It’s generally not worth the bother of engaging the anti-vaxx movement. In my personal experience, it is awash with lies, manipulative rhetoric, bad logic, and implausible conspiracy theories (which, as with all implausible conspiracy theories, tend to yellow-brick-road their way to “the Jews”). Even the rubes it has gulled (the “true believers”) are so deeply entrenched in delusional thinking that it is too often impossible to get through to them. So I won’t be engaging “every” claim in the anti-vaxx movement (there are hundreds; and when refuted, hundreds more get invented, in a never-ending death-spiral). You’d have to pay me. Because the tedium and labor of enduring all this is only justifiable at cost.

So this article only exists because I was paid. And since it’s quite expensive to hire me to critically examine hundreds of claims, I’ve been booked to tackle only one today: that viruses don’t exist.

Yes. That’s a thing. And it has an entire movement that I found annoys even most anti-vaxxers.

General Advice

Before I get to specifics, I want to impart to you some advice for dealing with any claims in that domain, because there are three “dirty tricks” that all cranks like anti-vaxxers pull that you can look for to catch this happening every time, so you can vet these things yourself and not need someone like me to:

1. They will cite papers that (i) don’t actually say what they claim, or (ii) don’t actually imply what they claim, or (iii) have been retracted or refuted by subsequent, higher-powered studies, or (iv) have never been independently replicated while the contrary finding has been. This is dishonest and manipulative. So anyone whose argument is mostly built this way is either (a) a liar you should never trust again, or (b) their gullible victim, whose judgment on this matter you shouldn’t trust until they get up to speed. And (b) you might be able to help. But for (a), just walk and block.
2. They will make claims you can prove false with ten minutes of effort, and which when thus eliminated, fatally cripple their argument, calling their conclusion (and their competence) into sufficient doubt to walk away (see my Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research). Don’t play their game of having to rebut “everything” they say. A single fatality to their argument is enough to identify it all as a waste of your time; but three is decisive. Any ensuing whining and raging is just emotional manipulation at that point. You don’t owe them any more of your time. You can just walk and block.
3. They will make arguments that you can immediately identify as fallacious, and which when thus eliminated, fatally cripple their argument. Here, maybe, they can “fix” the argument, and all they have demonstrated is that they are bad at thinking. Which is not a good sign. But you can give them a chance. Though they only get three. Third strike and they’re out. You then know they cannot think. And if they cannot think, nothing they do think is worth the bother of your listening to. Walk and block.

Those three tactics are common to all pseudoscience and every implausible conspiracy, so it’s good advice all around. Whether it’s flat earth, lizard people, or climate denial. Or, indeed, even Christianity or Islam or woo—or MAGA.

The No Virus Movement

There aren’t a lot of people in this “movement.” Its thought-leaders you can probably count on one hand (or maybe two; it thus has less expert support than your average UFO cult). And even its lay enthusiasts are scant compared to the broader swath of generic anti-vaxxers. Its relationship to that is kind of like Young Earth Creationism to Old Earth Creationism: one has a hazy veneer of respectability that the other completely lacks even among their peers.

A big proponent of the No Virus Theory, two of whose “chapters” arguing this I was hired to take seriously (and I did—until I couldn’t anymore), is Mark Gober, whose book (?) on it, An End to Upside Down Medicine: Contagion, Viruses, and Vaccines—and Why Consciousness Is Needed for a New Paradigm of Health (2023), couldn’t even be bothered to have page numbers, but is instead formatted like a web page, not an actual book, paper, or report. Which is not a wave-off, but it is a red flag. More worrying is that Gober has no relevant credentials (other than, presumably, mathematical analytics; he’s an ex-banker) and is a proponent of aliens, telepathy, and other woo. He boards the parapsychology institute IONS. And he’s a geocentrist (I’m not joking). So of course his book about virology is not peer reviewed science. His publisher is his own literary agent. This is not the correct way to critique consensus science. It sends up a lot of red flags. It’s a textbook sign of crankery. It’s precisely the kind of thing you shouldn’t be reading unless you were paid to.

Gober relies a lot on a bigger wig in the movement, Mark Bailey, who self-published a long essay of the same sort, “A Farewell to Virology,” also never peer reviewed (and also basically a web page copied and pasted into a book template, though this one at least is paginated). He’s an MD at least, but has no degrees in virology or any biomedical research field, and his book contains no original research. Bailey claims to have worked on clinical trials as a research scientist, but he provides no cv or lists any papers or studies he co-authored or even worked on, not even in his entire 67 page essay. On my own I could not find any; and you can confirm for yourself that he is not this Mark J. Bailey, although that guy’s cv gives you an idea of what our Mark J. Bailey is supposed to be able to show us.

Gober also relies a lot on Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History (2013) by anti-vaxxers Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk. Humphries is only an MD, a self-described “nephrologist-turned-homeopath,” with no degrees or substantive experience in biomedical research. Bystrianyk is supposedly also an MD, but shows no peer reviewed studies in Google Scholar; Humphries herself claims only two studies in unrelated medical matters decades before publishing this book. And they still just self-published their also poorly edited book, which also looks like a web page they just pasted into a book template (what is with these people?). And again no peer review. It’s also not clear that they support the No Virus argument (so I will assume they don’t), rather than dispute that vaccines do anything (other than maybe cause needless harm, the standard anti-vaxx refrain). But that gets used by others as evidence viruses don’t exist, so their arguments remain pertinent here.

Gober and Bailey do clearly claim viruses have never even been proved to exist—that they have never been isolated or their transmission demonstrated. Which was so annoying to Michael Palmer—a fellow anti-vaxxer of some renown who does have relevant research qualifications—that he wrote three articles soundly refuting it. Palmer shows how both assertions are false. You should read his essays in reverse order, because anti-vaxxers exploit the normal order of explaining things in order to undermine learning, so you need to see that happen to be immunized against it. So, start from the end and then go back to the beginning: read Palmer’s “Experimental Proof of Virus Transmission and Contagion,” then read “The Fallacies of the ‘No virus’ Doctrine,” then read “Do Viruses Even Exist? Spoiler: Yes, They Do”). 

And mind you, this is from an anti-vaxxer. When even anti-vaxxers are calling an anti-vaxxer crazy, that’s pretty damning. But for a sober mainstream discussion of all the quite vast evidence we have that viruses have been reliably detected, isolated, and even photographed, and their structures and genomes mapped (something that would be impossible if they didn’t exist), and their entire mechanism tracked at every step from transmission to disease, see:

• Modern Uses of Electron Microscopy for Detection of Viruses
• High-Resolution Virus Pictures Help Researchers Develop Vaccines
• The Vast Viral World: What We Know (and Don’t Know)
• Human Viruses: Discovery and Emergence

And so on. Just to get started. Because there are literally millions of studies establishing all this.

Dissolving Idea: Method

None of those No Virus pseudobooks engage any proper way to challenge a scientific consensus (see On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus). That they are bypassing even correct procedures, much less all channels of peer review, is a bad sign. Those mechanisms exist precisely so that non-experts can know what’s worth taking seriously and what’s just idle crankery. Since we can’t all vet every thing, we need expert communities to filter information by quality for us. So bypassing even the processes that that entails, much less the existing process itself, signals to us that you want to avoid an informed public, not that you want to inform the public. You don’t want to be put under critical expert tests before being heard.

