Cowan and Haberland Illuminate the Dogma of Virus Denialism

Introduction

On November 10, 2022, Tom Cowan published an interview with a German engineer named Marvin Haberland in which they attempt to rebut my article “Answering Tom Cowan’s ‘Five Simple Questions for Virologists’”, in which I pointed out the falsity of Cowan’s claims that scientists never purify samples before isolating viruses in cell culture and never use uninfected controls during the culture experiment. Instead of identifying any actual errors on my part, however, they manage only to pile false claims upon false claims and to tie themselves into knots with self-contradictory gibberish.

Here is the video, which I encourage you to see for yourself so that you can verify that I am accurately characterizing their arguments in my following rebuttal:

To briefly summarize:

• Cowan cites a hoax article to mischaracterize the 1954 Enders study describing isolation of the measles virus, which certainly did not show that cytopathic effects observed in cell culture are caused by the treatment of the cells and not by a virus.
• Haberland contradicts Cowan by affirming that I am correct that scientists do purify samples either by filtration or centrifugation before doing cell culture.
• Haberland also contradicts himself by first saying that this observation of mine is irrelevant because this step is not necessary while later agreeing with Cowan that scientists would need to prove 100% purification at this step for cell culture to be considered a valid method of isolating viruses.
• Cowan and Haberland contradict themselves and illustrate how there is no possible evidence that they would ever accept for the existence of viruses by first criticizing scientists for not proving that the purified supernatant contains only virus by observing virions under electron microscopy before doing cell culture and then arguing that observation of particles under electron microscopy does not prove that the particles are viruses. (While Cowan does not explicitly repeat the claim here, it is also certainly not true, as he has oft claimed on other occasions, that scientists have no way to tell whether the particles they observe under electron microscopy are viruses or just extracellular vesicles like exosomes.)
• In attempting to dismiss as irrelevant my correct observation about the falsity of Cowan’s claim that scientists never purify the sample before doing cell culture, Haberland asserts that to prove the existence of a virus, purification and observation under electron microscopy must be done after cell culture. Demonstrating willful ignorance, he claims that this is never done, which is false, as anyone can see even just by looking at the very same New England Journal of Medicine study that they critique together, as well as the studies I had already cited in the very article of mine that they are attempting to rebut.
• Haberland claims that scientists have never done transmission challenge studies to show that inoculation with an isolated virus causes disease, which is false. In fact, with SARS‑CoV‑2, in addition to numerous animal challenge studies fulfilling Koch’s Postulates, there is also a human challenge study.
• Haberland claims that scientists never do any experiments to prove that the purified sample obtained from a sick patient contains a virus, which is a ridiculously false claim since that’s precisely the purpose of the cell culture experiment.
• Haberland dismisses whole genome sequencing as independent proof of the existence of a virus in the sample with remarks that amount to nonsensical gibberish.
• Haberland dismisses the cell culture experiment as evidence for the presence of a virus in the purified sample by claiming that scientists never use valid uninfected controls. To support this claim, he asserts that studies instead describe “mock infected” cells, which he claims is an undefined term in science and could mean anything. Humorously, Cowan then falsifies Haberland’s claim by presenting the scientific definition of “mock infected”, which means a control given the same treatment except for remaining uninoculated with the supernatant obtained from purifying the patient sample—yet both proceed as though totally oblivious to how Haberland’s claim had just been proven false.
• Once again illustrating how there is no possible evidence that they would ever accept for the existence of viruses, they both agree that even if scientists used uninfected controls according to the definition of “mock infected” (which they do), this would still be insufficient evidence since they don’t also inoculate the control cells with the supernatant after magically removing the virus from that purified sample (they offer no ideas as to how they expect scientists to be able to do that).
• Looking again at the New England Journal of Medicine study describing the isolation and whole genome sequencing of SARS‑CoV‑2, Cowan and Haberland assert that images taken with electron microscopy showing the characteristic virions with protruding spike proteins that give coronaviruses their name (corona meaning crown in Latin) are not evidence for the virus since scientists do nothing to otherwise characterize and identify the particles as such, which is also a ridiculously false statement in light of how they demonstrate cytopathic effects and viral replication in cell culture and place the identified virus in its phylogenic tree using whole genome sequencing, which technology poses an insurmountable obstacle for virus denialists since it is independently from the isolation of the virus in cell culture proof of the existence of the virus (hence their reliance on absolute gibberish to dismiss the validity of this technology).

Now let’s examine each of those points in greater detail to illuminate the dogma of virus denialism.

How Cowan Mischaracterizes the 1954 Enders Study

The discussion between Cowan and Haberland begins with the vague claim that virologists “fail to do controls” and so have never proven the existence of any virus. That segues into Cowan presenting an anonymously written article published by the godfather of virus denialism, Stefan Lanka. The article is a hoax, falsely claiming that scientists have never used uninfected controls when doing cell culture experiments, which are considered the gold standard method of virus isolation. Dependent upon that false premise, the article claims that cytopathic effects observed in cell culture are simply caused by the treatment of the cells and not by the presence of a pathogenic virus.

