Viruses are Real, No Matter What Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. Say
Germ theory denialism has been around since the 1800s, but it's promoted today by pseudoscience conspiracy theorists
Germ theory denialism is a false belief that pathogenic microorganisms (viruses, bacteria, parasites) don’t cause disease.
This falsehood started with Antoine Béchamp’s terrain theory from the 1800s, which he posited at the same time that Louis Pasteur was developing germ theory of disease.
Terrain theory has been discredited after centuries of data empirically supporting germ theory, and Antoine was limited in his tools and underlying knowledge, but in this day and age, there shouldn’t be anyone still propagating this fallacy. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Today, we hear these claims from a loud and prominent ‘celebrity’ minority: Joe Rogan and the guests he brings on (including a recent appearance by Bret Weinstein), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth (a Fox News Contributor who, early in the COVID-19 pandemic said he never washed his hands because germs didn’t exist), Woody Harrelson, Bill Maher, and others.
You’ll hear things like:
Viruses don’t exist because we can’t see them with our naked eye.
Viruses don’t cause illness.
COVID-19 doesn’t exist.
Viruses aren’t contagious.
AIDS is caused by using poppers (amyl nitrite), not HIV.
Symptoms of “COVID-19” are just because you are exposed to toxins.
And if you support germ theory, you’re just sheeple and pharma shills.
Just to be clear, none of these claims are true. We need to stop conflating notoriety with expertise, and stop giving ‘celebrities’ a platform to spread harmful disinformation.
And to be EXTRA clear, AIDS is NOT caused by poppers. It is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
In the 1800s, Béchamp believed that the environment of the body, the "terrain," was the primary factor in disease rather than external pathogens. He claimed illness depended on “tiny molecular granulations” called microzymas, which became pathogenic after a change in environment. The change in “terrain”, not pathogen invasion, caused illness. You’ll hear people throw around the term “pleomorphism” to support this. This term, scientifically, refers to when microorganisms change their morphology in response to environmental cues, but has nothing to do with whether the microorganisms once was benign and now can cause disease.
Béchamp posited that the body's internal condition: nutrition, acidity, and physiology, is crucial in determining one's health. A healthy terrain resists diseases, while an imbalanced terrain leads to illness. Again, with pseudoscience, there’s a nugget of truth: we know nutrition and overall physiology is important, but it is not why people get infectious diseases. (and acidity? You have buffer systems that maintain a consistent pH, sorry alkaline diet people, that’s not a thing).
Béchamp was jealous of Pasteur and the attention, esteem, and funding he received as his research progressed.
When Pasteur began to develop a theory of infectious disease, Béchamp called it “the greatest scientific silliness of the age.”
More than that though, if you get sick, it’s your fault: it’s your bad diet, it’s your exposure to ‘toxins’, it’s your unhealthy lifestyle.
Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the same phrases that are repeated by wellness influencers, chiropractors, naturopaths, and fitness bros today.
Your symptoms are because of toxemia, by toxic exposures, by toxin accumulation, and you need to help your body detox.
Forget those organ systems that filter your blood and remove waste products! Buy their latest detox supplement instead. Get your spine aligned, that’ll cure you!
No reputable scientist or person who understands science today denies germ theory.
What is germ theory?
Germ theory revolutionized medicine by identifying microorganisms, such as bacteria and viruses, as the cause of [infectious] diseases. This doesn’t mean ALL microorganisms cause disease - in fact, the vast majority are benign to humans, many even beneficial.
Louis Pasteur's work was integral to our understanding of disease, microbiology, and immunology. His contributions were crucial in shifting the scientific community's understanding of the causes of disease from the abstract to a tangible, microorganism-based explanation. Germ theory was a shift from prior beliefs, such as miasma theory, which attributed disease to "bad air" and other non-living factors.
Pasteur’s famous swan-neck flask experiments in 1859 dispelled the idea of spontaneous generation. He showed sterilized broth remained free of microbial life unless exposed to air containing microorganisms, demonstrating that life did not spontaneously arise in the broth.
In the mid-1800s, silkworms were dying en masse in France, which threatened to destroy large swaths of the silk economy. Pasteur was enlisted in 1865 to explore what was happening. His research determined that specific microorganisms caused specific diseases. In the case of silkworms, these were two distinct illnesses, pébrine and flacherie.
Pébrine, also called Silkworm nosema, was caused by Nosema bombycis, a microsporidia fungus. Flacherie is caused by consumption of mulberry leaves that were contaminated with certain bacterial species (Serratia, Streptococcus, and Staphylococcus). Today, with additional technology, we have also identified a viral contribution to flacherie.
Robert Koch, a contemporary of Pasteur, published Koch’s postulates in 1890, criteria designed to establish a causal relationship between a microbe and a disease and provided a methodology for exploring that:
The microorganism is present in all cases of the disease with the same symptoms, but absent in healthy individuals.
It should be isolatable from the diseased individual and grown in pure culture.
Introduction of the microorganism from the culture to a healthy host should result in the same disease.
The microorganism should be re-isolatable from the newly diseased host.
Germ theory deniers often try to weaponize Koch’s postulates, saying “they don’t fit for viruses, therefore viruses don’t exist”.
