Great article as usual, Jessica. You know my hat is off to you for everything you do. The point I am going to comment is indirectly related to your point. Since day 1 of the "pandemic" I was confused about why "they" decided to "contact trace" people for a viral respiratory pathogen. I am an MD, MS in Preventive Medicine with a 30+ years career as an educator in the field of Epidemiology. For decades, it has been an accepted principle that we do not "contact trace" people for respiratory viral diseases, because the patterns of "transmission" are so complex, and in theory, anyone can "spread" the infection to anyone anywhere they go. It doesn't make any sense to try to "contact trace" or try to figure out from whom anyone "caught" the disease. If you add to that the complexity of mutations and "variants" (we used to call them strains)... contact tracing does not make any sense. We do contact tracing for diseases such as STDs and food borne diseases. Even if someone is a sexually promiscuous person, it is a reasonable task to try and identify sexual contacts, and try to control the "spread"... likewise if you got a food borne infection; it is reasonable to try to identify people who ingested a common food source. Not so with supposed "respiratory viruses". TB is a different matter, because it appears to "spread" within contained environments, not in the open community.
Nowadays, after 30+ years of being a medical doctor and epidemiologist, I am starting to question some of the concepts about infectious diseases that I took for granted as "true"... but that is another matter... some of my colleagues will accuse me of "heresy".
The point is that even if we accept the conventional medical-public health model, with COVID they reinvented every principle we had accepted for decades. Sorry for the long blurb.
I agree regarding contact tracing. No matter what one believes about transmission dynamic, contact tracing for a respiratory illness doesn't make sense. IIRC, there's even recognition of that in the communicable disease codes of my state, with a vague exception for "pandemic influenza," which is also not a well-supported phenomenon. I don't know much about STDs (thankfully!) but I know some things about food-borne illness from being in a restaurant family. The health department is well within is purview and achievable goals when it comes to that kind of tracing...but even then, there can be a bit of guesswork and leaps.
With the Chicago couple, them apparently not transmitting to each other, nor to any other contacts, raises the question of what "spread" and transmission dynamics are.
As I'm fond of saying, if you don't "catch" a cold or flu from the person you sleep with, how can you catch it from the grocery store cashier?
The only thing you said I disagree with somewhat is that COVID reinvented every principle. At least in the U.S., many of the same things that were done with COVID (and seemed "sudden") were, in fact, being done with the flu surveillance/attribution/shot program for years, albeit it on a lower level. I think of it as proof-of concept (same goes for SARS, H1N1, MERS, etc)
Hi Ruth. Thanks for checking in and for the chance to clarify.
I have never said "There are no viruses," "viruses aren't real," or anything along those lines. I've referred to viruses as "biological entities" or (borrowing a phrase from a doctor we interviewed) "packets of information." I am most skeptical of claims about viral dynamics and the causal link between viruses and particular symptoms or illness and tend not to focus on what viruses "are."
My layperson's guess is that these things are always in us, always identifiable given the "right" test and may become problematic under certain circumstances...and/or are simply co-incidental to/aggravated by/a reaction to bacteria etc that really are the culprits…but do not themselves really "transmit".
I am also unpersuaded that viruses are "in the air." The term used by WHO et al in flu surveillance etc is "circulate." I suspect that term is accurate but it may be the case that the circulation is largely WITHIN us. So "inside out" - NOT "outside in."
Whatever thing(s) was/were being "tested for" & coming back positive - and classified a SARSr-CoV, then named SARS-CoV-2 - may have been "new" to discovery but not new to the animal kingdom, including humans. The virologists on the ICTV-CSG which re-named 2019-nCoV to SARS-CoV-2 felt the same way, as their emails show and the initial draft of their paper also indicated. https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/the-sars-cov-2-name-game-long-read
Testing positive for a particular virus does NOT preclude the presence of other pathogens/causes, establish a link between a single pathogen and an illness, or prove human-to-human (or animal-to-human) transmission has occurred.