The hoax article’s central claim is that “Cell death caused solely by laboratory conditions and not by a virus has been misinterpreted since 1954 as evidence of the existence, presence, action and malignancy of suspected viruses.” Instead, “The ‘virus effect’, the death of cells in the test tube, invented and made famous in 1954, is a completely normal stress mechanism of cells in the laboratory.”

The reference is to a study by John F. Enders and Thomas C. Peebles published in Experimental Biology and Medicine in June 1954 and titled “Propagation in Tissue Cultures of Cytopathogenic Agents from Patients with Measles”.

This is a study that Cowan and others have cited frequently to support the claim that the cytopathic effects observed in cell culture are not caused by the presence of a virus but by the treatment of the cell culture. To support that claim requires them to deny that scientists use uninoculated controls when doing cell culture experiments.

Consequently, the anonymous author of the hoax article brazenly lies that when Enders and Peebles conducted their experiment, “control tests were not carried out, which is why the observations have no scientific significance.”

This type of bald-faced lie is typical for those in the cult of virus denialism. It is easily disprovable by simply examining the source cited, yet proponents of the claim that viruses have never been proven to exist persist in making such falsifiable claims anyway, as though they expect that nobody will ever actually check the primary source materials to verify their characterization of those sources. For numerous other examples in addition to the false claim that scientists never use controls during cell culture, see my article “Tom Cowan’s Sources Contradict His Claims about SARS‑CoV‑2’s Nonexistence”.

When you point out to them that many studies do describe the use of uninfected controls during cell culture, their response is to offhandedly dismiss the controls as not being “proper” controls, which is exactly what Cowan and Haberland do in response to my observation above that scientists do use controls during cell culture experiments, as we’ll come to shortly.

First, let’s come back to the Enders 1954 study. Cowan knows perfectly well that the claim that no uninoculated controls were used during Ender’s cell culture experiments is false, yet he cites this hoax article to support his position anyway. In fact, he has cited the use of uninoculated controls in the Enders study as supposed proof that the observed cytopathic effects were caused not by the presence of a virus but by the treatment of inoculated and uninoculated cells alike.

Cowan made that argument, for instance, in an online documentary series called Endgame: The Coming Collapse and How to Survive It. The host’s purpose in interviewing Cowan was to share Cowan’s knowledge of gardening with the viewers. (Cowan has a company called Dr. Cowan’s Garden with a founding mission “To improve human, ecological and economic health by increasing the cultivation and consumption of plant diversity.) However, Cowan derailed the interview by expressing his disinterest in discussing the topic he was invited to discuss and instead launching into a discussion about his claim that viruses have never been proven to exist. During that interview, Cowan cited the Enders paper to support his claim.

By Cowan’s account, Enders’ study proved that the supposed measles virus particles were nothing more than the breakdown products of starved and poisoned cells because Enders had shown that particles indistinguishable from viruses were also obtained from an uninoculated cell culture. To support this, Cowan provided the following quote from the paper:

A second agent was obtained from an uninoculated culture of monkey kidney cells. The cytopathic changes it induced in the unstained preparations could not be distinguished with confidence from the viruses isolated from measles.

While that quote might superficially appear to support his claim, in fact, it does not because Cowan simply quotes the statements out of context. Note that what Enders described as indistinguishable was not the agents themselves but the cytopathic effects that those agents caused in the cell cultures.

The paper described the collection of samples from children with measles, purification of the samples by centrifugation, and inoculation with the supernatant in cell cultures. Cytopathic effects were observed in infected cells compared to uninfected controls that had otherwise been maintained under the same conditions.

However, an anomaly was the observation of similar cytopathic effects in one of the control cultures. This was not altogether unexpected. As Enders explained, while monkey kidney cells were a suitable candidate for viral propagation, “it must be borne in mind that cytopathic effects which superficially resemble those resulting from infection by the measles agents may possibly be induced by other viral agents present in the monkey kidney tissue . . . or by unknown factors.” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, it was possible for monkey kidney cell lines used for culture to be contaminated with monkey viruses or for the cells to otherwise show pathologic changes due to other causes. Note also that Enders described the resemblance of these possible changes to the cytopathic effects caused by the measles virus as being superficial.

Enders described isolating measles virus along with two additional “agents” during these cell culture experiments. The first of these was observed in an infected cell line and was distinguished from measles virus because it was “neutralized by herpes simplex immune rabbit serum”, suggesting that the agent was herpes simplex virus.

The second was obtained from the uninoculated control referenced by Cowan. Replacing the selected quote back into its context reveals Cowan’s deception: in fact, the paper states explicitly that the cytopathic effects caused by this agent were “easily distinguished” from the cytopathic effects of measles virus with subsequent observation, and antibodies generated to neutralize measles virus failed to bind with this other agent. Here is the very next sentence following the one Cowan deceitfully plucked from its context (emphasis added):

But, when the cells from infected cultures were fixed and stained, their effect could be easily distinguished since the inter-nuclear changes typical of the measles agents were not observed. Moreover, as we have already indicated, fluids from cultures infected with the agent failed to fix complement in the presence of convalescent measles serum. Obviously the possibility of encountering such agents in studies with measles should be constantly kept in mind.

