"....scurvy was initially thought to be a contagion,...[the] response was, “Ah, but you see, it was because of a lack of vitamin C.” I honestly didn’t know how to respond without coming across as insulting, so I let the matter drop, hoping the penny might drop for him later..."
OK, Asa, going into displaying full ignorance mode, here, but...
Isn't that, in fact, scurvy? IE lack of a critical factor for capillary health, based on the glucose/ascorbic shared receptor (GLUT4 iirc), for which the receptor has overwhelmingly stronger affinity for glucose, and so in the near absence of any ascorbic acid -- a few weeks out at sea no more greens and no unspoiled meat (yes, meat has vitamin C) and just alcohol and heavy refined carbs -- resulting in eventual breakdown of the fine circulatory system over a period of months at sea?
Please drop the penny on me. As a former hypercarnivore (for seasons) I *know* eating meat alone does not result in scurvy...but....what was your interlocutor missing in his response, above?
Thanks for jumping in on this RDM. I'm pretty sure a lack vitamin C is indeed the cause of scurvy. My point here is that the objection proves the point. It appeared to be a contagion, but it wasn't. Some have speculated similarly that seasonal respiratory illnesses might have something to do with vitamin D... but that's besides the point.
Thank you, Asa, for going out on a limb to critique 100+ years of germ theory pseudoscience. Your position is being vindicated as we speak. Your other subscribers may be interested to read a recent Telegram post by Dr. Mike Yeadon, former vice-president and chief scientist of the allergy and respiratory research division at Pfizer, a doctor who did over 30 years of medical research in the pharmaceutical industry, and who used to be a true believer in virology and vaccinology, but who now rejects the "theory" of viral contagion. His Telegram post is quoted in full below.
BY DR. MICHAEL YEADON JUNE 7, 2024
Obviously, I now understand the methodology.
There’s absolutely nothing to fear except fear itself. Familiar ring, eh?
Do remember, a century of published clinical experimentation has failed to demonstrate that, whatever the causes of acute respiratory illnesses, they are NOT CONTAGIOUS.
In no case, when a healthy person (“recipient”) was asked to remain in close proximity for hours to a person unwell with such an objectively determined illness (“donor”), like we used to use to decide if someone is unwell, did the recipient healthy person go on to develop the same symptoms.
Just to be clear, we mean here “the recipient people didn’t develop similar symptoms to those of the donor people at a frequency greater than when two healthy people shared the same space for the same period of time”.
They sought evidence of transmission, aka contagion, and failed to find it, study after study, from 1918 to the present day.
Some investigators very recently made the same kind of attempt to see if healthy recipients would “catch covid19”, whatever it was that had caused the donors here to be unwell. In that study, too, the healthy recipients did not become unwell.
I recognize that many people will reject this evidence. They’ll cast around for reasons why the conclusions must be invalid. They do that because many people are “sure” that they’ve definitely “caught” colds or the flu from sick people or that they’ve “infected” others in the same manner.
I confess I struggled with this at first, dismissing what I was being told out of hand. I did so because i, too, “knew” that in the past, I’d “caught” colds from others.
The evidence shows that this doesn’t happen.
That then simply invites us to find other explanations for our strong sense that contagion in relation to acute respiratory illnesses does happen.
Do note I’m not commenting on contagion generally. Right now, I suggest we focus only on the type of illness being used to crush our freedoms and medical autonomy. Diversionary discussions aren’t helpful.
As a scientist, I’ve explained before that one is in no way obligated to provide a new hypothesis while invalidating a current one, now shown to be in discord with a mass of empirical evidence.
However, it might be helpful in making a mental transition to be aware of some possible alternative explanations.
1. Acute respiratory illnesses are really quite common. I experience a couple of colds annually. Flu, rarely, only 3 times in my life. Being commonplace, consider how likely it is that you might develop a cold over the next couple of weeks. It’s not that low a probability. If you do, you’ll cast your mind back. If you recall a person with similar symptoms, you may well conclude you caught it from them. How many occasions did you have such encounters, yet not go on to develop a cold? It would be fair to ask that question. I think we rarely notice when we don’t “catch a cold”. Here, the explanation proposed is coincidence of two, not uncommon things.
