Page 45 - Summer2020final

and will have the same symptoms. If you then new coronavirus in their blood or lung tissue. As far as I know, not only
grow the meningococcus out of their blood and did that not happen with five hundred or one hundred or ten people—I’m
transfer that to another animal, the same thing not sure it happened with anybody.
happens and so on. That’s how Koch said we Instead, they took people’s respiratory sputum and examined it under
prove infectious etiology—an infectious cause an electron microscope, but if you look at someone’s respiratory secre-
and effect. tions, there will be a lot in it. I’ve seen the pictures, which show a coro-
navirus but also all kinds of other things—viruses, debris and proteins.
VIRUSES AND KOCH’S POSTULATES They essentially looked at that coronavirus under a microscope and said,
What is a virus? A virus is a piece of DNA “This has different genetic material than usual,” and knowing that the
or RNA and a few other proteins, encapsulated genetic material of coronaviruses is RNA instead of DNA, they said, “we
by a piece of your own cell. A virus is a billionth think this is a new coronavirus.” Fair enough. They may have seen a new
of a centimeter—too small to be seen under a virus. In fact, they probably did—but they didn’t demonstrate that this
normal microscope. To look at a virus, one needs new virus is present in millions of copies in everybody with the disease.
an electron microscope, which was not invented If I were the disease investigator, I would next have said, “Show me
until the early 1930s. five hundred symptom-free people of approximately the same age and
Consider a common viral disease like chick- the same health status.” In other words, you have to have a group that
enpox. More or less everybody with chickenpox is similar to the five hundred people who are sick. Once you have your
has the same set of symptoms—fever, feeling control group, you want to see how many of them have an example of this
crummy but not horrible and getting vesicular coronavirus in their respiratory secretions or blood. According to Koch’s
rash (which means oozing bubbles). After seven postulates, it should be zero. But as far as I know, not only was that not
to ten days, the person gets better. One hundred done with five hundred controls, it was not done with one hundred or
percent of those people will have literally mil- even ten controls. Again, it was not done with anybody. That’s a problem.
lions of copies of the virus in their blood. They I’ve read the original articles postulating that this coronavirus was a
will also have thousands and maybe millions new infection. The articles say, “We did not attempt to purify the virus.”
of copies of the virus in their vesicular fluid. What does that mean? It means they took the respiratory secretions con-
Applying Koch’s postulates to the chickenpox taining this new coronavirus—but also possibly ten or a million other
virus, the steps would involve obtaining a puri- viruses and a whole lot of toxic stuff—and they injected it down the
fied culture of the virus, exposing an animal, throat or in the nose of some animals, and some of the animals, not all,
producing chickenpox symptoms, obtaining got sick. In fact, in one study they couldn’t get normal mice sick—so-
more chickenpox virus from that animal, expos- called “wild mice”—so they used genetically defective mice, and those
ing the next animal and so on. mice got sick when injected with this unpurified snot. That doesn’t sound
That’s what should have happened in this like proof to me.
current coronavirus situation but, as far as I
know, didn’t. First, there are no particularly DIFFERENT CONDITION, SAME STORY
characteristic symptoms. People may have a Let me give you another example (and you can find meticulous ref-
low-grade fever and a dry cough. However, erences for this in Virus Mania; see sidebar page 42). In the late 1800s,
lots of people—who might have the flu, a cold, a new disease involving paralysis of the limbs started showing up par-
asthma or a reaction to air pollution—have ticularly in children but sometimes in adults. Nobody knew what it was.
low-grade fevers and dry coughs. Unlike with It appeared at the same time that people started spraying orchards with
meningococcus or chickenpox, that vague set a chemical called lead arsenic. When scientists did pathology exams
of symptoms doesn’t really help with diagnosis. and autopsies, they found that a certain part of the nervous system (the
Let’s say you have five hundred people with anterior horn cells of the spinal cord) was affected and was leading to
these symptoms in a city somewhere in China the paralysis. Lead arsenic is a specific toxin for that part of the nervous
and you say, “Okay, we think this is a different system, but—because this was the heyday of Pasteur’s germ theory—they
kind of dry cough and low-grade fever.” Know- said “this must be an infection” and called it polio.
ing about how one proves infectivity, you might Because they didn’t find any bacteria in either the polio cases or
reasonably assume that scientists examined the people without polio, they decided it must be something smaller than
blood of these five hundred people and demon- bacteria. However, this was prior to the invention of the electron micro-
strated that they all had millions of copies of this scope. So, they tried to transmit the disease to a healthy animal to see

SUMMER 2020 Wise Traditions 43