Comparing the Isolation of HIV to the Isolation of SARS-COV-2

By Julie Beal

Hundreds of scientists questioned the discovery of HIV, alleged to be the first human retrovirus. They were critical of many aspects of this discovery, but they were all based on the fact that HIV was not provably isolated or purified. Since then, a handful of scientists have tried extending some of these criticisms to other viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, but their theories are flawed by a misunderstanding of, i) the difference between isolation and purification, and the limits of what can be achieved, ii) methods of genetic sequencing, and, iii) the uses and limits of PCR. All of these technologies have matured significantly since the 1980s and will be explored further in separate articles.

There were plenty of valid reasons to question the alleged isolation of a HIV virus and hundreds of scientists agreed about this, including Kary Mullis[i] (the man who invented RT-PCR). But their arguments cannot be directly transferred to the rona (or other viruses) as this article seeks to show.

The important thing to keep in mind throughout is that proof of isolation is not proof of something that causes disease. When an isolate of the rona is obtained, it is evidence that something very similar was inside the person the sample was taken from. The nature of this physical entity can also be confirmed by genetic sequencing, proteomics, electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and yes, even RT-PCR. All of these details merely describe its form and constituents; they do not confirm that this entity causes disease but, for various reasons, it’s called ‘virus’ by those who study it.

Proof of isolation is not proof of a naturally-occurring disease, either, because it’s possible to obtain an isolate from somebody who’s been infected with a virus that was designed and created by a human being.

To find out if a virus-thing is able to cause disease, scientists look at symptoms and autopsy results, do experiments on animals, and see what happens to cell cultures infected with the virus, all of which seem like reasonable enquiries. But RT-PCR tests never prove disease.

The Alleged Discovery of HIV

The two men credited with the discovery of HIV were Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier. Critics say they were trying to find a retrovirus to explain the cause of AIDS, and to do this, they looked for evidence of reverse transcriptase activity. They performed an experiment in which they were successful at detecting reverse transcriptase activity and they also saw particles coming out of the cells, so they claimed these particles must be retroviruses. It’s argued that this is not enough evidence and that they did not provide proof of isolation. The experiments were performed by adding T cells from a patient with leukemia to a cell culture sourced from the lymphocytes of an umbilical cord. Various things were then added to the cell culture, which critics claim stimulated the cells and caused a reaction. The Perth Group, for instance, point out that adding PHA[ii], IL-2, antiserum to human interferon, and other oxidizing agents to uninfected cells produces the same results as the HIV experiments which had added supposedly infected cells from a patient with leukaemia. Thus, they say, Gallo and Montagnier both failed to prove the existence of a unique retrovirus called HIV, and that instead of coming from outside the body, it could have been produced by the T cells themselves.

These critics were not claiming that viruses don’t exist at all. They were specifically questioning the alleged discovery of a retrovirus by Gallo and Montagnier by comparing their techniques to standard ‘virus discovery’ techniques. For example, it’s standard practice to look for antibodies to a virus, because this is held to be one of the ways to prove the existence of a virus, but critics claim this was not achieved with HIV.  In contrast, nobody has claimed that antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 do not exist, but there is a currently a popular belief that the alleged SARS-CoV-2 virus is produced by the cells themselves, just like HIV. It’s even claimed that all viruses are the product of the cells themselves. However, whilst critics of the HIV theory think that a particular type of cell helped to create viral particles with reverse transcriptase activity, followers of Stefan Lanka have gone a whole lot further. Lanka asserts that all viruses are simply the product of dying cells, and he says virologists make the cells die by adding toxic substances. In other words, Lanka claims that viruses are created by killing cells in the lab, but this is entirely untrue.

When scientists are trying to see if there are viruses in a sample, they add the sample to a cell culture and then add a combination of FBS, DMEM and antibiotics. FBS stands for fetal bovine serum, which is the serum part of blood, taken from a baby cow. DMEM is a mixture of vitamins and amino acids. Lanka claims this mixture causes cells to die (known as a cytopathic effect) which then creates the release of various particles, but quite the opposite is true because FBS, DMEM and antibiotics are what keep the cells alive and free of bacteria.

You’d be amazed just how normal it is to use cell cultures; they’ve got thousands of different uses other than growing viruses, but they only work if they’re kept alive! It’s a very ugly and unnatural affair, but the point is, a cell culture has to be kept alive or it’s a useless waste of money! Cells replicate and keep on doubling when they’re healthy, and the longer that goes on for, the better, from a purely financial point of view. So cells are fed, kept at the correct temperature and pH, and CO2 is added, but even then, they don’t last much longer than 30 passages. When the cells are no longer viable, they have to be discarded.