2. People do become unwell with acute respiratory symptoms. There’s no argument against that, only it’s cause. Whatever the cause is, imagine there’s an environmental or other shared component (like diet, or even genetics). You develop a cold and someone you live with or work with shortly afterwards also goes down with a cold. While it’s entirely understandable that you both conclude it was passed between you, here I’m proposing that you both developed the same kind of illness because of shared environmental factors.
3. We’ve this mental model of causation of acute respiratory illnesses. We’re told they’re due to submicroscopic, infectious particles called “viruses”. But if they’re not the cause, what might be? I confess I do not know. However, I laid out a decent length hypothesis a while ago on this channel. Essentially, a derangement of regulation of airway surface liquid and associated mucus and the mucocilary escalator mechanism which, among others, keeps your airways in good order.
Changes in temperature, humidity, various solutes and salts, are hypothesised to trigger an inflammatory response & it’s this that we notice as “a cold”. In this hypothetical model, if you’re run down, stressed and don’t have time to attend to your bodily clues and cues, you’re more likely to develop all sorts of syndromes.
Anyway, bottom line is, you’re being lied to about chicken influenza. Ditto cow flu. Just laugh at them and point out to others, this sounds the same sort of lying & catastrophising that we heard in early 2020.
It was mad and illogical for the events that followed to have happened. None of it happened by luck. There was an agenda to amplify whatever it was for malign motives.
The same thing appears to be happening again. Oddly enough, it’s precisely the same cast of characters as last time.
Thank you Harry for sharing this item! Perhaps one of the most salient points here is "one is in no way obligated to provide a new hypothesis while invalidating a current one" --- as this seems to be one of the strongest barriers people put up when confronted with the observation that clinical trials have falsified the contagion paradigm time and time again. In the Louis Pasteur piece I linked to, the author points out that Einstein remarked that there might be mountains of confirmation to support his theory, but it would only take one instance of contradictory evidence to falsify it. Our instinct seems to be never to say "I don't know" but instead to propose an alternative or to cling to a false position until a better model is proposed. This isn't science: it's convention. And none of it would be all that bad if lives and livelihoods weren't on the line as in the present case.
Right. The covid shots (and the entire history of vaccines since Pasteur) have shown the grievous harm to human health that bad science can bring about. But it seems we can't begin to understand the true scale of the damage caused by them until "germ theory" gets officially debunked. That could happen one day. Maybe when the difference between science and convention is rediscovered.
I kept rereading the paragraph about key concepts and correspondences. Your self-dialogue there is very effective. We have to hold up these beliefs lest one fall over and take the others with it. We could see these contradictions and doubling-back moves all during Covid, of course, with its weekly do-overs, each trumpeted by the media with "now it can be told!" fervor. Now that that is over, all the sidesteps and maneuvers are once again behind the curtain, but operating nonetheless.
Good to hear, Allen. Often enough I have the experience of the scales falling from my eyes. It's at once thrilling and frightening. This particular journey regarding germ theory has been most difficult because it really is so drilled into us.
I'm not ready to engage at this battlefront yet; my research in this regard is ongoing (and also low priority). While there are certainly issues in the reigning approaches, I don't find Terrain Theory to be much more rigorously supported by the evidence. Both paradigms have significant amounts of evidence that cannot be incorporated, which suggests to me that we do not actually have a viable paradigm here yet, and that when we do it may bear a resemblance to both the current competing paradigms... but then again, it may not. My one point of agreement is that money has distorted this research area beyond hope of reaching any adequate scientific conclusion.
Thanks, Chris. While I value your engagement, as you know, your statements here don't add up. You say you're not ready to engage on this topic, which is fine, but then you go ahead and engage, admittedly without research, or without much of it... and without much interest ("low priority"). In fact, you come to a pretty strong conclusion: "Both paradigms have significant amounts of evidence..." But you haven't followed up on my suggestions and you seem to be saying that you have no intention of doing so. So why leave a comment on this subject at all? If you took the time to review the additional material I suggested, you'd see that what you're saying is nonsensical... or you'd be specific about any objections. You aren't obligated to know everything about or even to be interested in everything presented here. That's fine. But in this case, you're being dismissive and condescending for no apparent reason.
Apologies if I came across dismissively here, that wasn't my intent. It's low priority for me because I'm trying to hold the centre, and this topic doesn't help with this project. I don't mean it doesn't matter. You're right, though, I should have just kept my thoughts to myself in this instance.
