Mike Stone Proves My Point about the Dogma of Virus Denialism

Introduction

Mike Stone is the individual behind the website ViroLIEgy.com, which is dedicated to propagating the claim that virologists have never proven the existence of viruses. In recent weeks, he has attempted to challenge me for stating that the belief in the nonexistence of viruses is upheld by demonstrably false claims. In particular, he has taken issue with me saying that the claim that scientists never purify patient samples before isolating viruses in cell culture is false.

He wrote an article accusing me of hypocrisy and attempting to rebut me. Instead, what Stone has managed to accomplish is to further illustrate my previously stated point that there is no possible evidence for the existence of viruses that you could ever provide to the leading propagators of his position that they would ever accept.

This in turn illustrates my accompanying point about how the nonexistence of viruses is really a belief system to which they cling dogmatically, requiring them to ludicrously reject all relevant scientific literature while themselves being capable of producing none that actually supports their belief.

The Background

Cowan’s False Claims

Back in July 2022, I had an email exchange with Tom Cowan, one of the leading propagators of the claim that neither SARS‑CoV‑2 nor any other virus has ever been isolated by scientists. During that exchange, I confronted him about certain false claims that he makes to support his belief.

One of Cowan’s claims is that scientists reporting the isolation of viruses in cell culture never purify patient samples before inoculation of the cells in the lab. Accompanying that claim is his claim that scientists never use controls when doing cell culture experiments.

Cowan had argued that only “unpurified material from a patient” is used for the cell culture experiment in all the published studies, so I responded by pointing out that this was incorrect. As an example, I cited a 2013 study in Nature titled “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor”, which describes how fecal samples from bats were purified by centrifugation prior to inoculation of the resulting supernatant in cell culture. Additionally, the paper describes how uninfected controls were used during cell culture.

Cowan’s response was to assert that centrifugation of the sample “clearly is not purification”. He asserted that to be considered a purification step, it is not enough to separate virus particles from cellular debris by centrifugation. Scientists must go further, he argued, and show electron microscopy images of only purified virions, and no other substances, prior to inoculation of the supernatant in cell culture.

So, I pointed out to Cowan that in his own “Statement on Virus Isolation”, coauthored with Andrew Kaufman and Sally Fallon Morell, they describe centrifugation as a process that “purifies the specimen” (their emphasis).

I also noted that his claim that scientists must use electron microscopy between centrifugation and cell culture is likewise contradicted by the study they cite as an example of the “proper” method for virus isolation.

In that study, scientists isolated bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect bacteria, by following the same steps as are used by scientists to isolate animal or human viruses: first, they used centrifugation to purify samples obtained from a lake, and then they used cell culture to isolate the bacteriophages. In this case, they cultured the viruses in bacterial cells, just as animal or human cells are used for the isolation of viruses that infect our own cells.

As I pointed out to Cowan, it was not until after the isolation of the viruses in cell culture that the authors of that study used electron microscopy to take images of the bacteriophages. They did not use electron microscopy between the centrifugation and propagation of the viruses in bacterial cells.

Thus, according to the very source that Cowan cites as an example of the “proper” method for isolating viruses, it is unnecessary to use electron microscopy between centrifugation and the cell culture experiment.

Beyond merely observing his self-contradictions, I further confronted him for deliberately misleading his audience by claiming that scientists never purify samples prior to inoculation in cell culture. As I wrote back:

In your “Statement on Virus Isolation”, you state that the “proper” way to isolate a virus involves centrifugation to purify the specimen. Thus, when you tell your audience that scientists never purify specimens prior to doing cell culture, you know that they will misinterpret that to mean that they don’t do centrifugation. It is dishonest of you to propagate the false claim that scientists never purify viruses prior to doing cell culture when you know that centrifugation is done for the purpose of purification. It would be one thing for you to argue that such centrifugation is insufficient as a method of purification, but to simply claim that they don’t have any purification process as though they don’t do centrifugation is willful deception.

My observation of the second of those two self-contradictions arose from Cowan challenging me to show him electron microscopy images from the Nature study of the SARS-like coronavirus virions taken after centrifugation and before inoculation in cell culture.

Applying his own standard of evidence, I replied by challenging him to show me electron microscopy images of bacteriophages taken before propagation in bacterial cells from the study he cites as the example of how “proper” virus isolation is done.

Naturally, he failed my equivalent challenge, thus illuminating how he attempts to derive authority for his claims by citing studies in the published literature, but when you take the time to examine what those studies say, you can see how they directly contradict the fundamental premises of his arguments.

As I remarked about this in my article “Tom Cowan’s Sources Contradict His Claims about SARS-CoV-2’s Nonexistence”:

Thus, Cowan was setting a bar so high for me in terms of “proving” that a virus has been purified that he couldn’t meet it himself with his own cited source despite having cited that source as an example of the “proper” method of purifying and isolating a virus.

