What have we learned from 'The Great Virus Debate' between Steve Kirsch and Dr. Andrew Kaufman?
Steve Kirsch:
From your perspective you haven’t been scientifically convinced these viruses [SARS CoV2, measles, smallpox, poliomyelitis …] exist.
Dr. Andrew Kaufman:
Yeah, there’s not just enough evidence to suggest they exist.
VSRF Live #131: The Great Virus Debate! An Interview with Dr. Andrew Kaufman, M.D. (@about 35:00)
Prove the SARS-CoV2 virus doesn't exist
Steve Kirsch dukes it out with Dr. Andrew Kaufman
A “debate” took place recently between founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation Steve Kirsch, who has been an outspoken critic of the COVID-19 vaccines, and psychiatrist and molecular biologist Dr. Andrew Kaufman who is not convinced that viruses exist, let alone the one for SARS CoV2, the credited cause of the disease called COVID-19, as shown above.
Kirsch, who does not have a medical background, relies on his “experts” and mainstream research papers to challenge Dr. Kaufman on the existence of viruses even though Kirsch himself doesn’t believe "experts" when it comes to the safety of vaccines.
Kirsch predominantly latches on to one paper which he believes proves that the virus exists and uses it to try to trip up Dr. Kaufman. The paper claims that the virus was isolated from the first COVID-19 patient in the U.S. and that they were able to replicate the cell cultures four times, what the paper called “passage four stock replication.” Dr. Kaufman argues that the paper does not prove that what they are studying is the SARS CoV2 virus, wonders how they could have diagnosed the disease in the patient if they needed her samples to identify the virus's genome, and contends that scientists in China made up the initial genomic sequence of what they called SARS CoV2 based on an indiscriminate soup of a patient's lung fluid combined with partial sequences from a genome database.
Following is an excerpt from the "debate" regarding Kirsch's insistence that the study he is referencing proves the existence of the SARS-CoV2 virus (edited for clarity).
Four passages must mean something, right?
Kirsch wants Kaufman to explain how the study’s authors could have "passaged" the virus through cultures four times if the virus doesn’t exist. Kirsch repeatedly says that his team of experts told him that those passages amount to prima facia evidence that viruses exist in general and that the SARS-CoV2 virus specifically exists (starting at about 37:51).
Steven Kirsch (S.K.):
Is it possible to get to passage four stock if there's no replication?
. . .
So the paper that I'm talking about is titled “Isolation and characterization of SARS-CoV2 from the first US COVID-19 patient.”
Dr. Andrew Kaufman (A.K.):
I read that paper, but I read it . . . a couple of years ago.
Kirsch then reads the passage which he's referring to:
“We subsequently generated a fourth passage stock of SARS-CoV2 on Vero E6 cells, another fetal Rhesus monkey kidney cell line. Viral RNA from SARS-CoV2 passage four stock was sequenced and confirmed to have no nucleotide mutations compared to the original reference sequence” and then they give the Gen bank accession number in that paper.
Kirsch wants to know how he cannot agree that this proves the virus:
So how is it possible, Dr. Kaufman, to have a fourth passage if there's no replication?
Bitesize bio explains "cell passage replication:"
What Do We Mean by Cell Passage?
Cultured cells, if provided adequate space, nutrients, and environmental conditions, will grow logarithmically. However, they reach a point where space becomes limiting, and if no intervention is taken, cell growth will slow, and cells will begin to die.
This is why you need to check the confluency of your cells regularly, and once they reach about 80% confluency, you need to ‘split’ or subculture the cells. This is also known as passaging your cells.
So What is a Cell Passage Number?
Cell passage number is simply a calculation of the number of times you have split or passaged your cells. Each time you go through that process, you should increase the passage number (p number) by 1.
Details don't matter
A.K.:
Well what [are] the starting materials of that experiment, Steve? Did they have a virus and put it in there? Is there a virus in that . .?
S.K.:
You said you read the paper.
A.K.:
No, I read that paper two years ago. You think I remember the details? But I know how all these papers are done similarly. What was the starting material?
Kirsch, who doesn’t want to answer Kaufman’s question, repeats his contention that it is a generic yes or no question and claims that all the experts he’s queried have no hesitation about the correct answer.
Since Kirsch already knows that Dr. Kaufman has a contrary opinion about the certainty of viruses, it is perhaps illogical of Kirsch to expect the same answer from Kaufman that he gets from his “experts.” Kirsch claims it’s immaterial but Kaufman stands his ground, stating that without knowing all the details it’s impossible to answer the question. Without knowing all the details, how can one say what was replicating and, specifically, that it was the SARS-CoV2 virus?
S.K.:
It doesn't matter. This is a generic question. . . .