And to be clear, the point I am making is not that we should just “trust” peer review. We know it’s unreliable, awash with false positives and false negatives (see The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up and the Function of Peer Review in History and my recent series on Stylometry). But if you believe you are being blacklisted or unfairly shut out by the process, you still have to show that. Your studies should indicate what the peer reviewers said (if anything) to warrant blocking publication, and demonstrate that it is a bogus reason or not even true of your study, so that we, the people, can see that that is what happened—rather than that you wanted to avoid doing that. Which looks shady. For when peer review does and doesn’t matter, and how equivalent vetting can be sought, see my Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research.

But for want of a real process, we can attempt our own due diligence, even though it is probably a waste of our time and resources. Which is why people like me exist, whom you can pay to do it for you. So, in order to illustrate proper procedure—which you yourself could follow, adapting it to any other question or example—I will first walk you through my prima facie quality check of Dissolving Illusions, because Gober relies on the same (or same kind of) arguments heavily. And do note that the whole process I will describe for that book took me a day (and then dealing with Gober, two)—although I had a decisive answer already within forty minutes. I just kept going to make double extra sure.

But here is what you should all do when confronted with a similar situation…

The first task is to check what critical reviews already say (especially, if you can find them, expert reviews), since often someone has already done most of the work for you. Obviously you don’t just gullibly believe what any critic says. But when they make clear arguments with clearly stated premises, you can save a lot of time by just vetting them, rather than the thing you want to vet, because that will usually be a gigantic wordwall of thousands of claims and assertions (as crankery tends to be), and a critic who already plowed that ground probably has zeroed in on the key things you really need to test. But again, that, too, you can test, by checking whether a critic is evading rather than zeroing in.

The second task is to evaluate if any of those already-published criticisms check out. Is what they say the author says correct? Is what they say is wrong with what the author says correct? Does the author already rebut what they say—or not? And if they do, does their rebuttal check out on both its facts and logic? This can get you well-situated and on a good head-start. A picture will start to emerge. The author will start to look like a quack, or the critics will start to look disingenuous, or there will be open questions about either that you then need to answer, and by then you will know what those questions are and you can focus on answering them.

More diligence is required than this before accepting a challenge to an expert consensus, especially a challenge that has suspiciously avoided any kind of peer review. Because that is what an expert consensus is for: it is a massive-scale independent vetting process. So you won’t be doing better than an entire expert community unless you put in some effort. This is why anyone who has a valid concern about a corrupt academic field needs to first show that the consensus is not well-founded before they can claim to have corrected it. Conversely, you have a lot of work to do before you can buy into a challenge to the consensus that is either bypassing peer review or being sidelined or ignored by it.

And that does not require you to be an expert. Most facts are checkable even for a layperson. And every argument can be parsed into its logic and tested for fallacies by anyone—you just need to know how to parse and vet the logic of an argument. I describe how lay people can do this, even when there are facts so advanced they can’t check them, in Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony (walking you through an example that can be adapted to any field or science, not just ancient Greek grammar) and A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research (walking you through how to do any research correctly, regardless of the subject field, and thus not fall into traps of bad thinking).

Dissolving Idea: Results

I often look to see if there are any good Amazon customer reviews. A good review is one that shows they actually read the book, cites and quotes a lot of material in the book, and makes checkable claims about that material—so it doesn’t require you to “believe” them. For Dissolving Illusions, this is a good customer review (by Isabella B. on April 13, 2015). When you check, you will find all of her claims check out. And that does not look good for Humphries and Bystrianyk—even after considering their attempt at replying to her remarks (in respect to her blog article which, you’ll understand shortly, is not the most salient piece to examine here), where they actually avoid her essential points and try to change the subject, with a massive crank wordwall (as you can check for yourself and see there).

Checking (so as to compare) how an advocate responds to critics is a valuable step in critical thinking, but I won’t walk you through that here. In general, if you see any point in doing that yourself, remember all the tricks: line-out all arguments that evade the actual point (evasion ticks the “unreliable” box); and line-out all arguments that are not an examination of who is telling the truth (and who is not) about specific points of fact (because whoever you catch lying the most is the one you should stop trusting), which includes fallacies (because reaching false conclusions by an abuse of logic counts as not telling the truth). Only devote time to what remains. And then vet that: fact-check, logic-check, and count up the lies and pseudo-arguments on either side and compare; and don’t forget the first principle of all apologetics: leaving evidence out that, when put back in, changes the conclusion. This is the role of framing: trying to frame you into forgetting or overlooking things and thus mistaking the matter as only what the crank claims the dispute is. So it is not enough to just fisk a critique or a response. You have to look out for what is not in it.

Isabella finds several serious logical and factual errors that check out as indeed the errors she describes, and the book never addresses them (at all or effectively). This greatly reduces the trustworthiness of its authors, as well as the merits of the book’s thesis—as these errors are not in trivial side points but in its core arguments. Some of the examples she gives even implicate deliberate deception—where Humphries and Bystrianyk must know what they are saying is either false or a non sequitur.

Here’s an example:

[Humphries and Bystrianyk write] “It is a little-known fact that any antibody, even a vaccine-induced one, can render a person more vulnerable to disease […] Some antibodies increase the ability of viruses to infect their target cells. This phenomenon is called antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) of infection (p 367).”

When I looked up the “ADE phenomenon” I found that it has only been observed in relation to the particular characteristics of the dengue fever virus and HIV virus. It is not a phenomenon that relates to the viruses we currently vaccinate against — measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, rotavirus and influenza. Why bring up ADE when it has nothing to do with vaccine viruses, and especially the measles virus?

I checked her point, and it is substantially correct: there are a few more examples one could mention, but to the point, there is no relevant example of ADE at all. And there is no ADE occurring with any actual vaccine, either: rather, recurring ADE prevents development of a vaccine. So this is something controlled for in vaccine development. It is not some “risk” that people are assuming by accepting any approved vaccine for anything whatever. So I checked further. Humphries and Bystrianyk claim ADE is a risk with “coxsackieviruses” but there is no vaccine for coxsackievirus. The only ADE recorded from that virus is caused by human antibodies, not vaccines. So how is this relevant to any point Humphries and Bystrianyk want to make?

It is impossible for Humphries and Bystrianyk to know as much about ADE as they show they do and not know this. Which demonstrates to me that they are lying. They are using a disingenuous scare tactic to misinform their readers into thinking ADE is some sort of pervasive problem with vaccines generally, or at all relevant in any of the vaccines they are supposed to be talking about. They even give the impression of this being a risk with “measles” vaccines today. But it is not. We have not used any ADE-incident measles vaccines for half a century.

This is all deception: they are manipulating words and juxtapositions to give the impression of having stated relevant reasons to avoid vaccines that are actually all false in that respect. Their words can only be made to be “true” if you reinterpret them so as to render them irrelevant to their argument (e.g., coxsackieviruses cause ADE, but no coxsackievirus vaccine does, so this is irrelevant to their argument; last century some early measles vaccines showed rare instances of ADE, but no one uses those vaccines anymore, so this is irrelevant to their argument; etc.).

Remember Rule 2 from the top? Once you’ve established the authors are liars, you can burn the book. Use it to warm your hands over a fire and a beer. You’re done. You don’t have to waste a single other minute of your life on their disinforming game. So you can put their book to a more productive purpose, like warming and illuminating your deck party.

You’ll find the same all the way down.

