I will just use ">" for quotes here. This will be a looooong one.
> Actually, I'm proud of my ignorance.
No one should be, imho.
> Unless we acknowledge ignorance, what we can learn becomes severely limited.
agreed. Acknowledging ignorance is commendable.
> And conjecture is the bedrock of science; in theory at least, it constantly makes conjectures and then sets out to test them, discarding or amending them as necessary.
True, but I am sure you know there is a very wide range of conjenctures. The one in the Myth is really weak, permiates the whole opus, and flies in the face of both facts and simple critical thought experiments.
> Whilst it's true that Cowan veers off a bit towards the end of the book,
He is deep in it from the very beginning and all the way through. If you don't see it, I doubt anybody can convince you otherwise.
> imho his central thesis, that viruses may not in and of themselves be infective agents, is an intriguing and plausible one,
That intrigued me too. You can believe it or not, but that's why I wasted a few hours on it.
> especially given the existence of exosomes which so closely resemble them. I don't know whether or not they are, but he's at least made me consider the idea.
Well, I guess you can give him credit there - making people aware of exosomes. There are much better ways to learn about them though
> 5g may or may not be pathogenic; I don't know that for sure either, but regardless, the notion that at least some bacteria and "viruses" (if that's what they can legitimately be called) may be utilised as part of our immune response to toxicity that has its origin in food and/or the environment isn't intrinsically ridiculous.
If I am not mistaken, it is already mainstream after the acceptance of benefits of gut bacteria. And it's not just in response to toxicity, mind you.
> We already know that human beings contain large numbers of bacteria that are important for gut health,
True. But if you put e-coli in the wrong part of the digestive tract (the upper part of it) it wreaks havoc. There's always this nuance: good for what, good for where. Cowan and Co forget about it and bend facts the way it fits them.
> and Gallo et al. in the paper mentioned earlier seem to take seriously the possibility that exosomes could be essential in immune responses, recommending further research with the aim of seeing whether they can't be utilised in combatting disease.
If you are talking about the PNAS paper that was mentioned here - yes, I agree (I read it). This does not make viruses or bacteria non-causal agents in disease, nor do the authors anywhere in that paper hint at that.
> So there's some evidence that bacteriologists and virologists may gradually be coming round to the idea that bacteria and things that resemble viruses aren't all infectious agents.
That's been so for decades, actually (I know, Cowan pretends it's otherwise using Pasteur as a strawman). Just think - why would people worry more about, say, anthrax bacteria than some other bacteria? Even though you do not believe I am scientist, some of my work actually involves suspended bio material. When there was the bioterrorism scare after 9/11, we tried to apply for funding to study its spread. You know the difference between weaponized and wild anthrax? It can be aerosolized. So how do you study dispersion and cervivability of anthrax, say in an indoor environment? There are benign species that are similar in shape, but you can work with them without having biosafety level 4 facility. Bacillus atrophaeus, for example. Not all "bugs" are dangerous and that's been known for ages.
As I see Cowan's and Co argument - it is nothing but a straw man. Let's take a criteria from a couple of centuries ago and demand that everybody now follows it. The funny part - he trashes the author of the criteria too.
> One thing I'm very sceptical about is that we've "isolated" viruses that putatively cause AIDS and COVID-19. "Isolated" means one thing in commonsense understanding, and another to people (unjustifiably in my view) convinced that scientists have actually extracted pure viruses and used such extracts to infect uninfected organisms.
That's the problem with "isolation" critera that these clowns perpetuate. Let's take what they like - toxins, poisons. How about hidrogen cyanide (HCN)? I am sure everybody knows about it. Let's take a glass of water and another glass of water that contains HCN. HCN is not pure, right? It has water with it, a lot of it. You can add some other stuff to that sollution too, so it is not "pure" by any means. If you try to "isolate" HCN by drying water to see what is there, you will not find HCN in the residue - it's volatile, trust me, it will evaporate. What Cowans do is equivalent to crying that see, it was not isolated, so it's not that "hypothetical" HCN thingy that all the eggheads say kills people.
And as to the talking heads on CNN and other prestitutes - what they are talking about generally has very little to do with science. You may or may not believe it, but I gave quite a few interviews (not to CNN though) - even if you are careful and chewing things up to make it digestible, there is always something in the result that you have not meant to say. This is not to say that all scientists are truthful, no.
