“[Bechamp] understood that what we now call “dysbiosis” was just an imbalance or maladaption of the microbiome.”
Jason Pontin, Wired 6/15/2018, The 19th-Century Crank Who Tried to Tell Us About the Microbiome,
A great deal of funding for virology research around the world is provided by institutions and foundations with clearly stated population reduction goals. Being curious about this perspective and the ongoing “virus challenge” debate, further research led me to attend a local virology symposium last October.
I attended the symposium hoping to bolster my confidence in the theory that virus, as currently defined by the dominate medical community, does in fact cause disease. Below are some of my takeaways from this symposium.
- Arizona State virologist, Bert Jacobs, was asked a question about full length E3L in Monkeypox. Among other things he said that this would be a gain-of-function experiment. He said that RIBC and NIH permit this experimentation in BSL-3 labs. He cautioned to be careful, “we’re doing risky…(I didn’t catch it all)… soon we may know how risky.” Was Jacobs perhaps referring to the recent preprint Boston University paper?
- Kristin Parent, from Michigan State, presented on deciphering virus entry mechanism: from bacteriophages to giant viruses, reference one study here on initiation of giant virus infection. She compared Salmonella, E Coli, and Shigella noting that Shigella behaves differently and best efforts to isolate phage are difficult. Parent was asked if what she was observing was real, does virus lead to an infection event. After some explanation, Parent said that her tests do lead to productive infection, but that she has not published these findings saying that knockouts are really difficult. Parent’s slide indicated receipt of funding from the Burroughs Wellcome PATH Fund
- At lunch, a local postdoctoral virology student shared with me that she had applied for a grant to study why some pigs get sick while others don’t. Curious about why all of the morning presentations of virus images where graphic renderings, I described that in my industry I am used to very specific photographic forensic presentations. She explained that time on a mass spectrometer is very expensive and difficult, time-consuming work. There were a few actual photos in the afternoon session.
- At breakfast with a local virologist, I mentioned the virus debate within the community. He kindly explained the debate was political and that it was clear that vaccines have reduced disease, having been demonstrated in historical graphs.
- Several researchers during the symposium referred to their work as an “arms race” or “evolutionary arms race.”
Unfortunately, the symposium did not bolster my confidence in the virus theory. What a beautiful thing it would be if there were open, informed conversations across all disciplines about the cause and treatment of disease, if all healers could practice freely, and if people took back personal responsibility for their own health, learning the use of nutrient-dense foods and inexpensive homemade remedies, and consulting with an appropriate healer as needed.
“I think it’s simple logic. It doesn’t require that anyone have any specialized knowledge of the field. The fact is that if there were evidence that HIV causes AIDS-if anyone who was in fact a specialist in that area could write a review of the literature, in which a number of scientific studies were cited that either singly or as a group could support the hypothesis that HIV is the probable cause of AIDS-somebody would have written it. There’s no paper, nor is there a review mentioning a number of papers that all taken together would support that statement.”
Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winning biochemist and inventor of the PCR technique