An interview with a late Canadian author has appeared again on social media and shows how he makes several false allegations about COVID-19. Among them, he questions the existence of coronaviruses by saying that they have never been isolated. This is not true, and such a claim reveals the author’s lack of understanding of virology.
A clip from the interview was posted to various Instagram accounts in mid-March (here, here and here) and was taken from a wider 95-minute podcast recorded in May 2020 (here). It shows the interviewer, who died several months later (here, here), and claims scientists who say SARS-CoV-2 was isolated are lying because ‘no one has ever purified a coronavirus’.
“You can see a virologist lying when they use the word ‘isolation,'” he said. “There are countless papers that say we isolated the virus, but let me describe how they did it … They took a nasal swab and processed it somehow; like you have to add antibiotics to kill bacteria and things like that.You process it and add it to a cell culture.They observed how cells die in the cell culture and they write, “We isolated the virus.” Clearly it is not specific.Even if you have identified a virus, you have not yet identified a specific virus.Then they search for RNA and find a long strand of RNA that looks like what was previously called coronavirus “But no one has ever cleared a coronavirus.”
Asked if this means that no one knows if coronaviruses exist, he added: “Yes, I think what they did; they looked at people with colds and they found some RNA patterns and said, ‘Oh, that must be the virus.’ They jumped to these conclusions. With the new world of biotechnology and PCR, this technology that underlines the test, these things are very easy to do, but they are nothing grounded. ”
However, the first argument about isolation is not true. There are several examples of scientists isolating SARS-CoV-2 (here, here, here, here), the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, where they also have the complete genome sequence (here, here, here). Photographs of isolated SARS-CoV-2 particles have been released by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (here).
Meanwhile, the second argument, that coronaviruses have never been purified, shows a misunderstanding about how viruses work – and does not prove that they do not exist. Siouxsie Wiles, associate professor at the University of Auckland’s Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology, had earlier addressed similar allegations, saying they were referring to outdated microbiological theory (here).
Wiles said the claims about purification came from the four ‘postulates’ – or conditions – set out by the 19th-century German microbiologist Robert Koch on the conclusion that a microbe is the cause of a disease. One of these conditions stipulates that the organism must be isolated from the host, that is, the infected human, before being cultured in a pure culture.
However, Wiles says that at least one of these postulates was outdated in Koch’s time – and all were devised before viruses were discovered.
“Viruses are not like the bacteria that Koch was discovering,” Wiles said. “Viruses must take over a host host to repeat. In other words, they turn cells into virus-producing factories. And depending on what proteins a virus has on the surface, it may just infect very specific cells of certain host species, or a wide variety of cells of different species.
‘Therefore, when virologists want to isolate a virus from a sample, they will take the sample or part of it and add it to some cells – usually sweets that are relatively easy to grow in the laboratory – and then see if the cells die and / or if virus particles are released into the liquid nutrient bath, the cells grow in it. ”
Since the new coronavirus was discovered, more than 123 million cases of new coronavirus infections have been confirmed worldwide. More than 2.8 million deaths have also been reported as a result of COVID-19 (here).
VERDICT
Untrue. There are numerous examples of scientists isolating SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID -19, and sequencing its genome. The argument about purification is related to the microbiological theory of the 19th century that does not apply to viruses. The new coronavirus has been proven to cause millions of deaths worldwide.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.