You might have heard some revolutionary news: germs don’t exist. Ok, they exist, but they only make you sick after you ruin your relationship with your environment—the terrain. Actually, the idea isn’t new. Initially floated in the 19th century, terrain theory was never proven in real-world experiments, and so fell dormant—until now. As with many terrible 19th-century science metaphysics, conspiritualists are feeling nostalgic. And do we have a group to introduce you to this week.To help us debunk this funk, Dr Dan Wilson returns to the pod to offer his keen ear in breaking down the bullsh*t being shoveled by Tom Cowan and Andrew Kaufman during The Event 2021. First, Derek offers a brief history of the battle between germ theory and terrain theory—one that produced a clear winner in Louis Pasteur, which, as conspiritualists now spin it, is just further evidence of the Deep State conspiracy holding us all back. Show NotesDan Wilson on YouTube | Instagram | TwitterThis pseudoscience movement wants to wipe germs from existenceGerm theory denialism is alive and well – and taking the nuance out of scientific debate
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Conspiratuality Conspiratuality I'm Derek Barris, and it's just me this week.
I'm piloting Solo to give Julian and Matthew a little bit of time to work on our book, which you may have heard about if you follow us on any of our social media handles, predominantly on Instagram.
We're also on Facebook occasionally, and we all have our own independent Twitter accounts where we're much more regular.
You can also support us at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can help keep us editorially independent and get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
But let's move right into this week's episode.
Because you might have heard some revolutionary news lately.
Germs don't exist.
Okay, they do exist, but they only make you sick after you ruin your relationship with your environment, the terrain.
Okay, well, the idea actually isn't that new.
It was initially floated in the 19th century, but having never been proven in real-world experiments, the theory fell dormant.
Until now, that is.
As with many terrible 19th century science metaphysics, conspiritualists are feeling quite nostalgic.
And do we have a group to introduce you to this week?
To help me debunk this funk, Dr. Dan Wilson returns to the pod to offer his keen ear in breaking down the bullshit being shoveled by Tom Cowan and Andrew Kaufman during The Event 2021.
I'll first offer a brief history of the battle between germ theory and terrain theory, one that produced a clear winner in Louis Pasteur, which, as the conspiritualists now spin it, is just further evidence of the deep state is just further evidence of the deep state conspiracy holding us all back.
The story of modern medicine has one very specific substance to thank.
Alcohol.
Love it or leave it, but wine and beer have played a pivotal role in the formation of human societies and, as it turns out, medicine.
Alcohol helped lead to the development of the germ theory of disease.
But I want to start this investigation with the concept of contingent contagionism, which emerged as a middle line between miasma theory and contagionists, or germ theorists.
Okay, let's back it up even further.
What is miasma?
Now this idea held that diseases such as cholera and the plague were caused by bad air that emanated from rotting organic matter.
Miasma theory mostly applied to contagious diseases, though some adventurous thinkers believed obesity could be caused by the vapors as well.
As with the antiquated notion of humors, miasma theory was first floated by Hippocrates four centuries before the turn of the modern era.
In the 19th century, the belief was that disease could enter cities through miasma and then be transmitted from person to person.
This allowed doctors to start to think about disease specificity while also covering their tracks by affording their ignorance a layer of mysticism.
So, they had to deal with the church, for example, who did not want to think that God would just create disease and then have it manifest within people.
So, the thinking went, yes, yes, it's contagious, but the contagion is divine, or at least it's invisible and unexplainable.
The problem was, it wasn't unexplainable, the theory was just wrong.
As the science writer William Bynum stated, theories that explain everything often explain very little.
I think that should be a mantra for a lot of the conspiritualists we cover.
So this notion of the pervasive air as the cause of all viruses just would not do.
And yet that notion persisted for nearly 6,000 years.
And so one common practice during plagues, for example, involved quarantining and isolating individuals, but they were also placed around fires that purified the air around them.
In 1850s in Europe, miasma supposedly explained a cholera outbreak.
Scientists knew something bad was in the air, yet an English physician named John Snow, well no, not that one, well Snow said, well why don't you check the water?
And even so famous a nurse as Florence Nightingale said no, no, spritz the air with lavender and all shall be fine.
But as you can guess, Snow's instinct proved correct.
Now interestingly, during this time, fog was considered to carry the miasma from the port to the city, or the mountain to the city.
Really an ominous folklore.
The heaviness of the air resulting in the heaviness of the body.
It's an intuitive sentiment, the idea that what's happening in the world is happening to us.
Yet it's also an egotistical one.
Everything outside becomes about us.
And this in part is what blinds us from understanding the sometimes counterintuitive nature of science.
We want so badly to be connected to everything, we forget that not everything is connected, at least not in the way that we want it to be.
So, cholera wedged itself between miasma theory and germ theory, and some thinkers recognized isolation and quarantine as the best solution at that time, while others advocated for improving the drainage systems and cleaning the streets.
European governments primarily focused on quarantine, and sadly, they neglected the environment, or at least the part of the environment that actually carried the disease.
Thankfully the 19th century was ripe for scientific exploration, and there was precedent for this.
In 1546, the Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro wrote of disease seeds that were carried by the wind or communicated by contact with infected objects known as fomites.
And these were identifiable under the microscope.
He called them animalcules, or little animals.
Fracostoro was part of the early wave of bacteriologists that were investigating putrefaction.
They wanted to know the reason that meat and fruit decayed and rotted.
For a while, these animalcules were thought to have appeared spontaneously.
Enter big religion.
Now this theory, as I hinted at before, created a real problem with the church, who couldn't believe that God would allow such little animals to suddenly appear in such a manner.
Priests thought the very notion of monsters appearing on food to be blasphemous.
Some even called the spontaneous appearance of what we now know as germs to be as possible as six-headed cows.
Fast forward to the 19th century, when patho-anatomists speculated that these anemocules, such as parasites and bacteria, were responsible for certain diseases.
In 1835, Agostino Bassi argued that fungus discovered on dead silkworms were responsible for silkworm disease.
This led Johann Schönlein to apply the same principles to ringworm.