For example, Isabella checked their claim about “rashless measles,” where (they claim) certain measles vaccine therapies entail the “potential development of tumors and connective tissue disease later in life,” by hunting down (and even paying for) the article they cite, and finding it did not say that. I followed the same trail (but used sci-hub.se to avoid having to pay a criminal price for it) and she’s right: Humphries and Bystrianyk cited a study pertaining to cases in the 1940s (which are thus entirely irrelevant to modern measles therapies) of non-vaccination therapies (and thus cannot have said anything about vaccines creating this risk) where the risk they documented goes away when you add vaccines, and in fact that paper says the solution to the problem they identified is vaccines!

Humphries and Bystrianyk are therefore blatantly lying here. They cite a paper that refutes them as if it supported them. And it is clear there can be no other paper they could cite to recover this point. So they just engineered a fake citation to back a lie. If you find many examples of this (and she does), when they aren’t telling the truth about the papers they cite (either what they say, what they entail, or how they stand in light of contrary studies), then it’s even Rule 1, and you can burn the book.

Isabella wasn’t the only good review there. This one by David A. Rintoul (on March 19, 2018) provides an organized list, with examples, of violations and failures of logic and honesty throughout the book. You can, again, check all that and see who is telling the truth. I am quite certain by now that it won’t be Humphries and Bystrianyk. But you don’t have to trust me on that. You can check yourself. David and Isabella have done a lot of the groundwork for you and shown you where and what to check to find out who the liars are here.

Those are pretty good. But of course I prefer to find expert critiques when I can (which is how and why I found even the anti-vaxxer critic, Michael Palmer, earlier). So I did some googling and found Joel A. Harrison’s 60-page critical report on their book, Wrong About Polio: A Review of Suzanne Humphries, MD and Roman Bystrianyk’s “Dissolving Illusions” (2018; with a corresponding PDF version and a briefer summary). Notably, these critiques, the actual expert critiques, Humphries and Bystrianyk haven’t responded to (at least as of May 2025). Yet Harrison’s is especially damning. It also raises points that I did suspect on my own but was relieved to see confirmed by an expert.

For example, by ignoring other effects of illnesses besides death, Humphries and Bystrianyk develop a false impression of the utility of vaccines. We do not vaccinate solely to improve mortality but reduce adverse symptoms, lost work, taxpayer and patient medical-financial costs, and chronic and acute disabilities. By leaving out all those other benefits, Humphries and Bystrianyk create a monumental deception: they pretended none of that exists. And leaving things out that, when you put them back in, reverse the conclusion, is Apologetics 101—ergo, Crankery 101. And so here: even if vaccines did not help mortality, they do help everything else. That’s why hiding the case rate and only looking at death rate is a deception. Most of the effect is seen in the case rate, because we have more and better hospitals to rescue people from dying now, so we are artificially suppressing that effect, yet it would be better if we didn’t have to. “You didn’t die thanks to a week on a ventilator” is still a failure—that vaccines still help prevent.

But even on that sole question of mortality, Humphries and Bystrianyk use graphs that misrepresent the factual reality, trying to sell the claim that vaccines caused no measurable change in declining mortality rates and thus “didn’t do anything.” For example, if (as they did) they only look at the recorded primary cause of death at time of death, it won’t say (for example) “measles” but, for example, cardiac failure or pneumonia or encephalitis—even when those were caused by measles. So all their death-rate charts are deeply misleading and can’t by themselves support the point they tried to make. They are ignoring almost all measles deaths. And sure, when you get to ignore all the data refuting you, you can avoid being refuted. But that’s not proving a point. It’s just hiding the fact that your point is false. Which is lying.

Indeed, as Harrison points out, “measles weakens our immune systems, increasing the mortality risk for 2–3 years afterwards,” so Humphries and Bystrianyk were failing to count nearly all deaths caused by measles. If we use a more honest test of their thesis, and check comparative population data—which show the vaccine’s effectiveness on mortality by comparing contemporary populations by vaccination rate, we see an extremely large mortality benefit to vaccination. Completely refuting Humphries and Bystrianyk. This indicates, again, that they are liars. They should know this was an essential test of their thesis. But they avoided it, and concealed it (indeed even its relevance) from their readers. That’s how a grift works. That said, their compromised data could be used to analyze patterns of effect pertaining to their argument. While most disease-incited causes of death are not being counted, the deaths that are being counted do in some sense “proxy” to some measurable effect on mortality—just not all of it. But we’ll see what a more honest use of their kind of data looks like in the next section.

Harrison shows an even bigger problem for their treatment of smallpox. Humphries and Bystrianyk ignore the role of variola major and variola minor, the latter vaccinating the population naturally against the former (much as flu did to influenza, a process COVID is undergoing now, and much like HSV1 does for HSV2). The human-made vaccine thus extends that vaccination to those not already protected by antibodies for variola minor, and reduces the severity of various major symptoms even when still contracted. You therefore cannot use tables of mortality for “small pox” to measure the effectiveness of the vaccine. You would need to look at a control group without variola minor antibodies or vaccine, and then compare that with the rest of the population (like, you know, honest scientists already did). Moreover, that vaccine’s effectiveness against related illnesses like monkey pox also evinces the point. And again you have to measure by symptoms, not mortality, to get the full picture. But, as I already noted, Humphries and Bystrianyk do none of these things. Because, I must honestly conclude, they are liars.

So that’s step one (find good critiques that have already been done that are easy to check, and check them) and step two (find expert critiques that have already been done that are easy to check, and check them). Which leaves step three: do what they did yourself. That is, if you still want to by this point—or if you find yourself in a situation where you can’t find anyone having already done it. This means applying your own critical thinking (like learning The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking) and doing your own research for real (per A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research), and not in the sham way dupes and conspiracists do.

From my decades of experience with cranks of all kinds, one trick I expected to find in Humphries and Bystrianyk (because all medical cranks use it) is the use of framing to hide data. For example, Humphries and Bystrianyk show us data tracking measles cases and deaths only to 1966 (e.g. p. 273). But its vaccine didn’t come out until 1963. And boosters didn’t begin until after 1966. They also use such a small scale you can’t see the change in rate after 1960, thus hiding the actual effect of the vaccine even after 1963—a decision I have to conclude was deliberate (because it makes no sense to do it their way).

So, try looking at the data without that manipulation:

If you look at the ensuing decades (what happened after the vaccine came out), the graphed result looks entirely different than what they claim. And indeed when we slacked off on vaccinating in the US, a predictable spike in the disease resulted, which was only controlled after returning to expanded vaccination. And it’s happening again, because of, yet again, dumb-ass anti-vaxxers. Every time people stop vaccinating, measles spikes. What are the odds?

Even the 2014 spike (the first in twenty years) was traced to this same cause. So was the 1989 spike twenty years before. And the 2019 and 2025 spikes were worse because this harmful ideology is spreading. This decisively proves the vaccine works. As the above (and even their) graph shows, measles would cycle up and down in continuous spikes, as waves of the disease hit the populace every few years—until the vaccine was introduced. Then, guess what? No spikes. Just look at the graph. The pre-vaccine and post-vaccine regimes are extremely stark in their absolute difference. This is not plausibly a coincidence.