But of course, they forget we didn’t have the tools or technologies to understand viruses in 1890. Dmitry Ivanovsky (1892) and Martinus Beijerinck (1898) were the first scientists to discover viruses working with tobacco plants. They realized there were infectious particles that were far smaller than bacteria that were causing disease: this was the tobacco mosaic virus.
What are viruses?
Viruses are complex and diverse infectious agents that play a significant role in health, ecology, and biology. A common misconception is that viruses are all the same, but in reality, there are many different types of viruses. They straddle the line between living and non-living, as many can exist and survive outside a host, but won’t be reproducing until they find a new host.
Viruses are miniscule infectious microbes composed of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) encased in a protein coat. Viruses are the only organisms that “ignore” the central dogma of molecular biology, and can have RNA as genome, due to the genetic simplicity of viruses.
Key Characteristics of Viruses:
Obligate Intracellular Parasites: Viruses require a host cell in order to hijack their replication machinery and reproduce, and exhibit an infectious extracellular stage in order to find new host cells for progeny viruses.
Capsomere Protein: Each virus has a gene for at least one capsomere protein, which forms the protective shell around the nucleic acid.
Replication by Assembly: Viruses infect host cells and hijack cellular machinery to synthesize their components, assembling new virions (virus particles).
Evolutionary Capacity: Viruses have the ability to evolve over time, adapting to new environments and hosts.
Classification of viruses is complicated, and is based on several criteria:
Type of Nucleic Acid: is DNA or RNA the genetic material? Is is single-stranded or double-stranded? Is it positive-sense (+), negative-sense (-), or ambisense? Is the genetic material segmented or a single piece?
Capsid Structure: What shape is the protein coat, icosahedral, helical, or complex?
Envelope: Does the virus have a lipid envelop surround the capsid?
Physical Attributes: What size and shape is the virus?
Replication strategy: does the virus reproduce through an intermediate molecule or directly from the genome it brings with it?
All of these complexities mean you can’t lump viruses into a bucket together, which I discussed in this newsletter as well.
Viruses exhibit tropism: the ability to infect only certain animals, tissues, and cells:
Depending on the tropism, viruses can infect and cause diseases in various organisms. But just like other microorganisms, not all viruses cause disease.
Humans: HIV (AIDS), SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), RSV, influenza viruses, Measles virus, Smallpox virus, etc.
Animals: Vesicular Stomatitis virus (VSV) affect horses, cattle, and swine, influenza viruses can affect non-human species (like birds and pigs) and can jump into humans through genetic changes.
Plants: Tobacco mosaic virus, Papaya ringspot virus.
Bacteria: Bacteriophages are viruses that specifically infect bacteria.
Zoonoses refer to viruses and other microorganisms that can “jump” species from animals to humans, often leading to new human diseases. The vast majority of human diseases are caused by zoonotic microorganisms.
Studying viruses requires more advanced tools due to their unique life cycle and miniscule size (5-50 times smaller than bacteria).
Electron Microscopy is essential for visualizing viruses, which fall below the detection range of light microscopy.
Viruses isolated from an organism are introduced into a new host to observe if the same disease manifests. We typically do this in the lab by conducting plaque or foci assays: we have cell culture (since viruses require cells to reproduce) and we monitor the presence or absence of virus in those cells over time.
Sequencing allows us to determine the nucleic acid sequences in a virus to understand its genetic makeup and relationship to other viruses.
The problem is, people who don’t understand the scientific process take Koch’s postulates too literally, when we now have the tools and technologies to isolate viruses, sequence uncultivable bacterial species, and characterize transmissible protein aggregate diseases like Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).
The purpose of Koch’s postulates is and always has been to ensure scientific rigor is applied when proposing an organism as the cause of a disease. This is the opposite of what the wellness industry does, when they attribute a myriad of unrelated and generic symptoms to “toxic mold syndrome” or other nebulous pseudoscience diagnoses.
People who claim things like “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS” have a fundamental lack of understanding of how scientific knowledge accrues and often are prone to medical conspiracism.
We know that microorganisms cause specific diseases. Microbiological research has consistently isolated and identified pathogens responsible for diseases. The discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the cause of tuberculosis. Antibiotics, specific chemicals that target bacteria, and antivirals, which inhibit viral replication, add further evidence to the role of microbes in disease. Vaccinations, which train the immune system to fight specific pathogens, have led to the decline or eradication of numerous infectious diseases, such as smallpox and polio.
Germ theory denialism disregards the extensive body of evidence and empirical data supporting the existence and role of pathogens in disease.
Denialism can lead to dangerous health practices, such as the refusal of vaccines or antibiotics, potentially leading to outbreaks of preventable diseases (hello, measles, anyone?). It undermines public health initiatives, including hygiene and sanitation efforts that have historically been crucial in controlling the spread of infectious diseases. On a broader scale, it erodes public trust in science and medicine, which is vital for addressing health crises, like pandemics.
As always, thanks for joining in the fight for science!
Thank you for supporting evidence-based science communication. With outbreaks of preventable diseases, refusal of evidence-based medical interventions, propagation of pseudoscience by prominent public “personalities”, it’s needed now more than ever.
Your local immunologist,
Andrea