In every case, a form of putrefaction was involved.
In 1940, German physician Jacob Henley, who was also studying putrefaction in yeast cells, claimed that infectious diseases were caused by living agents that entered the human body, in this case, parasites.
Henley combined clinical, veterinary, epidemiological, and zoological training to challenge the concepts of spontaneous generation and miasmatism.
Now Henley never really received much credit as the going theories of miasmatism and environmentalism, as championed by Justice von Liebig, one of the fathers of organic chemistry, ultimately won out.
Fermentation and putrefaction were considered purely chemical and not biological processes.
That brings us to Louis Pasteur, who is actually trained in physics and chemistry, not medicine.
As mentioned, bacteria had been identified long before his time, and the idea of germs causing disease predates his work.
What he offered was a coherent logic around germs that no one else had devised, and that began with his experiments in the late 1850s.
Now to the good stuff.
Alcohol.
Chemistry led to biology thanks to tartrates, a waste product of winemaking.
By studying crystals left behind in the process, Pasteur concluded that molecular asymmetry distinguished living from inanimate objects.
He wanted to know about microorganisms, so he set out to reveal the true workings of biology.
In 1854, Pasteur began studying the fermentation processes of wine and beer, the souring of milk, and the production of vinegar.
Liebig had thought fermentation was due to unstable chemical products known as ferments.
But Pasteur's studies revealed that fermentation involved living microorganisms, meaning that the process was not purely chemical.
Now before you go thinking Pasteur's intentions were atheistic, I just want to note that he was trying to prove materialists wrong.
He believed life couldn't possibly arise out of mere matter, and he even helped lay the foundations for vitalism, which created a rift between non-living chemistry and living microorganisms.
In fact, by finally disproving spontaneous generation, Pasteur won the trust of Catholics through his continued experiments on microorganisms.
Now it was in his experiments focused on heating wine, milk, and beer, done to destroy these living organisms through a process we named for him, pasteurization, that the germ theory of disease began to take root.
Pasteur confirmed that disease is indeed communicable through organisms by identifying pea brine, which is a silkworm disease.
In 1878, Pasteur argued a case for the germ theory of infection before the French Academy of Medicine.
During that talk, he stated that germs are responsible for disease, putrefaction, and fermentation.
He also said that when organisms responsible for disease were identified, vaccines could be developed.
And the following year, he put his theory to the test by inoculating chickens against cholera and anthrax.
The result?
You guessed it.
The birds that were inoculated were fine when later infected with these diseases.
While the group that didn't get vaccinated at all, well, they all died.
Funny how that works, no?
Well, no to some of the people we'll be covering today.
So after developing these original vaccines, Pastor then moved on to rabies.
In 1885, after numerous animal tests, a nine-year-old boy who had been bit by a rabid dog 15 times was brought to him.
After two weeks of injections, the boy actually lived.
So Pastor's rabies vaccine became the basis of the modern intervention we know as vaccines.
We don't have to scroll through a history text to discover the efficacy of his work.
Today, up to 50,000 people in rural India who do not have access to this vaccine die every year from rabies.
How about in America?
Well, we have the vaccine readily available, so about one or two people die every year.
And that's usually due to the fact that they haven't been vaccinated against rabies or couldn't get to a doctor fast enough after being infected.
Germ theory began to be integrated into medical textbooks in the 1890s thanks to Pasteur and, in large part, his rival, the physician Robert Koch.
There was a sense of national pride playing out here, as the Frenchman and German tried to outdo one another.
In the end, the older Pasteur is credited with the legacy of germ theory, though Koch's postulates, or basis of reasoning about bacteria, are today the gold standard of disease causation.
All that is to say that while Pasteur is credited with this theory, he was in no way working in a vacuum.
Why all this basic history of one of the soundest concepts in medicine?
Well, in recent years, and especially since the pandemic began, the germ theory of disease has been disputed by proponents of terrain theory.
Now I predominantly used science history books by Roy Porter and William Bynum to research this episode, and strangely, neither book contained a word about the work of Anton Beauchamp or his terrain theory, which he developed from the work of French physiologist Claude Bernard, though it did touch upon its precursors, which are miasma theory and environmentalism.
Beauchamp, also a Frenchman, had a bitter rivalry with Pasteur, and his work wasn't completely discredited.
It's actually a really funny story.
The fact that conspiritualists champion him today is pretty ironic, given the fact that Beauchamp's work directly led to the synthetic dye industry.
Which of course led to the development of the entire range of tranquilizers, SSRIs, SNRIs, and antipsychotics that are now on shelves.
And his work also led to the development of the first chemotherapeutic drug.
So I find it funny that champions of terrain theory are basically heralding the biggest pharma guy in history.
But Botops took issue with Pasteur's theory of fermentation, claiming instead to have discovered molecular granulations, or microzemas, that were the elementary units of life.
He challenged Pasteur's germ theory by stating that bacteria could never infect humans and cause disease.
This notion, which is known as microzymium theory, has long been disproven, yet, surprise surprise, that theory still exists in alternative medicine circles.
Part of this concept includes terrain theory, the idea that all disease springs from unfavorable host and environmental conditions, allowing the host's native microzymas to be invaded, which leads to the decompensation of the person's tissues.
The basis of all of this is called pleomorphism, which is the disproven idea that bacteria changes morphology and reproductive methods solely according to environmental cues.
Now, it should be noted that this theory stems from Beauchamp's laboratory work, where the environment only involved beakers and cultures.
Now, of course, that's where Pasteur's work also began, but he proved his lab experiments in the real world through the development of some of the most important vaccines in history.
Failing to prove his experiments in the real world, Beauchamp became a faculty member at a university before running a pharmacy with his son, and his theories never actually were verified.
So we really see here how this mindset informs the modern conspirituality thought pattern.
It's a combination of the romanticized notion that the human belief of interconnectedness is exactly how we feel it should be.
It's the same feeling that one gets in a yoga studio when they're meditating for world peace, and because the yogi feels it themselves, that's enough proof that it's working.
If it doesn't, that's a problem with the world, because I did my part, right?