Cowan and Haberland’s Persistence with False Claims

Cowan could have then chosen to change course and clarify to his audience that scientists do purify samples before doing cell culture, but that, as he is fond of pointing out himself, absolute purity of viral particles is a difficult if not impossible technological challenge.

Likewise, he could have chosen to inform his audience that scientists do use uninfected controls, also called “mock infected” cells, during the cell culture experiment.

Instead, apart from instances in which he acknowledged the purification step in response to my having pointed this step out to him, he continued to publicly repeat his claims that scientists only ever use an “unpurified” sample for inoculation and never use controls during cell culture. This demonstrates that he deceives his audience willfully.

In fact, in a video he published on October 5, Cowan not only repeated the claim that scientists never use controls during cell culture, but he brazenly lied that the only response to this claim he’d received from his critics—among whom and he had specifically named me—was to make “excuses about why they don’t even want to do control experiments.”

Cowan, of course, knows that this statement of his is untrue. He knows that I do not make “excuses” for why scientists don’t use uninfected controls. He knows that I rather point out that scientists do purify samples and do use controls during cell culture. His reliance on strawman argumentation further demonstrates the willfulness of his deception.

I publicly responded to that video of Cowan’s is my article “No, I Didn’t Call Tom Cowan a ‘Cancer’ in the Movement”, published on October 7. In it, I pointed out once again that scientists do purify samples and do use controls.

Yet again in an article he published on October 13 titled “Five Simple Questions for Virologists”, Cowan claimed that scientists only ever inoculate cell culture with “unpurified” samples and do not use controls during the cell culture experiment.

So, I wrote an article titled “Answering Tom Cowan’s ‘Five Simple Questions for Virologists’” in which I pointed out once again that his claims are false, that scientists do purify samples and do use controls.

Then on November 10, Cowan published another video in which he brought on a guest, German engineer Marvin Haberland, to try to rebut that latest article of mine. They failed to do so, however, as I detail in my own rebuttal published on November 15 and titled “Cowan and Haberland Illuminate the Dogma of Virus Denialism”. In my rejoinder, I illuminate their numerous self-contradictions and demonstrate how, logically, there is no possible evidence that they would ever accept for the existence of viruses.

Indeed, as recently demonstrated by Mike Stone, whom we’ll come back to, they demand a level of evidence so high that they know it is presently a technological impossibility (if not a logical impossibility).

This is not unlike the hoax Freedom of Information (FOI) requests claiming that no institution has any record of the isolation of SARS‑CoV‑2, which requests are in fact specifically worded to return no results. Naturally, when you request documentation of the isolation of SARS‑CoV‑2 using a method other than the methods that scientists use to isolate viruses, you will get no results.

Ironically, during their attempt to rebut me, Haberland in fact acknowledged that I am correct that scientists do purify samples before doing cell culture.

He then argued that this correct observation of mine was irrelevant because it is not actually necessary to purify the sample prior to doing cell culture, that what scientists instead need to do is to take electron microscopy images of the purified virus after doing cell culture—and that, Haberland claimed, is something that scientists never do.

But that claim is false, too. In fact, again, the very source that Cowan cites in his “Statement on Virus Isolation” for the “proper” method of virus isolation shows electron microscopy images taken only after the viruses were propagated in host cells. The Nature study I had discussed with Cowan back in July also described purification of supernatant obtained from cell culture for observation under electron microscope, with resulting images included in the paper.

Indeed, during their video, Cowan and Haberland chose to examine one study that I had cited in my article, and that study, too, showed Haberland’s claim to be false.

Titled “A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019” and published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in February 2020, the study describes how supernatant from human airway epithelial cell cultures that showed cytopathic effects was collected and centrifuged in preparation for observation under electron microscopy. Images of the virions subsequently observed under the electron microscope are included in the paper.

Cowan and Haberland literally examined the study together with Cowan sharing it on his screen, and Haberland was the whole time giving the impression that he had already carefully read it prior to joining Cowan on his show. So why did he claim that scientists never take electron microscopy images of purified virions after the cell culture experiment?

Two possibilities come to mind: either Haberland just had no idea what he was talking about but pretended to, or he knew that those images were published in that study but chose to lie about it. Always preferring to give people the benefit of the doubt, I favor the former explanation.

Similarly, Haberland insisted that the authors of that NEJM study did not use a control during cell culture, which is also false.

In fact, the study describes the use of “control” and “mock-infected” cells, the latter of which is a term that is literally defined as an uninfected control.

Haberland falsely claimed that the term could mean anything, that it was “not a defined” term in science and so could mean a cell culture given a different treatment than the culture inoculated with the supernatant obtained from centrifugation of the patient sample. In other words, he argued that it could mean a procedure that was not a control.