Lanka also claims that control experiments are never performed but again, this is also untrue. A control experiment[iii] involves comparing infected cells to uninfected cells, i.e. cells with a sample added, and the same kind of cells with no sample added. The uninfected cells are called ‘mock-infected’ cells, and pictures are taken to show that viruses are coming out of the infected cells but not out of the mock-infected cells. In other words, the uninfected cells remain healthy but the virus-infected cells start to die off, and this is known as a cytopathic effect, or CPE.

This control experiment was performed by the first scientists to isolate SARS-CoV-2 – the team led by Zeng Li Shi in Wuhan. Not long afterwards, the CDC isolated the virus from a patient in Washington. Both sets of researchers provided photos comparing infected cells with mock-infected cells (available here and here). Since these were the first groups of scientists to claim the existence of a new kind of virus, it’s their work we need to check for proof of isolation and purification, in the same way that others have scrutinized the work of the two men who claimed they’d discovered a retrovirus, i.e. Gallo and Montagnier. To do this, however, we need to be quite clear what we mean by ‘proof of isolation and purification’ – how should these things be done? And what is the difference between the two? Engelbrecht and Demeter, for example, specify, “… only a virus, proven through isolation and purification, can be a solid gold standard…”.  Frustratingly, however, none of the no-virus theorists have been able to say how a virus should be isolated and many of them confuse isolation with purification[iv], as if they are the same.

For example, Englebrecht and Demeter contacted various scientists[v] who’d published pictures of SARS-CoV-2 viral particles coming out of cells and asked them if the particles had been purified. None of these scientists claimed to have proven the existence of the rona, and none of them said they’d purified their isolates, but they did use genetic sequencing and other methods to ‘confirm’ the presence of the rona.

The original evidence for the existence of the rona was presented by researchers in China – at first it was genetic sequencing by the China CDC and metatranscriptomics by the Shanghai lab. But then came the first ‘isolation’ by researchers at the WIV.

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Their research will be described more fully in a separate article, but we’re not going to know if they did it ‘correctly’ according to the no-virus theorists unless they can specify how it should be done[vi]. Scientists at the WIV, led by Zeng Li Shi, were the first ones to produce viruses from a patient sample. They said they had “successfully isolated the virus … from both Vero E6 and Huh7 cells” using a sample from patient ICU-06. They called it 2019-nCoV. Isolating the virus involved adding the genetic material from the patient’s sample to monkey cells and cancer cells and finding that viruses started coming out of them, all with a distinctive ‘coronavirus look about them’. The cells were kept alive with DMEM containing 10% FBS, and bacteria were controlled using penicillin and streptomycin; they were incubated for three days by which point, “clear cytopathogenic effects were observed”.

Vero E6 cells are from a monkey kidney, and Huh7 cells were obtained from the cancerous liver of a Japanese man, so they are both epithelial cell types. Vero cells are commonly used to culture viruses, especially in the vaccine industry. In contrast, the HIV virus was cultivated in T cells, and a T cell is a type of lymphocyte. T cells are white blood cells that originate from the bone marrow and play a role in the immune response, e.g. CD8+ killer T cells, and CD4+ helper T cells. They can be cytotoxic and kill off cells and they’re also involved in preventing an autoimmune response.

Dr Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos – Dr. Val Turner – House of Numbers

The need for purification

Dr Papadopulos and others have pointed out that neither Gallo nor Montagnier provided proof that the retrovirus-like particles had been purified, and said the pictures of particles coming out of cells did not prove the virus had originated from outside of the body. They think the reverse transcriptase activity could have been the result of the cell culture conditions, or the drugs being taken by people in the gay community, such as poppers (to get a high) or AZT (meant to counteract HIV). They also say reverse transcriptase activity occurs in normal human cells.

According to Dr. Papadopulos, “Montagnier and Gallo published electron micrographs [EMs] of culture fluids that had not been centrifuged, or even separated from the culture cells, for that matter. …. But photographs of unpurified particles don’t prove that those particles are viruses.” She says the only way to purify a sample is to, “culture cells, find a particle, isolate the particle, take it to pieces, find out what’s inside, and then prove those particles are able to make more of the same with the same constituents when they’re added to a culture of uninfected cells.” She says that Montagnier and Gallo should have proved the particles were from a retrovirus by showing they were in the 1.16 gm/ml band of the density gradient.

