Locked in a small room with flu sufferers — but no one caught it. Why?
Dr. Sam Bailey critiques a 2026 Nottingham Trent University study republished by TVNZ’s One News, where volunteers spent two weeks in poorly ventilated rooms with flu patients—no transmission occurred despite high-risk conditions like shared objects and close contact. The PLOS Pathogens paper, "Evaluating Modes of Influenza Transmission," dismissed airborne spread claims post-hoc, contradicting the scientific method’s requirement to disprove hypotheses first. Bailey cites Daniel Reuters’ 2024 book, Can You Catch a Cold?, which reviewed over 200 experiments finding no evidence for human-to-human flu transmission via germs, and accuses researchers like molecular epidemiologist Connor Meehan of clinging to the unproven "germ hypothesis" to protect medical establishment interests. Flawed studies, though widely reported, expose cracks in mainstream narratives, prompting calls to challenge the false germ paradigm using resources from drsambailey.com. [Automatically generated summary]
When the COVID-19 show commenced in early 2020, censorship became extreme in order to maintain the narrative.
It was alleged that a novel virus had emerged from Wuhan, China, which was not only deadly, but also highly contagious.
The new respiratory pathogen was said to be able to spread from person to person with the greatest of ease, necessitating face masks, social distancing and lockdowns of entire countries.
My husband Mark and I were part of a small group that systematically refuted the evidence for SARS-CoV-2, but quickly found out that no virus material resulted in instant strikes, if not outright bans on social media.
But now that it is 2026, millions more people are aware of the flaws in the official narrative and are starting to ask more questions.
It was still a surprise when the mainstream media in New Zealand and abroad recently published a story about the failure of flu transmission and what they conceded was a well-designed study.
However, the excuses they then offered were not such a surprise.
The article in question was called Locked in a Small Room with Flu Sufferers, but no one caught it.
Why?
And it appeared on the One News platform on the 23rd of January 2026.
To give our international audience some background, One News is produced by Television New Zealand, or TVNZ, a state-owned media company here in my home country.
Starting in March 2020, One News provided the daily televised platform for former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardoon and Dr Ashley Bloomfield to promulgate the COVID-19 fraud.
The mindless displays were a low point in New Zealand's history, but unfortunately, during the height of the fear campaigns, many Kiwis were glued to the screen show.
Some did not even wake up when Jacinda Ardoon admitted what it was all about.
We drum in that messaging around the dangers of COVID pretty diligently for a full two-week period of sustained propaganda.
So it may seem hard to believe now, but at the start of 2020, I was a medical presenter on a TVNZ show.
To be clear, I was not employed by TVNZ, but the show I fronted was aired on their network, and the feedback I received was that I was the most popular presenter with the New Zealand public.
As you can imagine, state-owned media networks are generally required to support government narratives.
So when the WHO and the New Zealand government declared the opening of the COVID-19 games in March 2020, there was a problem.
Several months earlier, I had started my own internet platform and began countering the ridiculous COVID narrative that was being pushed.
This resulted in an ultimatum from the legal department.
Take down my videos or else be permanently removed from the TV series.
It was not a hard decision for me, and you can find out more about this in my video, How to Spot COVID-19 Misinformation.
So coming back to the article about failed influenza transmission, you can appreciate that the headline is not a typical one for state media, although the bottom line at the end of the piece certainly is, as it reads, When in doubt, it is safest to assume you could either catch or spread flu and to follow public health guidance, including vaccination and mask use where appropriate.
So, how do they go from A to Z?
The first point to note is that this article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Heading over to the original article at the conversation, we find that the author, Connor Meehan, works for Nottingham Trent University, which quote, provides funding as a member of the Conversation UK.
We are then reassured that we could join 200,000 subscribers who get their news from experts.
The conversation boasts the self-proclaimed statement that we publish trustworthy and informative articles written by academic experts for the general public and edited by our team of journalists.
In other words, exactly what state-owned media has a tendency to mindlessly parrot.
Locked In A Small Room00:13:10
Now that we know the involved parties, let's get into our dissection of the article, Locked in a Small Room with Flu Sufferers but No One Caught It.
Why?
It opens with, A group of volunteers spent days locked in a small hotel room with people actively infected with flu.
They played games, shared objects and exercised together in conditions designed to help the virus spread.
Yet not a single person caught influenza.
