Is this the Last Nail in Virology's Coffin?

Tobin Owl calls all experts in logic and science to witness

Hey Folks,

What you are about to read was written by regular Nevermore contributor Tobin Owl, who basically believes that virology is nothing more than pseudo-science quackery.

I am obliged to state for the record that Nevermore does not take a position on the existence or non-existence of viruses. We certainly are not all of one mind on this issue, and that’s fine. We are not a political party and we don’t have a party line.

As for myself, I have stated my opinion that the burden of proof lies with those claiming that viruses exist. As I understand it, the virus-believers have failed to adequately address the questions raised by virus skeptics. I have not seen convincing evidence that viruses exist, and so I remain agnostic on the subject.

That said, if I follow the principles of logic to their natural conclusion, I would have to admit that it is more reasonable not to believe in something whose existence is unproven.

Then again, I also believe that Sasquatches exist in the Fourth Dimension, and I don’t know how I would go about proving that. At the end of the day, I believe that people should have the right to believe in whatever invisible beings they please.

Generally, it’s considered inconsiderate to tell Christians that angels don’t exist, or little children that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. If people want to people in viruses, who am I to tell them they’re wrong?

I suppose that if I had to give my two cents, they’d be this: viruses are boring, people. They don’t do anything cool. It’s very hard to tell a good fairytale with viruses as protagonists. If we’re going to imagine invisible entities, why not unicorns or fairies instead?

With a sprinkle of pixie dust,

Crow Qu’appelle

The Last Nail in Virology's Coffin

by Tobin Owl

April 15, 2024

A recent paper by Dr. Mark Bailey has dealt a definitive, deadly blow to virology’s teetering house of cards.

If you haven’t made a point of doing your own investigation into the methods of modern virology, you may think this claim sounds crude and uneducated. You may be thinking “Virology dead?! Come on now, be serious.”

But in the minds of many of us who’ve been examining the subject in detail, indeed the entire body of virology, though deceptively technical and superficially “sophisticated,” appears flimsier and flimsier the deeper we look. Personally, though I’ve written a few pieces on the subject, these brief expressions pale in comparison to the many, many hours I’ve spent studying the matter from every angle. And yet my own diggings likewise pale in comparison to those of other researchers—like the Bailey’s—whom I see as the real experts who’ve done their homework and done it well.

In Is Virology Science, I featured excerpts from Mark’s seminal paper, A Farewell to Virology (Expert Edition). In that paper he made the point that,

…one of the pivotal issues with virology was that it invented itself as a field before establishing if viruses actually existed. It has been trying to justify itself since its inception: In this instance, a virus particle was not observed first and subsequently viral theory and pathology developed. Scientists of the mid and late nineteenth century were preoccupied with the identification of imagined contagious pathogenic entities…

That paper went into a lot of detail exposing the fallacies of virology, including how “SARS-CoV2” was invented and how the first “genome sequencing” of the alleged virus was produced from a crude patient sample without isolation of any particles whatsoever.

Now, in a much briefer and concise paper entitled Virology’s Event Horizon, Dr. Bailey brings the point home again, emphasizing the key word in the quote above—“imagined”:

It … remains largely unappreciated that viruses were not discovered and then studied - they were imagined. Virology went on to invent itself on the basis of these hypothetical particles…

And, for the sake of those who are unaware, “viruses” continue to be imagined. For although alongside the myriad of artistic depictions of imaginary viruses there are also genuine electron micrographs of particles claimed to be any kind of virus you can imagine, the particles in those images:

1. have never been isolated so as to be able to examine their chemical nature independent of the biological and chemical soup they are floating amid

2. are never used in isolated or purified form (separate, independent, unmixed) in experiments which allege to show their pathogenic nature (their declared “cytopathic effect” or CPE)

This, of course, is problematic. At least if you are concerned about real science rather than articles of faith.

Is Virology Science?

Was Dr. Qureshi reading my mind, or was I reading his?

Below, I’ll provide an excerpt from Mark’s brief paper. But before moving on to that, I’d like to make an announcement on a related theme.

