The Emperor's New Clothes - part 6
Oddly enough - in virology the process of isolating a virus is the exact opposite from the dictionary definition.
I would like to continue and deepen into the issue of isolation and purification of the virus because this issue is perhaps the most fundamental for our discussion.
Let's first define the literal meaning of "isolation".
The definition in the dictionary in our context is " to separate from another substance in order to obtain something in its pure or free state (that is from all other things)." Hence, in order to be able to claim and declare that we have isolated one virus or another - we must separate it from any other material other than the virus and receive it in a purified state and without any material other than the virus. Now - let's re-examine the virus isolation and purification procedure in light of this definition. Let’s revisit the article “A novel Corona virus from patients with pneumonia in China, 2019”
From the description of the "isolation" of the virus in the article -
· Samples were taken from the respiratory tract of people with symptoms of pneumonia.
· The samples were transferred in test tubes to a strong centrifuge in order to precipitate the heavy particles.
· The upper liquid in the test tubes was sucked out and dripped into petri dishes in which human cells were cultured.
· These human cells were taken from people during surgery to remove lung cancer! That is, these are cancer cells!
· These cells were kept at 37 °C and in an environment rich in CO2 (5%) and were washed with a solution every 48 hours.
· In addition - the cells were diluted and transferred 3 times to a new cell culture.
· During this process, they looked for a cytopathic effect (CPE)- that is, the disintegration of the cell culture due to the death of some of them.
In simple words - at no stage of the above process was there a complete separation and purification of any virus particles from anything else in the system. In fact - the exact opposite was done! Instead of separating all other things until only one thing has left - they kept adding more and more things until they had a “soup” of many things in it! Let us recall what other factors are in the system - that is, in the sample taken from those sick people. Besides a virus that is supposed to be there and be isolated, there are also - human cells, Bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms, along with all sorts of particles inhaled from the environment. Next, after the centrifugation which has an element of separation (well done!) they start to add more things - they add a cell culture which contains foreign human cell with all it’s genetic material, they add a growth solution (Usually fetal calf serum - taken from Bovine source) which has many bio-molecules in it, and they usually add antibiotics to keep the culture free from bacterial infection. So what do we have now? we have a system that contains the unpurified sample from the patient, we have a variety of organisms such as bacteria and fungi, all of which themselves contain nucleic acids that consists a part of all the genetic material in the “soup” and we have all kind of other bio-chemicals added by the researchers. Does it sound to you that they managed in this process to isolate and purify the particles of one particular virus? Does it meet the definition of “isolation” above?
It is important to emphasize - they performed ultra-centrifugation to settle large particles and thus separate large and heavy particles from small and light particles, but there is no description of a process in which they separated the various and many components from the phase of the light particles(That refers to the supernatant that they sucked out and transferred to the cell culture). How could they know that in the light phase (supernatant) there are only viruses and only one type of these? To assume that it is - contradicts all scientific logic. In addition, the claim that the procedure of taking body fluid from a human, passing it through a centrifuge and spreading it on a culture of cancer cells which after a few days resulted the death of these cells - that this is proof of the isolation of a virus that causes a new disease - is quite delusional when you think about it (and sorry for the bluntness...).
Why wasn't the virus isolated and purified directly from the respiratory tract sample? (turns out that it’s never done so).
And why did they had to transfer the solution and the cells 3 times to a new culture? (The claim that there is supposedly not enough virus in the sample is strange in light of the phenomenal infectivity potential associated with the virus - which required us all to wear masks and stay 2 meters away from each other).
It is obvious that every such transition (from one culture to another) adds more and more factors, more and more variables, more and more noise and hence serve to the exact opposite than isolating and purifying something.
Going back to the reply from the FOI, the Ministry of Health provided additional evidence that is supposed to prove the isolation of the virus -
Translated - “Another review article with abundance of references showing the isolation of the virus from patients, it’s characterization with molecular methods based on molecular sequencing and full genomic sequencing. the title of the attached article - “Characteristics of SARS COV-2 and Covid-19”
sounds promising, ain’t so? Let’s find out if it finally has the needed evidence.
It turns out that this is a review article describing the work done to characterize the virus. However, there is no information in this review article that meets the clear criteria I requested. Here, too, all we can find are references to papers describing the same procedure done on cell cultures ( in-vitro ) and sequencing by computer programs ( in-silico ).
To conclude the topic of isolating and purifying the virus, I will refer the reader to take a look at the NIAID virus isolates database. The NIAID is the institute that until recently was headed by Mr. Fauci. The NIAID’s isolates depository is called BEI resources and on its website you can find technical information about the deposits it has. If you access the SARS-COV-2 page you will find a PDF file with all the details on the virus isolate provided to this depository by the CDC.
Notice that here too you can clearly see that the "isolate" is not a virus isolated and purified from all other material. It is written in plain black on white - what are the components of the “isolate”? cell fragments (cell lysate) and supernatant taken from green monkey kidney cells .
Doesn't it seem strange to you?
wouldn't you expect to see on the label of SARS-COV-2 isolate only one word - "SARS-COV-2"?
Another concluding question - why do they use green monkey kidney cells? Why not use human epithelial cells as a model for research? A postulated answer - next chapter.