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Gabriel's avatar

Thank you for putting this out.

As a layperson it's been frustrating to see the "no virus" crowd basically act like one is morally responsible for 2020/21 for simply not adopting their dogma. Which I think is wrong even if they were correct.

Many "no virus" proponents argue that virology is a mythology to justify "public health" abuses. As a layperson this argument seems compelling, especially considering concerns with some pre-covid vaccines and other issues within medicine that seem to have come to a head during covid.

The problem I have with that is that it reeks of motivated reasoning.

As a follow-up question is it splitting hairs to argue that "regardless of the virology the measures taken in 2020 themselves were always going to more harm than good"?

It seems like there's no room for people to accept viruses or even gain of function without also conceding to the pretext of massive theft and abuse of lockdowns. That's currently the mindset I'm in, and it seems fairly lonely.

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Sanjoy Mahajan's avatar

Discussing this article is like trying to dynamite fog. For its pre-eminent rhetorical method is conflation. It conflates the question of virus existence with the question of bacterial existence and with the question of exosomes. It conflates using antibodies for detecting hormones with using antibodies for detecting "viruses." It conflates using PCR for detecting bacterial or human genetic material with using PCR for detecting "viral" genetic material. It conflates the everyday meaning of isolation with the virologists' doublespeak meaning of it.

These conflations are all bogus, and the article's extended discussions simply assuming them are at best obfuscatory.

But let's as an example take one of the conflations anyway: isolation. The article uses "isolation" as follows: "In the study by Liu et al. [20], the virus was ISOLATED from a single patient" (my CAPS). The cited study, in its section "Sample Collection and Virus Isolation" describes the so-called isolation as follows:

"The Bronchoalveolar Lavage Fluid (BALF) was collected from the patient at 1 day after admission. Vero cells were used for the virus isolation in the biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory. The BALF sample was centrifuged at 5,000 rpm at 4°C for 5 minutes, and then 200 μl supernatant was added to monolayer of cell in 6 well plates and incubated at 37°C and 5% CO2 for 1 hour. Then cells were washed with PBS 3 times, and fresh DMEM containing 2% fetal bovine serum (FBS) and 1% penicillin streptomycin (PS) was added to cell culture. Cells were maintained at 37°C and 5% CO2, and CPEs were monitored daily with light microscopy. Meanwhile viral RNAs were detected at 3 and 5 dpi using qRT-PCR to monitor the replication of virus, and the supernatant was harvested at 6 dpi."

At no point in this witches' brew did the study authors ever have a sample with ONLY the virus -- i.e., satisfying the plain-English meaning of isolation. So -- and contrary to the article's bogus straw-man assertion that cell cultures are a "favorite bogeyman of the virus skeptics ... because they contain exosomes" -- the objection is not to cell cultures themselves (which may have uses AFTER one has isolated the virus) but to claiming that the method results in any kind of isolation as it is normally and correctly defined. The virologists' and the author's Humpty Dumpty insistence that "isolation" means what they choose it to mean, no more and no less, is just gaslighting.

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