Lately, we have been getting spikes again—but solely because of people falling for anti-vaxx propaganda like this and not getting their kids vaccinated. We can see a direct 1:1 correlation between events of declining vaccination and the return of spiking cases. And Humphries and Bystrianyk had to have known this about the 1989 outbreak. The outbreaks that happened after they published in 2013 they may even have been responsible for in part. But even before then, they had the data showing the “spiking cycle” disappearing after vaccination, and the case rate and death rate radically plummeting exactly then as well, between 1963 and 1967. It would otherwise have cruised on, spiking above and below the 1960 rate after that—but for the vaccine. As is visible even with their undercounted death rate; even more with a full death rate, and case rate.

Leaving information like this out is not just dishonest but fatal to their thesis (the second fact probably explaining the first). Hence honest (as in, real) studies get different results than theirs.

How to Lie with Graphs

The method of deception they employ to hide these facts is to use distorted scales misrepresenting the data. And I want to focus on this a bit because it is crucial to understand that lying does not just mean making directly false statements. Omitting or hiding contrary information is lying. Framing a statement or diagram so as to mislead a reader about what is being said or what it really means is lying. And someone who repeatedly lies is a liar. And that’s Rule 2. Walk, block, burn the book and have a beer.

For example, they will show you a graph like this (p. 273):

And then argue that this shows that every illness was already on a trajectory of decline to insignificance without vaccines, and that vaccines didn’t do anything at all—which No Virus proponents then use to argue “therefore” viruses don’t exist, though really that’s a non sequitur, since even if vaccines were useless, viruses could still exist. It’s not like if I showed you that spellcasting doesn’t do anything to get rid of viruses, I get to conclude viruses don’t exist. So that argument is not even logical. But the premise is also false. As you saw above, when we don’t distort the graph the way they have here, we see their claims are not even true: we always had cycles of spiking with high numbers of cases and deaths for all of these illnesses, and the trend was not toward zero but well above it, and vaccines precipitously eliminated all of that.

They also deploy here another standard crank tactic: to exaggerate an additional explanation, and then pretend (by black-or-white fallacy) that the other explanation has been eliminated. But reality (and logic) doesn’t work that way. It is true that most decline in all diseases (even bacterial and nutritional and environmental diseases—all diseases) is caused by improving state investment in public health and sanitation. As we live in cleaner, better-fed environments, we get less ill and die less often. Likewise as medical science gets better and more available, cases can stay the same while deaths decline (because we are spending gobs of time, money, and risk “saving” those people). That does not mean vaccines did “nothing.” It is the combination of public health investment and vaccination that got the result. But to see that, you can’t collapse your graph so much that it disappears. That’s dishonest. So it looks to me like they are choosing to hide the evidence here, rather than showing it to you. Hence the resulting “look” of the graph supports their false narrative, but only dishonestly.

This is most evident on their graph for diphtheria, typhoid, measles, and smallpox. The last two are the bottom lines there. They have collapsed the graph so much you can barely see it, but there is no major decline trend for those illnesses until the 1920s (the leveling of the spike cycle after 1896 is likely due to improvements in diagnostics and isolating the ill, but the averaged rate hardly differs from before). Now, be aware, for smallpox, the entire period covered by this graph is all vaccinated (mandatory national smallpox vaccination began in the 1840s, which is off-graph to the left somewhere, so you don’t get to see it or its effects), so that line has literally no relevance to their argument (I suspect they are hoping you don’t notice that).

But if you want to see evidence of that vaccine’s effect, we have records from Sweden:

Look at the graph. Guess what happened in 1801 and then 1816? You probably guessed right. The vaccine was introduced in Sweden in 1801 and mandated nationwide in 1816. By comparison, as already noted, the measles vaccine went national in the US in 1963, but Humphries and Bystrianyk’s graph is so squished it looks like it had no effect—hence, check the un-squished graph I provided above, where it’s effect is stark. Really, it had an enormous effect, same as smallpox in Sweden (and everywhere else vaccination became mandatory or universal). So you might then ask, why do deaths (and note: their graph only tracks direct deaths, not cases or indirect deaths, and thus ignores all other horrors and costs) drop in the 1920s and the answer is: antibiotics. A common factor in deaths from these two infections was secondary bacterial infection, which sometimes was still logged as a measles death (especially when they were highly proximate). By eliminating that, the death-rate jumped to a lower baseline that remained pretty much the same until 1963, when it collapsed to near zero. Why? Vaccines.

Their squished graph hides all of that. But let’s look at an honestly calibrated graph:

You can see here the death rate was steady (spiking in cycles) until the 1920s, when antibiotics reduced the mortality rate for measles to its baseline rate (of just measles alone), while the case rate remained pretty much the same (records of mere cases don’t predate 1944 but you can see the trendline). But the death rate for measles still then leveled out at hundreds a year (after it was discovered in the 1940s that prophylactic co-treatment of antibiotics to prevent, not just treat, secondary infections reduced measles mortality again, explaining the decline between 1940 and 1955). And still millions a year were suffering (remember, death isn’t the only bad thing diseases do and not the only reason we want to eradicate them). All of that dropped to near zero after the vaccine. So no case can honestly be made that the measles vaccine “didn’t do anything.” The kids who died from it even just a month or two ago now didn’t have to. So anyone who is arguing vaccines don’t do anything is literally killing kids.

So what about typhoid? Its vaccines rolled out after 1896. Before that their graph shows two spikes from major outbreaks (you might notice the largest of them coincides with the Civil War), but the average actually did not substantially change until the 1890s. So again they play on the deceptive “look” of the graph to imply vaccines “didn’t do anything.” But see the rate between 1880 and 1895 on their graph: it’s almost the same. But for the outbreaks, we’d not see much of a downward trend. Then, after 1895, the decline tracks the expansion of the vaccine program, which is what allowed us to essentially eliminate the disease. These authors of course also play on the fact that even that decline was due to the combination of increased vaccination and improved civil investment, e.g. public water and sewer utilities and medical care. It’s not “one and not the other.” So their argument doesn’t hold water.

But…hold on. Typhoid isn’t even a virus. It’s a bacterial infection. So it can’t have anything to do with the claim that viruses don’t exist anyway. Because vaccines have often proved effective even against some cellular microbes. Humphries and Bystrianyk aren’t arguing viruses don’t exist, but anyone who cites them to make that argument is in trouble here. Because the typhoid line on their graph is irrelevant to any argument that “viruses” don’t exist. Same for diththeria: also a bacterial infection, and therefore irrelevant to that argument. And yet diththeria vaccination started in the 1890s. First with toxin-exposure, a technique relying on the same principles. And full vaccines arrived after 1910, and became widespread by the 1930s, with mass campaigns in the 1940s. And guess what happened:

Yeah. That’s right. The actually high case and death rates plummeted to zero exactly then. This is hidden from you on their squished graph (and remember, their graph doesn’t track cases at all, and thus easily conflates our ability to rescue someone from dying with how many people get ill, thus again hiding the biggest effects of the vaccine). This was also fighting a bacterium, of course, so it can’t support a thesis about viruses anyway. But when you zoom out, their graph no longer shows any steady decline in deaths before the 1890s when vaccine-related treatments began either (see this helpful thread), so even though this has nothing to do with viruses and is irrelevant to the No Virus argument, I will show you this other graph anyway, so you see how they are lying to you:

Look closely at the blue diphtheria data-line in that graph (this is from England, where we have data going farther back): the death rate is not on continual decline like they claim. It spikes in cycles but averages pretty much the same from the 1850s to 1890s, and begins to decline only with the mass introduction of antitoxins in the 1890s (manufactured by a process similar to vaccination). Yet still doesn’t drop below common rates found for many years in the 1800s until the 1920s, precisely when real vaccines were introduced, and even then the rates stay on average pretty much the same from then to the 1940s, after which cases and deaths vanish from the graph altogether—precisely when England began its mass vaccination campaign. And remember, this graph is only tracking deaths (and thus hiding cases, symptoms, and other effects like hospitalization).