To the extent that SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus, I do not think it was "created" in a lab because I do not see evidence that scientists can “create” coronaviruses (or even adulterate them well), nor do I see hard evidence that coronaviruses transmit from animal to person or person to person. If something is from a lab and made it into humans, it would need to be through injections or testing regeants, swabs, or soemthing else “direct”.
I largely agree with Martin Neil and Jonathan Engler regarding GoF research - i.e., it is conducted and has been conducted for awhile, but is directed toward vaccine development and doesn't/can't yield anything that "escapes" and does any real widespread damage. https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/virus-origins-and-gain-claim-of-function
I think co-opting something already “out there” or in humans is far more likely than person to person "spread" of something from a lab, market, or bat cave...especially on the short timeline most people presume.
I did not say I reject the notion of transmission; rather, I am unpersuaded by claims about transmission. I said, "Nor do I see hard evidence that coronaviruses transmit from animal to person or person to person."
While a "layperson" in the sense that I'm not an MD and my PhD is not in a science field that doesn't mean I'm unstudied. :)
I'm not disregarding the body of literature - nor making claims to having read everything there is to read.
If I test positive for influenza but negative for other things on an RVP, do the negative results on the other viruses mean the other viruses (or bacteria) aren't present? No.
Can you point me to a study that demonstrates transmission of viral agents? If so, I'm happy to review it. Interestingly enough, I've had substantive and respectful correspondence with one of the virologists involved in the naming of SARS-CoV-2 and, as I far as I could tell, transmission aspects of viruses and the link between viral agents and specific illness are more inferred and presumed than demonstrated or proven. Most viruses, he said, don't cause illness/disease. It's only some that do. (Me: Are thought to!)
I can't speak to Mpox because it's not something I've looked into, but I did not say that no sickness or illness is contagious, nor did I question to existence of pathogenic agents. I'm addressing the agents called viruses being "passed" between humans and being primarily or solely responsible for an illness or certain symptoms.
Simultaneous illness within a household could have many causes, none of which have to be the members catching or passing something from each other. Again, I'm not saying people can't or don't contract illness from other humans...or claiming to understand all of the ways bacteria are passed.
There are more unknowns than knowns, as far as I can tell.
Transmission has not been demonstarted; testing for anything is dubious and superfluous unless it changes or directs treatment in a beneficial way. A test result means little and of itself. Testing for newly-detected things has been used multiple times since 2000 to create the illusion of a new "spreading" thing.
I did not point to pneumonia for an argument about transmission but casuality. (I think you meant MRSA, not MERS.)
You may recall that the intial claims about 2019-nCoV were that it caused pneumonia. (The Chinese name for the disease Wuhan Seafood Market pneumonia, and then officially,
Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia.)
My chief interest has been in the events and data related to early 2020, including the NYC event and the disappearance of positive flu tests.
My broader questions about viral transmission and the causal link between viruses and illness all stem from the 2020 events, as well as previous "pandemic" events.
I care less about the characteristics and origin of SC2 than I do things like the proposed mechanism for a "lab leak"/release or zoonotic emergence/leaps (whether in a market or over a longer period from an animal "reservoir"). See
"The Most Basic Questions" article for my pespective on what I think should be prioritized for inquiry and discussion but usually isn't (esp the second, third, and fourth categories).
Great article as usual, Jessica. You know my hat is off to you for everything you do. The point I am going to comment is indirectly related to your point. Since day 1 of the "pandemic" I was confused about why "they" decided to "contact trace" people for a viral respiratory pathogen. I am an MD, MS in Preventive Medicine with a 30+ years career as an educator in the field of Epidemiology. For decades, it has been an accepted principle that we do not "contact trace" people for respiratory viral diseases, because the patterns of "transmission" are so complex, and in theory, anyone can "spread" the infection to anyone anywhere they go. It doesn't make any sense to try to "contact trace" or try to figure out from whom anyone "caught" the disease. If you add to that the complexity of mutations and "variants" (we used to call them strains)... contact tracing does not make any sense. We do contact tracing for diseases such as STDs and food borne diseases. Even if someone is a sexually promiscuous person, it is a reasonable task to try and identify sexual contacts, and try to control the "spread"... likewise if you got a food borne infection; it is reasonable to try to identify people who ingested a common food source. Not so with supposed "respiratory viruses". TB is a different matter, because it appears to "spread" within contained environments, not in the open community.
