I was asked an interesting question the other day by Rob Dubya. He asked me to present the case for the traditional view of viruses and viral infection/disease. It’s a good request because there’s a reasonable number of people who question this traditional view. So why do I think the ‘traditional’ view of viruses is, if not wholly fully nailed down in all minutiae, definitely ‘along the right lines’?
When it comes to a lot (where ‘lot’ has a value that is very close to ‘pretty much all’) of biology/microbiology I have to confess to not only being a bit of a fish out of water, but a fish who’s left the ocean and is currently touring the Rockies on a bicycle.
In some future retrospective perspective it might be seen to have been a mistake, but I took the decision not to do any googling or other checking for this article. I wanted to present my view as it currently is ‘in my head’, so to speak. So, as you read further, please keep this in mind and try to forgive any factual errors or mis-remembered details (or errors in understanding). I’m dragging some of this stuff from decades-old chambers of memory.
The answer I’m going to give is wrapped up in some of the issues I touched on in my previous article. What do we mean by “understanding”? In this case, specifically scientific understanding?
In this last piece I threw “trying to be funny and interesting” out of the window and presented the solution of a very simple, but deadly dull, physics problem. One of the things I did, after the solution had been arrived at, was to check for consistency. If I end up with an equation that has a quantity measured in seconds on one side, but something measured in kilograms on the other, then I know I’ve done something wrong. It would be like writing something like 3 seconds equals 7 kilograms. That ‘equals’ in these equations is, as they say, a harsh mistress.
This consistency is, of course, required by the scientific method. Although these days we tend to split things into subject areas like physics, biology, psychology, and so on, in reality the Universe does not give the slightest milligram of fuck about our classifications. Some piece of ‘knowledge’ or some ‘explanation’ has to be consistent with all other such pieces and explanations (assuming the Creator wasn’t tripping on acid when He/She/It set things in motion).
We might, with a considerable degree of accuracy, describe science as the pursuit of things that don’t fit. You think you’ve got a lot worked out, your ‘model’ of how the universe works is in good shape, but then, like an unexpected rigidity in the nether regions of that beautiful woman you’ve just met on a blind date, something pops up to make you realise that something is not quite right with your previous view of reality.
Just before the turn of the 19th century physics was in this position; looking forward to many nights of unbridled passion for the foreseeable future. But there were some surprises lurking in the nether regions of physics that threw everything into chaos.
Newton still stood like some unassailable colossus. Maxwell was rapidly joining him. The theoretical structures of mechanics and electromagnetism were withstanding all assaults. There were a few problems to do with light and atoms, but the expectation was very much that these problems were ones of detail rather than serious flaws in the constructed edifice itself. There was nothing wrong with the theories of Newton and Maxwell, it was supposed - we just hadn’t properly figured out how to apply them to atoms and light.
It seems strange to us now, but back then the existence of atoms was not fully pinned down. The overwhelming majority thought the atomic theory of matter was correct (and constructed theories/performed experiments based upon this supposition) - all the evidence was pointing in that direction - but there was some slim room for doubt. Einstein’s 1905 paper on Brownian Motion is usually credited with settling the matter once and for all. This paper was, for a long time, the most cited physics paper of the 20th century.
In a lot of physics texts describing this period you’ll often read about two “clouds on the horizon”. These were the inability of the physics of the day to explain the spectrum of black body radiation and the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. The black body problem is said to have led to the development of Quantum Mechanics. The null result in the MM experiment is said to have led to the development of Special Relativity.
This is a nice picture, but it’s a kind of mythology. Things were actually much more serious than just these two issues. The existence of spectral lines was a real puzzle, for example. Gases, assumed to be composed of atoms, could be made to emit light - but the light emitted came out with definite, sharp, frequencies. It looks like a kind of barcode. There was clearly some ‘structure’ to these supposed atoms. But nobody had any good theory, at all, as to what this structure might be, or how it gave rise to these lines.
It was even more difficult when absorption spectra were thrown into the mix. Gases could also absorb light - but, again, only certain frequencies were absorbed - and these spectra looked like a kind of ‘mirror image’ of the emission spectra.
Any attempted model of these ‘atoms’ made no real sense. The stability of these atoms did not arise from such models. Nobody could figure out why atoms were stable (we already knew that charged particles were part of the make-up of these hypothesised atoms). Furthermore, the spectral lines indicated some internal ‘degrees of freedom’ which should contribute to the specific heat capacity of these atoms - and yet the measured heat capacities were much lower than expected. It was as if this internal structure, which had to exist, did not affect things in any way that made sense with the existing models and theories. There were (assumed) ‘hidden’ variables that did not behave in a way that agreed with existing theory.