> Alas, the papers I've seen are often so obfuscated by jargon that it's difficult to be sure what procedures were followed.
That PNAS paper is quite plain language and they clearly define the difference between viruses (including damaged ones) and exosomes.
> But there are quite a few qualified scientists who maintain that we haven't isolated viruses. Even the conventional scientists who ascribe to germ theory may say that their experiments haven't isolated the AIDS or COVID-19 viruses, especially when pressed for an opinion: or even when not, as when they include the explicit disclaimer in their papers.
That could be true. But that's true for other things, like diabetes seems to be one disease, but actually is a bouquet of things that go wrong. AIDS could be the same thing. I admit, I have not gone into it, I have only 24 h in a day.
> We do know that vaccines are potentially dangerous -- not least because they often contain adjuvants such as mercury and aluminium compounds.
I agree. "Live" or neutralized can also be dangerous if some of the viruses or bacteria survive and are still active. BTW, just as with poisons, the end result depends on the dose and the dose depends on the "territory", but even a perfectly healthy territory can be overcome if sufficiently potent agent is given in sufficiently large quantity. Do you know what I mean?
> Many probably don't know about these additives, but if you were to propose injecting people solely with such toxins sans the supposed active principle, they'd be up in arms. However, add it in, and they're miraculously supposed to enthusiastically embrace vaccines. The active principle, an allegedly killed or otherwise disabled pathogen, apparently not only cures the disease, but also renders inoperative the toxic brew in which it is delivered.
But that's a different story from whether or not viruses/bacteria actually exist. Believe it or not, I stopped taking flu vaccines (not sure how long I will be allowed to do that), because I do not think the risks outway the gains, especially that quite often they mispredict the strain.
> Louis Pasteur, that great hero of Western medicine, allegedly fudged his findings, and there have been a number of officially acknowledged incidents with vaccines that caused more problems than the diseases they were supposed to cure.
See above.
> There's one great overriding problem in science, especially prevalent latterly: the tendency to accept theoretical postulates prematurely, and build on them immense edifices of dogma that one questions at one's peril. At which point, science becomes ossified and inflexible, a kind of religious faith.
Fully agree, however I am not sure about the "especially prevalent" part. I think it's been like that since forever. Now it is exacerbated by $$$, but even back in alchemy days the great brains were BSing their sponsors that they can make gold out of lead (well they probably meant not the physical substances, but I am pretty sure kings who payed them thought that way)
> We're seeing it all over the place -- from cosmology to psi research, Darwinism to nuritional science, and now, germ theory, which may be only partially correct. I never really questioned it before, but that's what I'm entertaining after reading Cowan's book.
That's what really perplexes me: you really don't see problems with Cowan's book? He's lying for crying out loud. 88 countries, if I remember correctly, had G5 by April 2019, but the effect was sooo slow I guess. G4, G3, radars - none gone away, and yet epidemics have a clearly isolated time signature. Can't you see through his BS?
> As to his assertions about 5g and his taking seriously the concept of biogeometry, well, I offer no opinion. As others have said, discussing such things tends to leave him open to ridicule regardless of whether they might have merit.
Rightly so, as he has no merit, see above
> But the rest of his argument seems to me, as I keep on saying, at least plausible. In other words, I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I keep an open mind, because I know I know less than I may sometimes kid myself I know.
I don't think his argument is anywhere near being plausible, I gave plenty of reasons. What are your reasons that there is a baby in that bathwater?
> Alex uses the phrase "inquiry to perpetuate doubt". I think it's a good phrase, because when all doubt disappears, one presumably claims to know everything about a given topic. Which is an enormous claim, entirely antithetical to the true scientific spirit.
I like it too. Apply it to Cowan's work and see what happens. He is a complete fraud and I gave you reasons why.
> How certain is any of us that germ theory is completely correct? Personally, I don't think the probability is 100%. At the moment, I'm hovering around 50%. Maybe parts of it are correct and parts aren't.
Awesome. I personally would put it pretty close to 100%, with some nuances remaining.
> Maybe some bacteria are infectious, as may be some particles we label "viruses", but the rest act in ways that help us. One sticking point is the fact that no "viral" agent appears to have been demonstrated to satisfy Koch's or Rivers' postulates.
See above. What I have seen makes sense if you apply some logic: you add a mix of something that contains A,B,C,..., then you have a control that does not have A, see what happens. If the one with A caused problems, then it probably has something to do with it. If you also see that A increased in concentration after administering it - it probably is infectios, not just poisonous. You don't need to isolate it.
