J-mac is of the opinion that there is no such thing as a virus. He wishes to discuss this further but cannot initiate threads.
So here you go, J-Mac: the floor is yours. Let me know if you’d like to expand this OP, or you can expound your thesis in comments.
Actually, my reading isn’t that J-mac doesn’t believe in viruses, it’s that he doesn’t believe vaccines prevent the illnesses vaccines cause, and may even make the illnesses worse.
Flint,
He’s at least open to the possibility that they don’t exist:
And:
OK. I know that electron microscopes have the resolution to see viruses directly, so they’re no longer just a model fitting evidence.
He promotes Stefan Lanka, who definitely doesn’t believe viruses are real (despite having previously published on viral genomics). He frames it as ‘what if…?’, but I perceive him as an actual virus denier in the Lankian mode. J-mac can correct me if I’m wrong, though his engagement here is intermittent so I’m not holding my breath.
(I did a search for Lanka’s paper and it came up with “Lanka virus”, which I really hoped was someone trolling him by naming a virus in his honour. Sadly no; it’s a murine virus from Sri Lanka!).
Not to make their case for them, but they believe all evidence is artefactual.
Yeah, this is the familiar “if it refutes my convictions, it’s not evidence” refrain. We’ve been seeing it a lot lately.
They’re highly selective. There’s a common belief that viruses are ‘really’ exosomes – extracellular vesicles. They occupy a similar size range to viruses, and need much the same techniques to investigate, structurally and chemically. Yet they accept the existence of exosomes without a murmur. There are no ‘exosome deniers’.
Allan:
There’s something fishy about these exosomes. Not very vesickly (vesiclacious?):
Yup. They differ chemically too. Exosomes are lipid encased, viruses are surrounded by protein. Protein that the encapsulated nucleic acid encodes. Viral genomes are consistent within type, exosomes vary. The viral genomes have no homology with the host, contra exosomes. All facts the likes of Lanka fail to address. They can convince the rubes – “what’s a nucleic acid?” might be their response – but molecular biologists require a tad more detail.
Hi keiths,
Thank you for making my voice heard! lol (before we leave this planet I would like you to join me for a meal or coffee some time. The transportation and accommodation taken care of).
I kinda hoped you would because I don’t care dealing with the lapciuchs admins here to allow me to post my own posts…
Just to clarify one point: I’m not of the opinion that viruses don’t exist simply because I can’t prove they don’t exist. Just like you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, do you?
So, since I have become a thorn in the flesh between “no virus crowd” and no contagion, I had to make some difficult decisions…
these are bacteriophages but they are not viruses per say, are they?
J-Mac:
Your thanks should go to Allan, who created this thread for you.
Yes, bacteriophages are viruses.
There was a time that you knew better. Why are you struggling so much with viruses?
Btw how do I link a picture so it shows in my post?
I just wrote and posted a post that disappeared entirely. Wtf is going on?
Rumraket:
Hi Rumraket, I looked at the Dashboard and don’t see any pending OPs or drafts from you. I’m not an admin, though, so I don’t know if there’s some other place where your OP could be stuck. Neil, Jock, Alan, could you take a look?
Image uploads are broken. It’s one of several problems with the site at the moment. I’m trying to organize a repair job, and Lizzie has agreed to allow it, but I need some login info for the hosting provider before I can proceed. I just sent her a reminder about that.
For now, I’m using imgbb as a workaround when I want to post images in comments, though I haven’t tested whether it works for OPs. Instructions here.
I already looked, and could not find any trace of a lost post.
J-Mac,
So do you think they exist, or not? I don’t think God exists; I do think viruses exist. Taking a position is not based on proving the negative. Positive evidence for viruses is significantly more abundant than that for a Creator.
There are a few bugs. I’ve taken to copying my text to the clipboard prior to posting, just in case.
A virus is any nucleic acid/protein construct that utilises host machinery to replicate that nucleic acid and to make those proteins. Bacteriophages are a class of virus that infects bacterial cells.
If you accept the existence of this class, but prefer not to call them viruses, on what grounds do you accept them? They’re in the same size range as what you might call ‘true viruses’, of similar composition, investigated and examined by the same techniques. So what leads you to accept that evidence in the one case but not the other?
those who care can look at this layman’s virus study which is pretty good but not the same we do.
https://open.substack.com/pub/controlstudies/p/controls2?r=1w6ae3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=fals
I personally know that the theory of evolution and its puppets, like you know who here, are responsible for the fake covid-19 panicdemic. I can prove it in the court of law but there is no such thing as a court of law anymore…
I don’t care what people here would like the truth to be or how much they are willing to bend the truth so that it is not a lie…
even hypothetically, if pathogens, like viruses don’t exist, what would this mean for the world, and not only the evolutionary enthusiasts?
keiths? where are you at?