The problem is, research isn't a feeling.
Pastore's work went out because he verified it in public, and then other researchers further validated his claims.
Beauchamp's theory's never worked out, but to some people, it feels like it should be right.
Now, to be fair, and Dr. Wilson and I will talk about this soon, the terrain or the environment obviously matters.
It's not only vaccines and handwashing that led to lower mortality rates in the early 20th century.
Improved sewage and drinking systems and urban sanitation efforts were also key in extending life and helping people to not die from what became preventable diseases.
And yet the ghost of Beauchamp lives on in chiropractors who we recently covered and their belief that disease has nothing to do with external pathogens as well as, of course, anti-vaxxers who pin disease on poor dietary and health lifestyles and the mysticism they can feel because, well, they have the privilege to be able to afford the lifestyle to be able to do so.
Germ theory had four major impacts on our understanding of science, and it is here that we find the conspiritualist crossover.
Now, again, these were not new ideas per se, but germ theory solidified an important turning point in the evolution of scientific knowledge.
Now, first two are theoretical.
The separation of the cause of disease in the patient's body, which led to the development of an objective criteria for diagnosis and treatment.
This, of course, is what germ theory denialists rebel against, especially in the A Course of Miracles discourse we cover often on this podcast, because they believe in a metaphysics of disease.
Now the second was disease specificity, which was already theorized and now it was strengthened.
So that means that you can identify the bacteria, the virus that is causing the disease.
Now the second two are practical.
So you have the development of antiseptic surgeries, or surgeries that prevent the growth of disease-causing microorganisms.
And this preceded the widespread implementation of anesthesia, which revolutionized surgeries moving forward.
So if you enjoy going under when you're getting a surgery, you can thank Pastor's work for leading to that.
And then finally, the ability to recognize and understand the sources and patterns of infections and epidemic diseases.
So this is the foundation of what we now call public health.
So a lot of, Pastor did a lot of good work for us and the creation of our society and health structures.
So there you have it.
The modern rage against the vaccine stems from a metaphysical theory of disease in which your personal relationship with the environment is all that matters.
And to take it a step further, that your thoughts dictate the state of your health.
We heard a lot about that in the episode on chiropractors a few weeks ago.
And that comprises a large part of what protecting yourself really implies, that you better shield yourself against the notion that pharmaceuticals are curative.
And again, remember Beauchamp played a large role in helping to create the modern pharmaceutical industry, right?
In this mindset, humans are natural and divine, and so all the answers somehow, somewhere, fall in that domain.
But they don't.
Speaking of the metaphysics of terrain theory, we're going to listen to clips from The Event 2021, the online pseudo-palooza of disinformation and junk science that you might remember from episode 88, New Age Crack.
Listening to the grifters on this episode, Tom Cowan and Andrew Kaufman, discuss spirituality meshed with science while using a ton of science-y jargon, honestly, it left me scratching my head.
I know it's bullshit, but I can't quite explain why it's bullshit.
So I had to ask a friend of the pod, Dr. Dan Wilson, aka Debunk the Funk, to return to break down their disinformation.
Dan has a PhD in molecular biology and runs popular science communication feeds on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.
You can find them all in the show notes.
We also tag him all the time because he's always producing amazing content.
As the title of his channels reveal, he's all about debunking, which is exactly what you need when medical grifters use their training not for good, but to disguise their agenda with a lot of terminology that the average layperson Like myself, can't understand.
Now as I said, I soak up all of Dan's work whenever he posts and I'm grateful that he took on that role.
Because unlike the three of us working together on these projects, he's doing it all by himself.
So if you haven't seen his work, I'd recommend his Debunking the Disinformation Dozens series, which is exceptional.
And more recently, he published part one of his book review of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's screed against Anthony Fauci.
So after a few questions catching up with the good doctor, we're going to hear his thoughts on COVID-19 misinformation and this new religion of the terrain.
Dan Wilson, welcome back to Conspirituality.
Thanks for joining.
Thanks so much for having me.
I'm so happy to be back.
We have a lot to talk about today.
Today it'll be about one specific thing, but you were last on on episode 29 in December of 2020.
So we found you because of your Debunk the Funk videos, which are awesome.
They continue to be awesome and very important.
Can you just remind listeners why you started doing this work in the first place?
I started my YouTube channel because I wanted to exercise my science communication passion in a way that I thought would be productive and I think everybody who communicates science and educates in science has a niche to fill and I thought that mine was best placed educating people through debunking.
Being a former conspiracy theorist and all, I was very familiar with all the anti-vaccine conspiracies and I thought that that was just a fun way to exercise my want to do science communication.
And that was actually just before COVID happened.
And then COVID happened.
So I had a lot more material to have fun with.
We're coming up on our two year anniversary.
And one of the questions we had in the beginning is whether or not we would have enough content to make this sustainable, which is now laughable in some ways.
Now, 15 months later, since we've last talked to you, Has it gone as you expected?
Has it gotten worse?
What's your feelings about the current state of science misinformation right now?
In a lot of ways, I think it's gone as expected, but Also not great.
You know, throughout every pandemic there are always some kind of go-to conspiracies that conspiracy theorists kind of gravitate towards and just end up rehashing.
No matter what the disease is, no matter what the situation is, they kind of just always come up with the same ideas.
Watching that play out during this pandemic, because it was absolutely true with this pandemic, was both expected and a little depressing.
I think that at the beginning of the pandemic, I wouldn't have expected conspiracy theories to get as big as they did surrounding vaccines and whatnot.
That was maybe a little naive of me, but I didn't expect the Joe Rogans.
I didn't expect the organized dissent, which I should have because anti-vaxxers are notoriously very organized.
But overall, the disinformation has gone worse than I expected, but the silver lining, I think, is that if you look at our actual vaccine numbers and compare them to history, we're not doing terrible.
Compared to the rest of the world, the US is, of course, we could be doing much better.
But if you look at, for example, the polio, Uh, epidemics and when the vaccine became available for polio.
It took years, decades, to get to the point where we were eradicating polio from the US and getting it to the point where it was no longer epidemic and causing serious damage.
