Dr Tom Cowan’s critique on my no-virus article
by Mees Baaijen, March 13, 2025
Again, the highly ornamental Bromelia virus
Yesterday I was honored by dr. Tom Cowan, who dedicated almost 20 minutes of his precious podcast time to my recent article Virus or no-virus? Germs or terrain?
I am also very grateful that he used his genius to tele-diagnose me, without any cost, with the Syndrome of Insufficient Thinking (SIT), a severe and contagious disease which he discovered some years ago. Before going into any detail on my article, he then describes my case further by saying that my paper and my person are full of SIT. He sure was not familiar with the high praise my work often gets, otherwise he would have arrived at the diagnosis SHIT (where H stands for Heroic).
In the same shrewd way (see here) as in his book The Contagion Myth, considered the Bible of the no-virus proponents, he than misrepresents my paper entirely. I start by saying that the heavy technical scientific lifting has already been done by others (with links to two articles), and that I just want to tell of few stories on how the no-virus/bacteria theory goes totally against my 50-year experience as a field veterinarian and farmer, in six different countries.
I then come to the central hypothesis of this paper, on a logical fallacy in the no-virus/bacteria view, which says:
Based on logic and Occam’s Razor, the general rule in the absence of germs would be:
highly variable terrain patterns cannot lead to
uniformized and synchronized disease patterns.
The uniformizing and synchronizing agent is of course the germ! Maybe this metaphor helps: imagine that everybody has a bucket containing their extremely varied personal terrain factors, filled since birth (in fact from conception, and even earlier). Then a group of people suddenly presents the symptoms of what is normally called an infectious disease. According to the terrain theory, that’s because all these buckets, with their hugely diverse contents and filling levels, start to overflow simultaneously, in a collective, spontaneous detox. And all are outpouring the exact same sludge: the huge disparity in terrain factors suddenly results in a relatively uniform pattern of disease symptoms. But that’s not a logical or believable conclusion. Many medical doctors even think that it’s a symptom of a contagious disease, “pea brain”.
So, disease causing organisms, or germs, remain as the only logical explanation for the clinical and pathological uniformity observed in such disease outbreaks.
Dr. Cowan craftily avoids any discussion of this central part and only focuses on the clinical/pathological stories I tell. He finds them worthless, because as a field veterinarian in a very poor African country in the 1980s, I supposedly made the enormous mistake to use only clinical and pathological (necropsy) diagnoses, instead of having my own virology lab always with me, with well trained personnel, a beautiful secretary, and sophisticated equipment. He then admits that he is making fun of the author, even in a mean way, which clearly shows that he’s in fact an honest and nice person.
Yet along the way he misreads my term “Ehrlichia infected blood” as “pus”, and even two times! Note that he also makes such Malicious Slips of the Tongue in his book (see link above). Maybe he suffers from the dangerous MST syndrome?
Death blow to no-virus
After my viral virus paper came out, several readers tipped me on conclusive evidence for the existence of viruses. One is a stunning article by Eckard Wimmer about the far-reaching implications of the test-tube synthesis of a “chemical called poliovirus”. Basically this means that anybody can take a virus specification (from the internet), buy the required ingredients (nucleotides) off the shelf, and make their own virus by stringing the (RNA or DNA) beads.
The second item is a very impressive book by Adam Finnegan (a Lyme disease patient), The Sleeper Agent, on the early years of the science of virology (since 1892!), and on the almost simultaneous start of the development of viral, bacterial and other bioweapons. The central figure is Dr. Erich Traub, a German veterinarian who worked for Nazi Germany, Russia and the USA.
An important theme is Dr. Traub’s discovery of the two types of disease caused by germs: the inflammatory type, where the immune system reacts, creates symptoms, abnormal blood parameters and antibodies; and a second type, immune tolerance, where the immune system is paralyzed, no antibodies are created, and the blood parameters stay normal, but the patient is feeling as “run over by a truck”, and is easily infected by other germs (as in Lyme disease or in long Covid, and after Covid jabs).
For an explanation in plain English by Adam, see his 50-minute video “Deconstructing the no-virus theory”.
To conclude:
You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep-seated need [of all humans] to believe.
Dr. Arroway, in Contact (1985), by Carl Sagan
I haven't read Tom Cowan's piece, and I don't trust him not least because of involvement with the occult, but here's my critique :-).
1. The germ / contagion theory is clearly an elegant hypothesis which seems to explain at least some observations very well - thus far we are in agreement.
2. However - the purpose of "science" is to design appropriate experiments to test hypotheses and show whether they are true or not. In the case of viruses, such experiments do not provide the proof which should have been easy to provide. In essence there are four kinds of experiments which have been done:
(a) initial experiments to "isolate" viruses and show that the "isolated virus" can cause disease. As far as I can discover these experiments are all deeply flawed in two senses
(i) none of them involved a proper control arm and/or the control arm produced the same result as the active arm of the experiment.
(ii) "causing the disease" is often conflated with cytopathic effect - which are of course two different things.
(b) subsequent experiments to gather information about a virus (e.g. molecular structure etc.) which all beg the question - in other words they assume that the initial experiment (a) successfully proved the existence of a virus, when that was not the case.
(c) detection experiments to try and find viruses directly in samples taken from a patient. This has never been successfully done despite the fact that we are told that millions of virus particles sufficient to cause infection are present not only in the sick patient's cells, but that they survive in droplets, on surfaces etc. for a long enough period to cause infection. This is all highly counter-intuitive - there is no really good reason which stands up to scrutiny which explains why virus particles cannot be found in the cells of a patient who supposedly has the disease but can only be found after being cultured in diseased kidney cells of a different animal which is not even susceptible to the disease.
(d) controlled contagion experiments to show that disease does indeed pass from one patient to another. Again these experiments have all failed to show that people exposed to sick people acquire disease more frequently than people who are not so exposed. If contagion occurred it really should not be difficult to show - but dozens and dozens of properly controlled experiments (from tobacco mosiac virus on), some involving many thousands of patients, have failed to show evidence of contagion.
3. There have been several cases where diseases which doctors thought were contagious because of the type of observation you have advanced as evidence of contagion have now been definitively shown to be caused by terrain. Beri-beri is one such, and scurvy another.
4. The reason we conduct controlled experiments is because hard experience has taught scientists of the danger of drawing conclusions purely from observation. Yes of course observations should guide the initial hypothesis - but if experiments fail to confirm the hypothesis then it MUST be discarded. Just because alternative explanations don't seem convincing is not sufficient reason to stick with a seductive explanation which has failed the test of science.
PS Oh - and let's not forget (5) - the germ theory of disease has
(a) been pushed very hard by deeply untrustworthy people. The Rockefellers are intertwined with modern medicine to an enormous extent.
(b) been enormously profitable for drug salesmen - i.e. the same Rockefellers who have worked so hard to corrupt medicine with their ideas.
The definition of isolation is to separate one thing from everything else. In the example of viruses, this has never been done. As much as you think it must have been or we wouldn’t have vaccines for example or micrographs showing them, this is false. Without a completely isolated item with which to test a theory of contagion and causation of disease, the whole of germ theory falls on its face. If there is one properly made scientific paper without flaws and with proper controls to prove a virus has been isolated and used to create disease in another person (or animal) by natural means, ie inhalation, then the no virus group will admit defeat. It’s never happened and the paper doesn’t exist. Viruses are a total hoax. If you want to learn the real history of viruses and vaccines then Roman Bystrianyk’s substack is great. As is Daniel Roytas’ book “Can You Catch A Cold” as is Jamie Andrew’s substack. Hope that helps