Dr. Tom Cowan: Five Simple Questions for Virologists
Five Simple Questions for Virologists
by Dr. Tom Cowan
October 13, 2022
Hello, everyone. Almost three years into the “great virus debate,” we’re still awaiting answers to questions we have for virologists. I thought this would be a good time to put forward in one place the five most basic unanswered questions, with the hope that any virologist will reply with answers. I’m happy to share their answers with my audience.
Question One: When attempting to prove the existence of any “thing,” we follow certain procedures. First, we define the thing we are looking for, then we go to the natural habitat of that thing and attempt to find it. If we find it and we isolate it (meaning, separate it from its environment so we have it in pure form), this step allows us to find out what the thing is composed of and what it does. It works very well with trees, frogs, bacteria and even nanoparticles.
Can you give us a reference in which this step has been done for any pathogenic virus, and, if this reference doesn’t exist, explain why not?
Question Two: Virologists claim that the “viral culture” experiment proves the existence of the virus. In that experiment, an unpurified sample is taken from a sick person and mixed with fetal bovine serum, toxic antibiotics, and a starvation medium. It is then inoculated on a highly inbred cell culture, which results in the breakdown of the cells (called “cytopathic effect”). This process is called “isolation” of the virus.
Can you define what the term “isolation” means to you, and whether you agree that the above process is a scientifically based isolation procedure?
Question Three: The scientific method at its core means the choosing of an independent variable (that which you wish to study) and a dependent variable (the effect this independent variable causes). By this widely accepted definition of the scientific method, one would need to isolate and test the virus and only the virus as the independent variable. So, a proper experiment would be to isolate a pure virus from a sick person that you allege is made sick with this virus and inoculate this and only this virus onto the cell culture and see whether it causes the CPE. Then, of course, one would run a control experiment: The identical steps would be taken, except no virus would be added to the culture.
Can you point us to a study in which this clear experiment has been done? If it doesn’t exist, please explain why. If the reason is that you can’t find the purified virus in any fluid of any sick plant, animal, or human, then are you willing to acknowledge that the only experiment one could do to prove the existence of these viruses simply can’t be done? If you agree that this experiment can’t be done, could you please refer us to a paper that shows how a “viral culture” is experimentally validated with proper controls at every step of the experiment?
Question Four: It is often claimed by doctors and scientists that every nook and cranny of our bodies is teeming with viruses. These viruses, it is claimed, make up what is called a “virome.” Some claim there are 10 to the 48th number of viruses in our bodies.
If this is true, when you inoculate unpurified lung samples onto cell cultures, presumably containing gazillions of these viruses, why is the only virus that “grows” the one you’re looking for, i.e., SARS-CoV-2? Why aren’t these other viruses seen, photographed, and found in the broken-down cell culture?
Question Five: Finally, can you offer other examples of “things” that are claimed to exist solely through the finding of pieces of that thing? To be clear, if no records of a purified virus such as SARS-CoV-2 exists, by what logic or scientific principles can one claim to prove that any piece, such as an antigen or genome, has come from that “thing?”
All the best,
Tom
cover image credit: Rednic