And now, we are just about a year out from when vaccines became widely available to the American public.
And we're already approaching 70% fully vaccinated, which is pretty good for one year.
Again, it could be better.
And of course, the goal is not to eradicate SARS-CoV-2, but we're doing okay overall.
This interview is going to run in 10 days from now, so we're going to ask you a little bit of speculation before we get into the main part of our talk.
Now that there is another potential wave coming with the uptick in the numbers in Europe and the UK, what do you think the response is going to be here if all of a sudden there's some more restrictions coming our way?
Well, as we know, we just relaxed a lot of Non-pharmaceutical interventions in the U.S.
Most places are removing mask mandates or mask masking policies altogether.
a lot of the other non-pharmaceutical interventions like social distancing or all those recommendations are kind of getting relaxed.
And what we've seen throughout the pandemic and also throughout history is if you put on the brakes for all of these interventions, then cases are going to start creeping back up.
And we shouldn't be surprised when that happens.
We have vaccines that work.
So most of the people who get really sick are going to be unvaccinated.
If cases start rising again in the US, we're probably going to kind of rubber band back into thinking, oh, what do we do about this?
Cases are rising.
Because I think a lot of people don't understand that vaccines, the real power of them is that they prevent disease and not cases that They don't prevent positive PCR tests, they prevent you from getting in the hospital.
And so I think people might panic per se about that and we might rubber band back into more restrictions and people will be upset about that.
I hope we don't do that.
I hope that people continue to get vaccinated and that most of the cases are in vaccinated people so that most of them don't actually get very sick.
Judging from what the U.S.
has been doing so far in the pandemic, it looks like, I would guess that we would overreact.
And not use our tools properly.
Yeah, understatement for sure.
Overreact in the wrong way, I'll say.
Because I always think that there's a principle in infectious disease where you can't be too cautious.
Because in the beginning of this, in the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, if we had done everything really fast and really forcefully, Then we'd probably be in a situation where we're looking back saying, why did we do all that?
Nothing happened.
But it was because we did all that that we were able to prevent the pandemic.
It always blew my mind being in the wellness industry.
And the whole idea of what's parroted in those circles is that yoga slash supplements slash breath work are all preventive.
And then you get another, a real preventive.
I mean, these can be preventative in many ways, but you get a real prevented application of science, like a vaccine.
And they're like, no, it's not preventive.
But the anti-vaxxers are really the community driving the theme of this week's topic, which is germ theory.
What do you know about terrain theory?
Right.
So...
Terrain Theory is, it basically is proposing that instead of pathogens or microbes causing disease, instead the environment or your lifestyle or something else that you're doing is affecting you in a way that makes you sick and then the germs are not the sole cause of it.
They're almost an after effect or they're just not the only cause of it.
Which is funny because conspiracy theorists have this funny way of including a grain of truth in most of the things that they say.
Sometimes they're just completely wrong but a lot of times there's a grain of truth And the terrain theory one is interesting because of course it's true that your environment and your lifestyle and the things you do can make you sick.
But pathogens and germs, they also make you sick.
And we know that very, very well.
I've called people who subscribe purely to terrain theory the flat earthers of biology and I totally think that that stands true.
From your research, why have they clinged on to Beauchamp?
Is it just to be contrarian to Pasteur?
Does it fit into the anti-vax dynamic?
What are some of the reasons you've identified that they've gone with this narrative?
You know, I think in the wellness community and in the pseudoscience new age community in general, I think it all comes down to this Fact that pathogens and germs do cause disease and we have methods and medications that can treat or prevent those infections.
But to them, if they can deny that that's the case, then they can substitute their own products and their own treatments and their own preventative measures and sell them to you.
I think that that's the driving force in a lot of the influencers who reject germ theory because they're always trying to sell some supplement, some magic gunk from a mountain in Tibet that is going to solve all your problems.
I didn't make that up.
People actually have a product like that.
But they're always trying to sell something and they wouldn't be able to sell it if they didn't make you believe that it's not germs, it's not these viruses and bacteria, it's...
Actually, my environment and this product is going to clean my environment, so to speak.
No, I'm with you.
I actually did some events and work with David Wolf some 15 years ago when he was in my circle.
I remember he was a driving force behind goji berries and the Tibetan magical fruit.
They're not really even found in Tibet.
So, you know, there's a lot of myths in these circles.
But we're going to clip, I've clipped some talks, some parts of the talk from the event 2021.
It's a panel on post-germ theory.
And it seems that the way that this talk went is that they have to disprove that germs cause disease before they can talk about the terrain.
So that's sort of the order here.
It's hosted by Alec Zek, who is a holistic health coach and co-founder of the event, and another co-founder, Mike Winner, who is a decentralization advocate, and he's the founder of, speaking to what you just said, Alpha Vedic, a supplement company, and his podcast has recently featured David Icke and Kelly Brogan.
Now, the two men that they're talking to are Tom Cowan and Andrew Kaufman, who I know you've covered before, so before we get into these clips, How did you come across Tom and Andrum?
What are your top-line feelings on their work?
Wow, yeah.
So, I remember the COVID pandemic was probably a few months in, and I have a friend who works on exosomes.
And she knew that I was doing my channel, and she messaged me one day.
She said, hey, you should cover these people who think that viruses are exosomes.
And I was like, what?
That's such a stupid idea.
And she was like, yeah, I know.
They're great.
And that's how I found out about Andrew Kaufman.
And so I've made a few videos about them before.
And they are, I think, textbook grifters.
I think it's honestly fair to say that.
They deny that viruses exist.
They deny that viruses cause disease.
And a friend and I were actually able to attend one of their One of their webinars last year, my friend actually got to go live and ask a question and it was great.
It was one of my favorite videos to make because he got to share his screen and show pictures of SARS-CoV-2 and oh man, they just kinda kicked him out.
They kind of kicked him out after, you know, saying, oh, I haven't seen this paper before.
I don't know this electron microscopy technique, which was weird.
I should know about that.
Yes.