So when we don’t hide data like they do, when we see the whole picture, it supports the effectiveness of vaccines. It does not support any claim they are making. And note the grey smallpox data-line here, too: it also destroys their false narrative. By going back to 1838, it shows routine deadly spikes in that disease every decade until the U.K. Smallpox Act of 1871 mandated universal infant vaccination—after which the death rate plummeted, and in just one generation (when most of the population was vaccinated, being by then comprised of those infants now become adults) it vanishes entirely from this graph, being too small to show up on it for the remainder of human history. Which creates a stark divide between the two halves of this graph, corresponding to the 19th and 20th centuries: one century vaccinated, the other not. See the difference?

And then there’s tuberculosis: also a bacterial infection. Moreover, it wasn’t fought with any vaccine in the US. So their entire graphed line for it is completely irrelevant to even their argument, much less a No Virus argument. And yet it’s the tallest and most dramatic line on their graph. They are probably counting on you being impressed by it. Yet it should be erased. Because it doesn’t even relate to viruses or vaccines. But, if you are wondering, controlled studies of the effectiveness of the TB vaccine do confirm substantial reduction in cases and deaths internationally. And it had a noticeable impact in England when vaccination became widespread there in 1953. And yet its effect is only middling (it can cut rates by half or a third, but not eliminate cases or deaths, and is mostly only effective in children). So to “see” its effect you need more than deceptively constructed graphs: you need actual science.

And when we stick to just vaccinated viruses, the same thing happens in every case: advances in public investment improve all-cause mortality, reducing diseases to their baseline cycles of case and death rates—and then a vaccine wipes them out almost entirely or measurably reduces both cases (and thus miseries and costs) and deaths. For example, we have concrete evidence of the effectiveness of the flu vaccine, over the last ten years and over the last eighty, with exactly the same change in the mortality curve, from continual spiking to a low near flat incident rate precisely when the vaccine was introduced in 1945. And even now, the difference in incidence between vaccinated and nonvaccinated is not only measurable but large. And that’s also not even considered a highly effective vaccine. Yet it still cuts incidence (and death) by more than half. And there is no actual way to argue against this evidence—without lying.

The Gober Attempt

Okay. So now that you have all that preparation, let’s look at Gober’s End to Upside Down Medicine. I’m sticking to only chapters 2 and 3 (pp. 39–83), which are the ones claiming “viruses don’t exist” (and therefore vaccines are a scam). Which depends a lot on Bailey and Humphries and Bystrianyk. But we’ll see how we should think of Gober’s attempt at this.

His first argument is that “they never found an isolated, purified” HIV virus but only ever “a ‘soup’ of cellular material that they simply assumed contained the virus.” This is a lie. It is a lie in all the ways already explained by anti-vaxxer Michael Palmer (see links above to ground yourself in the truth of how viruses are isolated and detected and studied). But let’s carry his points specifically into Human Immunodeficiency Viruses (HIV). I’ll stick with HIV-1 to keep it simple but all the same follows for HIV-2. We don’t just have photographs of individual viruses (no “soup” we just “guess” they are in), but even photographs of the virus in its stages of cell invasion. See, for example, “Ion-Abrasion Scanning Electron Microscopy Reveals Surface-Connected Tubular Conduits in HIV-Infected Macrophages” in PLOS Pathogens 2009. That was literally the first hit the instant I entered “Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1” in Google Scholar. And it told me there were, in all, 21,600 articles matching that description; and 44,000 articles discuss isolating HIV-1. Gober at al. will claim all these tens of thousands of studies are lying or deceiving you. But it’s Gober et al. who are lying or deceiving you.

As even Wikipedia will explain to you, we not only have thousands of photographs of individual HIV-1 (no soup guessing) but in every stage of its attack (we can see it by itself; we can see it attaching to cells; we can see it invading cells; we can see it blocking mechanisms in the cell that neutralize its abilities to fight it off), and we have completely mapped its RNA genome (which is impossible if we were just guessing it was in some soup; and impossible if it didn’t exist, since non-existent things don’t have consistently detected genomes), and we have even traced the causal relationship between those genes and what HIV does (and thus can explain AIDS right down to specific genes the virus introduces into its host). We have also mapped the entire shape and structure of the HIV proteins (impossible for something that doesn’t exist). And that’s on top of all the “soup” stuff Gober is dishonestly mocking (because of course you can also prove a thing exists in a “soup” by observing the effects when it’s present compared to when absent, as explained by Palmer, and this has also been done for HIV-1 in spades, across thousands of studies).

The most impressive example is a recent study using an electron microscope to take a motion picture of HIV-1 actually mechanically operating (see Scientists See an Ultra-Fast Movement in an HIV-1 Surface Protein), which ties together all the above, because this gave them information on how HIV neutralizes immune systems, and what it would take (mechanically) to stop it doing that:

The moving part is a structure called envelope glycoprotein, and AIDS researchers have been trying to figure it out for years because it is a key part of the virus’ ability to dock on a T-cell receptor known as CD4. Many parts of the envelope are constantly moving to evade the immune system, but vaccine immunogens are designed to stay relatively stable.

Seeing that structure snap open and shut in mere millionths of a second is giving Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) investigators a new handle on the surface of the virus that could lead to broadly neutralizing antibodies for an AIDS vaccine. Being able to attach an antibody specifically to this little structure that would prevent it from popping open would be key.

Likewise, we can photograph uninfected and infected cells, and see when HIV is present, and confirm it is present when effects are also present but absent when it is absent, thus proving it causes AIDS even with direct photographs:

We have closer-up views of just the isolated virus (which visibly shows you the virus has been isolated):

By using thousands of photographs it is possible to completely model the typical physical structure of an HIV-1 virus (the following image is a computer model built from imaging data):

We also have photographs of the virus at every stage of its attack on a cell. And it’s not the only virus all this is true of.

So how does Gober cope with all this? He completely ignores it and acts like it doesn’t exist. Instead he claims he has peer reviewed studies to cite that show none of this has happened, but he only points to a crank website. No peer review. If you feel betrayed, you should. This is just another way of lying. All he does is just go on quoting more cranks saying we “never saw a virus.” We saw a virus. They’ve seen it thousands of times. They’ve photographed it. They even fucking filmed it. Cranks will claim it wasn’t a virus in any of these images, just dirt or something else, but the isolating procedures and staged imaging all refute that.

Gober next tries a “gotcha” when he says his cohorts asked every institute for their studies proving SARS-CoV-2 virus exists and they replied they had none. But Gober is lying. You can confirm this yourself. The CDC has—yep!—photographs of the virus. As well as everything else. We have thousands of photographs of SARS-CoV-2. And we have its genome. And a map of its protein structure. And every other thing proving it exists; including a causal demonstration of how its genes produce structures that produce symptoms (and causally how they do)—chief among these being how the virus’s genome hijacks a host genome to reproduce itself, the defining structural feature of all viruses. All of which obviously can’t exist if the virus doesn’t, yet there it is. Photos. Genes. Isolations. “Scanning electron micrograph of SARS-CoV-2” in Google Scholar finds 19,500 articles; “isolating SARS-CoV-2 virus,” 55,000 articles; “genome of SARS-CoV-2 virus,” 395,000 articles. Is the No Virus argument starting to look like a fantastical conspiracy theory now? Indeed. It’s Holocaust denial redux.