Ironically, although he was apparently incognizant of how he was falsifying Haberland’s claim, Cowan then showed on his shared screen the following definition of “mock infected”:

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.

After Haberland admitted that I am right that scientists do purify samples prior to doing cell culture, Cowan objected that it “depends on what you mean by ‘purification’”. He and Haberland then essentially reiterated the very same argument that Cowan had presented to me during our email exchange, which was that for centrifugation to be considered a purification step, scientists must first achieve 100 percent purification of the sample and then prove this level of absolute purity by viewing only virus particles under electron microscopy before using that supernatant for inoculation in cell culture.

Contradictorily, Cowan also has argued that 100 percent purification by centrifugation is not technologically feasible. For example, he is fond of selectively quoting from a paper published in the journal Viruses in May 2020, which states that separating extracellular vesicles (EVs) such as exosomes from enveloped viruses by centrifugation is a challenging task due to the similar dimensions of these two different particles. As that paper states (emphasis added):

The remarkable resemblance between EVs and viruses has caused quite a few problems in the studies focused on the analysis of EVs released during viral infections. Nowadays, it is an almost impossible mission to separate EVs and viruses by means of canonical vesicle isolation methods, such as differential ultracentrifugation, because they are frequently co-pelleted due to their similar dimension. To overcome this problem, different studies have proposed the separation of EVs from virus particles by exploiting their different migration velocity in a density gradient or using the presence of specific markers that distinguish viruses from EVs. However, to date, a reliable method that can actually guarantee a complete separation does not exist.

Thus, Cowan is demanding that scientists do what he knows to be practically impossible given the present limitations of human technology. This is an example of what I what I mean when I say that there is no possible evidence against their belief in the nonexistence of viruses that Cowan and his fellow believers would ever accept.

Another illustration of this is how Cowan dealt with the fact that the NEJM study did describe the use of uninfected controls during cell culture. After sharing the definition of “mock infected”, he rejected it and instead criticized the 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.

Thus, Cowan even rejects the definition of “mock infected” as a “proper” control, which is to say 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.

Of course, he offered no ideas as to how scientists ought to go about removing the virus from the product of centrifugation done specifically for the purpose of containing the virus separately from other substances in the sample, such as cellular debris.

Scientists’ inability to perform this feat of magic is yet more proof, in Cowan’s mind, that no virus has ever been proven to exist. This also perfectly illustrates my point that there is no possible evidence for the existence of viruses that you could present to Cowan and friends that they would ever be willing to accept.

Mike Stone’s Bad Faith in the Comments

On November 21, Mike Stone left a comment on my rejoinder to Cowan and Haberland. I didn’t realize it at the time he was engaging with me on my website, but I came to learn that Stone is the person behind the website ViroLIEgy.com, which is dedicated to propagating the claim that viruses have never been proven to exist.

Stone introduced himself in the comments as the friend of someone on Facebook whose post I had responded to. This was a reference to someone who had published a post on Facebook expressing extreme vitriol toward me for observing that propagators of the belief that viruses have never been proven to exist support that belief by making false claims.

So, providing the link to my rejoinder, I responded to that individual’s comments on Facebook by again citing the example Cowan’s claim that scientists never purify samples before isolating viruses in cell culture.

Stone took issue with my statement that I had “pointed out the falsity of Cowan’s claims that scientists never purify samples before isolating viruses in cell culture”. I was wrong, and Cowan was right, Stone insisted. To support that position, Stone simply reiterated essentially the same argument as Cowan’s that scientists must “check the sample before culturing to establish whether or not only the assumed ‘viral’ particles are in the sample.”

At the same time, instructively, Stone said that “this level of purification can not be achieved”.

Thus, Stone’s comment served to illustrate the validity of my point that there is no possible evidence you could ever show to fervent virus deniers that they would accept. Like Cowan, he was expressing his demand for scientists to prove the existence of viruses by achieving what he knows to be an impossible standard.

Obviously, it is bad faith argumentation indeed to accept as evidence only that which you know to be logically or technologically unachievable, just as it demonstrates bad faith to repeat an argument over and over without substantively addressing the counterargument that have already been made.

Stone simply ignored, for example, my points about how Cowan self-contradictorily describes centrifugation as a process that “purifies” the sample in his “Statement on Virus Isolation”.

Stone similarly refused to acknowledge the validity of my point about how Cowan’s claim that scientists must show electron microscopy images of virions in purified supernatant before inoculation in cell culture is similarly contradicted by his own source cited as an example of the “proper” method for virus isolation.