Thus, the Enders paper does not support Cowan’s claim that the observed cytopathic effects were caused by the treatment of the cell cultures since these effects were not observed in the other uninfected controls; and in the one uninfected control in which cytopathic effects were also observed, contrary to Cowan’s false claim, the effects were distinguished from those caused by the measles virus, and the cause of the cytopathic effects in this control culture were reasonably determined to be due to contamination of the monkey kidney cells with some other virus.

Yes, Scientists Purify Samples Before Inoculation in Cell Culture

After citing the hoax article originating from a publication of Lanka’s, Cowan turns his guest’s attention to my article answering his five questions.

Cowan skips over my answer to his first question, which asked whether it is possible to point to a study in which a virus was isolated. I answered in the affirmative and provided two examples: this 2020 study in Emerging Infectious Diseases describing the isolation of SARS‑CoV‑2 and this 2013 study in Nature describing the isolation of a SARS-like coronavirus (both of which I selected because I knew that Cowan was already aware of them).

Cowan moves on instead to my answer to his second question, which asked whether the term “isolation” can be defined, which question he had premised upon his false claim that scientists never purify samples before doing cell culture. My answer was:

The premise of your question is false. Scientists do purify the sample before doing cell culture. And, yes, we can define what virus “isolation” means to scientists: it means to separate the virus from the host in a way that enables scientists to characterize and identify the virus. The “gold standard” method for doing this is the cell culture.

Cowan asks Haberland whether my answer is correct. Haberland replies by saying:

Well, I would say that the first part, scientists have purified the sample before doing cell culture, there is already a mistake. They don’t need to purify it before doing the cell culture. It’s important to purify it after the cell culture because the virus, as they say, is grown and multiplies in the cell culture. So, we want to purify it afterwards. It is true that they purify, sometimes, samples before culturing them, but it doesn’t matter. We want to prove the virus, we want to obtain the virus separated from everything else in the cell culture. That’s why we need to purify it afterward, and this they never do. And this is the point. This is already debunking the whole thing. I mean, what he [Hammond] says doesn’t even matter.

Thus, Cowan’s guest directly contradicts Cowan’s claim that they never purify the sample before doing cell culture. Haberland essentially agrees with me that Cowan is wrong about that, but he dismisses my admittedly correct observation that Cowan’s claim is false as somehow irrelevant. The relevance, of course, is that it goes to show how Cowan supports his position by making statements that he knows are untrue.

Yes, Scientists Use Purification and Electron Microscopy After Doing Cell Culture

While admitting that I am right that purification of samples is done before inoculation in cell culture, Haberland claims that this is irrelevant because what really needs to happen is for purification to be done after the cell culture experiment. This is never done, he claims, but that is simply another lie.

In fact, both of the studies I had already cited described the purification of virions for observation under electron microscopy after isolation in cell culture.

The first, “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 from Patient with Coronavirus Disease, United States”, published in March 2020 in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, describes how infected cells were scraped with the back of a pipette tip and “pelleted by low-speed centrifugation” for observation with electron microscopy.

The second, “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor”, published in October 2013 in Nature, similarly describes how, after isolation in cell culture, “Purified virions displayed typical coronavirus morphology under electron microscopy.” An image of virions included in the study includes a caption explaining how virions were collected from the cell culture and “purified by sucrose gradient centrifugation” for observation under an electron microscope.

During their discussion, they also looked at another study, titled “A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019”, published in February 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine that similarly describes how supernatant from human airway epithelial cell cultures that showed cytopathic effects was collected and centrifuged in preparation for observation under electron microscopy. Like the other two studies, this one includes images of the virions observed under the electron microscope.

After Haberland contradicts Cowan’s claim that they never purify samples before doing cell culture, Cowan objects that it “depends on what you mean by ‘purification’ because to most people that implies, if you purify before the cell culture, then you have pure virus . . . so, that’s not the case.” Of course, Cowan here is simply begging the question by either presuming that there is never a virus in any such sample or insisting without any supporting evidence that there are also other substances in these samples that cause the cytopathic effects subsequently observed in cell culture.

Either way, Haberland then interjects:

What he [Hammond] is saying is that purification beforehand, the sample, they just run it through a filter or they run it through a centrifuge sometimes, but they will not assess the result. They will not check the result with electron microscope, they will not perform experiments like transmission experiments with that, and so on. They will not do any further experiments to check whether there is a virus inside this purification. So they just will take it, put it in culture, and from there on, they will go on. So we need to purify the final result of the cell culture and then prove that this purified virus or particle caused disease. This is the point. . . . There is no electron micrograph from any of these purified samples, so this is the point.

There are several points to make about Haberland’s statements here. First, his claim that they “will not do any further experiments” to determine whether a virus is present in the purified patient sample is nonsensical since that’s precisely what the cell culture experiment is.

Second, his claim that they never do purification and electron microscopy after doing cell culture is false, as I have already shown.

Third, Haberland makes a point about demonstrating that a virus is the cause of a disease, which is beside the point about demonstrating that a virus exists. Obviously, there is no point in discussing the role of a virus like SARS‑CoV‑2 in causing a disease like COVID‑19 with anyone who denies that viruses exist.