Kaufman's website features supplements, of course, and we're going to start with a clip of the trailer of his recent film, which I believe was premiered during the event or shortly thereafter, and it's called Terrain.
So let's listen.
This is all about fear and if people were not afraid you would see this disappear literally overnight.
There is no existence of a virus and unfortunately you need a child to be able to point to the emperor and say he's got no clothes on.
Once we can understand that it's a model that is bankrupt, that's built on fraud and misinterpretation, then we can liberate ourselves from it and move towards something much more truthful.
What do you think, Doctor?
If people weren't afraid, would the virus end overnight?
No.
No.
Yeah, so I think we're probably going to get into this a little later, but Tom Cowan thinks that Fear is one of the causes of disease.
When it comes to infectious disease, that's just not true.
I mean, there are people who have not been afraid of the virus and have proudly stated they're not afraid of the virus who have ended up Dying or seriously suffering from it.
There have been small children too young to understand what SARS-CoV-2 is, who have suffered from it, been hospitalized from it, and some who have even died from it.
And so this whole idea that fear is going to cause this unique infectious disease that we can characterize in very particular ways, It's a nice idea.
It's a nice idea that we can just not be afraid and solve all our problems, but that's not reality.
But I guess offering that comforting alternative is kind of the appeal of these ideas.
This whole grift reminds me of the people who are saying that the war in Ukraine has ended COVID because the news isn't 24-7 on it.
When you see that, how do you even respond to that?
Do you respond to that?
I don't respond to it online, no.
I just look at it and I hate it.
It's so weird to me that these are people who will bash mainstream media any chance they get.
Call the mainstream media liars and fakes and anybody who follows them sheep.
But then when the mainstream media stops covering COVID and instead is covering the thing that is going to get the clicks, like Ukraine, then suddenly that means that COVID's gone.
No, absolutely not.
You just have to not look at the mainstream news and you'll quickly find plenty of stories about the ongoing COVID pandemic.
So it's ironic and frustrating but with that kind of thing I kind of just laugh and move on because I have to laugh at it.
Yeah, I'm with you.
Now the discussion we're talking about today is called The Post-Germ Theory Paradigm Shift, and the hosts ask you to imagine a world where fear of microbes doesn't exist.
So these clips are all over a minute each, but I want to give listeners a chance to really get into it, and then we'll get your reaction, Dan, afterwards.
But the first one, they tee up the talk with Tom Cowan, who's discussing COVID-19, and he'll expand out a little bit from there.
I'll speak for myself, but I mean there's no virus.
The virus that's called SARS-CoV-2, or for that matter, any virus that's considered to be a pathogen, i.e.
causes disease, has actually never been shown to exist in the way that we understand something exists.
In other words, the bottom line is the concept That there are, quote, particles, which are things, right?
We're not talking about an idea, or a feeling, or something intangible, like an energy form.
We're talking about a physical particle.
That particle has never been shown to exist in the way that anybody would Say that that has been proven a specific particle same morphology, same shape, same genome, identical particle that has clearly never been done.
There is no published study on any.
So-called pathogenic virus, including SARS-CoV-2.
We're getting the point there.
So how do you respond to that?
I don't... Go.
It's wild.
I love this guy.
It's just so off the wall.
You know, he talks in a way that makes it all sound convincing, but it's just...
Ridiculous.
You can walk into any virology lab and they'll show you exactly what it is that they're studying and that it is a real thing.
But let's I guess go through the main points here.
So he says that SARS-CoV-2 or any pathogenic virus has never been shown.
To exist as a particle, and that's just not true.
We have incredibly powerful electron microscopes.
We have techniques like cryo-electron microscopy, which I was very familiar with during my PhD thesis.
And essentially what we can do with these microscopes is we can see on an angstrom level scale.
And for those who don't know what an angstrom is, an angstrom is 0.1 nanometers.
So we could see down to resolution of say like five angstroms and we can see exactly the structure of these viruses we can see the proteins that make them up we can see the amino acid sequence of these proteins and if anyone's familiar with amino acid sequences you know that they're coded for by the genome and
And we can indeed see that the sequence of amino acids in the proteins that we see match exactly the genome that we can detect in these sick patients and in these viral isolates.
So, you know, we can see people getting sick, we can isolate the virus from them, detect it using all sorts of biochemical and genetic methods, and we can image it using a high-powered electron microscope.
We can even take that same virus and make another animal sick with it.
I think I wrote down one thing that he talks about here.
He goes through, he mentions same morphology, same shape, same genome.
Well, so one thing to understand here is with capsid viruses, so some viruses are just a protein coat around a genome.
Some viruses have an envelope, so a little fatty lipid layer around either a protein co-antigenome or just a genome.
If you're dealing with a capsid virus, those are going to be exactly the same morphology and same shape.
It has to do with the geometry of how the proteins fit together.
It has to be a certain shape all the time.
With envelope viruses, they can be varying sizes, varying abundance of protein on their surface, but they're always going to have generally the same genome, including SARS-CoV-2, but they're always going to have generally the same genome, including SARS-CoV-2, which is an We can sequence SARS-CoV-2 from millions of different people, and it can all be practically the same genome.
Of course, no one genome is going to be exactly the same, because as organisms replicate their genome, they make mistakes.
There are slight mutations.
But if you sequence across millions of people who are all infected with the same virus, the genome is not going to differ significantly between all of those different viruses.
So we have plenty of ways to show that these viruses do in fact exist.
Many virologists have spent their whole lives studying them, and countless people throughout history have suffered from them.
So to deny their existence is just...
It's wacky and I laugh at it, but it's genuinely harmful for the people who believe him.
From there, Kaufman goes on to call SARS-CoV-2 an alleged virus that produces an alleged disease, and then he actually says the entire field of virology is invalid.
And he says that the entire vaccine and antiviral drug industries are built on the false scientific premise that viruses exist.
And then Callan returns and he explains why the virus actually doesn't exist.
It goes like this.
A, you can't find the virus in any bodily fluid.
Everybody agrees with that.
They say that's because you can't find a virus like that.
Even though it's very clear that you could find a same size particle You could find caffeine in coffee beans.