There could be of course sinergetic effects, but still, in most cases there is one main factor. For example, formaldehyde is toxic in itself, but much more toxic for those who smoke. Still, formaldehyde is the main causative agent in damage attributed to it.
> It's always hazy, and we may tend to mistake surrogate markers, such as PCR employs, for viruses. In other words, we may be mistaking correlation for causation. To me, that's distinctly possible.
PCR is a different story. It is being (I suspect on purpose) misused (by not scientist, but the medical profession that follows guidelines dropped on them) with the number of cycles, to "show" that immunity does not last (see, the antibodies are decreasing! when it is not about antibodies, but T-cells), etc., etc. That PNAS paper does not doubt that viruses exist, but that they could be difficult to distinguish from exosomes. The fact that viruses take chucks of host DNA was known since at least mid 80s. They leave some of their own too.
Exosomes actually make the origin of viruses probable. Suppose some of those native exosomes escaped their original organism and happened to be somehow compatible with another species such that they can introduce their genetic material into a new host. Plausible? I would think so. Now imagine that some of them had some machinery to reproduce whatever they brought with them without negative control mechanisms and there you go, you have what conventionally is called a virus. Plausible? Def more plausible than 5G or a comet passing by.
> Alex has asked more than once the question: "do you think there's a covid-19 virus? y/n/m". Taking "m" as meaning "maybe", I'm wondering why he's asking it -- maybe it's a "when did you stop beating the wife?" type of question, an attempt to force people into boxes. Whatever, imho it would have been better if he'd said "y/n/dn", where "dn" signifies "don't know", which is my position. I have a strong suspicion there may not be a COVID-19 virus, to be sure, but I don't know. I've seen no convincing evidence it does, surrogate evidence having been taken as proof positive in lieu of actual isolation followed by actual infection and reinfection. This seems circumstantial to me.
Yes, a conjecture, but much stronger than a comet, would you agree?
> Such doubt as I have could be dispelled if there was some paper I could understand (or was rendered understandable to me), that incontrovertibly demonstrated that Koch's or even Rivers' postulates had been followed. But to my knowledge, none ever has. If it had, why then would there be all the controversy about HIV causing AIDS or SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19? One incontrovertible paper for each would suffice, and yet if there is one, I've yet to see it cited.
See above re postulates. Should we demand that all quantum phenomena be treated strictly within an outdated classical mechanics paradigm? Even if the quantum theory is wrong, it makes things tick - we would not be able to communicate now without all those semiconductors, you know. This is why a couple of posts back I brought up the pragmatic/utilitarian aspect of science. Even if a theory is wrong, if it makes things easier to interpret, predict, design useful things, etc, - that's all one needs, at least for a time being.
Re controversies: Cowan claims germ theory is wrong. I think I have shown that he is full of shit. His main claims and alternative ideas also do not stand even simple critical inquiry. Do you think he helps to motivate people to address your questions re HIV and COVID? He actually does an enormous damage to your cause. Do you think there are a lot of people like me who what to spend hours uncovering this idiocy? I am actually thinking this will be my last post in this topic.
> All the papers seem to use surrogate markers instead of the thing itself. Why should that be if it's possible to isolate, extract and infect/reinfect with pure viruses?
See above. You admit it could be difficult due to exosomes, but also due to other practical reasons. The paper in the Isolation writeup actually does a decent job showing, by deduction, that those particles were likely the covid virus. You do not need something in pure form to show it works (remember that HCN example?).
> Why doesn't the scientific establishment step in and perform an experimentum crucis and have done with it? I can only conclude it's because it's currently technically unfeasible. Hence, inevitably, there's inbuilt room for doubt. At least to some degree, people who have no doubt seem to me to lack imagination, to have a touching faith in human nature and how scientists are totally objective and hence immune to subversive influences.
Not just feasible, but it could be not that high on the priority list. Plus, yes, because it is a hot topic, there will be plenty of "ambulance chasers" and thus plenty of questionable papers. But it is not that the scientific community is that brain dead or corrupt to question 100% of its output.
Imagination, yes. I actually also listen to Greg Carlwood's THC. Quite a few of his guests have such an "open" mind, oh my. But yes I find it entertaining and stimulating imagination, yes. Still, one should not forget about taking everything critically, even the stuff that contradicts the big man.