A new book has just been published by lifelong naturopath Daniel Roytas, long a highly-esteemed lecturer at Australia’s leading natural medicine colleges and universities. Yet his book challenges many of the deeply engrained assumptions even of a majority of practitioners of natural medicine—ideas about germs and contagion that people of all walks take for granted, including, formerly, Dr. Roytas himself. The book, titled Can You Catch a Cold?, reviews the forgotten history of the failures of germ theory to produce authentic validation, even when not just a few experiments were intentionally designed to try to study and prove contagiousness. At 450 pages long with over 1000 footnotes, the book brings a formidable and unprecedented review of the scientific and medical literature concerning the question of whether illnesses like the cold and influenza are indeed contagious. I haven’t yet acquired the volume, but it’s definitely on my must read list; once I have that opportunity, I’ll likely report on it again. You can listen to an interview with Dr. Roytas by Dr. Sam Bailey who has written a forward to the book.

(Note: Dr. Mark Bailey and Dr. Sam Bailey are husband and wife. They are both medical doctors, both with medical degrees and decades of clinical experience.)

Without further ado, here’s the excerpt. It represents the ironclad heart of Mark’s poignant paper. Pay special attention to the terms dependent variable, independent variable and control which are all necessary and required under international standards of science for all scientific experiments. (Update: This last statement about international standards has been recognized by the author to be in error and is stricken. Regardless, control experiments are vital for validating experimental conclusions.) But in the virology world, the second is missing in action while the latter is generally never even attempted except in a few rare, poorly documented instances (dubbed “mock-infected controls”).

Note that I omit the references found in the text. If you find this of interest, please visit the related webpage where you can download the full document.

If you consider yourself competent in logic and in the scientific method, and have a basic understanding of how virology is performed—and if anything, it is a performance—then tell me, Has or has not Dr. Bailey sent virology straight to the grave?

Virology’s Event Horizon

Mark J. Bailey, 31st of March, 2024

Excerpt (p. 3-5)

What has taken place for over a century has been a series of pseudoscientific practices, including the continued use of a reification fallacy - that is, assuming viruses have a physical existence despite the fact that they remain a hypothetical construct. In other words, “the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing.”

It can be shown that the virologists have painted themselves into a corner and the paradigm that they have created has them snared. If the discipline of virology is said to be a branch of natural science, then its practitioners are reliant on empirical evidence gained through observation and experimentation. Within this framework of the scientific method lies the requirement to generate a hypothesis (that is necessarily falsifiable) and then to test it with experiments. The experiments in question must possess a dependent variable, the part that is an observation or effect that depends on an independent variable. The independent variable is the postulated cause of this observation or effect. Experiments also require a ‘control’, namely the ability to compare variables and conditions in a manner that makes it possible to observe the results when varying one factor at a time.

There can be no excuse for allowing virologists to depart from the scientific field they claim to be operating within. As was noted in A Farewell to Virology (Expert Edition):

In 2008, the journal Infection and Immunity featured a guest commentary titled, “Descriptive Science” that explained why, “descriptive research by itself is seldom conclusive,” and may simply serve as a starting point to orientate further investigations. The authors pointed out that, “microbiology and immunology are now experimental sciences and consequently investigators can go beyond simply describing observations to formulate hypotheses and then perform experiments to validate or refute them.”

And herein lies the complete downfall of virology and the virus model itself. An experiment that follows the scientific method and purports to show the existence of a virus needs to have a valid control to establish that the observed effects are the result of the virus (the claimed independent variable) and not other factors.

If the virologists even attempt to perform a control experiment in their methodologies they assert to demonstrate viral existence, frequently omitted are the details of the “mock-infected” group in their publications. The definition of mock-infected is:

...a control group in scientific experiments designed to evaluate the effects of viral infection on cells or organisms. In a mock-infected control group, the cells or organisms are treated with the same conditions and reagents as the infected group, except they are not exposed to the virus (emphasis added)

A control used in infection experiments. Two specimens are used one that is infected with the virus/vector of interest the other is treated the same way except without the virus. (emphasis added)

In other words, the only difference for the control group is one variable - the alleged virus. This can be done in the case of bacterial or fungal cells because it is possible to separate out such cells and leave the other biological material in the sample.

It is therefore contested that the virologists themselves have conceded that a true mock-infected experiment is an impossibility as apparently they cannot physically isolate (and thus remove) virus particles from specimens derived from an organism said to be afflicted by a “viral” illness.