So how did Gober construct this lie? The letter actually sent to the CDC (and other institutions) sets impossible and ridiculous conditions, so obviously no documents matched his ridiculously impossible request. He then reports this in the book as the CDC having “no evidence” of the existence of the virus. Notice the deception: they did not ask the CDC for all its evidence of the virus; they asked it for a specific kind of evidence that is impossible (a virus found nowhere near any other cell, living or dead; note, there is no micrometer of inhabited space on Earth that lacks “any other” cell material) and also irrelevant (we can tell genomes and cells and particles apart, so we don’t need to find a magical place that is absolutely sterile yet still has the virus in it, which would be a neat trick since the virus needs other cells to reproduce, and sterilization would destroy it). Yet Gober misleads his readers into thinking they asked them for all their evidence. So he is lying to you when he claims they said they had none.

I must pause to emotionally vent for a moment. Forgive me. But this scale of deception is disgusting. This shit fucking pisses me off. And it is why I despise doing this. I am now wasting days of my life dealing with his bullshit. It’s barely worth what I’m being paid. And this is why we don’t give these fuckers the time of day anymore: it always turns out like this. And I’m sick of it.

Okay. Back to it…

• Gober then goes on a rant about all the other causes of illness (some real, some dubious, some made-up), which is irrelevant. That a poison can kill you does not mean a virus can’t. There is just no comprehensible logic in an argument like that. But it’s designed to deceive you. You are being manipulated with this shell game. So you have to keep your eye on the ball: does any of this evince viruses don’t exist or don’t cause disease? No. So, moving on.
• Gober mentions the “possibility” that vaccines could harm people (and even implies they cause COVID), but if you are a critical thinker you will notice “possibly” does not mean “probably,” and he presents no evidence to get to probably, so this is just another manipulation. So you have to keep your eye on the ball: does any of this evince viruses don’t exist or don’t cause disease? No. So, moving on.
• Gober then tries an argument from ignorance, to the effect of, “Just because we can’t explain why COVID broke out when it did and hospitalized and killed so many people suddenly, and now isn’t, doesn’t mean we are wrong that there is no virus causing it.” Which is the same fallacy. The question isn’t whether it’s “logically possible” space aliens did it, or an undetected poison in salmon skin chips, or a new television signal, or a wizard. The question is what is the most probable cause. And all the evidence overwhelmingly proves the answer is: SARS-CoV-2 virus. By every possible test.

Then Gober just cites a bunch of other liars and cranks, nothing but fringers like Mark Bailey, but they just replicate the same lies and manipulations and fallacies. None of them have any peer reviewed study to back them. All of them ignore all the evidence against them and dishonestly claim it doesn’t exist. And all of them misrepresent the peer reviewed studies that do exist to deceive their readers. It’s all a con.

The Gober Deception

That accounts for the first half of Gober’s chapter on this. In the second half he tries to defend it. He breaks his argument down into two assertions: “viruses are not physically isolated in virology experiments” and “virology studies lack proper controls.” Both are false. He argues by word game: he does not mean by these things what actual scientists mean by these things; he then shows that his pseudoscientific meanings are not satisfied by the actual science; therefore science has not “isolated” viruses and “lacks any controlled studies” of them. But of course, his meanings are bullshit. In real scientific vocabulary, virology does all of this correctly. So he is the pseudoscientist here, not them.

What follows is nothing from any peer reviewed science but just a bunch of dumb analogies about hammers and juice (“aw shucks” cranksterism). His entire line of argument is fallacious, amounting to saying “if you haven’t completely ruled out every logically possible alternative, then you can’t have found the most probable cause,” which is false. This is like saying, “You can’t prove aliens didn’t cause that plane to crash, therefore you can never prove it was pilot error or mechanical failure,” which is just an utter failure to understand how evidence, probability, and inductive logic work. Since this fallacy is the form of every argument he makes in this chapter, every one is the same fallacy and thus can be consigned to the fire. Rule 3. Warm your hands. Have a beer.

Michael Palmer refutes this entire line of reasoning, so I don’t need to repeat his survey of how virology actually shows what is most probable here (and by far). See my links to his essays above. You don’t need to rule out aliens—or prove that someone’s allergic reaction still occurs at the North Pole before believing they have an allergy (yes, Gober uses almost that exact argument near the end of the fiftieth page of his PDF). In actual reality, we have isolated individual viruses (see photographs above), we have then gene and protein mapped them after isolation (thousands of studies), and we have documented (photographically and by controlled studies, both in animals, in vitro, and in humans, both live and post mortem) how specific genes produce specific structures, and how those structures physically produce specific effects (like hijacking a cell’s reproductive mechanism or metabolism or even immune response). And we have millions of controlled experiments showing that the presence of a viral genome corresponds to a rise in the very symptoms predicted by its structure, while its absence does not (that’s what an actual control is). But we also have de facto motion pictures of a virus doing what its detected genes predict, and photographs of it attacking a cell, at every stage—thus linking the photographed “viruses” to the “genomes” and proteins we mapped, leaving no rational doubt they are co-located and thus all the same thing.

But in case you were maniacally skeptical, yes, we actually have physically confirmed parts of the genome inside those photographed viral envelopes (“X-ray crystallography virus genome” returns 78,200 articles, but, just for giggles: example, example, example). Which proves those envelopes go with the RNA. But we also know that the RNA genes correlate with the structures they cause to form around the virus, so we have verified the link between the genes and the photographed structures (“linking virus genes to specific structures” returns 740,000 articles; note that some viruses are built from DNA rather than RNA, e.g. smallpox is a DNA virus, and we’ve known that for almost a century, but I’ll go on about RNA because it’s more typical).

And we have done that causally, not just by correlation. But we also have correlation: no RNA, then no structures; RNA, then structures. That’s what real science means by a controlled experiment. We’ve also done this all the way to symptoms (no RNA, no symptoms; RNA, symptoms). And again not just correlation but by causation: we have observed how the RNA-predicted structures get their envelopes into or hijacking cells, and photographed this. And we have confirmed not just that this causes symptoms (with, again, yes, controlled experiments—in animals, in vitro, and in humans), but also mechanically why (we have identified the entire causal chain from RNA gene to physically observed structure to physically observed cellular effect to observed symptoms at the organism level). What the fuck more do you need?

“But you didn’t do any of this at the North Pole.” Fuck off.

Gober then goes on a tour of the history of virology all the way back to ancient Rome. I won’t vet that. By now I know he is an unreliable liar who can never be trusted. So I don’t trust any of this. There are more trustworthy sources on the history of virology to consult. Even Wikipedia is more trustworthy than this guy (see History of Virology; and also Virology, for the current state of the field, which is actually the only thing that matters here). But if you want top-shelf surveys, see Foreign Bodies and Viruses, Plagues, and History. And if you want to get even more technical: Principles of Molecular Virology, Virology Step by Step, and Viruses: A Natural History—because viruses aren’t just a human threat, they attack animals and plants and even bacteria, and we’ve got extensive evidence for all of it, contrary to the No Virus camp’s RFK Jr. style complaints that this is all just about allopathy and “the medical industry.” Gober’s history survey is manipulative anyway, because “we used to have things wrong” or “we used to not know things” is not a relevant criticism of contemporary virology. It’s just a lazy fallacy of poisoning the well, a standard crank tactic. So again you have to keep your eye on the ball: does any of this evince viruses don’t exist or don’t cause disease? No. So, moving on.