Even the great unification of electricity, magnetism and optics achieved by Maxwell’s theory was problematic. Maxwell’s equations, which had been supremely successful in generating correct experimental predictions, did not ‘transform’ in the right way. The idea here is that if we do an experiment at one constant speed, and the same experiment at another constant speed, there should be no difference in the results (the same idea as when you’re on a plane you can’t tell you’re travelling at 400 or 500 kilometres per hour if it’s a smooth flight without checking against some external reference). The experiments that were done confirmed that electromagnetic phenomena had this property too - EM experiments could not be used to tell how fast you were moving (without utilising some external reference).
The problem here was a theoretical one. When you worked out the maths and did the ‘transformation’ between one speed and another, the theory predicted you should be able to detect difference in motion using EM. It turned out that Maxwell was right - what we’d got wrong was in the kind of ‘transformation’ we were doing to (mathematically) move from one moving frame to another.
There were some other problems just around the corner too. Like that of radioactivity.
So, there weren’t just two ‘clouds’ on the horizon, there was the birthing person of all typhoons on the way1. Physics at the turn of the century was only identifying as correct.
The take-away here is that for late 19th century physics several things just ‘didn’t fit’. It’s chasing down things that don’t fit that pretty much defines science. Paradoxically, however, most actual science is done within existing frameworks and does not change any underlying paradigm. We can view this activity as continual ‘checking’. This is mostly working with (predicted) consequences of existing theory - so in a way it’s a search for things that don’t fit. Almost always, however, you end up confirming (agreeing with) the existing paradigm.
Our understanding, in a scientific sense, is always only provisional. This is why statements like “follow the science” or “believe in the science” are so monstrously stupid.
However, this does not mean we should simply mistrust current scientific understanding as if it’s some whimsical, nebulous thing. It’s almost as far from that as it’s possible to be. The great success of quantum mechanics and relativity are sometimes taken to mean that the previous theories were “wrong”. QM and relativity did not invalidate classical mechanics or electromagnetism - it refined our understanding of them. We now recognise our old classical physics as a subset of an improved theory. Newton’s Laws are still as valid as they ever were. In a certain sense we can understand Newton’s Laws as an emergent property of a deeper theory.
Why have I spent so much time talking about something that is nothing to do with viruses? It’s because I want to emphasize this quest for consistency. Any new ‘model’ of the universe, if it is to be adopted as the new best explanation, has to explain all the things that the previous models did AND it has to explain the things that “didn’t fit”.
So, for physics at the turn of the 19th century, those things that didn’t fit completely changed our understanding of how things work - but it was a very specific change. The old, classical, physics became a part of a much larger understanding.
The question, then, in terms of viruses is whether the things that don’t fit are going to lead to an even more radical revision (of disease causation) than the revision of physics in the 20th century.
Viruses exist. We can take pictures of them. We can figure out the genetic code that is used to create them. We can map their evolution and create viral lineages, just like we can do for living creatures. They are like chemical nano-machines - not alive, yet not quite the same as a bunch of inert chemicals either.
Some people will argue that nobody has ever “isolated” a virus. I don’t think that’s technically true, but it also misses the point. We’ve never ‘isolated’ quarks in physics but we’re confident they exist. Before the 20th century we’d never isolated, or seen, individual atoms either, but all of the strands of evidence we’d collected made us very confident they existed.
Part of the difficulty with ‘isolating’ a virus is the difficulty of culturing them. They’re not like bacteria. I hope we’re all comfortable with the actual existence of bacteria. They’re much bigger than viruses for one thing, but their method of reproduction is also quite different. Pop a bacterium on a food source like the agar in a petri dish and, pretty soon, you’ve got zillions of the little buggers thriving. Bacteria, as far as I know, reproduce asexually (in modern terms we might say there is no sex binary for bacteria - there is only a ‘sex’ unary) and they only need a source of food to be able to do that. They have to get the energy and raw materials from somewhere.
We can do all the same genetic testing and comparison of lineages etc with bacteria as we can do for viruses - and the techniques and methodologies are much the same. Constructing a genetic lineage for bacteria can be a bit trickier because they can do clever stuff like lateral gene transfer, as well as reproduce asexually.
So, we have something that is distinct from a bacterium, for which we can use the same methods that we use for bacteria to determine an evolutionary lineage. So, whilst we might not have ‘isolated’ a virus in the same way as we can isolate a bacterium, we do have to ask the question as to what, precisely, are we seeing when we determine the genetic code of these viruses? Some figment of our imaginations? Clearly something, with a different genetic code to that of a bacterium, is being seen.