J-Mac:
If pathogens didn’t exist, the world would be a completely different place. The world isn’t a completely different place. Therefore pathogens do exist.
Viruses and evolution are two separate disciplines, though there is some overlap. Viruses evolve, for example, and there is extensive evidence of viral integration into our own genomes over evolutionary time.
But, you don’t have to be an ‘evolution enthusiast’ to accept the evidence for viruses, and neither depends on the other for evidence.
Just to be clear, J-mac, which of the following do you accept the existence of?
1. Bacteriophages
2. Viruses
3. Bacteria
Which of the following (assuming existence) can be pathogenic, at least some of the time?
1. Viruses
2. Bacteria
3. Fungi
4. Protists
5. Yeasts
?
Nor do I care what you would like the truth to be. Glad we’ve cleared that up.
There does seem to be a strong thread of motivated reasoning among virus deniers. Many came to it through Covid scepticism and resentment. And those who lost jobs over it, or who have spent years railing against it, are unlikely to be open to reason. Viruses have to be fictitious; there’s a lot of sunk cost there…
J-Mac,
Jamie Andrews! Hahaha. He is an incredibly stupid man. He’s one of those who does not believe DNA is real. He thinks that, because uv light can cause cell lysis at certain wavelengths, all molecular-biological use of fluorescence is invalidated (modern DNA and protein sequencing use the tiny bursts of fluorescence that occur when a molecule is nibbled off, or added to, the end of a chain. Fluorescence is also used to track viruses through tissues).
I’ve had dealings with him on Twitter (he’s now blocked me, a small mercy).
I was once arguing with someone who insisted viruses were really exosomes. I jokingly said, in echo of a common virus denial trope: “exosomes have never been isolated y’know”. He sent up the bat-signal and Jamie swaggered in with a paper on exosome isolation by gradient centrifugation. So all one need do to isolate viruses to their satisfaction is do gradient centrifugation! Which is routine.
He was too dumb to recognise the own goal.
Really? I’m going to make it easy for you keiths…. You have no proof for your claim….
u die
u cant prove anything…
keiths:
J-Mac:
I’m not familiar with this “pathogens don’t exist” batshittery. Do you and your fellow travelers literally believe that contagion isn’t a thing? Or do you have an “explanation” for it that doesn’t involve pathogens?
I recall reading about a physician in a hospital, long ago, who decided to wash his hands between patients. Soon the hospital noticed that his patients recovered much more frequently than average, and instructed all their doctors to wash their hands frequently. With very positive results.
The point is, at that time there was no germ theory of disease, so nobody had a good explanation for why this washing practice worked. It just did.
(Is it the Christian Scientists who don’t believe in medicine, and are willing to watch their children die of perfectly curable illness because “That’s the way God wants it”? Institutionalized batshittery.)
I really have no idea what that is supposed to mean. The questions were very straightforward, an honest attempt to find out which of the many variants of germ theory scepticism you adhere to.. Too hard?
keiths,
That is pretty much it. “Prove contagion” is something of a catchphrase. They will have impossible standards for such a proof, while having no standards at all for their own pet theories.
Other catchphrases: Koch’s Postulates, Scientific Method, Independent Variable.
I went weeks with a guy, Gary Orlando, who insisted that even Tobacco Mosaic Virus, the best studied of all, was an artefact. You can buy kits from academic suppliers for High School kids to do experiments with. But every single experiment ever done at any level was just someone getting their controls wrong. And yet no virus denier ever bought some to do their own experiments, nor showed how any of the myriad experimental results could be obtained without ‘viral’ seeding.
IF viruses don’t exist as, who is the real loser?
The evolutionary theory, or those who blindly believed it?
My opinion is simple:
1. the virus model does’t add up. its bs. can it be replaced with another bs. yes.
2. evolutionary “biologists are mainly responsible for covid fraud. those who refuse to acknowledge it or take a never- ending bulls..t shots…
they may statistically have less snifes which they can kill large populations… of
J-Mac:
The viruses. They really want to exist. Unicorns already got the shaft. Give viruses a break.
The world would be a better place if we replaced each bs with another bs. yes.
True, but Trump has promised us a snife in every pot, and I, for one, believe him.
We’d all.be better off if they didn’t, but sadly they do. Children think things aren’t there if they screw their eyes shut. It’s cute when they do it. Adults, not so much.
Evolution has very little to do with virology. Although viruses do evolve.
Chortle
Not without a teensy bit more effort on your part…
Evolutionary biologists had almost nothing to do with Covid: existence or response. What a weird conflation.
Sorry, have you nodded off?