Stone likewise ignored my point about how Cowan’s own guest, Haberland, acknowledged that I was correct that scientists do purify samples before doing cell culture, and how I had explained that scientists do not have to prove 100 percent purification of a sample to produce valid evidence for the presence of a virus in that purified sample.

Stone ignored my point about how Cowan was demonstrating bad faith by euphemistically using the word “unpurified” to mean anything less than a level of purification that is practically impossible. Most particularly, he refused to acknowledge my point about how this argument of Cowan’s illustrates that there is no possible evidence you could ever present to them with that they would ever accept.

Obviously, I have neither the time nor interest in losing productivity by going around in circles with trolls in the comments. Neither do I wish to ban anyone without first providing them with an opportunity to engage in a respectful and meaningful exchange of views. To resolve this dilemma, on my Terms of Use page, I draw clear lines between trolling and legitimate participation by presenting detailed rules for using the comments section of my website. These rules can be summarized as permissive only of arguments made in good faith.

So, I presented Stone with numerous opportunities to demonstrate good faith with a very simple request. I asked that he simply acknowledge the distinction that I had observed between supernatant obtained from the process of purifying a sample by centrifugation and an “unpurified” sample. Stone repeatedly refused.

Instead, at each opportunity, he irrationally persisted in the position that the supernatant obtained by that purification process is, by his own definition, “unpurified”. He repeatedly refused to demonstrate a modicum of good faith by simply acknowledging that there is in fact a distinction.

If that is not bad faith argumentation, I don’t know what could possibly qualify.

Eventually, my patience with his trolling behavior grew thin, and I notified him of a final opportunity to simply acknowledge the logical distinction I was making between the supernatant obtained from purifying the sample with centrifugation and an “unpurified” sample. He nevertheless persisted in refusing to acknowledge this valid point of mine. Consequently, I revoked his commenting privilege.

Mike Stone’s Bad Faith on Facebook

Before and after I revoked his privilege, Mike Stone kept persisting in the same argument with me in the comments on his friend’s Facebook post.

On Facebook, as on my own site, I simply requested him to acknowledge the distinction I was making. As I told him in that forum, “You are still proving your bad faith by refusing to acknowledge that Cowan’s claim that scientists only ever inoculate cell culture with ‘an unpurified sample’ is false, even though you know perfectly well that it is false.”

Stone instead insisted ad nauseam that Cowan’s claim is true, continually refusing to acknowledge the elementary logical distinction between supernatant obtained via centrifugation and an “unpurified” sample. By Stone’s anti-logic, there is no distinction.

Attempting to support his argument, Stone snarkily remarked that I “seem to have forgotten what purification is about”, which he accompanied by presenting the following two definitions of “purification”:

“Purification: the act or process of making something pure and free of any contaminating, debasing, or foreign elements”

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/purification

“Purification refers to the separation of virus particles from host components in a biologically active state.”

https://experiments.springernature.com/articles/10.1007/978-1-0716-0334-5_21

However, these definitions of “purification” accord perfectly with my use of the term and certainly do not support his contention that “purified” can only mean absolute purity. The definition from Dictionary.com, for instance, provides the following example of a sentence using the word “purification”: “We fund groundbreaking development projects like water purification and clean cookstove technology.”

According to Stone’s reasoning, since my family’s Berkey water filtration system does not achieve 100 percent purity, we are always drinking “unpurified” water. I do not know of any alternative systems that are capable of achieving absolute purity, so evidently water purification technology does not exist.

This is, of course, nonsense. I sure feel a lot better knowing that my family is drinking purified water. The meaning of the word “purified” in everyday use as well as in scientific literature simply does not exclude anything less than absolute purity. It simply does not follow from the Dictionary.com definition that water that is 99 percent purified equals “unpurified”.

The same holds true for the second definition Stone presented, which is from a textbook chapter on purification of plant viruses. The separation of a human virus from the host’s cellular debris by centrifugation is, by this definition, purification. While the aim of purification in this context is “to produce a preparation containing only infective virus particles”, absolute purity is a technological challenge. “Even after suitable concentration,” the chapter notes, “virus preparations still contain some low and high molecular weight host contaminants for which further purification is required which would remove most of them.” (Emphasis added.)

Thus, Stone’s own source provided for the definition of “purification” supports my use of the term and belies his own. The chapter describes the product of the “purification” process as a state of purity where most but not necessarily all host contaminants have been removed from the resulting supernatant.

The word “purified” is simply not inapplicable to anything less than absolute purity. This is nonsense both in the everyday usage of the word and in technical literature.

Since the definitions he presented were consistent with my own use of the word “purified”, I continued to repeatedly request Stone to please acknowledge that a sample that has gone through the purification process of centrifugation is not “an unpurified sample”, and, continuing to demonstrate bad faith, he still persistently refused. “I have repeatedly told you”, he argued, “this is untrue unless you can show that only the ‘virus’ particles remain within the sample.”