The unexpected finding comes from a well-designed study that set out to answer a basic question, how does flu really spread?
Influenza, the virus responsible for flu, is known to spread through aerosols released when an infected person coughs, sneezes or even breathes normally.
It can also pass from person to person via contaminated surfaces such as door handles or phones known as fomite transmission.
That's right.
The question was not does the flu spread, but rather how does it spread?
Then the author informs us that it is already known to spread through the respiratory route and links to a 2018 paper titled Infectious Virus and Exhaled Breath of Symptomatic Seasonal Influenza Cases from a College Community.
Whoopsie, that is not an appropriate citation because the study did not attempt to transmit influenza between human subjects.
Instead the researchers collected the exhaled breath of subjects who had a fever plus cough or sore throat.
They then performed RTPCR on the samples using a protocol from the CDC's influenza panel.
The group's aerosol PCR results were then compared to the group's nasopharyngeal swab PCR results in this table called viral shedding.
So the first thing you should notice is that this has nothing to do with human to human transmission as that was not tested by the methodology.
It also has nothing to do with establishing the existence of viruses as that had already been asserted at the start of the study.
They believed that the RNA being detected by RTPCR was quote viral as the CDC claims to know the sequences of alleged influenza viruses.
This is the circular reasoning from which the virologists cannot escape as they never find anything in nature that meets the definition of a virus in the first place.
It is thus pseudoscientific to declare it as viral RNA when the origin of the RNA remains unestablished or at least not shown to belong to a postulated virus.
The researchers further imagined they were finding viruses through the indirect cell culture technique with Madden Darby canine kidney cells.
If their samples caused cytopathic effects within four days, it was called a positive virus culture.
If not, the culture was passaged and given another four days to turn quote positive.
Cytopathic effects are simply another name for cellular breakdown.
In particular, cell lines are favoured by the virologists due to their propensity to react.
In this strange paradigm, apparently a suitable place to test human influenza samples is in a cocker spaniel's kidneys.
We have covered the pseudoscience involved in the cell culture technique many times and how it has nothing to do with imagined viruses.
For the highest level refutation outlining why the methodology is trapped in a fatal logical fallacy, you can read Mark's essay, Virologies Event Horizon.
Back to the article in the conversation and the author Connor Meehan next states that how efficiently the virus spreads depends on several factors including how much virus an infected person sheds, the temperature and humidity of a room and how close people are to one another.
He provides another citation which is a 2023 review paper, Block the Spread, Barriers to Transmission of Influenza Viruses.
This paper states that aerosol transmission of influenza viruses has been documented from observational studies, randomised controlled trials and experiments in animal models.
Randomized controlled trials?
That piqued our interest and we thought we might have missed something after all these years.
There is a single citation and it is a 2013 Nature paper titled Aerosol Transmission is an Important Mode of Influenza A virus spread.
But alas, this is not some startling evidence of influenza spreading through human experiments for if we go to the method section we read that in Hong Kong and Bangkok during 2008 to 2011 large randomised controlled trials were conducted to investigate the efficacy of surgical face masks and enhanced hand hygiene in reducing transmission of influenza in households followed by we constructed a mathematical model that accounted for the alternative modes of transmission.
So once again transmission of influenza was assumed from the start and then a model was used to quote investigate the efficacy of surgical face masks and enhanced hand hygiene in reducing transmission.
Interestingly the authors did admit in the first sentence of this paper's introduction that influenza A viruses are believed to spread between humans through exposure to respiratory droplets expelled during coughing or sneezing from infectious individuals.
However, they provided no citation for this and then continued with their modelling as though contagion was a fact.
So we can see that in the first part of the conversation article the author makes unfounded claims as the studies he cites did not establish that influenza transmits between people or the quote virus spreads.
In the fifth paragraph he states to tease apart which of these factors matter most researchers at the University of Maryland in the US ran a real-world transmission experiment using people who had caught flu naturally.
And this is where he cites the article that prompted the mainstream media reporting in the first place.
The paper was published in PLOS Pathogens on the 7th of January 2026 with the spoiler alert title Evaluating Modes of Influenza Transmission Insights from Lack of Transmission in a Controlled Transmission Trial with Naturally Infected Donors.
In this human experiment subjects with influenza were brought into close contact with volunteers by confining them in a hotel room with limited ventilation and poor air quality for a period of two weeks.
