On Viral Isolation.

I left you last week with a promise to describe the isolation procedure for viruses, with the intent of explaining the rigorous standards that have been, until recently, in general use when it comes to isolation of a virus. You don't need a big imagination to understand that in order to create a diagnostic test for a virus, you should know that that test detects only that virus, and that it detects it darn near every time it is administered. 

To break this down, we need proper definitions. In this situation, it is important to understand what a "viral isolate is" and what a "cultured viral sample" is, because often when we hear the term "isolate" or "isolated virus" what is really being referred to is a cultured virus, which has not been isolated according to the rigorous standards set forth at the dawn of virology.

To properly isolate a virus one must obtain viral particles separate from everything else, as can easily be seen on an electron microscope (an extremely powerful microscope). This is done by extracting a sample of infected tissue from the host, and spinning it in a centrifuge so that the viral particles collect at a certain density band in the centrifuge - since they are all the same, they have the same density so one can reasonably expect these particles to be the virus and only the virus. At that point, the viral sample is collected from the density band via pipette and can be seen under an electron microscope. If all particles are identical, it is appropriate to claim viral isolation. At that point, we can do experiments to discover its infectivity as well as to collect information regarding its genome.

Viral culture is a little different, and a little easier to do. To culture a virus, infected tissue or fluid is taken and added to a cell culture that can contain a variety of things. Antibiotics are a common adjunct in viral culture. If the cells in culture become infected, the sample is considered positive for the virus. At this point you might ask how we ascertain that the culture cells have become infected, and the answer is that the cells die. We simply assume that the virus has killed them, and not some other compound in the culture. It should be obvious that viral culture is not viral isolation; nor is it an acceptable substitute for viral isolation. At best, we can say we have detected the virus. That's it.

What would you think if I told you that viral isolation, as described in the first paragraph, has never been done in the case of SARS-Cov-2 or HIV (and other viruses as well; hepatitis C is none one example). The late Dr. Etienne deHarven, one of the founders of electron micrography, was highly critical of the "isolation" experiments performed on HIV and stated many times that no electron micrograph of isolated HIV exists or has ever existed. Even Dr. Luc Montagnier, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, admitted in an interview with Djamal Tahi in 1997 that "we did not purify... I repeat, we did not purify". (Purification is sometimes used as a synonym for isolation in the first sense.) Similarly, when you read the scientific papers describing SARS-Cov-2 "isolation", you find that what they really did was culture, not isolation. In fact, there are no fully intact isolates of SARS-Cov-2 to be found anywhere. All the CDC and similar agencies have are viral cultures, and computer programs containing the inferred genetic code of the virus. The genetic code was inferred from fragments of the virus found in culture and pieced together. It did not come from a viral isolate because no true viral isolate is available.

The implications of this are profound. Can we even be sure that all these genetic components came from the virus under consideration? We can't, because of everything else that is contained in the cell culture. In fact, there are segments of the genetic code from both HIV and SARS-Cov-2 that are present in the humans genome. This is at least partly what PCR testing is not allowed to be used for diagnosis of HIV - studies showed too many low-risk, antibody-negative individuals showing positive "viral loads". 

Consider now that the PCR test is the gold standard for covid diagnosis, and you might start to become, rightly, suspicious as to what these tests are actually detecting. It is my posit that we can't know for sure, and therefore these tests are at best unreliable for diagnosis. How much unreliable, then, are they for quantifying an entire pandemic and using them as the basis for making very sweeping, potentially dangerous decisions, including even laws and mandates relating to the pandemic.