As an ironic example, he said, “I can put dirty river water through purification but if it comes back slightly less brown, it is still unpurified.”

It is certainly reasonable to describe water that is still unfit to drink as “unpurified”. However, it is certainly not reasonable to describe water that has been made safe to drink by putting it through a water purification system as “unpurified” on the grounds that the system cannot achieve 100 percent purity.

So, I pointed out to Stone that, by his logic, 99 percent purified equals “unpurified”, and I asked him to acknowledge this. He did so, responding, “Correct.” His whole argument centered around this semantic charade.

I also pointed out that Stone was, like Cowan, asserting that the proper method of virus isolation should not involve the use of cell culture. He again acknowledged that this was correct. Their mutual position, of course, is directly contradicted by the source Cowan cites in his “Statement on Virus Isolation” as an example of the “proper” method of virus isolation, since the researchers in that study did isolate viruses by culturing them in host cells.

I further pointed out that his position depended upon rejecting literally all of the relevant scientific literature. He acknowledged again that I was correct, with the caveat that he considers all of virology to be “pseudoscience” and hence not “scientific” literature.

So, I pointed out that he was rejecting not just virology, but also all the relevant literature from the fields of biology, epidemiology, immunology, etc.; when I said he rejected literally all the relevant scientific literature, I meant all of it. He again acknowledged that I was correct with the same caveat that he views literally all of the relevant literature to be “pseudoscience”.

Since he shared so many positions with Cowan, I asked him, “Also, do you believe that exosomes exist? If so, can you show me a study where a sample was taken from a human and put through a purification process whereby 100% purification of exosomes was achieved?”

The reason for these questions is that Cowan has argued that the particles that scientists view with electron microscopy are not viruses but exosomes; at the same time, he has maintained that scientists cannot prove that viruses exist because they cannot be separated from exosomes by centrifugation. This is yet another self-contradiction since, by the same reasoning, scientists cannot prove the existence of exosomes.

Evidently cognizant of the self-contradiction, Stone gave an answer that was at least logically consistent, saying, “No, they have not met the burden of proof with exosomes either.”

Since the whole premise of his argument was that the cytopathic effects observed in cell culture are never the result of a virus being present in the supernatant but are always caused by something else present in the “unpurified” sample, I asked him to propose a practical method for scientists to achieve 100 percent purification. He naturally refused, saying that this “may be entirely impossible” and was not his problem to solve.

I then commented, “Thanks also for acknowledging that you have no proposed method for achieving 100% purification of a sample, which is to say that you have no proposed method that would satisfy your demand for what you would consider to be proof of the existence of a virus. The logical corollary is that there is no possible evidence that you would accept for the existence of viruses. Please acknowledge.” (Bold emphasis added.)

But he refused to acknowledge this logical truism. Instead, he rejected it by circularly reasoning that he had “already stated what would suffice as evidence”, which was 100 purification of the sample. He declined to explain how it does not logically follow, then, that there is no possible evidence that he would ever accept for the existence viruses.

I also challenged him to provide evidence to support his alternative explanation that something other than viruses with the centrifuged samples cause the cytopathic effects observed in inoculated but not uninoculated cell cultures. As I pointed out, “you have no alternative hypothesis that better explains the evidence”.

His response to that was to say that he did not need to support his alternative hypothesis with evidence since it was sufficient to “show that the evidence” for the existence of viruses “is fraudulent”—which, of course, is the fallacy of begging the question (the petition principii fallacy, or circular reasoning). He hadn’t shown that isolation of viruses in cell culture is fraudulent. He was merely rejecting the valid methods used by scientists to determine whether a virus is present in the patient sample and to identify the virus. His conclusion that all relevant literature is “pseudoscience” was arrived at by adopting that position as his premise.

All of the relevant scientific literature, he circularly reasoned, “does not adhere to the scientific method” and was therefore “pseudoscience”.

Having achieved some insights into his thinking and recognizing the futility of further engagement, I stopped going around in circles with him on Facebook. Stone, however, persisted by publishing an article on his Substack on December 2 titled “Hammond’s Hypocrisy”.

Mike Stone’s Hypocrisy

In his article, Stone accuses me of being a hypocrite for revoking his commenting privileges on my site on the grounds that he had repeatedly refused to demonstrate a modicum of good faith by acknowledging that the claim that scientists only ever use an “unpurified” sample for inoculation in cell culture is false.

His absurd counterclaim is that I refused to demonstrate a modicum of good faith by accepting his own definition of “purified”. I demonstrated bad faith, by his ludicrous reasoning, by insisting that there is a distinction between the supernatant obtained through the purification process of centrifugation and “an unpurified sample”.

