussion of these philosophical issues in this article:

https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/on-the-claim-that-viruses-dont-exist

"When I was studying philosophy in graduate school, my favorite class was epistemology, or how we know what we think we know.

As philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein have observed, "knowing" something to be true isn't as easy to establish as we often assume that it is.

This is especially the case in so-called "medical science." Many make the unexamined assumption that "medical science" is akin to Newtonian mechanics, but this is a gross misconception. The causes of sickness and health—both in individuals and in large populations—are immeasurably more complex and multifactorial than most other objects of scientific analysis.

Consider that while many reasonable people often debate about health and disease, none would debate about whether jumping off twenty-story building onto concrete would result in severe injury or death. A complex situation is inevitably riddled with ambiguity and uncertain outcomes and therefore becomes a subject of opposing interpretations and debate.

During the Covid pandemic, vaccine advocates often proclaimed that they "follow the science," as though science was a settled entity in their possession. And yet, even a superficial study of the history of medicine teaches us that every generation has overestimated its understanding of the human body and disease. Only an arrogant fool would believe that scientific understanding has culminated with his generation.

Proper scientific inquiry has always given us glimpses into how much we don't know. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. put it, "Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details."

I often think about Holme's statement when some of my readers tell me "Viruses don't exist!"

Note that this is a categorical claim that a basic concept in the study of disease is a fiction—a figment of the human imagination.

The claim is not that the significance of a contagious virus as a causative agent is often overstated, and that other factors may play a greater role in causing the disease.

Nor are these readers claiming that the attribution of a given disease to viral causes may be unfounded.

The latter argument was made by the molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, who proposed that the disease syndrome called AIDS is not the direct result of an agent called human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), commonly diagnosed by the presence of antibodies against HIV found in the blood of AIDS patients.

Note that Duesberg's argument is not the same as the categorical claim that "viruses don't exist."

The claim that "Viruses don't exist!" raises the following pressing question.

Why, around the turn of the 20th century, did guys all over Europe and the United States start believing in the existence of submicroscopic agents that cause diseases?

This is a huge and fascinating subject about which one could write thousands of pages. My intention with this essay is to offer a conceptual framework for readers to start thinking about this fascinating subject in a less categorical, either/or way.

Prior to the end of the 19th century, the word "virus" was used in the ancient Latin meaning of the word—that is, a "poison" in the form of a slimy fluid that seemed to have contagious, disease causing properties. This was the meaning of the word as Edward Jenner used it to describe the fluid that oozes out of smallpox blisters.

Likewise, Pasteur used "virus" in the old sense when he spoke about the rabies "virus" found in the saliva of rabid animals. If humans or animals were inoculated with this "poison," they too frequently developed the same disease symptoms.

With the development of bacteriology and of ever more powerful microscopes during the last 20 years of the 19th century, infectious disease researchers began to wonder if there could be something in fluids associated with disease that could be much smaller than a bacterium—that is, so small that it cannot be seen with even the most powerful optical microscope.

During the first 30 years of the 20th century, lab researchers used porcelain filters to filter fluids associated with diseases. The object was to remove any particles that would be visible under the most powerful microscope they could lay their hands on.

They then injected this ultra-filtered fluid into healthy lab animals, and they frequently observed that such animals developed the same disease symptoms as the animal from which the fluid was taken. Such experiments seemed to confirm the perception that there was a disease-causing agent in the fluid that was much smaller than a bacterium.

In a seminal 1926 lecture and in a 1927 paper, the American infectious disease researcher, Thomas M. Rivers, proposed that such "filterable agents" were particles that appeared "to be obligate parasites in the sense that their reproduction is dependent on living cells."

To understand why this is a compelling idea, consider the following salacious thought experiment.

A married man goes to Las Vegas for a business conference. In the evening he gets drunk and has a sexual encounter with a strange woman. Though his vision and judgement are blurred, he vaguely notices a small red blister in her genital region. A few days later, he notices a similar red blister in his genital region, and he also notices that it's very painful.

He goes to the doctor, who diagnoses the painful red blister as a symptom of a disease call genital herpes, which the doctor claims is caused by the herpes simplex virus, or HSV.

A bit of historical research indicates that this virus was first isolated and characterized in the modern sense of the word by a German virologist named Löwenstein, who published a paper in 1919 titled Aetiologische Untersuchungen über den fieberhaften Herpes—"Etiological studies on febrile herpes."

Surveying the literature since Löwenstein, the man notices that hundreds of researchers have, over the span of a century, performed lab research on what they believed to be the infectious agent that Löwenstein believed he isolated and described in 1919.

The man supposes it's possible that all of these people dedicated their formal education and professional lives to investigating a fiction—a mere figment of Löwenstein's imagination—and that his rash of red blisters was caused by something other than this purported "herpes simplex virus."

However, the man now has a practical problem—namely, what does he tell his wife? By a strange twist of fate, his wife is an extremely intelligent and curious woman who has recently drawn the conclusion that viruses don't exist.

The man ponders that under the current circumstances, his wife's conviction seems to offer him a practical advantage, so he contemplates not telling her about his condition.

He thinks perhaps he could just keep his infidelity to himself and hope that his prescription of "antiviral" medication will quickly and effectively suppress the red blisters from ever erupting again.

However, the man considers that, in addition to being dishonest, this approach has a practical problem, because his doctor tells him that, even with the antiviral medication, there is still a risk that he will transmit the "HSV" to his wife.

After agonizing about it for a couple of days, the man decides to confess the entire disaster. After her initial anger at the betrayal subsides, she deliberates whether to divorce her husband or to try to forgive him and to remain in the marriage.

After agonizing about it, she decides to try to forgive her husband and to remain married to him. However, now she has to decide what to believe—and what practical steps to take—regarding his "HSV diagnosis."

IF viruses don't exist—a proposition she'd recently come to believe with great conviction—then she doesn't have to worry about it.

But then she is struck by the dreadful thought: "But what if this virus—this so-called herpes simplex virus—does exist? What if it is the agent of this disease that could be transmitted to me and cause me to suffer this disease?"

I mention this unpleasant hypothetical scenario as an illustrative example that what we describe as "knowledge" may be characterized a concept that has practical, real-life utility.

In the case of the painful, red blisters, the concept of herpes simplex virus as the submicroscopic causative agent seems to have significant explanatory value. Ignoring this explanation does not seem like a rational option.

Here I would like to state that this essay is not meant to be a thorough explication of the entire field of virology. Many readers will note that the essay contains nothing about the related fields of serology, viral culturing, electron microscopy, and molecular biology/PCR analysis.

My intention with this brief essay is to give the reader a specific, real life example of why the concept of a virus as a causative agent of specific disease symptoms is a useful explanatory model.