Nowadays, after 30+ years of being a medical doctor and epidemiologist, I am starting to question some of the concepts about infectious diseases that I took for granted as "true"... but that is another matter... some of my colleagues will accuse me of "heresy".
The point is that even if we accept the conventional medical-public health model, with COVID they reinvented every principle we had accepted for decades. Sorry for the long blurb.
Always good to hear from you.
I agree regarding contact tracing. No matter what one believes about transmission dynamic, contact tracing for a respiratory illness doesn't make sense. IIRC, there's even recognition of that in the communicable disease codes of my state, with a vague exception for "pandemic influenza," which is also not a well-supported phenomenon. I don't know much about STDs (thankfully!) but I know some things about food-borne illness from being in a restaurant family. The health department is well within is purview and achievable goals when it comes to that kind of tracing...but even then, there can be a bit of guesswork and leaps.
With the Chicago couple, them apparently not transmitting to each other, nor to any other contacts, raises the question of what "spread" and transmission dynamics are.
As I'm fond of saying, if you don't "catch" a cold or flu from the person you sleep with, how can you catch it from the grocery store cashier?
The only thing you said I disagree with somewhat is that COVID reinvented every principle. At least in the U.S., many of the same things that were done with COVID (and seemed "sudden") were, in fact, being done with the flu surveillance/attribution/shot program for years, albeit it on a lower level. I think of it as proof-of concept (same goes for SARS, H1N1, MERS, etc)
https://x.com/Wood_House76/status/1710745807450784137
Yep. Many of the things "they" did with covid were done with influenza before, but to a much lesser degree.
Impressive as usual. The lack of response is telling on its own.
To be fair, I imagine most authors on most studies related to covid have ignored inquiries about their work/results.
Not something I would expect with other topics - or pre-March 2020 - but par for the course now, when it comes to covid research.
Jessica,
If you would care to review/amend this Complete Covid Timeline, let me know:
https://herecomeschina.substack.com/p/complete-covid-timeline
Can’t wait to see what you find out.
I think I've found out all that I can for now.
Authors won't respond.
Maybe someone else is also looking into this. We will keep our eyes open for any new I go.
Hi Ruth. Thanks for checking in and for the chance to clarify.
I have never said "There are no viruses," "viruses aren't real," or anything along those lines. I've referred to viruses as "biological entities" or (borrowing a phrase from a doctor we interviewed) "packets of information." I am most skeptical of claims about viral dynamics and the causal link between viruses and particular symptoms or illness and tend not to focus on what viruses "are."
My layperson's guess is that these things are always in us, always identifiable given the "right" test and may become problematic under certain circumstances...and/or are simply co-incidental to/aggravated by/a reaction to bacteria etc that really are the culprits…but do not themselves really "transmit".
I am also unpersuaded that viruses are "in the air." The term used by WHO et al in flu surveillance etc is "circulate." I suspect that term is accurate but it may be the case that the circulation is largely WITHIN us. So "inside out" - NOT "outside in."
Specific to 2020, my position is that there is no evidence that a coronavirus was suddenly spreading from person to person in late 2019/early 2020, adding risk of severe illness or death to a certain group of people. These recent posts express some of my related views: https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/thinking-about-lab-leak | https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/reaction-to-scott-atlass-remarks | https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/the-most-basic-questions
Whatever thing(s) was/were being "tested for" & coming back positive - and classified a SARSr-CoV, then named SARS-CoV-2 - may have been "new" to discovery but not new to the animal kingdom, including humans. The virologists on the ICTV-CSG which re-named 2019-nCoV to SARS-CoV-2 felt the same way, as their emails show and the initial draft of their paper also indicated. https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/the-sars-cov-2-name-game-long-read
Testing positive for a particular virus does NOT preclude the presence of other pathogens/causes, establish a link between a single pathogen and an illness, or prove human-to-human (or animal-to-human) transmission has occurred.