In his lead paragraph, Stone says that I am “promoting the fear-based propaganda that pathogenic ‘viruses’ exist and that ‘SARS-COV-2’ is a bioweapon secretly created in a lab that was suspiciously unleashed upon the world.”

To set the record straight, I have in fact spent the better part of the past few years combatting fearmongering propaganda about SARS‑CoV‑2, and I have never described this coronavirus as a “bioweapon” for the simple reason that I don’t believe it was created as a bioweapon. Stone is mischaracterizing my view that the preponderance of available evidence favors a lab origin.

Setting that mischaracterization aside, Stone writes about having taken up the challenge that I presented in the comments thread on his friend’s Facebook post to identify any factual or logical errors in my rejoinder. By his account, he immediately succeeded in doing so:

Right off the bat, we get not only one, but two factual errors by Mr. Hammond regarding purification and the use of valid controls for cell cultures. While the lack of proper controls is an important topic that requires fleshing out in a future article, my interest in this was based entirely on Jeremy’s claim that virologists purify a sample before performing cell culture experiments.

Stone presents no argument to support his claim that I am making a factual error by insisting that scientists do use uninfected controls during cell culture.

This is not a factual error on my part. It is true. The claim that scientists don’t use controls is false. Anyone can go into the literature and see this. But, then, Stone is starting from the premise that literally all the literature is pseudoscience, so it makes sense that he would reject what is actually in the literature in favor of his own personal interpretation of words like “isolation”, “purification”, and “control”.

Moving on, Stone spends the rest of his post ludicrously contending that I am wrong to insist on drawing a distinction between the supernatant obtained through the purification process of centrifugation and “an unpurified sample”.

Stone points out that I noted how Cowan objected to Haberland’s acknowledgment that scientists do purify samples before inoculation in cell culture by saying it “depends on what you mean by ‘purification’ because to most people that implies, if you purify before the cell culture, that you have pure virus”, which was “not the case.” As I wrote, “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.”

Stone responds to this observation of mine by saying, “we can see that it is actually Jeremy who is the one begging the question by assuming without proof that a fictional ‘virus’ is present within the sample and that there are no other substances therein that can cause the cytopathogenic effect (the breakdown of the cell as it dies).”

However, that is simply incorrect. I do not assume that there is a virus in the sample. I rather accept that this is what the evidence indicates. Drawing a logical conclusion based on the totality of available evidence is the opposite of making an assumption.

As I pointed out in my article, Haberland claimed that scientists never present evidence that a virus is present in the purified sample, but that is simply untrue. As I wrote, “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.”

So, again, I am not assuming anything but stating what the evidence shows. Rather, it is Stone who is making the assumptions: he assumes that there is never a virus in any sample, and he assumes that the cytopathic effects observed must be caused by something else present in the supernatant.

I am open to the possibility that there could be some other explanation for all relevant scientific observations, but nobody has presented one, much less provided any evidence for it. On the other hand, the possibility that all the evidence really could be explained by the existence of viruses is one that Stone rejects a priori.

So, no, I have not made a logical error by maintaining that viruses exist; and, yes, Cowan and Stone do beg the question by assuming that viruses do not exist and assuming that cytopathic effects observed in cell culture must be caused by something else present in the supernatant.

Stone then repeats his argument that anything less than 100 percent purity is “unpurified”. He presents his own definition of “purification”: “This means separating the assumed ‘virus’ particles away from any host material, bacteria, microorganisms, multivesicular bodies, exosomes, etc. so that nothing but the particles believed to be ‘viruses’ remain.”

But here Stone is contradicting himself. He speaks of “assumed” virus particles but not “assumed” exosomes, even though he told me in the Facebook thread that belief in exosomes, too, is based on “pseudoscience”. This, of course, makes no sense. Scientists have observed and characterized both viruses and exosomes, and they can and do distinguish between these particles. Stone’s belief that this is all fantasy is itself a fantasy.

That aside, separating viral particles away from host cellular debris is precisely what centrifugation accomplishes. It is true that due to their similar dimensions, separation of exosomes from viruses is a technological challenge, but given Stone’s assertion that exosomes, too, are “pseudoscience”, he can’t very well propose the hypothesis that it is exosomes, not a virus, causing cytopathic effects in cells in the lab. So, what does he propose is the cause? He refuses to say.

Stone writes that, in addition to exosomes, “there are other particles of a similar size and dimension as ‘viruses’ which can also be mistaken for these entities.” Which is true. But, again, scientists can and do also distinguish between viruses and other particles that might have a virus-like appearance.

