Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Dr Mike Yeadon's avatar

An excellent excoriation of the field. It’s extraordinarily frustrating that respiratory virus believers refuse point blank to deal in an adult way with the published record of dozens of attempts to demonstrate symptomatic transmission or contagion from a person sick with a cold to healthy recipients. Multiple attempts have been published from 1918 to the present day and none of them convincingly show this presumably trivial to show effect. After all, this is the heart of the matter. They refuse to cite a good quality paper proving transmission of acute respiratory illnesses. Not one is forthcoming. By the way, none even include adequate controls, which would include healthy people being “donors”, as well as sick ones, so you can see the spontaneous background rate of these illnesses (which is substantial, as colds are commonplace). When using gunk from a patient with which to attempt to demonstrate infection, a proper control will include gunk or washings from a healthy person, to test the effect of instillation itself. Furthermore, the experimentalist & the recipient should be blinded to the treatment they’re getting, so as to avoid biases. Again, these are all routinely missing.

I will apologise profusely and recant my position if anyone can cite a good quality paper demonstrating transmission of illness from someone with an acute respiratory illness to a healthy recipient.

Expand full comment
CaliforniaLost's avatar

I don't think the virologists are wrong about leprechauns. After all, these scientists are finding pots of gold...

Expand full comment
281 more comments...

No posts