So, there’s ‘something’, which is clearly not bacterial, which has a genetic code. That genetic code displays an evolution that can be mapped. Furthermore, we can generate pictures of the various protein structures encoded by those genes and map their changing nature as they evolve.
The fact that viruses evolve means that they also reproduce.
How is that reproduction achieved? They do this by ‘hi-jacking’ the cellular machinery of a living thing like a bacterium, or us. They are something akin to a parasite. A cell is an amazing thing. It’s like a whole industrial neighbourhood replete with various chemical factories and power stations bounded by the cell wall. Things are happening at an alarming rate and, every second, various proteins are being assembled. If you’re the size of a proton it must seem like some vision of maniacal hell with these huge ‘factories’ working away at blistering speed.
We’ve got a decent, but not perfect, idea of how it all works - right down to the atomic level. We can see how the genetic code gets used to produce the various necessary proteins and how the specific bits of that code that produce specific proteins get selected and utilised.
We also know how our hypothesised virus does the ‘hi-jack’. We also know the cell, and the body, have various mechanisms to fight against that and to correct things.
At the moment, then, without even talking about whether this process causes ‘disease’ we have a clear, consistent, picture of what’s happening. The picture of a ‘virus’ as a kind of chemical nano-machine with its own genetic code that it inserts into a cell to hi-jack the protein factories of that cell is consistent with what we know about how a cell works and how genes work.
Viruses don’t have it all their own way. The body responds to this hi-jack and sends in Jack Bauer and his team. It’s a very complicated and multi-layered response. We see a similar kind of response when a body is infected by bacteria. The important point here is that there exists in the body an ability to tailor this response to the individual pathogen that’s causing it.
And, no surprise, we can map this tailored response to the genetic code of the virus too. The antibodies, for example, that are produced in response to a virus are different for different evolutionary variants of that virus. Thus, antibodies also have an evolutionary lineage - and that lineage maps onto the viral evolutionary lineage.
So, not only do we see evolution in action in viruses themselves, but we see a correlated evolution in the defence mechanisms of the body itself.
All the various pieces of our understanding are lining up here and generating a consistent picture.
What about disease causation? I think it’s a reasonable supposition that if some foreign agent gets into the body and starts to thrive and reproduce, and your body goes into action to fight against that, there are likely to be consequences. If the body’s mechanisms are able to keep things under a degree of control those consequence are also not likely to be as serious as if the body is not managing to do this.
If things get out of control, we might need some extra help. Like antibiotics, for example. These drugs have been a real lifesaver and have transformed the health prospects for most. If one is a bit sceptical of the ‘germ’ theory of disease, then it’s going to take some interesting hypothesising to explain why antibiotics work to cure disease and why we see the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Anti-viral drugs exist, but they haven’t been as successful as antibiotics. They also tend to have more serious side-effects for the body. It’s easier to disrupt a complex living thing, like a bacterium which needs all sorts of things to be ‘just so’ to thrive, than it is to ‘kill’ what is essentially a much simpler non-living bunch of chemicals.
The ‘model’ we have, so far, seems to be consistent and to make sense. What about other strands of evidence?
How do these hypothesised viruses get transmitted? There are viruses which are difficult to transmit. Ebola, I think, is one of them. Outbreaks can be successfully contained by limiting contact with an infected individual. If the virus, and the disease it causes, are not spread by human-to-human contact, why does this preventative measure work?
Why, for example, does Monkeypox seem to be predominately affecting gay men at the moment?
There’s clearly some causative agent for the illness and it’s clearly spread by human-to-human contact for things like Ebola and Monkeypox.
A respiratory virus is much harder to contain. Here we also see more supportive evidence for the notion of human-to-human transmission, albeit mediated by the air. The simple picture of a new respiratory virus taking hold and rapidly infecting people that have not yet learned to tailor their immune response to it is consistent with what is observed.
We see an initial, very rapid, rise in infections that is self-limiting. As more people are infected and ‘learn’ how to deal with the new pathogen, the opportunities for viral spread are curtailed and the infection rate begins to decline and eventually stops growing as the virus can no longer propagate as effectively. This is exactly what we see in practice.
It’s not conclusive ‘proof’, by any means, but it is yet another piece of the jigsaw that fits.
Another piece of the puzzle that is hard to explain without recourse to the existence of viruses as causative of disease is the success of vaccination.