You can find any size particle, like a bacteriophage, just by doing filtration and, you know, density.
We have the technology to do this.
We have the technology.
And even, and so they say it can't do it.
So you have to take the snot, put it on monkey kidney cells, starve it and poison it, it breaks down, and then you say that means it's that's called viral isolation.
Now, like Andy said, we proved that if you don't add any snot, it still breaks down, proving that you had a virus, even though there was no virus.
Then you can take that culture fluid, right?
And the way they do the genome is they have this brew of genetic material that came from you, it came from whatever fungus or bacteria are in there, it came from whatever viruses are in there, or just genetic debris.
They chop it up into little pieces, use a template of this other imaginary coronavirus, And they reformed the virus.
With an alignment process called Next Generation De Novo Sequencing.
Now, here's the thing.
I am not an expert in these fields.
And so I can hear a lot of bullshit, but I don't have any rebuttal, and that's why I need people like you.
So thank you for your patience, but can you make sense of what just happened there for me, please?
Well, I can't make sense out of what he said, I can tell you exactly what he's claiming and why it's wrong.
Perfect.
Okay.
So he starts off saying that we can't find the virus in any bodily fluid and everyone agrees with that.
So I listened to enough Tom Cowan to know what he's saying here.
He's saying that he has Asked people why you can't take samples from a person, directly from a person, and then purify the virus out of that, and then image it in an electron microscope.
And the answer to that is, well, we can, but we can't positively identify it that way.
In order to positively identify it, we have to do high-powered, higher-powered electron microscopy, which again is called cryo-electron microscopy, so that we can get a better, more higher-resolution image of what the virus looks like, so that we can actually positively identify it.
In order to do that, you need a lot of virus.
You need tens or hundreds of thousands of good intact viral particles in your sample in order to get that kind of resolution, and you're just not going to do that with The amount of sample you get from a human, okay?
It's just not gonna work.
But what we can do is we can use a bunch of other methods to detect the virus in bodily fluid.
We can detect its genome using PCR.
We can detect its genome using fluorescent in-situ hybridization methods, which allows you to actually see where these specific probes of DNA go to find the virus in the sample.
We can detect its proteins.
We can see its effects in cell culture.
And that is something that, of course, he also has a problem with in this little clip here.
All virus deniers, all people like Tom Cowan and Kaufman, will have a big problem with traditional virological isolation methods.
So in order to isolate a virus you basically have to take a sample from an animal or a human And then you filter it, or you centrifuge it, or you clean it up somehow.
And then you take that cleaned up sample, and the reason you're cleaning it is to get rid of all the bacteria, all the fungi, all of the host cells, all the things that will, you know, essentially contaminate your sample when you put it into cell culture.
So, once you have your clean sample, you put it into a flask or tube that has cells growing in it, and the virus is going to infect those cells.
Of course, this is necessary because viruses don't replicate on their own, they need a host.
So if you want to Take away all of the bacteria, fungi, host cells, all that junk, and study the virus in sufficient numbers to actually do proper experiments with.
You have to grow it, and you're not going to grow it unless you put it onto host cells that it can infect and replicate inside.
And then once the virus has replicated enough, you can collect the fluid that the cells grow in, you can separate the cells from the virus, and voila, you have a virus.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with those methods.
In order to isolate something from a complex mixture, you always have to add things to it before you get what you want out.
And all of their gripes with cell culture are easily explained.
Callen and Kaufman will constantly claim that you're poisoning and starving the cells.
Well, no.
They complain about specific ingredients like fetal bovine serum or antibiotics without really understanding why those ingredients are there.
The fetal bovine serum is there to provide growth factors to the cells.
The cells will not receive signals to replicate without it.
Anybody, any of the thousands of people who do cell culture in America know this.
If you don't have FBS in your media, the cells just aren't going to replicate.
And then things like antibiotics are there to, of course, prevent contamination.
So, cell culture is normally done in a sterile environment, a sterile hood.
It's not perfect.
Sometimes when you're opening bottles and opening containers, you can contaminate your cells.
And your cells might be a week into a one-month experiment, or they might have cost the lab $500 per tube to purchase.
So you don't want your cells to get contaminated.
So you put antibiotics in the culture to prevent the growth of bacteria and fungi.
And these antibiotics are going to only affect bacteria and fungi.
That's why they're safe for humans to take when they're sick with bacteria or fungi.
So it comes down to just a complete lack of understanding of how virology is done and why each step is there.
They claim that if you don't have snot in the cell culture that you still get the same effects which we call cytopathic effects.
These are, cytopathic effects describe what you see happening to cells whenever a virus is Replicating inside them and harming or killing them in any way.
And that's also not true.
You can read any virology paper and see that they do, in fact, include what's often called a mock control, where they add a sample that is essentially blank, contains no virus to cells, and they only observe cytopathic and they only observe cytopathic effects in samples of cells that received virus.
So that's a misunderstanding or a blatant, purposeful misrepresentation of the literature.
And I think the last thing he talks about here is this idea that the genome is completely fabricated somehow.
now.
He talks about chopping the DNA up into all these pieces and then comparing it to a template But that's not what happened when SARS-CoV-2 was first identified.
It was sequenced de novo, from new, and the results of that sequence that was received was compared to A library of viral genomes and it didn't match anything.
So they had to do additional methods in order to figure out how this genome was actually arranged and what it actually looks like.
And now that is the template that sequencing experiments will compare their SARS-CoV-2 genomes to, but they're still acquiring it all Independently of the template, if that all makes sense.
So at every point, these guys are just misrepresenting kind of niche, complicated science, at least complicated to people who are not familiar with it, because why would you ever at least complicated to people who are not familiar with it, because why would you ever learn about this
But they're just capitalizing on this kind of blank spot in a lot of people's knowledge and trying to insert their own ideas that ultimately are, like we said earlier, comforting.
Oh, this virus doesn't exist.
You don't have to be afraid.
You just have to take matters in your own hands, which is just not reality.
I know you can never tell intentionality.
It's impossible and it's a barrier in many ways.