However, since I didn't, let me try and rephrase my earlier points for clarity: I haven't finished researching this topic, but from what I've seen so far neither of these paradigms takes into account all the evidence.
I certainly don't mean to dismiss terrain theory. In paying attention to the health of the individual, it most definitely has an important part of the puzzle, and one that is routinely elided in the medical industries. Meanwhile, the fact that the germ theory camp has decided to defend its position by saying things like 'terrain theory is used to attack face masks!' etc. is so asinine (since the evidence on face mask efficacy is diaphanously thin) it can only be read as a sign of weakness. But I would never want to reach a conclusion based on the more stupid things being said about a topic.
I am very slowly making my way through the research on challenge trials, and there's much more beyond this I need to look at before I'd be in a position to debate this topic on the merits. I read a little more on it each month, but it's going to be a long, long time before I reach any definite conclusions in this regard. Frankly, I suspect an entirely new paradigm is required, but I will not live long enough to discover what it might be.
In saying this, I am not seeking to debate the scientific aspects of this topic, but rather I'm trying (however badly!) to share how I think and feel about the topic right now. Personally, I'm always open to remarks like these from others because understanding how other people think and feel is for me the purpose of discourse, and I do not like the way that we are expected to take sides on everything... This seems an odd and unhelpful development to me, especially on scientific topics. I have found that sharing my view from the side-lines, however, is often not welcome, and perhaps I should learn this lesson, but my desire to talk has tended to get me into trouble, as it has here.
I still feel able to comment on topics I haven't taken sides on, but perhaps on the whole this is the wrong age for such an attitude, and I should just sit on my hands more often. Certainly, if you took my comment dismissively, I apologise. I was just trying to share the view from my inner life, however badly I might have done so.
No worries, Chris. As I pointed out in the article, I don't expect this article to convince anyone who isn't already moving in this direction. What I've provided are some cogent arguments against germ theory and resources for further exploration. I have not argued here *for* terrain; one needn't provide an alternative "theory" to debunk junk science. I understand that the microbe perspective is too conventional and culturally too deep-set for many to feel comfortable letting it go. But fence-sitting can get pretty hard on the bum.
"....scurvy was initially thought to be a contagion,...[the] response was, “Ah, but you see, it was because of a lack of vitamin C.” I honestly didn’t know how to respond without coming across as insulting, so I let the matter drop, hoping the penny might drop for him later..."
OK, Asa, going into displaying full ignorance mode, here, but...
Isn't that, in fact, scurvy? IE lack of a critical factor for capillary health, based on the glucose/ascorbic shared receptor (GLUT4 iirc), for which the receptor has overwhelmingly stronger affinity for glucose, and so in the near absence of any ascorbic acid -- a few weeks out at sea no more greens and no unspoiled meat (yes, meat has vitamin C) and just alcohol and heavy refined carbs -- resulting in eventual breakdown of the fine circulatory system over a period of months at sea?
Please drop the penny on me. As a former hypercarnivore (for seasons) I *know* eating meat alone does not result in scurvy...but....what was your interlocutor missing in his response, above?
Thanks for jumping in on this RDM. I'm pretty sure a lack vitamin C is indeed the cause of scurvy. My point here is that the objection proves the point. It appeared to be a contagion, but it wasn't. Some have speculated similarly that seasonal respiratory illnesses might have something to do with vitamin D... but that's besides the point.
Thank you, Asa, for going out on a limb to critique 100+ years of germ theory pseudoscience. Your position is being vindicated as we speak. Your other subscribers may be interested to read a recent Telegram post by Dr. Mike Yeadon, former vice-president and chief scientist of the allergy and respiratory research division at Pfizer, a doctor who did over 30 years of medical research in the pharmaceutical industry, and who used to be a true believer in virology and vaccinology, but who now rejects the "theory" of viral contagion. His Telegram post is quoted in full below.
BY DR. MICHAEL YEADON JUNE 7, 2024
Obviously, I now understand the methodology.
There’s absolutely nothing to fear except fear itself. Familiar ring, eh?
Do remember, a century of published clinical experimentation has failed to demonstrate that, whatever the causes of acute respiratory illnesses, they are NOT CONTAGIOUS.
In no case, when a healthy person (“recipient”) was asked to remain in close proximity for hours to a person unwell with such an objectively determined illness (“donor”), like we used to use to decide if someone is unwell, did the recipient healthy person go on to develop the same symptoms.
