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Here's the case:

http://lrbw.juris.de/cgi-bin/laender_rechtsprechung/document...

I dont think that counts as "a formality". It simply is not hard-scientifically proven.

The measles virus may still exist and make people sick, but to me that is a theory as the proof is still outstanding.

> The judges even said that it was clearly proven the measle virus exists.

Do you have a source for that?




Machine translation gives me the following for point 20: "In addition, the submission of a single publication was required, in which both the proof of the existence of the measles virus and the determination of its diameter were provided, so that it was not sufficient if - as advocated by the expert - merely the combination of the scientific statements in the six submitted professional articles prove the existence of the measles virus and at least two of these articles contain sufficient information on the diameter of the measles virus."

I would count that as a "formality": the bet required the proof to be in a single publication, but as it was instead split across several it didn't count.

On the latter question the machine-translated text is hard enough to read that I can't reliably tell what the defendant is claiming and what the court is declaring, but I think maybe the court is saying they're not convinced the submitted papers constitute proof?


That is a formality in my book too.

But if you read on from where your citation stops (i.e. after "...on the diameter of the measles virus"), you find:

"Furthermore, the content of the publications submitted did not meet the requirements for proof. The phenomena presented therein as measles viruses are actually transport vesicles (bubbles) of the cell itself. None of the documentation submitted is based on attempts where the pathogen - as required - had previously been isolated and biochemically characterized or even such an isolation had been scientifically documented. [... (cut out some more things that are formalities to me)...] The determination of the diameter was also not well-founded. The size range of 300 to 1000 nm given in one of the publications presented already refutes the thesis of the virus, since viruses are characterized by a small variation in their diameter between 15 and a maximum of 400 nm. Incidentally, information from the RKI dated January 24, 2012 states that the diameter of measles viruses is said to be 120-400 nm and often contain ribosomes inside, although the latter contradict the existence of a measles virus."

What I get from this is:

1. The virus was not properly "isolated and biochemically characterized" and "isolation had been scientifically documented"

2. The diameter established by the evidence provided was not well founded, and greatly contradict other findings.

What Lanka's main point to me is, is that in order to scientifically establish the existence of a (sub-)microscopic infectious disease carrier, you need to first truly isolate it.

Not "claiming to have isolated it in virologist terms", that is: claiming to have it contained in a concoction monkey kidney tissue, bovine fetal serum, and more; thus in a soup with other DNA carriers. Because this "redefinition of isolation" makes it impossible to say we actually found it. Also we cannot sequence the DNA/RNA of the virus in order to establish it's identity, when we are testing a soup that has other DNA/RNA in it. (That's why virologists use "in silico" sequencing, which is not trustworthy either: especially not when other DNA/RNA is present in the sample)

Since the theory of viruses has become widely accepted, we have learned a lot about other sub-cell biological things with DNA/RNA in them, like exosomes. We have truly isolated them, and truly sequenced their genetic material.

But somehow for viruses with still cannot do that.

I hence hold the position that the hard-scientific evidence on the existence of viruses is very thin, or just not there. It's merely a theory at this point.

Only once the existence is established we can meaningfully establish contagiousness.

For instance with polio it is claimed by "the horrific anti-vaxxers" that the vaccine was introduced when the wave of polio-like symptoms was on the decline. And that polio-like symptoms are since also, conveniently, characterized as other diseases. So there are other reasons than the effectiveness of the vaccine to the disappearance of symptoms in the population.

Hence we need to establish first the virus exists and is contagious, or we end up with the vaccine's effectiveness being the proof of the existence of the virus. Which is basically what I believe is where we currently are. And a decline of the wave of polio-like symptoms for other reasons can then easily be mistaken for effectiveness of the vaccine.

Therefor hard-scientific evidence is so important. Especially if states enact laws based on it, like we saw with covid measures and all state run vaccination programs.

Thanks for sticking to the discussion btw, I really appreciate you take the time to respond to my points that --i also know-- seem ridiculous from a mainstream viewpoint. Have a great day.


I know less about measles, but the broader question of how to identify viruses by DNA sequencing is what I'm now doing professionally.

You write: "Also we cannot sequence the DNA/RNA of the virus in order to establish it's identity, when we are testing a soup that has other DNA/RNA in it." That is generally not correct. When you sequence, what you get are subsequences ("reads") of around 200 base pairs. Generally a very large number of them. Then you try to figure out what genetic sequences could have led to you observing those reads, through a process called "assembly". The idea here is that if I have one read that looks like ABCDE and another like BCDEF, it's very likely that these were generated from an original sequence of ABCDEF. If your reads were drawn from a sample that has multiple things in it you will piece each one together separately, and as long as you took enough reads you'll be able to get the genetic sequence for each.

I've been working on wastewater recently, which is a huge mixture of many different things, but we see some extremely common genetic sequences. When you look up these sequences with BLASTN they turn out to be ones people have previously identified as plant viruses from vegetables people commonly eat, such as tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. [1] You can download the data and play with it yourself if you want?

Here's an approach that should let you replicate the identification of these sequences and is simple enough that you could code yourself:

1. Download one of the 180 FASTQ files the authors published

2. Extract the nucleotide sequences ("grep '^[ACTG]' fname.fastq")

3. Write a little program that emits all subsequences of length 40. Short enough not to get too many read errors, long enough that mismatches are unlikely.

4. Sort those subsequences. (Unix sort will do it, even though this will exceed the memory available on your machine unless you have a much better machine than I do.)

5. uniq -c

6. sort -nr

7. At this point the data should all fit in memory. Write a program where you make a map from the first 39 characters in a sequence to the last character, and from the last 39 characters to the first. Take the most frequent subsequence in the data and attempt to extend it using those two maps. You should end up with a sequence about 6k long.

8. Enter that sequence into https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PROGRAM=blastn&BLAS... It will probably identify it as Tomato brown rugose fruit virus.

I don't know how I would explain this if viruses didn't exist?

[1] https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/AEM.01448-21


I'll need a bit more time to look into this. But I will. Thanks.




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