What did he just say?
Burn the heretic.
I am, of course, not talking about the Success™ of the covid ‘vaccines’ which have redefined the word ‘success’ as something that means “fucking abysmal failure”. I’m talking about the handful of vaccines which have convincingly demonstrated success.
The measles vaccination program is an example of such a success. Measles is even more infectious than covid and when the first vaccinations were introduced infections fell off a cliff within a very short period of time. They went from hundreds of thousands in the US to a few thousand - and that’s with a vaccine coverage of only about 60%.
Now, as we know, correlation does not equal causation, but to use the words of the most eloquent US President ever, C’mon, Man.
The point here is that the measles vaccine was developed with the understanding (as it was back then) of what a virus was, how it caused the disease, and how to use what I think was a live attenuated vaccine to stimulate the body’s immune response to prevent infection. Was this ‘model’ they were using wrong? It sounds like a good experiment to me. Make a prediction from your existing model (the vaccine will halt transmission) and then test it (vaccinate people) and, hey presto, it worked.
The model might be wrong, of course. But any new alternative ‘model’ is going to have to explain why this experiment actually worked - as well as explain all of the things I’ve already discussed like viral lineages and the correlation with antibody lineages.
These are some of the lines of evidence that lead me to have confidence that the current model of viral infection is, essentially, correct. Are there things that “don’t fit”? Yes, there are. We don’t properly understand things like seasonality, for example. Or why some viruses seem to circulate in a kind of ‘quiet mode’ and then at some point in time get ‘triggered’ to cause an outbreak.
Are these going to be like the “clouds on the horizon” we had for physics? Are the answers to these things that don’t fit going to cause a massive upheaval in our understanding of viruses and what they do and how they work? Maybe. But my strong suspicion at the moment is the things we can’t make fit at the moment are ones of detail and not flaws in the fundamental model itself.
So that’s my brain-dump for today. All dredged up from memory and from an admittedly sketchy (and possibly a too simplistic, or incorrect) understanding of the biology. I know it has been a long read - but I hope it’s been useful.
I’m using this phrase to take the piss out of modern-day gender ideas and strictures to, hopefully, show how ridiculous they are
I'm always impressed by how you seem to assume that your readers are as intelligent as you are (I sure ain't), but now I'm doubly impressed that you tackled this subject seriously and without a hint of condescension. As someone who wanted to vaccinate myself the old-fashioned way against Covid-- by spending about thirty seconds in a small room where a person with a mild infection had coughed thrice*-- it does seem to this layperson that our current understanding of viruses is far superior to our understanding of the human immune response. While that makes me curious about the latter rather than skeptical about the former, I can understand why the apparent overconfidence of very public public health officials regarding our relatively inferior understanding of the marvelous and complex immune system has led to skepticism about the traditional view of viruses. And also to the problematic contemporary attitude toward vaccination in the medical community: "the more the better; just slap the word 'vaccine' on it and put it on the schedule for babies."
*I ended up spending 8 hours with a feverish small child-- or shall I say, bioterrorist-- breathing directly into my mouth while I slept, which turned out-- thankfully-- to be safe and effective.
as someone whos spent 20 years with an interest in biohazards you got it pretty good, i wondered if you would go and trip your self up with polio vaccines but you ignored it. its things like this that cause mistrust in vaccines:
1824: Metal workers had suffered for centuries from a paralysis similar to polio caused by the lead and arsenic in the metals they were working with. English scientist John Cooke observed: 'The fumes from these metals, or the receptance of them in solution into the stomach, often causes paralysis.'
1890: Lead arsenate pesticide started to be sprayed in the US up to 12 times every summer to kill codling moth on apple crops.
1892: Polio outbreaks began to occur in Vermont, an apple growing region. In his report the Government Inspector Dr. Charles Caverly noted that parents reported that some children fell ill after eating fruit. He stated that 'infantile paralysis usually occurred in families with more than one child, and as no efforts were made at isolation it was very certain it was non-contagious' (with only one child in the family having been struck).
1907: Calcium arsenate comes into use primarily on cotton crops.
1908: In a Massachusetts town with three cotton mills and apple orchards, 69 children suddenly fell ill with infantile paralysis.
1909: The UK bans apple imports from the States because of heavy lead arsenate residues.
1921: Franklin D. Roosevelt develops polio after swimming in Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick. Toxicity of water may have been due to pollution run-off.
1943: DDT is introduced, a neurotoxic pesticide. Over the next several years it comes into widespread use in American households. For example, wall paper impregnated with DDT was placed in children's bedrooms.