And I also know, as you know, that all conspiracies are rooted in some level of truth or else they couldn't fire at all.
And there is a replication crisis in science, in the social sciences and in the biological sciences that we have to contend with as we continue to try to get better at our interventions and our therapeutics.
But when you hear these, so again for me being someone who's fascinated by science, who's worked in a hospital and been around it a lot in my life, but cannot decode what they're saying at times like this, Do you hear people who actually have at least some real contentions with the way things are done, or do you hear people who are taking their knowledge and trying to skew it to fit into their narrative?
Oh, when it comes to the claims of Cowan and Kaufman, no.
I don't hear or see anybody with Anything real, any evidence, any actual experiments to back it up, substance, to agree with them and contend the field of virology.
It's true that, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty in science, but that's mostly at the forefront.
So at the At the limits of our knowledge, that's where most of the scientific debate happens.
Scientists are not debating whether or not viruses exist.
I can promise you that.
They are not debating whether or not These cell culture techniques that have been practiced and improved upon for decades are somehow fabricating virological experiments.
That's just not, you're not going to find a serious virologist who will.
Who will say that?
Or else I guess they wouldn't call themselves virologists.
He's giving a little too much credit there.
So, from this point, the co-hosts go on to compare modern science with the Reformation of the Church, and then they state that 99% of doctors have really missed the boat with vaccines.
I love the invented numbers like that.
They go on to talk about false flag operations in science.
Cowan actually calls vaccines biotoxins.
And then we get to this place where Andrew Kaufman talks about something probably dear to your heart, which is vaccine shedding.
Here's the thing.
We don't actually know if any recipients who got these injections really got this technology and really make this spike protein in their body because there's almost no studies that have been out there to show that it's in any body fluids.
So we have like this kind of anecdotal evidence that some people got some, you know, mild symptoms or perhaps some menstrual irregularities from, they think, being around vaccinated people.
But we don't have reports of people with, you know, cardiomyopathy or pericarditis or heart attacks or strokes or blood clots, right, or Guillain-Barre syndrome.
Or Bell's palsy or those serious things unless they've been injected themselves.
So, to me, that would be serious evidence of shedding if we saw those serious conditions in people without being injected.
But I haven't seen any evidence and I have looked at some survey data that make any real strong indication that shedding is a real thing in terms of that there's a physical, you know, untransmutable element to it.
Now we can certainly get an empathic type of reaction to our close friend or relative or loved one being jabbed when we know that that's such a dangerous and risky position.
And, you know, so we could have a sort of, you know, I'll say the word psychosomatic reaction, because actually our consciousness, it has a lot of power over our physical body.
And it's transmitted in water.
You know, here's where we go from, we start to get to the metaphysics here.
And we heard it all in there.
I'm going to introduce this idea, but I haven't seen it.
But if we think about it this way, it is possible.
So what did you hear in that clip there?
I heard so much.
It's so funny to see the evolution of this.
Because, you know, Andrew Kaufman and Cohen, they gained a lot of popularity during the pandemic.
And then they're often not the spotlight when it comes to these COVID conspiracies.
And so when ideas like vaccine shedding, which is not true, I agree with Kaufman there, you don't shed spike protein when you get vaccinated.
This idea of shedding, you know, he has to, his listeners will.
want to believe that they're shedding spike protein because that's such a dangerous scary idea for them that they want to believe but he has to say that it's not true because I don't believe that spike protein can be infectious because infections aren't real and but it you know it might be if you think about it on a metaphysical level with homeopathy and it's it's such a roundabout weird
It's almost like he's cornered and he doesn't know what to say, so he's saying whatever comes to mind in order to please his audience.
It's really weird.
I loved this.
I heard this whole saga play out in real time when it was going on months ago.
Um, and I just remember thinking like, wow, you know, he's gonna talk about shedding in his next webinar.
What's, what's he gonna say?
Cause he, he doesn't think that the spike protein exists.
What's he gonna say there?
So, um, it's just a whole lot of, Nothing and word salad is what I hear there.
You know, of course, vaccinated individuals do not shed spike protein.
It doesn't happen that way.
The spike protein gets expressed in your cells for a limited amount of time, and then your immune system recognizes it, chops it up, and presents it as antigen and that's how you get an immune response.
So this idea that you're going to shed it is of course not true.
He agrees with that, but he wants to be sympathetic to his viewers and say, oh, there's a reason you're feeling that way when you're around a vaccinated person.
And also don't get the vaccine.
As I said, I mean, the entire conversation starts to get metaphysical from here and we'll hear that in our last two clips.
But But before we get there, Cowan says that COVID exploited the notion that we are controlled by our DNA.
But then he says, and maybe you can help me understand this, because this is another one of those things that just floated by me, and I'm like, I don't understand what this means.
He goes, we have 200,000 proteins and only 30,000 genes.
And since one gene is supposed to make one protein, that's 170,000 proteins unaccounted for by these sequences.
That was so, I love that.
That's so good.
Because, so, there was a concept in molecular biology called alternative splicing.
It's essentially, what happens is All of your proteins are coded for by your DNA.
And in order to make it from DNA to protein, DNA has to be first transcribed into messenger RNA.
Um, but before it actually becomes messenger RNA, there's a lot of, there are a lot of maturation steps that it has to go through.
And those maturation steps include splicing.
There are sequences within that mRNA that actually don't code for anything, that get taken out by a structure called the spliceosome, which is really, really cool and pretty well understood.
And so all of the non-coding bits are taken out, and all the coding bits are stitched together.
But in alternative splicing, different combinations of the coding bits can be spliced together to get a different protein.
So, that is the basic concept that, you know, most molecular biology students in college will recognize as the reason as to why we have much fewer genes than we do proteins.
Cowan from there goes on to speculate about where the whole COVID thing is actually coming from.
But this is a pivotal point in the conversation because this is where we go from germ theory denialism into terrain theory.
There's a materialistic conception of DNA, RNA in the ribosomes making protein.
And there's an energetic conception, which is living beings download energy and through the water convert that into into living substance.