It is here in the middle of Gober’s canned history that he asks, “Has anyone ever seen such a microscopic thing performing all of those steps—infecting living tissues, replicating inside them, and then damaging cells on its way out?” Yes. Yes we have. Not only do we have photographs of viruses in the middle of doing each of those things, but we also have a causal-mechanical understanding of how and why they do those things: certain genes cause certain structures, which we can predict (and then confirm) mechanically cause each of those effects; and we have confirmed those genes happen to be inside individually photographed viruses, and are always present when those effects occur, and absent when they do not (the definition of a controlled experiment: example, example, example; but for fun: “in vitro documenting each stage of virus infecting a cell” gets you 20,400 articles).

Which reminds me to remind you of a universal rule for debunking cranks: always ask what are you not being shown. What is being skipped over. What citations are missing. What is being left out. Because crankery depends on the universal rule of all apologetics: leave all the evidence out that, when put back in, reverses all your conclusions. So what cranks do is frame you: they cherry pick data, and don’t tell you (a.k.a. lying) that they have skipped over stuff to find something they can use (verification bias). They have created a frame and hope you stay in it—otherwise, if you look outside the frame, you catch all the shit that they skipped. And then you know you were being conned.

And one way to frame you (and thus con you) is to set ridiculous standards of proof, and claim science doesn’t meet them, therefore it has no proof. Here, Gober is being absurd asking for pictures of everything and complaining about soup. Yes, he’s still lying about that (we have the pictures). But notice he got us wasting time talking about whether we had the pictures (and whether they are “really” pictures of viruses, and other bullshit we can all answer because science already did—it’s not like scientists didn’t already think of all these things). Which is all distraction. When really, we already had the controlled experiments hundreds of years ago. The smallpox vaccine was proved effective by controlled experiments. We didn’t need electron microscopes. We proved “something” is in sick people (and in specific volumes of air or water or on specific objects), and that pre-exposure to it builds immunity, long before we could “see” what it was. The controls are straightforward: when it’s there, it doesn’t cause illness; when it is, it does. When you are pre-exposed to whatever that is, you are less likely to get ill; when you are not, you are more likely to get ill. We don’t need any more evidence than that. But Palmer already covers that.

We of course did even more after that. In the 19th century we figured out through controlled filter tests how small viruses are, and how to deactivate them and still build immunity with them (hence, the advancement of inactivated vaccines). In the 20th century we figured out what DNA and RNA were, and could map and track viruses by the presence of their genes. Because you don’t have to see a thing to know it’s there, a fundamental principle of all modern science. But we were also photographing viruses as early as the 1930s, and within fifty years correlating them with the presence of their genes. And by the 21st century we were developing hyper-detailed photographs of viruses and their genes and structures all in one. But we never needed that evidence to know they existed and that, when treated and inserted into plants, animals, or people, they gain immunity to them. So the No Virus theory never made sense. Not even in the 18th century. And certainly not in the 21st.

So the only way to sell this is to lie.

For example, when Gober cites his first (and almost only) contemporary peer reviewed study on viruses in this chapter, he lies about what it says and means. Gober claims “A 2015 paper published in PLOS Pathogens doesn’t inspire confidence” in the existence of viruses because it contains the sentence, “How non-enveloped viruses penetrate a host membrane to enter cells and cause disease remains an enigmatic step.” Always check for quote mining (taking a sentence out of context to give a false impression of what was actually said—a.k.a. lying). Especially when you’ve established you are reading a liar. The study he cites, “A Non-enveloped Virus Hijacks Host Disaggregation Machinery to Translocate across the Endoplasmic Reticulum Membrane,” actually resolves the “enigma” it refers to. So Gober was playing on an emotional trigger-word to try and manipulate his readers while communicating nothing actually of any relevance to his argument. But he also cherry-picked that article from ten years before he published. Why? That’s a red flag. I wonder what happens when we check all the more recent science he skipped over? Oh. Right. Fucker.

Gober already lied even at the minor premise in this argument (that we “don’t know” how non-enveloped viruses infect cells—we do). But his major premise, that we know of viruses that don’t have lipid envelopes, only gets his desired conclusion if you define virus as requiring that, and he had just quoted “a group of doctors, scientists, and researchers” defining “virus” that way. But they didn’t. He is lying. His quote is a description of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Not all viruses. It’s also just a letter about SARS-CoV-2. It’s not a study or reference manual or virology textbook. So you should ask: why is he not quoting any virology textbook here? Isn’t that the only relevant place to find a contemporary universal “definition” of “virus”? In reality (outside the false picture Gober creates) non-enveloped viruses have been known for decades. Hey! There’s even a Wikipedia page on it! This isn’t some startling new discovery upsetting the entire definition of a virus, as Gober misleadingly implies. It’s long-established knowledge in the field.

Hence when we do what an honest person would do and check an actual definition of “virus,” we get this:

Viruses are infectious units with diameters of about 16 nm (circoviruses) to over 300 nm (poxviruses) … composed of proteins and are surrounded in some species of viruses by a lipid membrane, which is referred to as an envelope; the particles contain only one kind of nucleic acid, either DNA or RNA [and] do not reproduce by division, such as bacteria, yeasts or other cells, but they replicate in the living cells that they infect.

“In some species of viruses.” Gober faked up a definition of virus as “all” having envelopes, then cherry picked a study (one out of tens of thousands of studies) about non-enveloped viruses that conveniently used the word “enigmatic” somewhere in it (in a way actually irrelevant to any point Gober was making), in order to sell the idea to you that scientists don’t know what viruses are. Which is all a lie. It’s only worse that this deception is all in aid of the argument that “therefore” viruses don’t exist. Which is a non sequitur, even if his account of a changing definition here were true—since learning more about viruses is not “changing” what viruses are, nor is it evidence that we don’t know they exist. It is, rather, evidence we do know they exist, as otherwise we could not be accumulating so much new knowledge about them.

The second (and only other) contemporary peer reviewed study on viruses that Gober cites in this chapter he uses to pull the same stunt. He quotes “Difficulties in Differentiating Coronaviruses from Subcellular Structures in Human Tissues by Electron Microscopy” as saying “investigators have inaccurately reported subcellular structures, including coated vesicles, multivesicular bodies, and vesiculating rough endoplasmic reticulum, as coronavirus particles.” He then says this proves no one has ever succeeded in differentiating any virus from these things. Which is a lie. And he knows it, because that’s exactly the opposite of what that paper says and proves. So Gober clearly is hoping you don’t read that paper. He wants you to just “believe” the lies he is telling you about it. Indeed, Gober left out literally its very next sentence: “We describe morphologic features of coronavirus that distinguish it from subcellular structures.”

Ooops. So much for Gober’s argument. In reality this paper was not about virology generally anyway. It was about early, hastened efforts to isolate the coronavirus (and only that). And it was reminding researchers to stick to already-developed methods and protocols to avoid such mistakes. It thus evinces no field-wide problem with isolating viruses. In fact it documents that this problem isn’t field-wide but just a consequence of rushing covid research to fight the pandemic. And that paper obviously demonstrates the opposite of what Gober claims because it’s entire point is that we can tell viruses from other things. That’s how this paper was able to find that a virus was being confused with other things. Face, palm.

