I am a scientist who stood up and refused to take the vaccine. My roughly 20-year career, most of which was in pharma and biotech, derailed last October. I've been fighting back ever since. I've had the opportunity to share the truth on numerous podcasts and I'm grateful for that. I started a community of scientific truth tellers called Scientists for Health Freedom and soon I'll be launching a new resource to make science more accessible called Science Defined.
Mike Donio@TheRealDonio
Rational debate can be respectful if we stick to the facts.
A Rebuttal of James Lyons-Weiler by Mike Donio and Dr. Tom Cowani
In a recent article by James Lyons-Weiler, he called on non-scientists to refute Dr. Bryan Ardis that COVID-19 injections contain snake venom. He calls for rational, respectful debate, not personal attacks.
So let's give chase. Is it a problem or disrespectful to engage in the kind of rational debate he describes? Not if you stick to the facts and refrain from personal attacks. Anyone who attacks Lyons-Weiler or Ardis and not the facts is inadvertently doing so to disqualify their own argument. That said, when discussing the facts, it is important to be clear about the claims of others and what evidence exists to support your own claims. What we want to do is clarify and provide counter-arguments to some of the claims and so-called evidence that Lyons-Weiler has allegedly provided regarding viruses. So yes, asking questions and having a rational debate is good for science – and both scientists and non-scientists can participate – but let's make sure we're clear about the facts. Above all, the goal should always be to find out the truth.
As part of his effort to avert the attacks from those who do not believe that viruses have been proven to exist, he cites an impossible requirement apparently placed on him: "You must prove that the virus does not exist." He goes on to state that people should be aware that it is not possible to prove a negative, and we agree. However, the challenge is not to prove that they do not exist, but that they do exist. That "positive" can and must be proven, and it is precisely what is lacking in evidence. If you can't prove you have the viral particle, which in this case is the independent variable, how can you find out about its physical characteristics, composition, or function?
A common argument against the existence of viruses is that Koch's postulates have never been fully satisfied. Lyons-Weiler argues that this claim is false and that he has provided extensive evidence for it. So, what are Koch's postulates? It is a set of four requirements that, according to Robert Koch, German physician and microbiologist, had to be met in order to establish that a particular organism was the cause of a specific disease. In my opinion, none of them are fully fulfilled for most presumed viral diseases.
The first postulate states that the microorganism should only be found in abundance in organisms suffering from the disease, as described by a specific set of symptoms, but not in healthy organisms. This postulate made sense until it was discovered that animals that appeared to be positive for infection had no symptoms or outward illness. Thus the idea of asymptomatic diffusion was born, and that shot the first postulate on the spot. How could the first postulate hold if the putative pathogen did not lead to disease in every exposed subject? Even Koch himself dropped a universal requirement for fulfillment of the first postulate after this phenomenon was discovered. The idea of asymptomatic spread is therefore misleading.
The second postulate says that the microorganism should be isolated from a sick patient and grown in culture. We have seen several people demonstrate during the COVID-19 pandemic that there is no evidence that a virus has been isolated. In this case, isolation should be the separation of the virus from everything else, otherwise known as purification. It turns out that this is not the way the word isolation is defined by most virologists and this leads to a lot of confusion. Many prominent proponents of the viral theory admit that purification of virions is not possible due to the vulnerability of the virus or the lack of sufficient amounts in each patient sample. Of course, that begs the question of how the virus is supposed to make someone sick if it's not found in significant amounts. That is only the first part of the postulate and we are already off to a bad start.
Once the virus is isolated, it must be cultured, and sure enough, it is common knowledge that more than a few viruses are difficult, if not impossible, to culture. Well, that pretty much settles the second postulate, which many virologists agree should be shelved because of these findings.
On to the third postulate. The isolated cultured virus must now be introduced into a healthy organism and shown to cause the same disease or set of symptoms as the original organism from which it was isolated. Oh wait, apparently it was changed from "should" to "should" when they found out that not all organisms would get sick if they came in contact with the cultured virus. With several supposed viruses, you can't even infect animals with the human version, so you need a separate species-specific strain, and if you inoculate animals with it, you get a set of symptoms that in no way mimic the original human disease. Also, some animal models used to study human viruses are not translatable to a human at all, such as inbred, genetically modified mouse models. These problems with animal models and the inability to replicate the same or any disease are well known among virologists. Therefore, we conclude that there is ample evidence that Koch's postulates are not fulfilled for viruses, and Koch himself, as well as many prominent virologists, agree.
The ideal experiment in which you willfully expose healthy individuals to the isolated virus is admittedly a moral challenge. However, Lyons-Weiler claims it can't or hasn't been done, so he's just going with the rest of the data he's presented as fact. He may be surprised to find that these kinds of experiments have been conducted and provide powerful insights into the existence and transmission, or lack thereof, of viruses.
