Virology — A Case of Pseudoscience - AntiViral Ep. 5
AntiViral Ep. 5 exposes virology’s pseudoscientific core by critiquing its failure to follow the scientific method, from Aristotle to Ibn al-Haytham’s 10th-century framework—no purified virus has ever been isolated and shown to cause illness alone in controlled experiments. Instead, lab-generated sequences (e.g., monkey kidney cells + antibiotics) serve as flawed "independent variables," undermining claims of viral causality. The episode argues virology’s reliance on unproven assumptions mirrors discredited germ theory, suggesting systemic methodological collapse rather than mere skepticism. [Automatically generated summary]
Virology is pseudoscience, and the proof is hiding in plain sight in every middle school science textbook.
For the last few years, people like me have been in the trenches, debating with everyone from random people on the internet to actual real-life virologists.
And the most shocking thing we've discovered is that they have no idea what the scientific method is.
Or worse, they pretend it doesn't exist.
When you challenge their evidence using the basic logical steps of science that have been around for centuries, you get scrambled reactions.
Some virologists will agree the method exists, claim they follow it, and then show you a diagram of their experiment that gets everything wrong.
Others will straight up tell you there's no single scientific method, that the steps we outline are just something we made up.
But when you press them, they either go silent or, hilariously, end up describing the exact same steps they just said we invented.
It's gotten so weird that even some people on our side, the no-virus side, have started saying the scientific method itself is a scam.
So, what is the truth?
Does this method exist?
And if it does, why are so many scientists terrified of it?
Let's get back to basics.
What is science?
The word comes from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge.
But not just any knowledge.
Knowing all the Pokemon doesn't make you a scientist.
Scientific knowledge has to be earned through a specific process.
Every major dictionary, from Merriam-Webster to Black's Law Dictionary, and every major science council agrees.
Science is the pursuit of knowledge following a systematic methodology based on evidence.
That methodology is the scientific method.
Without it, you don't have science.
You have, by definition, pseudoscience.
So, what are these magical steps that virologists seem to hate?
It's not complicated.
First, you observe a natural phenomenon.
Something that happens in the real world, not in a lab.
Like, you see sick people.
Second, you form a hypothesis.
This is your educated guess about what's causing it.
This is where it gets critical.
You have to identify your independent variable.
The thing you think is the cause, like a virus, and your dependent variable.
The effect you observed, the sickness.
Your independent variable must be something you can find, purify, and control.
Third, you must have a null hypothesis.
This is the opposite of your guess.
X does not cause Y.
A core principle of real science is falsifiability.
You have to be able to prove your own idea wrong.
If you can't, it's not science.
It's a belief system.
Fourth, you experiment.
You take your purified independent variable, the supposed cause, and introduce it to a healthy group.
You also have a control group that gets everything the same, just without that one variable.
You need to see if the cause actually produces the effect, and if the effect is absent in the control group.
Then you analyze the data and see if your hypothesis was validated or not.
This isn't new.
This logical process has roots going back to Aristotle, but it was really solidified by an Arab scientist named Ibn al-Haytham around 1000 AD.
He's called the first scientist because he insisted on experiments as the standard of proof.
He was so rigorous that his methods, used by Roger Bacon 200 years later, were able to prove many of Aristotle's long-held beliefs wrong.
This is what real science does.
It challenges old ideas.
So, why does virology fail this test?
Because they can never perform the most crucial step.
They have never, not once, properly isolated a virus from a sick person, purified it, and shown that it alone causes sickness in a healthy person, while a control group remains healthy.
Why Virology Fails Science00:01:11
They can't.
Their independent variable is a computer-generated sequence from a toxic soup of chemicals, monkey kidney cells, and antibiotics.
It's not isolated from nature.
The experiment is invalid before it even begins.
When you don't follow the scientific method, what you're doing is called pseudoscience.
Oxford defines it as, beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method.
It looks like science.
It uses big words like science, but it lacks the rigor.
This is the secret.
This is why they get so angry and confused when you bring it up.
They know deep down that their entire field is built on a foundation that ignores the very definition of science.
Had they followed the method, the germ hypothesis would have been thrown out decades ago, along with the entire field of virology.
Instead, we live in a world where pseudoscience is king, where most published research is false, and where the people we're told to trust as scientists can't even pass a seventh grade science quiz.