Now, I would contend that the second one is correct.
And I would also contend that the people who really are doing this understand and have understood this for decades, that their conception is incorrect.
And one of my lines of evidence is, you know what the word ribosome means?
Rib, right?
R-I-B of soma.
Rib of the body.
You know where that came from?
The story of Adam and Eve.
Wow.
So they're laughing at you.
They know that this story of creation of living substance is somehow tied up with creative energy.
And they've turned that around.
And the whole COVID play is, like Andy said, is trying to make you make protein.
I bet you didn't learn that in your PhD course, Mr. Doctor.
There have been a couple times where they talk about ribosomes and I just, I love it.
Because, I mean, I studied ribosomes during my thesis.
I studied how the cell actually makes ribosomes.
Did you study the Bible during that time?
No, no.
Surprisingly, we did not, the yeast cells did not give us any Bible lessons.
But we, I, there's a lot of just nothing that he says there.
It's really hard to follow a line of thought.
But the thing that, of course, I want to point out is that he says, my evidence for this is, is the etymology of ribosome, which he completely gets wrong.
It is not rib.
The first part of ribosome in the etymology is ribose, which is the sugar in RNA.
Because ribosomes are made of RNA and protein.
And so when it was named, it was a body of ribose, of RNA material.
So I'm sorry.
Well, then he brings in Soma, which is a Hindu concept, of course, and then Rib from Latin, I'm guessing.
And they're all just like, it's Adam and Eve. - Yeah.
Which I don't, I don't, I have thought a lot about the ribosome in my time as a scientist, and I never thought of it as making any sensible analogy to Adam and Eve.
It's so weird.
It's so weird to listen to this and hear people say, wow, yeah, that's totally right.
Yeah, the ribosome does not mean rib of the body.
I don't understand the connection to what he's trying to talk about.
I don't understand how it plays into the whole COVID play of us trying to make proteins.
Our cells are always making proteins, so I don't really know what he's trying to say there.
I honestly can't extract a point from that.
No, it reminds me of being in college and sitting around with a bunch of dudes doing bong hits and then they start talking about how Washington DC is a Masonic structure and they start talking about all of the different buildings and how they're part of the temple and they talk for two hours without taking a breath and no one else getting a word in and then at the end of it you're left like, what just happened?
Yes.
It gives this illusion of depth and understanding when actually nothing was said that entire time and that's how I felt during a lot of this talk actually.
And you just respond with, dude, you should be a scientist.
Well, the conversation, and thank you, I know I'm keeping you up late on the East Coast, so I really appreciate your patience and diligence.
It's not a problem.
But this is the final clip, and the conversation itself never gets to terrain theory, at least the definition of it, amazingly.
But ableism does come into play, because Kaufman goes on, and his grand moment is saying that People need to take responsibility for their own health because you're the cause of your healthiness or unhealthiness, you know, the bodily sovereignty stuff we've been dealing with for a while.
And then for this final clip, Cowan lists the four causes that people actually get sick.
And I'd love to hear your reaction after we hear it.
I've said over and over, there's four reasons you get sick.
I used to say three, but now with COVID, I say four.
One, you have an accident, right?
You fall off a horse and break your leg.
Two, you're starving, so then you have scurvy, right?
And then you have all kinds of symptoms.
Three, somebody poisoned you and you can be poisoned in all kinds of ways.
You can be poisoned by Cyanide, glyphosate, EMS, you know, all kinds of things.
And then it either breaks you down or you try to eliminate it in a process that we erroneously call illness.
That process, which is your body's way of getting rid of it, is a detoxification therapeutic maneuver, which unfortunately the doctors have called sickness.
You're going through a maturation detoxification process.
And the fourth way, which I've now added, and I actually think is probably the most important, or tied with number three and two, is you're delusional.
Which means you have crazy-ass thoughts.
And when you have crazy thoughts, you do stupid things.
Like, you have a crazy thought that there's this virus, so you suffocate yourself with a mask.
And you live in fear, and you don't see your friends, and you isolate from loved ones.
Next thing you know, you're sick.
Why?
Because you're delusional, and you're acting out your delusions, and that's always a bad thing.
Okay, I want to point out, before we get into the delusions, how he threw in poison from cyanide to glyphosate, so then you're moving into Big Ag to EMFs.
And it's so part of the worldview.
It's like, oh, these are all the same thing.
As if what Vladimir Putin does to his enemies is the same as what you're getting in your produce, is the same as the 5G cell towers.
They're all mashed together.
But then you get to crazy ass thoughts.
I don't know if you actually listened to this one live, but I think you signed up for the event as well, because I saw on social media we chatted about that.
And according to the producers, 100,000 people did.
Who knows the actual numbers?
But in the conversations, when you looked at the chats, there were a lot of people there.
So a lot of people are listening to people like this.
And so when you hear that those are the four reasons you get sick, What goes through your mind?
I think the my first thought is just it's insulting.
It's absolutely insulting to the millions of people who have lost their lives just in this pandemic to SARS-CoV-2 alone.
It's insulting to those who are hospitalized and suffered from it.
It's insulting to the doctors who have treated it.
It's insulting to the children left orphaned without their caregivers because of SARS-CoV-2.
I mean, that's not delusion.
We have absolute proof, as much as you can define proof in science, we have proof of this virus existing and causing severe disease in people.
It is just, it's sad that someone like him is apparently getting such a wide audience that he is obviously pandering to, as you pointed out, by including glyphosate and EMFs in his list there.
in his list there.
And I just...
It's just really...
For as much as I laugh at these people, it's really sad that there are so many who genuinely trust him.
And because they trust him, they might die or suffer seriously from it.
But then after I have some of those depressing thoughts, I have to laugh again because I know for a fact that if Tom Cowan was, for example, bitten by a rabid animal, he would not take his supplements and stay calm and say, I'm not going to get sick.
He would go get a rabies shot.
Because he knows.
I think that rabies is an infectious virus that has an almost 100% mortality rate if you don't treat it.
So just knowing that he would never put his money where his mouth is and if that were to happen to him, just not seek out treatment.
