Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

In 2022, is it still possible to believe in a large scientific “truth” that just ain’t so?

An international group of doctors and scientists, including Kiwi microbiology, medical industry and health researcher Dr Mark Bailey, certainly seem to think it is possible.

Their suspicion is not simply that Covid-19 was a fraud. They have good reason to believe the theory of viruses itself is pseudo-science. Simply put, when they started from first principles – which all scientists are supposedly trained to do – they were surprised to find that viruses, as we are told, do not and never have been shown to exist.

It’s a big claim, but they are happy to put their concern to the test. And since starting from first principles is a rare thing in a communist world, I was immediately curious.

Last month, the group issued a challenge for anyone to perform an experiment to show that the entities known as “pathogenic human viruses” exist in the real world.

They use a textbook definition of a virus: a replicating, protein-coated piece of genetic material, either DNA or RNA, that can act as a pathogen. This entity should be able to infect living tissue, replicate inside those tissues, damage the tissues and, as a result, cause disease or death in the host. The entities must also be able to transmit to other hosts in which they should cause similar diseases.

The doctors say this theory is a bunch of baloney.

People are not becoming ill due to viruses, they say. Rather, sickness is the result of the “ordinary and inevitable breakdown particles” of stressed, dead or dying tissues in the body. Moreover, these particles are not transmissible, so there is no rationale to “enact measures to protect oneself or others against them,” they say in the document.

Further, they say the reason the medical community believes viruses exist is due to a tragic series of errors that have compounded over time, along with the general degeneration of science during the 20th century. There is also ample room for fraud and mendacity since trillions of dollars depend on the theory of viruses being true. But they’re not pointing fingers – just yet.

Very briefly, the group focuses on one fundamental error in virology: the convenient rejection of Robert Koch’s testing model. Koch was a German bacteriologist who, in the final decades of the 19th century, proposed a series of postulates to easily test if the cause of a disease was due to a virus. Koch’s Postulates go a bit like this:

  1. The microorganism must be found in the ill but not in the healthy;
  2. The microorganism is then isolated from a diseased organism and grown in a pure culture;
  3. The cultured organism should produce the same disease in a new host;
  4. The microorganism must be re-isolated from the experimental host and identified as identical to the original specific causative agent.

Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? The problem is, say the doctors, these postulates have never been fulfilled in any controlled experiment, which means viruses likely do not exist. Instead of accepting the data, the medical community deviously replaced Koch’s Postulates with a less rigorous test that would give them the results they wanted. These new postulates were advanced by Thomas Rivers in 1937:

  1. Isolation of virus from a diseased host;
  2. Cultivation of virus in host cells;
  3. Proof of filterability;
  4. Produce the same disease in the host;
  5. Re-isolation of the virus;
  6. Detection of specific immune response to the virus.

The difference between these approaches is not trivial. Rivers even said, “it is obvious that Koch’s postulates have not been satisfied in viral diseases” and that with his new test, it is now possible to “bring excellent evidence that an organism is the cause of a malady without the complete satisfaction of Koch’s postulates.” Obviously, the ability to skip rigorous science was popular in the pharmaceutical industry which by 1937 had bet heavily on the idea that viruses exist.

By adopting Rivers’ postulates and rejecting Koch’s, viruses are today assumed to be present in a sick host, without any evidence that this is true. Koch’s Postulates were replaced because they weren’t giving the right results.

The epistemic holes here would be funny if the issue weren’t so serious.

This mistake has plenty of implications for the Covid-19 pandemic. And judging by some recent papers about Covid-19, many scientists appear to be aware of the problem, it’s just that they either don’t know what to do or can’t quite put together the puzzle of corruption and rethink their testing. For example, according to a 2020 paper looking at the origin of Covid-19 by Zhu et al., the authors say:

“Although our study does not fulfil Koch’s postulates, our analyses provide evidence implicating 2019-nCoV in the Wuhan outbreak.”

This situation was so weird that when Dr Bailey asked NZ’s Ministry of Health to produce its evidence that showed Covid-19 was a real virus, the ministry responded that it had never itself tested if the virus existed. It got even weirder when the evidence the ministry relied on about the genome of Covid-19 and its “variants” all came from “in silico” computer models, not real viruses.

The group of doctors don’t like where this is going. So, they are challenging the medical community to prove once and for all that viruses exist. They offer a simple experiment:

  1. A unique particle with the characteristics of a virus is purified from an ill patient;
  2. The purified particle is biochemically characterised for its protein components and genetic sequence;
  3. The proteins are proven to be coded for by these same genetic sequences;
  4. The purified viral particles alone, through a natural exposure route, are shown to cause identical sickness in test subjects by using valid controls;
  5. Particles must then be successfully re-isolated (through purification) from the test subject and demonstrated to have the same characteristics.

The doctors understand this still would not satisfy Koch’s Postulates. They are offering a middle ground to get the scientific ball rolling. But if the medical community does not accept this challenge, that should tell us a lot too.

I believe this challenge is worth paying attention to because of the wider implications of falsifying the virus hypothesis. Let’s just say that a lot rides on the theory being true.

Cartoonist and commentator Scott Adams once warned that those offering a “laundry list” of reasons for their position is a “tell” that they have a weak position. After all, if you ask them to rank which argument is the most robust, they will do so. But that means any subsequent reason is by definition inferior and can be ignored.

So, by this standard, the most robust reason for accepting the theory of evolution by natural selection is the presence of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) in the DNA code of organisms.

ERVs are essentially artefacts of moments in history when a species was exposed to a virus that did remarkable damage to the population. The virus so traumatised the species that it transcribed parts of its own genomic code directly onto the DNA of the host animals, including humans. Apparently, about 8% of the human genome is composed of sequences with viral origin or ERVs.

The reason ERVs are crucial evidence of evolution is that these viral transcriptions can be found in identical locations on DNA across not just species, but genera, families and even order. Humans, birds, lizards, fish and many other animals have the same ERVs in the same location on their DNA which, according to the theory, points conclusively to a common ancestor.

But if viruses are just a misinterpretation of basic science, then what happens to the theory of evolution? Without ERVs, biologists are back to square one in their explanation of the tree of life. This kind of narrative collapse would be like suddenly finding out that the moon was a giant hologram or that E doesn’t equal mC2.

Would the falsification matter on a practical level? I doubt it. It would simply mean that humans can be wrong about enormous things like viruses and still create computers, build lasers and fly.

The twist is that those inventions are the results of engineering, not science. Scientists may have discovered electromagnetism, but it was engineers who built the lasers. Engineers are smart people. If viruses are proven to be false, they will just shrug and adapt to the new data.

The truly dangerous impact of falsifying the theory of viruses would be at the social and political levels. For instance, if viruses don’t exist, then what was in the vaccines? People were told to “trust the science,” but if the scientists were shown to be lying, then what? There is nothing worse than an unreliable God.

The biggest impact would be philosophical and, dare I say it, theological. After all, if the best evidence for evolution by natural selection is falsified, then what are ERVs? And why are they found in the same locations in DNA across species, classes and families?

Trust the science, they say. Well, let’s do some science then.

Nathan Smith is a former business journalist and columnist at the NBR. He also worked as the chief editor at the New Zealand Initiative policy think tank. He is now a freelance writer and copy editor.