Fourth, Haberland is irreconcilably contradicting himself and demonstrating how there is no possible evidence that he would accept for the existence of viruses. He argues that my observation that scientists do purify samples before doing cell culture is irrelevant because this step is unnecessary while at the same time insisting that scientists must prove purification of a virus at this step with electron microscopy. He argues that scientists must prove purification of a virus with electron microscopy at this step while at the same time insisting, as we will come to, that observation of virus-like particles under electron microscopy does not prove the presence of a virus in a purified sample.

In short, to prove the existence of a virus by their Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning is a logical impossibility. Rather than following the scientific method, Cowan and Haberland start from the premise that viruses do not exist and simply reject all evidence that contradicts their belief, notwithstanding how this results in a reliance on irreconcilable self-contradictions.

Yes, Scientists Do Animal and Human Challenge Studies Demonstrating Pathogenicity

Additionally, contrary to Haberland’s false claim, transmission challenge studies have been done. I have already provided several examples in my article “Correcting Misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 Whole Genome Sequencing”. Here is the relevant excerpt from that article:

For example, a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases on March 26, 2020, described the clinical and pathological manifestations of COVID‑19 in golden Syrian hamsters, which were identified as a good candidate for fulfilling Koch’s Postulates due to their cellular expression of ACE2 (suggesting that it might be possible to infect them with SARS‑CoV‑2). Using a control group of mock-infected hamsters (injected only with phosphate-buffered saline, which was “used to dilute virus stocks to the desired concentration” in the experimental group), they challenged the animals with the virus, observed infection as well as clinical and pathological manifestations of disease, and observed the development of anti-SARS‑CoV‑2 antibodies in all of the hamsters after recovery. (All the hamsters survived the disease.)

In a study published in Nature on May 7, 2020, another team of researchers described a viral challenge with mice genetically modified to express ACE2. Again comparing findings with a control group of mock-infected animals, their findings were similar to the hamster study: the animals in the experiment group became infected, developed disease, and developed antibodies specific to the spike protein of SARS‑CoV‑2.

A study published in Cell Research on July 7, 2020, performed a similar viral challenge experiment using rhesus macaques. Once again, in comparison to a control group of uninfected monkeys, the researchers observed that exposed animals became infected, developed disease, and developed antibodies to the virus.

The role of SARS‑CoV‑2 as a necessary but insufficient factor in the pathogenesis of COVID‑19 is a separate topic from the point of this article, though. The question we are concerned with here is whether scientists have actually proven the existence of this novel coronavirus, and the answer is that they have, including through the use of metagenomic sequencing.

As another example, there has actually been a human challenge study with SARS‑CoV‑2 demonstrating the transmissibility and pathogenicity of the virus. Titled “Safety, tolerability and viral kinetics during SARS‑CoV‑2 human challenge in young adults”, it was published in March 2022 in Nature Medicine.

So, Haberland’s claim that such experiments are never done is just another bald-faced lie further illustrating how the cultish belief in the non-existence of viruses is dependent on self-delusion maintained by demonstrable falsehoods and willful ignorance of the scientific literature.

Yes, Scientists Demonstrate that Purified Samples Contain a Virus

Cowan next asks Haberland if he’s aware of any studies in which they purify the sample “to a point where they show you only purified virus before the cell culture”, to which Haberland replies:

Well, some show purified particles, but they haven’t proved that they are viral. Just showing a photograph doesn’t prove anything. You need to prove that these particles you are showing are actually causing disease. So you need to take them out, and you need to, you know, spray them in the air of monkeys or cats or dogs or humans or whatever, or put it in the food, and then you need to prove that you cause the same symptoms in those animals compared to a control group where you spray just water vapor or whatever, and then you can say, okay, yeah, these particles on the picture are actually viral, once you show that they cause disease.

Cowan then repeats that he was unaware of any study in which they looked at the purified supernatant of a collected sample under electron microscopy, and Haberland agrees. Cowan here acknowledges that there are “purification steps before the culture”, but he maintains that “there’s no evidence of a purified virus”.

There are several reiterative or additional points also to be made about this segment of the video.

First, notice that Cowan is attempting to maintain that centrifugation cannot be considered purification of the sample without doing electron microscopy at that step, before inoculation in cell culture. But this is directly contradicted by his own “Statement on Virus Isolation”, in which he describes centrifugation as a process that “purifies the specimen.” It is that purification, his statement goes on to say, that “allows the virologist to demonstrate with electron microscopy” the particles that are “the isolated and purified virus.”

Obviously, whether or not electron microscopy is used to literally observe virions, centrifugation is purification, and setting aside Haberland’s nonsensical claim that scientists never do any experiments to determine whether a virus is present in the purified sample, the use of cell culture is just such an experiment, in addition to which scientists can and do also perform whole genome sequencing and electron microscopy.

As I have already covered in my video “Debunking the ‘Statement on Virus Isolation’”, a central claim of Cowan and his coauthors in that statement is that the “proper” method of virus isolation does not involve culturing the virus in host cells, which is contradicted by the source they cite to support that claim, which is a study in which bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect the single-celled organisms we know as bacteria, were purified by centrifugation from lake samples and cultured in bacterial cells. That is, the “proper” method of virus isolation according to Cowan’s own source is to culture the virus in host cells.