In like fashion, Gober’s entire canned history is just rhetoric. Because everything Gober talks about as occurring before 2000 is completely irrelevant to what we know now. Hence notice that that was all he is talking about (stuff from half a century ago), which he suddenly juxtaposed with these dishonest uses of contemporary studies, thus creating a fake impression that issues from fifty years ago are still issues today, when they aren’t. This is all manipulative. That’s when he will follow those lies with quoting another crank claiming we have “never” photographed a virus on or in a human cell. Damned fucking lie (see photographs and linked studies above). Of course this is a contradictory pose now for Gober to take. He simultaneously wants completely isolated viruses or else they don’t exist (so, we give him photographs of completely isolated viruses) and he wants viruses to be photographed on cells or else they don’t exist (so, we give him photographs of viruses invading cells). He clearly can’t tell the truth when we need him to.

After Gober concludes his baloney and manipulative history of virus isolation, everything he then goes on about regarding virus genome sequencing is false. As you can confirm by Actually Doing Your Own Research. But all the dirty tricks are here. Omitted information. False information. And fallacious inferences. For example, he tries to claim CRISPR is bullshit “ergo” we have never sequenced a virus genome, but apart from the fact that he’s full of it (CRISPR is not bullshit; it has been extensively documented to do what it claims to do, all the way to a Nobel Prize), CRISPR isn’t used to map genomes anyway. This is another one of those lies told by misrepresentation: he is giving the false impression that CRISPR is how we sequence virus genomes; it’s not—so why is he talking about it? Because he wants to deceive you into thinking this. CRISPR was invented in 2011. We have had sequenced virus genomes since 1976. Indeed, the first genome ever sequenced was a virus.

And these lies just go on and on…

• Gober claims we only get fragments. Another lie. We have whole genomes, and for countless viruses (including CoV-2, and CRISPR had nothing to do with it). He claims we haven’t confirmed these genomes are in the envelopes we isolate. Another lie. We have. Visually (e.g. crystallography), and through isolation and correlation studies—and even causal studies linking the genes to the observed structures of the envelopes (i.e. the genes we find explain the observed structures on those envelopes).
• Gober makes false claims about antivirals research (omitting almost all the studies that refute everything he says, and including only studies he can misrepresent as supporting what he says, and not describing any of the science correctly).
• Gober quotes other cranks lying about things like, “[what] I have heard…is that viruses are intracellular ‘parasites’—so, of course, we can’t find them outside the cells,” but we have found them outside of cells (see photographs above, and all studies cited above). So I can guarantee his cited crank never heard that argument from any real virologist. Because no real virologist would need to explain why we haven’t done what in fact we’ve routinely been doing for decades now.
• Gober tries to claim there is “one noteworthy instance” of a real peer reviewed “study” supporting him, but he cites a crank, Stefan Lanka, who never published anything on this under peer review—just a dumb bitchute video of him claiming he ran an improvised experiment that actually has no logical relevance to any of the actual techniques used to isolate viruses and prove they cause disease (everything Gober says to the contrary is false; and for a decisive expert take-down of this see Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson). So his “one noteworthy instance” is, in reality, zero instances.
• Gober even repeats the same crank lies about Lanka’s trial in Germany. No, a German court did not rule he’d disproved the existence of the measles virus—it ruled his promised “award” for anyone who could meet his ridiculous and impossible evidentiary standards need not be paid no matter how decisive all the evidence was for the virus. In other words, he got out of having to pay by loophole: like Gober, he did not ask for evidence proving it, he asked for evidence impossible to obtain, and then lied about that, claiming that “therefore” there is no evidence. He claimed that. The court did not.

The Lanka case is one of the best examples of how this is all a scam, and Gober is not a dupe or just a loony but a deliberate manipulator of evidence—a.k.a. a liar. Because he knows what actually happened here. So for him to claim that court “agreed” there was no evidence for viruses is just lying. Of course Lanka is also a liar. There is a ton of decisive evidence refuting him. Like Gober, he just rejects it all because it doesn’t meet his absurd pseudoscientific standards. That’s the definition of a crank. It’s identical to how flat earthers reject all evidence for the Earth not being spherical, or how creationists reject evolution, or climate deniers reject global warming: setting absurd standards rather than accepting conclusive standards. Likewise none of the other court cases Gober cites said or meant or entailed anything he claims. Check them all (on the seventieth page of his PDF). They are all on other, isolated disputes, and don’t provide anything confirming “viruses don’t exist” or “don’t cause disease.” Gober is therefore lying all the way down the line here.

Gober even quotes anti-vaxxer Sam Bailey (wife of the same Mark Bailey) claiming that that German court concluded “the best six papers in the entire measles ‘virus’ literature didn’t follow the scientific method” when in fact the court said exactly the opposite:

“It was proven that the publications submitted by the plaintiff … in their entirety provided evidence of the existence and causative properties of the measles virus and that the determination of the diameter in the form requested by the defendant was successful (and) the result is not objectionable” But the higher court … noted that one of Lanka’s criteria, that the proof be contained in a single scientific paper, rather than multiple papers, had not been met.

That’s right. They let Lanka off on a lame technicality: the virus and its effects were decisively scientifically proved, just not “all in a single paper” (a dumb requirement). So Sam Bailey lies about what the court said, and Gober uses her lie to lie about what the court said. These are fucking liars.

The way Gober uses the 2023 Marvin Haberland case is the same: Haberland set absurd pseudoscientific standards (requiring impossible and irrelevant controls); observes no one meets them; and concludes “therefore” virology “does not use controls” and “has never proved anything.” The non sequitur (“no impossible controls” becomes, illogically, “no controls”) is used in aid of a lie: they do use controls (abundant and proper controls), and their methods are epistemically successful in proving what they claim, to extremely high probabilities. So Gober and Haberland are using tactics of deception here. And they double down on these lies by claiming courts of law have agreed with this. They did not. The Haberland court only ruled he didn’t have to wear a mask on a technicality, without performing even discovery (much less issuing any judgment) on virology. So when Gober et al. say he “disproved” virology in court, they are lying.

Conclusion

So again, you have to keep your eye on the ball: after you unravel all their deceptions, does anything left in all this actually suggest viruses don’t exist or don’t cause disease? No. Moreover, are you tired of this by now? How many more pages of goddamned fucking lies should you waste a minute more of your life reading? None, obviously. Unless you’re paid to.

By the time I got to Gober’s lies about the Haberland case I had about twenty pages yet to go. But by the beautiful blessing of the Dark Gods of Gorp, they are a pinch to dismiss. Because all Gober then does is repeat the same lie about information requests, whereby his cohorts send requests to institutions for things that don’t exist, and then claims nothing exists. Which is lying. Here, again, “no proof meeting impossible standards” becomes “no proof meeting even reasonable standards.” It’s a non sequitur in aid of deception. He is manipulating his readers. And after that is chapter three, wherein nothing relevant is said at all. It just tries a dubious critique of 19th century science. Which has no bearing on 21st century science. Again, does any of this evince viruses don’t exist or don’t cause disease? No. So, we’re done here.

By the end of chapter three Gober has presented no evidence whatsoever that viruses don’t exist or don’t cause disease, and has ignored and left out all the vast evidence we have that they do.

End of line.