Just to be clear, we mean here “the recipient people didn’t develop similar symptoms to those of the donor people at a frequency greater than when two healthy people shared the same space for the same period of time”.
They sought evidence of transmission, aka contagion, and failed to find it, study after study, from 1918 to the present day.
Some investigators very recently made the same kind of attempt to see if healthy recipients would “catch covid19”, whatever it was that had caused the donors here to be unwell. In that study, too, the healthy recipients did not become unwell.
I recognize that many people will reject this evidence. They’ll cast around for reasons why the conclusions must be invalid. They do that because many people are “sure” that they’ve definitely “caught” colds or the flu from sick people or that they’ve “infected” others in the same manner.
I confess I struggled with this at first, dismissing what I was being told out of hand. I did so because i, too, “knew” that in the past, I’d “caught” colds from others.
The evidence shows that this doesn’t happen.
That then simply invites us to find other explanations for our strong sense that contagion in relation to acute respiratory illnesses does happen.
Do note I’m not commenting on contagion generally. Right now, I suggest we focus only on the type of illness being used to crush our freedoms and medical autonomy. Diversionary discussions aren’t helpful.
As a scientist, I’ve explained before that one is in no way obligated to provide a new hypothesis while invalidating a current one, now shown to be in discord with a mass of empirical evidence.
However, it might be helpful in making a mental transition to be aware of some possible alternative explanations.
1. Acute respiratory illnesses are really quite common. I experience a couple of colds annually. Flu, rarely, only 3 times in my life. Being commonplace, consider how likely it is that you might develop a cold over the next couple of weeks. It’s not that low a probability. If you do, you’ll cast your mind back. If you recall a person with similar symptoms, you may well conclude you caught it from them. How many occasions did you have such encounters, yet not go on to develop a cold? It would be fair to ask that question. I think we rarely notice when we don’t “catch a cold”. Here, the explanation proposed is coincidence of two, not uncommon things.
2. People do become unwell with acute respiratory symptoms. There’s no argument against that, only it’s cause. Whatever the cause is, imagine there’s an environmental or other shared component (like diet, or even genetics). You develop a cold and someone you live with or work with shortly afterwards also goes down with a cold. While it’s entirely understandable that you both conclude it was passed between you, here I’m proposing that you both developed the same kind of illness because of shared environmental factors.
3. We’ve this mental model of causation of acute respiratory illnesses. We’re told they’re due to submicroscopic, infectious particles called “viruses”. But if they’re not the cause, what might be? I confess I do not know. However, I laid out a decent length hypothesis a while ago on this channel. Essentially, a derangement of regulation of airway surface liquid and associated mucus and the mucocilary escalator mechanism which, among others, keeps your airways in good order.
Changes in temperature, humidity, various solutes and salts, are hypothesised to trigger an inflammatory response & it’s this that we notice as “a cold”. In this hypothetical model, if you’re run down, stressed and don’t have time to attend to your bodily clues and cues, you’re more likely to develop all sorts of syndromes.
Anyway, bottom line is, you’re being lied to about chicken influenza. Ditto cow flu. Just laugh at them and point out to others, this sounds the same sort of lying & catastrophising that we heard in early 2020.
It was mad and illogical for the events that followed to have happened. None of it happened by luck. There was an agenda to amplify whatever it was for malign motives.
The same thing appears to be happening again. Oddly enough, it’s precisely the same cast of characters as last time.
Please don’t give in to fear.
Best wishes,
Mike
Thank you Harry for sharing this item! Perhaps one of the most salient points here is "one is in no way obligated to provide a new hypothesis while invalidating a current one" --- as this seems to be one of the strongest barriers people put up when confronted with the observation that clinical trials have falsified the contagion paradigm time and time again. In the Louis Pasteur piece I linked to, the author points out that Einstein remarked that there might be mountains of confirmation to support his theory, but it would only take one instance of contradictory evidence to falsify it. Our instinct seems to be never to say "I don't know" but instead to propose an alternative or to cling to a false position until a better model is proposed. This isn't science: it's convention. And none of it would be all that bad if lives and livelihoods weren't on the line as in the present case.
Right. The covid shots (and the entire history of vaccines since Pasteur) have shown the grievous harm to human health that bad science can bring about. But it seems we can't begin to understand the true scale of the damage caused by them until "germ theory" gets officially debunked. That could happen one day. Maybe when the difference between science and convention is rediscovered.