ISOLATION IS THE GOLD STANDARD

“Virus isolation in cell cultures has long served as the ‘gold standard’ for virus detection, and it is the method to which all others have been compared.” As noted by Christine Johnson, copy-editor of Reappraising AIDS, “The concept of virus isolation as a gold standard is particularly important in the case of HIV, since HIV has been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to define in genetic or molecular terms.”

According to Dr Papadopulos, “The use of viral isolation as an independent means of establishing the presence or absence of the virus is technically known as a gold standard, and is a quintessential element for the authentication of any diagnostic test.”

To prove that HIV is “a unique molecular entity”, the particles seen coming out of cells should be isolated, “that is, by obtaining them separate from everything else, extracting the nucleic acids and demonstrating that such particles are identical (their constituents including their nucleic acids are identical) and infectious.” The best way to do this, they say, is to examine infected cell cultures to confirm the particles have a distinct size and appearance, and then to centrifuge the cells using sucrose density gradients, where the particles should band together at a density of 1.16 gm/ml. This experiment should also be repeatable. It should be proven that when the particles are introduced into secondary cultures, the particles are taken up by the cells; and eventually translated into proteins, with the end result being that more identical particles are released from the cells. For most viruses, this is proof they are infectious, say the Perth Group, but retroviruses are different because it’s normal for healthy cells to contain retroviral sequences.

As specified by Roberto A. Giraldo, the ‘proper procedure’ for isolating and purifying retroviruses involves:

(1) “Concentration of the viral particles by centrifugation;

(2) Electron microscopy monitoring of the concentrated viral particles;

(3) Biochemical and genetic analysis of the purified viral particles;

(4) Controlling the experiments to avoid misinterpreting endogenous retroviruses as exogenous infectious retroviruses; and

(5) Biological tests to ascertain if the isolated retrovirus is indeed potentially pathogenic and virulent …”

The first two steps, says Giraldo, were omitted; there was no proof they had isolated the HIV virus using centrifugation, and the EM photos showing particles coming out of cells are not proof of viruses, because the same particles come out of uninfected cultures.

Purification using centrifugation

The use of centrifugation to purify a sample is described in a 2007 article (‘Role of Cell Culture for Virus Detection in the Age of Technology’) by Leland and Ginocchio. They say that most labs will “clarify certain sample types (e.g., respiratory samples) before adding them to cell cultures.” This is achieved by vortexing and centrifuging the sample, so that “bacteria, fungi, cells, blood, mucus, fibers, etc., are pelleted into the bottom of the spun tube, while the viruses, which will not be spun down by the g-force generated by most general laboratory centrifuges, remain dispersed throughout the liquid.”

Apart from this, it is also standard practice to perform whole genome sequencing of a sample, and if a virus is suspected, the RNA is isolated first. The Wuhan researchers followed all of these protocols when they first started analysing patient samples. For patient ICU-06, a series of purification steps were performed on the sample to obtain a supernatant; this involved “centrifugation at 2,500 rpm, vortexing for 60 s and a standing period of 15–30 min.” Following this, the RNA was extracted from the supernatant, then, before adding it to the cell culture, it was “spun at 8,000g for 15 min” and then filtered.

The Wuhan researchers analysed the specimen they’d isolated using next-generation sequencing and obtained over 10 million reads, but then they filtered out all reads from the human genome, leaving just 1,582 sequences, and 87.1% of them matched the genome of SARS. After that, they started piecing the reads together, using the ‘de novo assembly’ method that is required for novel organisms that haven’t been sequenced before. As is standard practice, they also used PCR to amplify target sections, and ended up with a full coronavirus genome that was very similar to another coronavirus called ‘BJ01’ as well as SARS. They also obtained full-length genome sequences from the other four patient samples using next generation sequencing; all of them matched the genome of 2019-nCoV, and they were all “more than 99.9% identical to each other”.

So was the rona isolated and purified?

If we look back at Giraldo’s checklist of how to purify a virus, and compare this list to what the Wuhan researchers did, we can see that:

(1) The viral particles were concentrated by centrifugation;

(2) They were photographed using electron microscopy;

(3) Biochemical and genetic analysis of the purified viral particles was performed, and the particles were shown to be highly similar to previously isolated coronaviruses. (These first three steps have since been repeated thousands of times because the rona has been ‘isolated’ from loads of other people.)

(4) A control experiment was performed to show that uninfected cells did not have these viral particles in them.

