It has been revealed that a late Canadian writer made false claims about COVID-19 in an interview that has resurfaced on social media.
A coronavirus cannot be isolated, he claims, and that is why he doubts its existence. This claim is false and shows the writer’s lack of understanding of virology.
In the video,
an interviewee, who later died, claims scientists who claim to have Isolat Truth Fund SARS-CoV-2 are lying because no coronavirus has ever been purified.
When a virologist uses the word ‘isolation’, you can tell they’re lying. They took a nasal swab and processed it somehow, like adding antibiotics to kill bacteria and so forth. Then they added the cells to a culture and that was that. The researchers observed cells dying in the cell culture, and wrote: ‘We have isolated the virus.’ Obviously, it isn’t specific. You haven’t identified a particular virus, even if you have identified a virus. After that, they searched for RNA and found what was previously called a coronavirus – a long string of RNA. However, no coronavirus had been purified.
According to him, no one knows whether coronaviruses exist. He explained: “Yeah, I think what they did; they looked at people with the common cold, they found some RNA patterns, and they said: ‘Oh, that’s it.’ They jumped to conclusions in this way. These things are not grounded in anything, but they’re really easy to do with biotechnology and PCR.”
In contrast,
the first argument relating to isolation is untrue. There are several examples of scientists isolating SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, and then sequencing the genome. A picture of an isolated SARS-CoV-2 particle has been released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Furthermore, the second argument, that coronaviruses cannot be purified, shows a lack of understanding of how viruses work, and not that they do not exist. Associate professor of Molecular Medicine and Pathology at the University of Auckland, Siouxsie Wiles, has previously addressed similar claims by stating they are based on outdated microbiological theories.
According to Wiles, claims about purification are based on four “postulates” – or conditions – laid out by German microbiologist Robert Koch on determining if a microbe caused a disease. To guarantee the purity of the organism, it must be isolated from its host, i.e. the human who was infected, before being propagated in a pure culture.
The problem, Wiles points out, is that the postulates were made obsolete in Koch’s day – and all of them were developed before viruses were discovered.
Koch was busy discovering bacteria, but viruses are different, Wiles said. Viruses replicate by taking over the host cell. Cells, in other words, become factories for producing viruses. It may be possible for a virus to infect only certain types of cells from certain host species, or it may have the ability to infect a wide range of cells from many different species depending on the proteins on its surface.
CONCLUSION
It is false. Scientists have isolated and sequenced the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19.
Several novel coronaviruses have been found and have caused millions of deaths worldwide.