Stone concludes his article with the following accusation (emphasis added):

Thus, even after a purification step is performed, the sample is not free of contaminants. Jeremy knows this yet he regularly states otherwise. This means that Mr. Hammond is the only one not engaging in a modicum of good faith in his articles as well as in his conversations as he is being deliberately dishonest about what he knows and believes. Until he owns up to this and confesses, Jeremy has shown himself to be a hypocrite by demanding that others show good faith in conversation with him when he himself is unwilling to do so in return. As he has admitted that the sample is not purified (i.e. free of contaminants, pollutants, foreign and host materials, etc.) after centrifugation, Mr. Hammond owes Dr. Cowan an apology and he needs to retract his unfactual and illogical article immediately.

So, Stone draws the conclusion that I have demonstrated hypocrisy based on the premise that I have regularly stated that centrifuged samples are “free of contaminants”, by which we know that Stone means a state of absolute, 100 percent purity. And this premise upon which Stone bases his accusation against me is a bald-faced lie. I have never made that claim. On the contrary, I have regularly acknowledged that absolute purity is a technologically challenging if not impossible achievement.

It is highly instructive that Stone found it necessary to resort to this strawman argument to support his position.

In fact, if you look again at what I told Cowan back in July during our email exchange, you can see that I explained to him it would be honest to say that scientists do purify samples by filtration or centrifugation, but that 100 percent purification of viral particles is difficult if not impossible to achieve; whereas it is dishonest, I told him, to claim that scientists only ever use an “unpurified” sample, as though there were no purification process at all.

This is the basic point that I repeatedly requested Mike Stone to acknowledge, as a demonstration of good faith, which he continually refused to do. He instead persistently refused to simply acknowledge the distinction between supernatant obtained through the purification process of centrifugation and “an unpurified sample”.

As another illustration of how the whole premise of Stone’s accusation against me is a malicious lie, I mentioned in my rejoinder to Cowan and Haberland that I had already addressed Cowan’s false claim that scientists have no way to tell whether particles they observe under an electron microscope are viruses or extracellular vesicles like exosomes, and I linked to my prior article “Tom Cowan’s Sources Contradict His Claims about SARS‑CoV‑2’s Nonexistence”. In that article, I pointed out that the authors of a paper Cowan cited to support his claim “in fact explained that, despite the difficulty in separating viruses from exosomes with centrifugation, scientists are certainly able to differentiate between the two particles. It is impossible to have attentively read that paper and to have missed that key aspect of it.” (Bold emphasis added.)

As I reiterated, “viruses and exosomes are co-pelleted in centrifugation ‘due to their similar dimension’, but scientists are nevertheless able to distinguish between viruses and exosomes due to the fundamental differences between these two kinds of particles.” (Bold emphasis added.)

So, the truth is the opposite of Stone’s premise. Far from regularly claiming that scientists achieve 100 percent purity of viral particles by centrifugation, I have rather consistently acknowledged that this is a technologically challenging if not impossible task.

It does not follow from the fact that there are technological limitations to what scientists can do that therefore literally all the relevant scientific literature—including not just virology but also biology, epidemiology, immunology, and other related fields—is “pseudoscience” that fails to adhere to the scientific method.

Virologists Do Use the Scientific Method

Here is an explanation of the scientific method from Encyclopedia Britannica:

In a typical application of the scientific method, a researcher develops a hypothesis, tests it through various means, and then modifies the hypothesis on the basis of the outcome of the tests and experiments. The modified hypothesis is then retested, further modified, and tested again, until it becomes consistent with observed phenomena and testing outcomes. In this way, hypotheses serve as tools by which scientists gather data. From that data and the many different scientific investigations undertaken to explore hypotheses, scientists are able to develop broad general explanations, or scientific theories.

And here is the definition of “scientific hypothesis” provided:

an idea that proposes a tentative explanation about a phenomenon or a narrow set of phenomena observed in the natural world. The two primary features of a scientific hypothesis are falsifiability and testability, which are reflected in an “If…then” statement summarizing the idea and in the ability to be supported or refuted through observation and experimentation.

The means by which scientists have identified viruses as the cause of various diseases follows the scientific method. The hypothesis is testable and falsifiable.

Stone is hung up on the practical inability of scientists to absolutely control every variable. By his reasoning, all of epidemiology is “pseudoscience” since even randomized controlled trials cannot absolutely control for every variable. This is an absurdly unrealistic expectation of methodological perfection. The point of the scientific method is not to achieve the impossible goal of methodological perfection but to do one’s best with the means available to continually improve our knowledge about what variables might affect outcomes and how they do so.

Instructively, Stone cannot point to any scientific research that has falsified the hypothesis that SARS‑CoV‑2 infection is a necessary but insufficient factor in the pathogenesis of the symptoms that characterize the disease known as COVID‑19. His position relies on simply rejecting the totality of evidence that already exists from application of the scientific method.