I kept rereading the paragraph about key concepts and correspondences. Your self-dialogue there is very effective. We have to hold up these beliefs lest one fall over and take the others with it. We could see these contradictions and doubling-back moves all during Covid, of course, with its weekly do-overs, each trumpeted by the media with "now it can be told!" fervor. Now that that is over, all the sidesteps and maneuvers are once again behind the curtain, but operating nonetheless.
Good to hear, Allen. Often enough I have the experience of the scales falling from my eyes. It's at once thrilling and frightening. This particular journey regarding germ theory has been most difficult because it really is so drilled into us.
Hi Asa,
I'm not ready to engage at this battlefront yet; my research in this regard is ongoing (and also low priority). While there are certainly issues in the reigning approaches, I don't find Terrain Theory to be much more rigorously supported by the evidence. Both paradigms have significant amounts of evidence that cannot be incorporated, which suggests to me that we do not actually have a viable paradigm here yet, and that when we do it may bear a resemblance to both the current competing paradigms... but then again, it may not. My one point of agreement is that money has distorted this research area beyond hope of reaching any adequate scientific conclusion.
All the best,
Chris.
Thanks, Chris. While I value your engagement, as you know, your statements here don't add up. You say you're not ready to engage on this topic, which is fine, but then you go ahead and engage, admittedly without research, or without much of it... and without much interest ("low priority"). In fact, you come to a pretty strong conclusion: "Both paradigms have significant amounts of evidence..." But you haven't followed up on my suggestions and you seem to be saying that you have no intention of doing so. So why leave a comment on this subject at all? If you took the time to review the additional material I suggested, you'd see that what you're saying is nonsensical... or you'd be specific about any objections. You aren't obligated to know everything about or even to be interested in everything presented here. That's fine. But in this case, you're being dismissive and condescending for no apparent reason.
Apologies if I came across dismissively here, that wasn't my intent. It's low priority for me because I'm trying to hold the centre, and this topic doesn't help with this project. I don't mean it doesn't matter. You're right, though, I should have just kept my thoughts to myself in this instance.
However, since I didn't, let me try and rephrase my earlier points for clarity: I haven't finished researching this topic, but from what I've seen so far neither of these paradigms takes into account all the evidence.
I certainly don't mean to dismiss terrain theory. In paying attention to the health of the individual, it most definitely has an important part of the puzzle, and one that is routinely elided in the medical industries. Meanwhile, the fact that the germ theory camp has decided to defend its position by saying things like 'terrain theory is used to attack face masks!' etc. is so asinine (since the evidence on face mask efficacy is diaphanously thin) it can only be read as a sign of weakness. But I would never want to reach a conclusion based on the more stupid things being said about a topic.
I am very slowly making my way through the research on challenge trials, and there's much more beyond this I need to look at before I'd be in a position to debate this topic on the merits. I read a little more on it each month, but it's going to be a long, long time before I reach any definite conclusions in this regard. Frankly, I suspect an entirely new paradigm is required, but I will not live long enough to discover what it might be.
In saying this, I am not seeking to debate the scientific aspects of this topic, but rather I'm trying (however badly!) to share how I think and feel about the topic right now. Personally, I'm always open to remarks like these from others because understanding how other people think and feel is for me the purpose of discourse, and I do not like the way that we are expected to take sides on everything... This seems an odd and unhelpful development to me, especially on scientific topics. I have found that sharing my view from the side-lines, however, is often not welcome, and perhaps I should learn this lesson, but my desire to talk has tended to get me into trouble, as it has here.
I still feel able to comment on topics I haven't taken sides on, but perhaps on the whole this is the wrong age for such an attitude, and I should just sit on my hands more often. Certainly, if you took my comment dismissively, I apologise. I was just trying to share the view from my inner life, however badly I might have done so.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
No worries, Chris. As I pointed out in the article, I don't expect this article to convince anyone who isn't already moving in this direction. What I've provided are some cogent arguments against germ theory and resources for further exploration. I have not argued here *for* terrain; one needn't provide an alternative "theory" to debunk junk science. I understand that the microbe perspective is too conventional and culturally too deep-set for many to feel comfortable letting it go. But fence-sitting can get pretty hard on the bum.