One of the best known is the Rosenau experiment during the 1918 flu pandemic. This was a series of experiments conducted in 1919 by the US Public Health Service and the US Navy led by Milton Rosenau. They selected 100 volunteers who had no history of flu and vaccinated them with different strains of Pfeiffer bacillus, which were originally believed to be the cause of the disease outbreak. It was administered by spray and swab in the throat and even in the eyes. None of the individuals got sick, so they injected them with mixtures of organisms taken from patients with the flu. They even gave blood injections from sick patients. Nothing. Not a single disease. As a final effort, they selected 10 of the healthy volunteers and had them make close contact with sick patients, shaking hands, talking and coughing. Do you want to guess what happened? If you said none of them got sick, you'd be right. This greatly surprised Rosenau, but it was still one of the most thorough attempts to prove a contagious disease and was an abject failure. Other similar studies have also been conducted and none have clearly demonstrated the transmissibility of any disease.
Finally, Lyons-Weiler suggests that if SARS-CoV-2 did not exist, thousands of labs around the world would have had to coordinate the creation of fabricated sequences encoding the SARS-CoV-2 genome. He goes on to suggest that because the SARS-CoV-2 genome fits nicely next to that of SARS-CoV-1 in the phylogenetic tree, it cannot be made up. First, he links to a page on the NIH website titled “NCBI SARS-CoV-2 Resources.” This page contains the “SARS-CoV-2 Reference Resources”, which links to the genome reference sequence. It turns out that this reference sequence comes from the first patient identified in Wuhan, also known as Wuhan-Hu-1, and its identification is detailed in an article by Wu et al. published in Nature in 2020. This sequence was identified from the lung fluid from a single patient, and Wu et al. have never isolated a viral particle to definitively determine that the genome is from a virus.
I also don't believe anyone is suggesting that there is a highly coordinated effort worldwide to form the SARS-CoV-2 genomes. I would even argue that it is more likely that it is not coordinated at all, because that lends itself to the identification of the supposed variants. The lack of coordination causes the appearance of mutation and genetic drift in the sequence.
What about phylogenetic trees? A phylogenetic tree is a diagram intended to represent the relationships between different species based on a comparison of their physical and genetic characteristics, in this case the viral genomes. Thus, the claim is that the genomes of the SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 viruses are so closely related that they coexist in a phylogenetic tree. However, we just noted that the first genome identified, the NIH reference genome, was from a single patient and the viral origin was not verified. The genome was generated from tens of millions of 150 base pair sequence products assembled de novo into sequences. Even then, about 1 million sequences were specifically compared to previously identified pathogenic agents, i.e. viruses, bacteria, etc. It was a highly biased search, revealing that two of the longer sequences closely matched a bat-like coronavirus genome. The homology was about 90 percent. This means that 10 percent didn't match, and that's not trivial when you're dealing with a genome of about 30.000 base pairs. There were also many other sequences of various sizes with similar or higher homology to other known sequences. Without isolating a virus to know its genome comes from, how can you separate viral and endogenous human nucleic acids from endogenous microbial nucleic acids or something else? It is likely that the original SARS-CoV-1 genome was identified in much the same way, so any relationship between the two is highly coincidental and based on biased approaches. Therefore, it is impossible that kinship or proximity in a phylogenetic tree can provide evidence for the existence of a virus.
We don't have to agree on everything, but if we want to have a rational debate, it has to be respectful. It's too easy when there's so much at stake to fall into direct criticism, but we need to make sure we steer clear of personal attacks. Anyone, regardless of scientific background, can be empowered to have an objective view of these issues. If the goal is truthful, more involvement from a variety of people with different points of view is preferable. In the end, it's the evidence that matters, not just belief, and if viruses are real, there should be plenty of evidence to prove their existence. We call for open investigation and debate on all evidence of viruses by anyone interested in the truth.
Logical, rational thinking and the scientific process depend on clarity of thought and a strict examination of every assumption. These are lacking in the current scientific community. For example, as we described, it is not logical, rational, or scientific to claim that a phylogenetic tree of in silico (i.e., computer) genomes proves the existence of a virus when the original genome did not come from a purified, isolated virus. as acknowledged by the author of this original genome. Nor is it logical, rational, or scientific to claim that bits of an organism (e.g., the "spike protein," genome, etc.) prove the organism's existence if the intact organism has never been found, isolated, and purified. Rational, logical people would never make the mistake of claiming that part of a hoof came from a unicorn, unless they first proved the unicorn's existence.
Virologists seem to have forgotten or chose to ignore these basic principles of rational, logical thinking. Ultimately, this leads to conclusions and actions that are not compassionate. If you believe in imaginary disease-causing viruses, whether engineered, natural, or lab-created, you'll end up locking people in their homes, forcing them to wear useless masks, injecting them with poisonous substances, and end up costing the lives of millions. and put millions of people at risk. That is the opposite of compassion. They have called the concept that invisible particles cause untold numbers of diseases in humans and animals the "viral theory." This theory is false and lies at the root of a misconception that threatens to destroy our lives. It's time for it to go away.
Walking boldly in the truth is a dangerous business today.