Additionally, during an email correspondence Cowan and I had back in July 2022, Cowan insisted that electron microscopy must be done after purification and before inoculation in cell culture, which I pointed out was also contradicted by his own cited source for the “proper” method of virus isolation, in which study the researchers only did electron microscopy after culturing the viruses in host cells and not between the purification of the lake samples and the cell culture experiment.

I have already pointed out these self-contradictions directly to Cowan during our email exchange, which you can read in my article “Tom Cowan’s Sources Contradict His Claims about SARS-CoV-2’s Nonexistence”. Nevertheless, as you can see, Cowan persists in making the same claims over and over despite knowing them to be erroneous.

Second, notice also that Cowan is maintaining that to prove the presence of a virus in the purified sample, scientists must observe virions under electron microscopy while at the same insisting along with Haberland that observation of particles under electron microscopy does not prove the presence of a virus.

This self-contradiction, again, is a perfect illustration of how there is no evidence that you could ever possibly provide to the virus denialists that they would accept. No matter how much evidence you present, they continually raise the bar and demand even more to the point of absolute absurdity, and it was precisely to illustrate that point that I wrote my article “Answering Tom Cowan’s ‘Five Simple Questions for Virologists’”.

Third, again, contrary to Haberland’s false claim, both animal and human challenge studies have been done demonstrating that SARS‑CoV‑2 causes disease (although, again, it is important to emphasize that infection is a necessary but insufficient factor in the pathogenesis of disease since host factors are also very important).

Fourth, again, it simply is not true that scientists never present evidence that a virus is present in the purified sample. They present multiple lines of evidence demonstrating this to be so, including observation of cytopathic effects and viral replication in cell culture in comparison to uninfected controls, observation of virions under electron microscopy, sequencing of the whole genome of the virus, characterization of its structural proteins, and observation of the binding of generated antibodies to various viral epitopes such as the receptor binding domain of the spike protein of SARS‑CoV‑2.

Ultimately, the key takeaway thus far into the video is that Cowan concedes that I am correct that scientists can and do purify samples by filtration or centrifugation before doing cell culture, which is to say that Cowan tacitly concedes that his claim that scientists only ever use “an unpurified sample” to inoculate cell culture is false—and Cowan knows that it is false.

Yes, Scientists Have Sequenced the Whole Genome of SARS‑CoV‑2

Next, Cowan and Haberland skip over my answers to Cowan’s third and fourth questions and go directly to the fifth. Here, Haberland takes issue with my observation that scientists have sequenced the whole genome of SARS‑CoV‑2, which independently from the isolation of the virus in cell culture is proof of its existence, as I covered in great detail in my article “Correcting Misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 Whole Genome Sequencing”. In response to this observation of mine, Haberland says:

And this is not correct. They have not sequenced the whole genome. They have sequenced the whole cell culture, but from there, they had to use computer programs . . . , and they had to calculate the whole genome. No one actually sequenced the whole genome. They sequence the whole cell culture, the whole mess, and because they don’t know what parts are viral or not, they have to calculate it, and then they get those results, and then they need to use so-called gap-filling algorithms to create the whole genome. So what the guy [Hammond] is saying here is just totally wrong.

In agreement, Cowan then says:

Interestingly, I think “sequencing” is the wrong word for what they’re doing. They’re aligning it or assembling a genome, not sequencing a genome. . . . They’re sequencing the RNA or the DNA from a cell culture, not from any particle called a virus.

Haberland then proceeds:

And the only reason why they need to run the computer program for getting the whole genome is because they have not obtained the virus in a purified state. Otherwise, if they had the virus in a purified state, separated from everything else, then they could sequence the virus in a whole approach without using any tools like metagenomic sequencing. They wouldn’t need to do that. . . . Because they don’t have the virus, they are using the computer algorithms.

Everything Haberland is saying here is completely nonsensical. It is pure gibberish. Whole genome sequencing technology is a computational technology, so it makes absolutely no sense to argue that this technology does not actually sequence the whole genome of a virus because it relies on computer programming. His claim that scientists could but don’t sequence whole genomes without using computer programs is patently absurd. Just how does he propose that scientists go about whole genome sequencing without using computer programs? This is ridiculous and simply reveals his complete lack of understanding about what whole genome sequencing is.

Also, if use of this technology fails to assemble a whole genome, then that is merely a partial genome sequence. Scientists do not simply fabricate the rest if they only obtain a partial genome sequence. They just report the partial genome sequence. You can see this in the GenBank database of genomic sequences, which is filterable by either “complete” or “partial” sequences. (Another international genomic database is GISAID, and here is a map of the phylogenic tree for SARS‑CoV‑2 generated using genome sequences submitted to this database by scientists from all around the globe.)

Haberland’s claim that scientists have to use computers for this because there is not actually any virus there is an absurdity. You cannot use whole genome sequencing technology to sequence the whole genome of a non-existent virus. If there is no virus present, the computer simply cannot produce a whole genome sequence for it. This is a logical impossibility. The claim that the computer essentially just fabricates the whole genome sequence is false and absurd. Whole genome sequencing is not a global conspiracy or a hoax technology.