1943: A polio epidemic in the UK town of Broadstairs, Kent is linked to a local dairy where cows were washed down with DDT.
1944: Albert Sabin reports that a major cause of sickness and death of American troops based in the Philippines was poliomyelitis. US military camps there were sprayed daily with DDT to kill mosquitoes. Neighboring Philippine settlements were not affected.
1944: NIH reports that DDT damages the same anterior horn cells that are damaged in infantile paralysis.
1946: Gebhaedt shows polio seasonality correlates with fruit harvest.
1949: Endocrinologist Dr Morton Biskind, a practitioner and medical researcher, found that DDT causes 'lesions in the spinal cord similar to human polio.'
1950: US Public Health Industrial Hygiene Medical Director, J.G. Townsend, notes the similarity between parathion poisoning and polio and believes that some polio might be caused by eating fruits or vegetables with parathion residues.
1951: Dr. Biskind treats his polio patients as poisoning victims, removing toxins from food and environment, especially DDT contaminated milk and butter. Dr. Biskind writes: 'Although young animals are more susceptible to the effects of DDT than adults, so far as the available literature is concerned, it does not appear that the effects of such concentrations on infants and children have even been considered.'
1949-1951: Other doctors report they are having success treating polio with anti toxins used to treat poisoning, dimercaprol and ascorbic acid. Example: Dr. F. R. Klenner reported: 'In the poliomyelitis epidemic in North Carolina in 1948 60 cases of this disease came under our care... The treatment was massive doses of vitamin C every two to four hours. Children up to four years received vitamin C injection intramuscularly... All patients were clinically well after 72 hours.'
1950: Dr. Biskind presents evidence to the US Congress that pesticides were the major cause of polio epidemics. He is joined by Dr. Ralph Scobey who reported he found clear evidence of poisoning when analyzing chemical traces in the blood of polio victims.
Comment: This was a no no. The viral causation theory was not something to be questioned. The careers of prominent virologists and health authorities were threatened. Biskind and Scobey's ideas were subjected to ridicule.
1953: Clothes are moth-proofed by washing them in EQ-53, a formula containing DDT.
1953: Dr. Biskind writes: 'It was known by 1945 that DDT was stored in the body fat of mammals and appears in their milk... yet far from admitting a causal relationship between DDT and polio that is so obvious, which in any other field of biology would be instantly accepted, virtually the entire apparatus of communication, lay and scientific alike, has been devoted to denying, concealing, suppressing, distorting and attempts to convert into its opposite this overwhelming evidence. Libel, slander, and economic boycott have not been overlooked in this campaign.'
1954: Legislation recognizing the dangers of persistent pesticides is enacted, and a phase out of DDT in the US accelerates along with a shift of sales of DDT to third world countries.
(Note that DDT is phased out at the same time as widespread polio vaccinations begin. Saying that, polio cases sky rocket only in communities that accept the polio vaccine, as the polio vaccine is laced with heavy metals and other toxins, so the paralysis narrative starts all over again. As the polio vaccines cause huge spikes in polio, the misinformed public demand more polio vaccine and the cycle spirals skyward exponentially)
1956: the American Medical Association mandated that all licensed medical doctors could no longer classify polio as polio. All polio diagnosis would be rejected in favor of Guillian-Barre Syndrome, AFP (acute flaccid paralysis), Bell's Palsy, Cerebral Palsy, ALS, (Lou-Gehrig's Disease), MS, MD etc etc. This sleight of hand was fabricated with the sole intent of giving the public the impression that the polio vaccine was successful at decreasing polio or eradicating polio. The public bought this hook, line and sinker and to this very day, many pro vaccine arguments are ignited by the manufactured lie regarding the polio vaccine eradicating polio.
1962: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is published.
1968: DDT registration cancelled for the US.
2008: Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) is still a raging in many parts of the world where pesticide use is high, and DDT is still used. AFP. MS, MD, Bell's Palsy, cerebral palsy, ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), Guillian-Barre are all catch basket diagnosis, all similar in symptoms, tied to heavy metal poisoning and high toxic load.
2008: WHO states on its website: 'There is no cure for polio. Its effects are irreversible.'
Conclusion: Modern belief that polio is caused by a virus is an ongoing tragedy for the children of the world. Public funds are wasted on useless and dangerous vaccines when the children could be treated with antitoxins. A call into failing vaccine mythology is warranted, as is a complete investigation of the real agenda being executed against humanity involving science, chemicals, vaccines, the medical field in general, and the government.