(5) Various animals were subsequently challenged with SARS-CoV-2 viral particles to see if they were indeed potentially pathogenic and virulent, and they generally caused a few flu-like symptoms and minor damage to their lungs, which is vague enough to be ‘similar’ to lots of other respiratory illnesses.

Another important point to note is that whereas HIV was supposed to be the first human retrovirus, SARS-CoV-2 is supposed to be a slightly different version of a well-known virus called SARS-CoV!!! Dozens of SARS-type viruses have been analysed and catalogued over the last twenty years, which is why the genome of the rona was sequenced so quickly.

Reasons to consider the evidence in this article

Anyone reading this article is probably already aware the world has gone a bit crazy. Everything is twisted and wrong, meanings have been turned upside-down, and nobody knows if they’re coming or going. All of this comes from being aware of the fact that masks are more dangerous than helpful, cases and deaths are being misrepresented, and the true figures for deaths from all causes are almost a non-event. As a result, it seems to make sense that there is no virus at all, but then again, maybe it also makes the world seem that bit crazier. For example, if you’re gonna say viruses do not exist, you’re gonna have to dismiss the entire genetics industry, because the methods they use to sequence a virus are basically the same as the methods they use to sequence other organisms.

So maybe it makes more sense that a ‘real’ virus was required for the ronascam, because it would have been hard to pull off otherwise. The tests wouldn’t have worked properly and it would have been almost impossible to stage. Scientists are still fallible, and they were definitely primed for a coronavirus pandemic, so perhaps that’s all that was needed. Instead of being frauds that invent viruses from nothing, maybe they’re just caught up in the hype, like most people. If so, the world seems a bit less crazy and easier to comprehend.

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Apart from that, the evidence presented in this and other articles might help you decide whether or not the rona is real, and if so, what effects it might have. If it is real, then maybe it was released on purpose, and maybe that tells us more about the architects of the Reset, especially when considered together with the history of vaccines.

If the rona is real, we can start asking, so what about ADE?[vii] What about the vax they had ready? Does the virus fit the vax? What kind of virus is it? Were any other outbreaks caused by lab-made viruses?

Because you’ve got to admit, if they thought it would work, the technocrats wouldn’t hesitate to design and release a virus, so they could break everything down and build back better for them.

Notes:

[i] According to Mullis, “PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV, and some of those people came down with symptoms of AIDS. But that doesn’t begin even to answer the question, ‘Does HIV cause it?’” He also said people are full of retroviruses, and he didn’t think they cause us any harm.

[ii] PHA stands for phytohemagglutinin, which is “a type of mitogen that helps lymphocytes to grow”.

[iii] In a video showing ‘control experiments’, Stefan Lanka demonstrated a cytopathic effect in a cell culture which was treated with the usual 10% FBS at first, but the amount of FBS was then drastically reduced to 1% and at the same time, the amount of antibiotic was greatly increased. Lanka used ‘AbAm’ which stands for ‘Amphotericin B’, an antibiotic that kills fungus as well as bacteria, so when yeast RNA was added to the cells, a cytopathic effect could have been created when the yeast and the AbAm reacted.

[iv] The buoyant density of coronavirus in a sucrose density gradient is 1.15–1.20 g/cm3 – but nobody seems to be askin

nobody seemed to be looking for this kind of detail, perhaps because of the results of the genetic sequencing that was so fundamental in declaring the new virus.

[v]One of the people contacted by Engelbrecht and Demeter was a coronavirus expert called Malik Peiris; his lab produced what is known as an ‘isolate’, and they warn users that it’s not pure! It contains “a mixed viral population” and only “a minority of viral genomes” contain the rona, so they suggest using plaque purification to concentrate the amount of SARS-CoV-2 in cultures. Another study criticized by Engelbrecht and Demeter was by Han et al, who said that after extracting the RNA, “Virus replication and isolation were confirmed through cytopathic effects, gene detection, and electron microscopy.” A third study by Wan Beom Park et al. includes pictures of a “negative control” with no cytopathic effects. The isolate was fully sequenced.

[vi] It would also help if they could specify how to confirm what exosomes are, what role is played by microbes that live inside of us, and if there’s a method of genetic sequencing they can recommend to help figure it all out.

[vii]ADE stands for antibody dependent enhancement, and it refers to somebody getting a more severe form of disease as a result of being vaccinated. Why are so many people testing positive since the vax?

See Julie Beal’s entire archive HERE

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