Tom graced YouTube with 2 videos entitled “Can you really catch a virus?” One of which is as follows:
Pharmacoengineering.com Does NOT endorse this garbage.
First off, whoever said you can’t catch something that is technically not alive? We use the term “catch” when you catch an illness. An illness can be caused by a myriad of different entities. This is something that you should ask the Webster dictionary. It is a moot point when it comes to whether a virus should be treated seriously.
Just because it is not alive doesn’t mean you cannot catch it.
What a general virus will contain is sugars, proteins, and nucleic acids. The virus hijacks your cells’ machinery to replicate. Why does it matter if we call it dead or alive. Viral particles can be contagious. You simply need your cells to come in contact with viral particles in sufficient quantities. If you generally come into contact with the level needed to get sick, or the multiplicity of infection (otherwise known as the average number of virion required to get sick), then you will get sick. Just because it is dead, it doesn’t mean you cannot come into contact with the level required to get sick. So yes, you can catch a virus.
In regards to viruses only infecting certain cell types, yes, that is very true. This is well documented. This is called tropism. Just because it will only infect small number of cell types or a single cell type, doesn’t mean you cannot catch it. If someone coughs viruses in your face and the viruses enter your nasal passageway, some viruses will actually have the ability to cleave their way through mucus to infect you. Viruses are not dumb. Just because they are not alive, it doesn’t mean they have not adapted to infect you when you come into contact with these non-living entities. They can hijack your microtubules and ride on in to your nucleus. These mechanisms are well documented.
Also, what is your medical license number? I doubt they are a practicing physician. If he is, he is truly shocking. For him to say he is smart and we should believe what he is saying because they had to interrogate him because he did so well on a test, has nothing to do with whether he is right about this. Einstein got a few things wrong too. Who cares that he is smart and received scholarships. Why should that be sufficient evidence? Where are his experiments backing these outrageous claims. Also, why is he swearing and being so crass. He disgusts me.
Anyway…
Did he say that viruses are nothing but a solvent? Have you looked up what a solvent is? A solvent solvates something into solution. For example, dimethyl sulfoxide is a very common solvent for many types of drugs and it helps in transdermal drug delivery applications. Please explain how a virus is a solvent. That makes absolutely zero sense.
Yes, viruses need our cells’ machinery to be replicated.
Viruses are created as a response to a build up of toxicities in our bodies? This makes zero sense. Have you looked up what a toxin is? The statement is mixing two orthogonal concepts.
Viruses’ double stranded RNA can function as a toxin. The toxin doesn’t cause viruses to replicate. The virus replicates because it can. There may be a toxic response due to the virus. There are non-viral-based toxins, such as botulinum, and if you come into contact with them, it will not generate viral particles.
He is making it sound as though if a cell becomes toxic, then the cell will replicate viruses. No. Just no.
Supermarket food and chemicals from shots and drinking tap water causing cells to become toxic? No. If these have sufficiently virulent viral particles then maybe -like contaminated tap water.
Chemicals are needed to mount an immune response to cause the body’s immune system to know it needs to mount an immune attack. We get boosters so the body knows to commit the antibodies to long-term memory. In the past, some of the chemicals are used to denature the pathogen. Engineering dna/protein enables fewer chemicals for vaccines because they can be engineered to not need to be denatured, as reversion to something virulent or pathogenic is not possible. However, adjuvants are likely still needed to signal to the immune response that it is something their immune system should learn to fight.
Being an anti-vaxer is not smart in the least. Some of the arguments made by such people were valid back when they initially started doing vaccine manufacturing but not anymore. Read vaccine wars. It is a great read.
We need some metals in our bodies, in approximately the same ratios that are found in the crust of the earth.
Plastics, pollutants and heavy metals may be toxic but have nothing to do with viruses.
It is not true that viruses don’t attack cell tissue. Yes, viruses attack the cells. If the cells are overcome with viruses, the cells lyse and viruses can go to other similar cell types and repeat the process. What is tissue? What is everything in our body that is not a cell? Did it come from cells in our body? Such as the extracellular matrix that makes up tissue? Cells make our body. If you attack cells, you attack the body’s ability to make tissue. Cells are the biological machines that make the tissue and continue to modify the tissue according to cues they receive.
Just because a specific tropism of a virus inhibits the virus from infecting ALL cell types in a body, does not mean you cannot extrapolate that to not infecting other humans. It is taking the tropism concept out of context. If the virus can infect hepatocytes, then the virus can infect hepatocytes in another similar organism. I say another similar organism because it is true that certain viruses cannot infect other species. However, viruses come in many flavors. HIV was originally in primates. It mutated and can now infect humans. If a virus can infect a bat, which is a mammal, it can more likely mutate and infect humans. This is very possible and has been documented. It is highly unlikely for an avian flu to mutate and infect us, because birds are not mammals. The more dissimilar the species are, the more unlikely it is that there can be a mutation that would lead to the beginnings of a new strain of virus that can infect a new type of organism. This is so incredibly possible.
Viruses mutating to infect new species, etc., is adaptation. If you take bacteria that only can survive at body temperature and mass produce them and slowly increase the temperature, and find just a few that survived and keep doing this, you will cause evolution to occur. The bacteria will start to live at hotter and hotter temperatures. There is another publication where they had matrigel (a 3D gel that cells can live in and crawl through) where they had a gradient of antibiotics from one side to the other. They let the bacteria start at the low end. You can literally in time watch the bacteria go right into lethal levels of antibiotics and live. Why? Because the environment is selecting for them. Only those that can live, do, and those that do live, replicate. This is the big problem with antibiotic resistance. It is an issue.
You can’t say that not everyone gets sick so it is not transmissable. Did each of the people come into contact with levels that breached the multiplicity of infection? Also, if they are already immune to what you have, which is entirely possible, then you wouldn’t think they got it… but they already did… or had the vaccine against it already.
You cannot say that a virus that infects the liver, such as hepatitis, cannot infect your heart and this “it should make sense” that it cannot spread from person to person. Zero sense. It will infect the other person’s liver and not their heart. That is the conclusion that should be made.
The rationale behind why a bunch of people will get a viral detoxification at the same time in a certain area because of the environment and climatic conditions… blah blah blah garbage. Nonsense. Again, viral particles aren’t made due to plastic toxins which he claimed earlier and tap water, etc. what?!?!? Makes zero sense. Viral particles come from viral particles. Plastics don’t give birth to viruses. The non-living viruses hijack our cells and make themselves over and over and over again. They have been doing this for eons. We have ancient viral sequence relics in our genome that are part of the human genome that encode for parts of viruses that are in our “junk” DNA.
It is honestly difficult for me to listen to this guy. I am only about half way through the video… it hurts my brain.
Sincerely,
Pharmacoengineering.com