This included setting the temperature and humidity of the rooms at levels said to favour transmission.
The participants played cards at close range, took part in communal exercise classes and shared objects such as computers.
And what was the result of this extreme exposure to people who were sick?
No transmissions were made.
No transmissions were made.
That's right.
It was reported that no recipient developed influenza-like illness, PCR-positive respiratory samples or serological evidence of infection.
Now despite the experimental attempts being a complete failure, don't forget that the title was not Is There Influenza Transmission, but rather Evaluating Modes of Influenza Transmission.
So the authors had already asserted it is a thing and offered the excuse that potential explanations and insights regarding lack of transmission include importance of cough and seasonal variation in viral aerosol shedding by donors of potential cross-reactive immunity in middle-aged recipients with decades of exposure and of exposure to concentrated exhaled breath plumes limited by rapid air mixing from environmental controls that distributed aerosols evenly.
This is not consistent with the scientific method.
A real scientist puts forward a hypothesis and then does their best to disprove the hypothesis through experiments.
They do not create new caveats in an attempt to maintain a hypothesis that was falsified by their own experiments.
What is comical here is that one of the papers I just mentioned, Block the Spread, Barriers to Transmission of Influenza Viruses, features this diagram.
We see the implication that someone with influenza, the donor, can transmit sickness to others through both close range and long range mechanisms.
It is suggested that effective close range interventions will be masks, vaccinations and reducing exposure time.
However, the transmission attempts in the hotel rooms did not employ any of those measures and there was still no transmission.
The diagram's long range intervention of ventilation looks equally dubious as during the hotel room study the ventilation was kept poor over the two-week period.
With regard to these latest experiments it would be a video in itself to perform a comprehensive analysis and given that they admitted the transmission failure we do not need to reveal the buried deceptions as we typically do with other virology papers.
However there are some interesting things to be found and if you would like to take a deeper dive into the details then I would highly recommend the article Zero Transmission, An Inconvenient Influenza Result by Mike Stone over at Viral IG.
As Mike reported, notably this is the first controlled clinical trial specifically designed to examine airborne influenza transmission using individuals who were quote naturally infected rather than intentionally inoculated in a laboratory.
In other words there were no artificial injections of lab created cell cultured soups into volunteers.
The truth is there has been more than a century of failures to demonstrate human to human transmission as we have covered extensively in our publications such as Virus Mania and the final pandemic.
You can also watch my videos such as Unscientific Human Experiments, The Truth About Contagion and Why Pathogens Don't Exist for more details about this crucial issue.
Perhaps the most famous example was the 1918 Rosenau experiments which resulted in the complete failure to achieve transmission of the Spanish flu.
Incredibly it was thought to be a highly contagious condition and yet the extreme attempts at using influenza sufferers to make others unwell did not work at all.
In 2024 researcher Daniel Reuters published Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History in Human Experiments.
The book analyses more than 200 contagion studies and the conclusion cannot be ignored.
Multiple attempts at transmitting colds and flu between humans have failed.
Furthermore, even if people can influence one another in some way, there is no suggestion that germs are the mechanism.
On the virus front, there is no evidence for their existence and when it comes to bacteria, there is no evidence that they can attack healthy tissue through natural exposure routes.
The germ hypothesis refuted itself long ago, and hence it should be no surprise that this latest influenza study failed to result in the expected outcome.
The problem is that the medical establishment relies on the germ fallacy in order to sustain its business model.
Most of the system's participants are probably unaware of their role in the scam, as they have been trained within establishment institutions.
They believe that viruses and pathogenic microbes are indisputable facts, so there is no need to check the original material for themselves.
That is why, whenever the data doesn't support the position, they introduce more excuses instead of realising it has actually added to already existing refutations.
If we look at the profile of Associate Professor Conor Meehan, the author of the conversation article, he states, I am a molecular epidemiologist who looks at the transmission of bacteria and viruses between humans.
My work focuses primarily on mycobacterium tuberculosis, but also many other pathogens.
While the professor may not be interested in opening his mind to look at the very foundations of his field, the good news is that far more people are.
The recent coverage of the contagion issue in mainstream media platforms may not be accurate, but at least it has made an appearance.
How much longer they can conceal the wider scientific issues from their presently captivated audience remains to be seen.
In the meantime, you can help bring people out of the false germ paradigm more quickly by sharing this video and all of the other free resources at drsambailey.com.