Additionally, while scientists can and do sequence whole genomes of viruses after purifying and isolating those viruses, the claim that scientists must first purify and isolate a virus before they can sequence its whole genome is also false. I corrected that false claim already in my article “Correcting Misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 Whole Genome Sequencing”.

The argument that scientists “need to” use the tool of metagenomic sequencing because they don’t have an isolated virus is nonsensical. Rather, as I have already explained, this technology enables scientists to sequence whole genomes of a multitude of viruses or microorganisms in parallel and without first isolating each microorganism. This technology has consequently opened frontiers of new research, such as by enabling scientists to better characterize the human virome and microbiome that are so essential for our own health and indeed for our very existence.

As I have previously observed, the existence of metagenomic sequencing technology poses an insurmountable challenge for virus denialists since the sequencing of the whole genome of a virus using this technology is proof of the virus’s existence independent from the isolation of the virus in cell culture.

Finally, the claim that scientists “don’t know what parts are viral or not” is also nonsensical. Of course they do. The whole genome sequence itself identifies the genetic material as viral, bacterial, plant, animal, or human. The sequencing of a virus’s whole genome enables scientists to map it on its phylogenic tree, which is like a family tree showing the evolutionary path of the virus. Again, I explained this already in that previous article, so to learn more about this technology and how Cowan and his fellow virus deniers misinform their audiences about it, just read that article.

Later in the video, they come back to the topic of sequencing, and Haberland makes the additional argument that whole genome sequencing is invalid because they never use “controls”, which makes no sense in the context of this technology and merely reflects the additional false claim that Haberland makes that the technology will produce the same result regardless of whether a virus is actually present or not. Ridiculously, he asserts that if scientists did whole genome sequencing of samples containing no virus, they would get the same result, which once again simply illustrates his lack of understanding of what whole genome sequencing is.

He seems to think that if they took a sample from a healthy patient and sequenced it alongside a sample from a diseased patient and the result was the sequencing of the whole genome of the virus from the healthy patient, too, that this would invalidate the sequencing of the genome from the sick patient. Rather, all this would demonstrate is that the healthy person was actually infected with the virus but simply hadn’t developed the disease (again, viral infection is a necessary but insufficient factor in the pathogenesis of the disease).

That said, it’s worth noting that the authors of the New England Journal of Medicine study that they examine together did obtain samples from patients “with pneumonia of known cause to serve as control samples”; they then did extract nucleic acids “from clinical samples (including uninfected cultures that served as negative controls)” and tested the genetic material for 18 viruses and 4 bacteria; additionally they used “unbiased, high-throughput sequencing”, which refers to next-generation sequencing, “to discover microbial sequences not identifiable” by the testing for the 22 known pathogens.

Cowan also later claims that they assembled the genome by taking RNA sequences, “and then they assemble those into the genome, based on aligning that to a predetermined template that they told the computer to align it according to this template”. This is simply a repetition of Cowan’s false claim that scientists tell the computer what genome to produce, which I already thoroughly refuted in my article “Correcting Misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 Whole Genome Sequencing”, which article I know Cowan is aware of. (Indeed, in response to that article of mine, he put out a video admitting that he hadn’t actually read it and repeating the same false claims I addressed in the article, which prompted me in turn to address those false claims once again in my video “Tom Cowan’s Misinformation on the Sequencing of SARS‑CoV‑2”.)

Also later in the video, Cowan asks Haberland why RT-PCR tests aren’t proof of the presence of SARS‑CoV‑2, which is a separate issue. It is true that the PCR tests have been misused to perpetrate systematic scientific fraud in the counting of “COVID‑19 cases”, as I have previously discussed, most notably in my November 2020 article “Facebook ‘Fact Check’ Lies about PCR Tests and COVID-19 ‘Cases’” and my recent article “Study Finds 42% False Discovery Rate for SARS-CoV-2 PCR Tests”. It suffices to point out that the misuse of PCR tests as a diagnostic tool does not invalidate the PCR technology itself.

Yes, Scientists Use Uninfected Controls During Cell Culture Experiments

Next, Cowan and Kaufman return to the claim that scientists never use controls during cell culture. Despite my having cited studies in which the authors described having used controls, Cowan persists in his claim by further asserting that these were not “proper” controls. The means by which Cowan and his guest attempt to support that assertion is illuminating.

The study Cowan focuses on here is one that I cited in my article about how Cowan’s own cited sources contradict the claims for which he is citing them. I had pointed out how Cowan cited a CDC study to support his claim that SARS‑CoV‑2 is incapable of infecting human cells and could only infect monkey kidney cells (which of course contradicts his claim that the virus doesn’t exist at all). You can read that article of mine for the full context and discussion, but here is the relevant excerpt for our purpose here:

The study findings do not support the conclusion that SARS‑CoV‑2 cannot infect human cells. Rather, the findings simply demonstrate that certain commercially available cell lines are unsuitable for the purpose of culturing SARS‑CoV‑2.

Other studies have in fact cultured SARS‑CoV‑2 using human cell lines. For example, commercially available human airway epithelial cells have been used to isolate SARS‑CoV‑2 from COVID‑19 patient samples.

Sharing his screen during the video, Cowan clicks on that third link, which is to the study titled “A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019”, published on January 24, 2020, in the New England Journal of Medicine.