Thus, the only experiments they can possibly perform must fall back on the prior assertion that viral particles are present in one group and not present in the ‘mock-infected’ group. It is a logical fallacy in the form of petitio principii, also known as ‘begging the question’ in that it purports to prove a proposition while simultaneously taking the proposition for granted.

Although many of us that have criticised the virus model have noted this problem before, we have perhaps not been explicit enough in pointing out that the reason the virologists have “neglected” to perform valid cell culture control experiments is because that, by definition, they are not able to do so.

[Owl’s note: Virologist’s studies claiming to have included a “mock-infected” control are actually few and far between. Generally, virologists omit controls altogether.]

Their predicament goes deeper than the attempts to physically isolate particles derived from the procedure of “culturing” hypothesised viruses during in vitro experiments. Once again, this practice is scientifically invalid as a methodology to establish the existence of something because the interpretation of the results depends entirely upon the presumption that the ‘something’ must exist. Cytopathic effects (CPEs) are claimed to indicate the presence of viruses but they can only be said to be the observation of cells breaking down in a test well. The CPEs are the dependent variable in the experiment but it is patently clear that no independent variable (a “virus”) can be discerned in this process. The postulated virus remains hypothetical as it could not be identified as a specific entity at the start of the procedure and cannot then be claimed to have a physical existence based solely on subsequent observations involving the dependent variable.

At this point, it may be claimed that the in vitro appearance of vesicular nanoparticles in a cell culture mixed with a specimen derived from an organism with a “viral” illness provides evidence that viruses exist. However, this once again invokes the aforementioned petitio principii fallacy as the existence of a virus (and many of its hypothesised properties) is asserted in advance in the form of the “viral” illness.

We can summarise that some of the problems with using cell cultures as purported evidence include:

• (a) The particles being declared as “viral” are seen for the first time as part of the CPE observations, i.e. they are dependent variables. It is preposterous to claim that they are also the independent variable in the same experiment.

• (b) The in vitro (laboratory) observations cannot be known to replicate an in vivo (within living) process.

• (c) The techniques involved in electron microscopy introduce further variables that are not controlled, in addition to technical artefact and the further limitation that they are static structures embedded in resin, not living tissue.

The details of each published cell culture experiment can be analysed in depth; something that has been done by us and others on numerous occasions. In themselves, points (b) and (c) raise currently insurmountable problems as it is unclear if the observations in these settings replicate natural biology. Regardless, the entire process relies on a logical fallacy, a manifestation of which is expressed in point (a) and with regard to the pivotal virus existence question it renders the entire exercise invalid.

Keep in mind that the cell culture technique is virology’s ‘gold standard’ of evidence that has been advanced to establish the postulated virus model. Whether any of the practitioners have realised that the methodology they have employed could not possibly be scientifically controlled is unknown.

The crucial premise of the virus definition is pathogenic particles that cause replica particles in a host but the established ‘gold standard’ cell cultures cannot make a determination of their existence - the information is beyond the technique’s “event horizon”. By all accounts, there is nothing left to fall back upon and no escape from such a redundant paradigm.

The virologists may protest that these techniques are the only ones at their disposal because it is not possible to obtain the hypothesised viruses directly from living humans or other organisms, something that they once set out to do but apparently abandoned. Such a protest is of no scientific merit and the burden of proof remains squarely on their shoulders. The attempts to support the virus model through scientific methods have clearly failed and the imagined viruses have no known existence outside of logical fallacies and pseudoscientific claims.

The citation of indirect observations such as clinical conditions, apparent clusters of illness, antibody assays, genomics, proteomics and tests such as the polymerase chain reaction cannot stand as evidence of viruses because the claimant is starting within a loop of circular reasoning in which they have already assumed virus existence. None of these observations can possibly provide the required evidence to verify the virus model. The original sin involved the reification fallacy.

Unfortunately for humanity, the virologists’ imaginings about their particles spread to enough minds to bring the world to its knees in 2020. A petard has been created but who will it ultimately hoist?

For 'tis the sport to have the enginer

Hoist with his own petard; and 't shall go hard

Tobin Owl is an independent researcher/writer. Over the past four years he’s conducted in-depth investigation focusing on the history of modern medicine, medical science, geopolitical conspiracy and the environment. Articles written prior to his move to Substack are found on his website Cry For The Earth