To the extent that SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus, I do not think it was "created" in a lab because I do not see evidence that scientists can “create” coronaviruses (or even adulterate them well), nor do I see hard evidence that coronaviruses transmit from animal to person or person to person. If something is from a lab and made it into humans, it would need to be through injections or testing regeants, swabs, or soemthing else “direct”.
I largely agree with Martin Neil and Jonathan Engler regarding GoF research - i.e., it is conducted and has been conducted for awhile, but is directed toward vaccine development and doesn't/can't yield anything that "escapes" and does any real widespread damage. https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/virus-origins-and-gain-claim-of-function
I think co-opting something already “out there” or in humans is far more likely than person to person "spread" of something from a lab, market, or bat cave...especially on the short timeline most people presume.
Hope that helps.
I did not say I reject the notion of transmission; rather, I am unpersuaded by claims about transmission. I said, "Nor do I see hard evidence that coronaviruses transmit from animal to person or person to person."
While a "layperson" in the sense that I'm not an MD and my PhD is not in a science field that doesn't mean I'm unstudied. :)
I'm not disregarding the body of literature - nor making claims to having read everything there is to read.
If I test positive for influenza but negative for other things on an RVP, do the negative results on the other viruses mean the other viruses (or bacteria) aren't present? No.
“The likelihood of at least one false positive is inevitably increased in multiplex panels with many targets, despite the fact that the false positive rate for most individual viruses on RVPs is low.” https://asm.org/articles/2020/march/making-sense-of-respiratory-viral-panel-results | See also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11078360/
The CDC EPIC study is also instructive: A high proportion of pneumonia hospitalizations didn't identify a “causal” pathogenic agent or single agent https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1500245
Specific to SARS-CoV-2, we addressed some of these questions in discussion with Pierre Kory: https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/dialogue-wpierre-kory and in this article: https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/whodunnit-unabridged
Can you point me to a study that demonstrates transmission of viral agents? If so, I'm happy to review it. Interestingly enough, I've had substantive and respectful correspondence with one of the virologists involved in the naming of SARS-CoV-2 and, as I far as I could tell, transmission aspects of viruses and the link between viral agents and specific illness are more inferred and presumed than demonstrated or proven. Most viruses, he said, don't cause illness/disease. It's only some that do. (Me: Are thought to!)
I can't speak to Mpox because it's not something I've looked into, but I did not say that no sickness or illness is contagious, nor did I question to existence of pathogenic agents. I'm addressing the agents called viruses being "passed" between humans and being primarily or solely responsible for an illness or certain symptoms.
Simultaneous illness within a household could have many causes, none of which have to be the members catching or passing something from each other. Again, I'm not saying people can't or don't contract illness from other humans...or claiming to understand all of the ways bacteria are passed.
There are more unknowns than knowns, as far as I can tell.
Transmission has not been demonstarted; testing for anything is dubious and superfluous unless it changes or directs treatment in a beneficial way. A test result means little and of itself. Testing for newly-detected things has been used multiple times since 2000 to create the illusion of a new "spreading" thing.
I did not point to pneumonia for an argument about transmission but casuality. (I think you meant MRSA, not MERS.)
You may recall that the intial claims about 2019-nCoV were that it caused pneumonia. (The Chinese name for the disease Wuhan Seafood Market pneumonia, and then officially,
Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia.)
My chief interest has been in the events and data related to early 2020, including the NYC event and the disappearance of positive flu tests.
My broader questions about viral transmission and the causal link between viruses and illness all stem from the 2020 events, as well as previous "pandemic" events.
I care less about the characteristics and origin of SC2 than I do things like the proposed mechanism for a "lab leak"/release or zoonotic emergence/leaps (whether in a market or over a longer period from an animal "reservoir"). See
"The Most Basic Questions" article for my pespective on what I think should be prioritized for inquiry and discussion but usually isn't (esp the second, third, and fourth categories).
Thanks.
Sure thing. I reserve rhe right to keep changing my mind as/if evidence compels me to do so.
Regarding people reading my NYC work and asserting I am saying there are no viruses, they are wrong, mistaken, and/or misdirective.