That study described how samples were taken from patients presenting with disease, purified by centrifugation, isolated in cell culture using human airway epithelial cells, centrifuged again in preparation for observation under electron microscopy, and whole genome sequenced.

Cowan curiously describes this as “one of the main studies” that I use despite my having cited it only in that limited context and despite having cited a great many other studies throughout all of my content addressing the false claims used to support the belief in the nonexistence of viruses. But setting that curiosity aside, his own purpose in citing the study is to try to support his claim that scientists never use controls when doing cell culture. This provides yet another opportunity to illustrate how his claims are contradicted by the sources he cites to support those claims.

In fact, while sharing the paper on his screen, Cowan reads aloud the statement in the paper about how the researchers used “uninfected cultures that served as negative controls”. Then he asks Haberland, “So why isn’t this a valid control?”

Obviously confused, Haberland says that if you “download the whole publication”, you can see that the authors used what they described as “mock infected” cells, which he further claimed was “not a correct scientific control”. He says this is shown in the supplementary appendix, which Cowan then clicks the link to, showing it in his web browser, but it doesn’t show what Haberland claims, so Haberland says it is “not the right document”—even though there is only the one supplementary appendix to this study. Haberland then nonsensically proceeds, “Anyway, if you find the correct methods, because they are not given in this publication, the whole methods section, there you can see what they did in the methods part.”

Thus, Haberland is either imagining a nonexistent supplementary appendix or confusing this study with some other study. In fact, this particular study does not describe their uninfected controls as “mock infected” cells; as Cowan literally shows on his screen while reading it aloud, the study authors just describe their controls as “uninfected controls”, the meaning of which is self-evident: cell cultures given the same treatment except for remaining uninoculated with the supernatant from the purified sample.

Perhaps Haberland had in mind the study I cited from Emerging Infectious Diseases, whose authors did describe their control cultures as “mock infected” cells. Haberland claims:

They don’t document the scientific control. They will not tell you what exactly they did for the mock infection, and “mock infection” is not a defined, you know, self-explanatory statement, because “mock infection” could mean you have a cell culture by itself, you add nothing, you just leave it there; “mock infection” could mean you have a cell culture and you add the same ingredients, and the same antibiotics, and everything the same; or “mock infection” could mean you have a cell culture and you add slightly different chemicals to it. We don’t know.

But that is wrong. Haberland’s claim that “mock infected” has no defined meaning in science is false. In fact, as I pointed out in my article “Tom Cowan’s Sources Contradict His Claims about SARS-CoV-2’s Nonexistence”, the term “mock infected” is defined as follows:

A control used in infection experiments. Two specimens are used one that is infected with the virus/vector of interest and the other is treated the same way except without the virus. Sometimes a non-virulent strain is used in the mock-infected specimen.

So, no, “mock infected” does not mean a cell culture that is not provided the same treatment as the inoculated cells, which would not be a control. The term means a proper control, by definition, and the fact that the authors of the study don’t take the time to explain the meaning of the term to readers does not somehow invalidate their methods or demonstrate that they did not use a proper control during cell culture.

Humorously, after his guest claims that “mock infected” is an undefined term in science, Cowan produces the exact same definition I just provided, once again showing it right on his screen and, after reading it, saying, “This is what we’re meant to believe is a mock infection, which is just a science definition; it’s also the definition from common sense, right?”

Evidently equally oblivious as to how Cowan had just disproven Haberland’s claim that “mock infected” is an undefined term in science, Haberland responds, “Exactly”—as though Cowan had somehow just bolstered Haberland’s false claim that the study—whichever one he actually had in mind—did not use a proper control during cell culture.

Once again illustrating how members of the cult of virus denialism will not accept any evidence, Haberland then proceeds to argue that “even if they did it like this, it would not be appropriate” because it would not control for “all the other variables in the sample”, which just goes right back to dependency on the false claim that scientists never purify the sample before doing cell culture.

Haberland leaves it up to his audience to attempt to puzzle over how to reconcile that argument with his acknowledgment that scientists do purify samples, not to mention his assertion that scientists don’t need to purify samples before doing cell culture to prove the presence of a virus. (It’s worth noting in this context that scientists can also do serial cell culture so that they can demonstrate the presence of a virus in the final culture even if inoculating the initial culture with an unpurified sample.)

Cowan then criticizes the New England Journal of Medicine study on the grounds that the authors “clearly did not take the virus out of the sample” to be able to do what he evidently believes would be the only “proper” way to do a control, which would be to inoculate the mock infected cells, too, with the supernatant obtained from purifying the patient sample, but only after having removed the virus from the resulting supernatant. How he proposes that scientists should accomplish this feat of magic is yet another mystery his audience is left to puzzle over.

This further illustrates how there simply is no evidence that Cowan would accept for the existence of viruses. The bar he sets for evidence of a virus is so high that it is a logical impossibility. When he claims that scientists don’t use “proper” controls when doing cell culture, this is what he means: he even rejects the use of cells given the same treatment as inoculated cells except for remaining uninoculated with the supernatant obtained from purifying the patient sample with centrifugation.