When challenged to propose an alternative hypothesis that better explains the totality of available evidence, he naturally refuses since he is incapable of doing so. This refusal of Stone’s to propose an alternative hypothesis that might better explain all scientific observation is itself a rejection of the scientific method.

In the comments on my site, Stone accused me of “copping out” by refusing to comply with his own demand that I accept his own definition of “unpurified”, according to which there is no distinction between supernatant obtained by centrifugation and “an unpurified sample”. But my insistence that there is a distinction is logical, whereas Stone tries to cop out by refusing to offer any kind of alternative explanation for the available evidence. It is certainly not logical to reject the hypothesis that is supported by all available evidence while refusing to propose an alternative explanation that better explains that evidence. This position is unreasonable, illogical, and unscientific.

If Stone were interested in using the scientific method, he would propose a testable and falsifiable alternative hypothesis that would explain why the particles known as “viruses” are not really viruses and why these particles are never the cause of any disease; he would propose a hypothesis that better explains all relevant scientific observations made to date, but he is incapable of coming up with one.

Stone’s own hypocrisy is thus revealed. His accusation of hypocrisy on my part rests on his bald-faced lie. He accuses literally all scientists with relevant publications in the literature of “pseudoscience”, yet he refuses to propose an alternative hypothesis that would better explain all their observations and findings.

If a virus is the cause of a patient’s illness, then scientists should be able to extract a sample from the patient, purify that sample by centrifugation to separate viral particles from most of the rest of what’s in the sample, inoculate cell cultures with the resulting supernatant, and observe cytopathic effects and viral replication in inoculated cultures compared to uninoculated controls. They do.

If presence of the virus is associated with the observed illness, then scientists all over the world should be able to replicate this result. They do.

If the virus is capable of infecting human cells, then scientists should be able to explain the mechanism by which this occurs, such as through the binding of a spike protein to a particular cell receptor and subsequent cleavage that enables the virus to pass through the cell membrane. They do.

If a virus is a piece of genetic information that use host cells to replicate, then scientists should be able to show viral replication in cell culture by using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology to quantify the amount of virus present in the culture over time. They do. (And please note that the misuse of commercial PCR tests to commit systematic scientific fraud in the diagnosis and counting of “COVID‑19” cases does not invalidate the underlying PCR technology itself.)

If particles of genetic information known as “viruses” exist, then scientists should be able to observe them under an electron microscope and distinguish them from other particles that might have a similar appearance, like exosomes. They do.

If viruses exist, then scientists should be able to characterize their structural proteins. They do.

If the immune system recognizes a virus as a pathogenic foreign entity, then scientists should be able to observe host immune responses to those particles. They do.

If viruses exist, then scientists should be able to use whole genome sequencing technology to sequence its whole genome. They do.

If viruses do not exist, then scientists should not be able to sequence their whole genome. Yet they do.

If the virus isolated using cell culture is truly the cause of the disease and not merely present in the patient samples, then scientists should be able to take the virus isolate obtained from the cell culture experiment, inoculate animals with the virus, and observe viral infection and pathogenesis of disease compared to uninfected controls. They do.

If the virus is human-to-human transmissible, then scientists should be able to document chains of transmission among disease cases. They do.

Tom Cowan and Mike Stone share the belief that viruses do not exist, but to maintain this belief, they must reject literally all of the available scientific evidence. They are incapable of producing any studies from the peer-reviewed literature that actually support their belief.

They can dismissively label literally all the relevant literature as “pseudoscience” and “fraud”, but they are incapable of producing an alternative hypothesis that better explains all reported observations, much less of producing a study that has falsified the hypothesis that pathogenic viruses exist.

They can criticize the limitations of current technologies and criticize studies for failing to achieve methodological perfection, but it is most unreasonable to demand that scientists achieve the impossible—essentially, to perform feats of magic—in order for those scientists to be described as using the scientific method to expand our collective knowledge.

They can claim that cytopathic effects observed in inoculated cells but not uninoculated controls are caused not by a virus but by something else contained in the supernatant obtained by centrifugation of the patient sample, but they refuse to specify what, much less to produce any evidence to support that claim.

In the end, all of the relevant scientific evidence supports my position that pathogenic viruses including SARS‑CoV‑2 exist, whereas Mike Stone and his fellow virus deniers are incapable of producing any scientific evidence supporting their belief that viruses do not exist. To point this out is not to “shift the burden of proof” by illogically demanding that they “prove a negative” but to simply point out that the scientific method involves falsification of testable hypotheses and overturning of prevailing beliefs by proposal of alternative hypotheses that offer better explanations for the available scientific evidence.

Since they have no science to support their position, all they are left with is dogma. As has once again been neatly illustrated for us, this time by Mike Stone, there is no possible evidence for the existence of viruses that you could ever present to them that they would accept.

Their belief in the non-existence of viruses is simply a matter of faith.