In sum, Cowan and Haberland support their mutual belief in the non-existence of viruses with false claims, self-contradictions, nonsensical gibberish, and demands for scientists to produce evidence that would be acceptable to them by perform logically impossible feats—like sequencing whole genomes without using computers or removing viral particles from the centrifuged supernatant for use in control cultures. Scientists’ inability to perform such magic tricks, they content, are the proof of their contention that no virus has ever been proven to exist.

Yes, Electron Microscopy Images Show SARS‑CoV‑2 Virions

In their preposterous examination of the New England Journal of Medicine study, Cowan and Haberland next look at the electron microscopy images presented, which Haberland rejects as evidence by responding:

They just point these arrows to these particles, and we don’t know what these actually are because nobody has characterized them, nobody has done transmission experiments with those. It’s just a picture out of cell culture, and you could find those out of every cell culture. I am now making an assumption. I say that it can be found in every monkey kidney cell culture which is stressed in terms of adding antibiotics, nutrition, like decreasing fetal bovine serum and so on, you can create these particles.

It suffices to point out that Haberland presents no evidence to support his claim that had the study authors observed supernatant from their uninfected controls under the electron microscope, they would have likewise observed the same particles—not unlike his absurd claim that metagenomic sequencing technology produces whole genome sequences of non-existent viruses.

Beyond the observation that he presents no evidence and acknowledges that he is basing his position on a mere “assumption”, though, it is simply untrue that the observed particles were not otherwise characterized and that there are no reasonable grounds from which to conclude that they are virions.

Again, the researchers had taken a sample from a patient presenting with disease, purified the sample with centrifugation, inoculated the supernatant in cell culture alongside an uninfected control, observed cytopathic effects and viral replication in the inoculated cells but not the control cells, ultracentrifuged supernatant from the cell culture once again for observation under electron microscopy, observed particles with their “quite distinctive spikes” that “gave virions the appearance of a solar corona”, and further characterized the particles by using de novo whole genome sequencing to identify the particles as “a novel betacoronavirus belonging to the sarbecovirus subgenus of Coronaviridae family.”

And while the authors noted that their study “does not fulfill Koch’s postulates”, subsequent studies did demonstrate the pathogenicity of isolated SARS‑CoV‑2 in numerous animal challenge studies as well as a human challenge study.

To claim that none of this is evidence of a virus is simply ludicrous.

While they do not explicitly repeat the claim in this video, they are implicitly relying on the claim made by Tom Cowan and others elsewhere that scientists have no way to tell whether particles they observe under an electron microscope are viruses or extracellular vesicles like exosomes, which is yet another false claim that I have already sufficiently addressed in my article “Tom Cowan’s Sources Contradict His Claims about SARS-CoV-2’s Nonexistence”.

Conclusion

While purporting to debunk my article answering Cowan’s five questions, in fact, Cowan and Haberland fail to identify even a single factual or logical error on my part. Instead, Haberland actually confirms that my observation is correct that, contrary to Cowan’s claim that scientists never purify the sample before doing cell culture, studies do describe the use of filtration or centrifugation at this step, which according to Cowan’s own “Statement on Virus Isolation” is a process that “purifies the sample”. Beyond that, they support their position with additional claims ranging from demonstrably false to utterly nonsensical.

To sustain their belief system, despite claiming to represent true science, members of the cult of virus denialism must absurdly dismiss literally all of the relevant scientific literature. They cannot cite even a single study in all of the published literature that actually supports their belief.

That is not to say that they do not cite any studies, but as I have also repeatedly observed, they simply mischaracterize their own cited sources, including taking statements completely out of their context and outright lying about what those sources do or do not say. In every instance in which they attempt to rely on published literature to sustain their belief, the sources they cite either do not support or directly contradict the claims for which they are cited.

As sufficiently demonstrated here, there is no amount of evidence that you could possibly present to them that they would accept as valid. To cling to their belief, they set the bar so high in terms of their demanded evidence that to meet their criteria is a logical impossibility.

This is illustrated by their argument that scientists would need to prove that the purified sample contains only virus before doing cell culture by observing virions with electron microscopy while at the same time rejecting observation of virions under electron microscopy as proof of a virus.

It is further illustrated by their rejection even of the use of uninfected controls otherwise given the same treatment during cell culture on the grounds that scientists would have to also inoculate the control cells with the supernatant after magically removing the virus from that purified sample.

Far from adhering to the scientific method, the non-existence of viruses is to them simply a belief system that they cling to dogmatically, requiring them to dismiss offhandedly, to the point of absolute absurdity, all evidence—which is literally all of relevant scientific literature—that belies their ideology.

By persisting in their false claims despite their errors having been repeatedly pointed out to them by myself and others, Cowan and his colleagues have caused tremendous harm to the health freedom movement, rendering their regrettably large number of faithful followers utterly ineffective in the fight against medical tyranny that was existential before the COVID‑19 pandemic and that escalated to frightening new heights under the lockdown regime with its coerced mass vaccination endgame.

We must rather combat this authoritarianism with effective arguments, which means we must support our arguments by citing the scientific literature rather than dismissing the literature and legitimizing the claims from the proponents of medical tyranny that members of the health freedom movement are spreading misinformation and engaging in science denialism.