. . .
Is it possible to get to passage four stock if there is no replication? This is an easy question that when I ask any of my experts who do this stuff for a living there is no question as to what the answer to that question is and so it troubles me that you're asking questions like how is this prepared. This is a simple cut-and-dry objective question. Is it possible to get to passage four stock if there's no replication? Yes or no?
A.K.:
Steve, I can't answer that question because I don't know what you mean "is it possible?". Like I said, passage just means you pipet some fluid from one culture and put it in a subsequent culture. So, you can do that a million times, right, as long as you have enough pipets and enough cell cultures.
. . .
In order to understand what this experiment . . . because you made that question completely out of context.
> What is the experiment like?
> What are the procedures?
> How many samples do they have?
> What are they?
> Who are they from?
> Is it one sample from one patient?
> Did they purify a virus out of it?
> Did they prove a virus is in it first, before they started the experiment?
> How do you know there's a virus in the experiment?
Circular reasoning
S.K.:
I'm reading directly from the paper.
"A patient was identified with confirmed COVID-19 in Washington State on January 22nd, 2020.
Dr. Kaufman explains that the paper's authors used circular reasoning to come to their determination.
The Background section of the paper from which Kirsch is reading, explains that the authors claim to have isolated the virus from the first U.S. COVID-19 patient and then took those samples to describe the virus's genomic sequence.
In this manuscript, we describe isolation of virus from the first US COVID-19 patient and described its genomic sequence and replication characteristics.
But Dr. Kaufman makes the point that in order to use the PCR test to determine that the patient did indeed have the disease called COVID-19, they needed to know the genomic sequence of the SARS-CoV2 virus beforehand. So, if they already had the sequence for the PCR test, then why would they need to take samples from the patient in order to learn its genomic sequence? In other words, if they didn't know the virus's genomic sequence before the samples were taken to determine the sequence, how could they use a PCR test which uses the sequence to know she the patient had COVID-19 in the first place?
A.K.:
You're talking about a paper that proves that COVID exists. How can you start with already knowing that they have COVID?
S.K.:
Because we're talking about COVID-19 which is the disease, not SARS-CoV2 which is the virus.
A.K.:
How do you diagnose COVID though?
S.K.:
Okay, so what they did is they used a cycle threshold of 18 to 20 both in the throat swabs and nasal swabs.
A.K.:
Okay, so they did a PCR test, right?
S.K.:
They did a PCR test, correct.
A.K.:
Now, how do you know that the PCR tests can diagnose COVID?
S.K.:
No, they didn't they didn't say that. They just said that it was confirmed that the PCR test said it was COVID and that they did. . .
A.K.:
The whole thing is based on that that patient has Covid, right?
S.K.:
Okay
A.K.:
Wait, they're saying they have COVID because they have a genetic test, right? That the genetic test is supposedly testing genetic sequences from a virus. But this experiment is to prove that there's a virus. So they assume there's a virus, they have a test for it . . . without ever finding it, and then they use the test results to prove that it exists. This is circular reasoning. Where's the prima facia evidence that there's a virus in the first place?
Method madness
Further along in the "debate" Kirsch seems fixated on proving that the genomic sequencing claims of scientists around the world must prove the existence of the virus to the point of trying to intimidate Dr. Kaufman. It is only at the end that Kirsch is forced to allow him to explain how scientists created what they claimed to be the genomic sequence of the virus causing the disease named COVID-19..
X user Kristen Welch commented on Kirsch's attempts at straw-man arguments and insistence on talking about genomic sequencing rather than about the foundational flaws in the isolation and identification of the SARS CoV2 virus.
Kirsch straw-man’s endlessly, interrupts his guest, and flounders around talking about genome sequencing instead of addressing the foundational flaws in virology such as cell culture or isolation procedures.
What about chicken pox?
Kirsch continued to focus on the replications during "passages," as well as the millions of positive COVID test to try to prove that viruses exist, despite Kaufman pointing out each time that the very first genome was taken not from an isolated virus but from lung fluid containing both human tissue and other organic material:
A.K.:
Steve you're using the wrong word. It's not "validated." [The PCR test has] been "repeated." And . . . when you repeat something that's incorrect, and it goes the same . . . all that tells you is that you are incorrect to begin with. It doesn't tell you that you're right because you can repeat the same mistake and get similar results.
Listeners, however, were intent on expanding the discussion. One listener, a nurse, was interested in how Dr. Kaufman would respond to chicken pox outbreaks. To this, the doctor explained:
A.K.:
I don't know if someone actually observed that [children are more likely to get chicken pox after being near another child with chicken pox] or they're just saying that other people say that, but I'm glad you brought up contagion. . . . [There are] over 90 actually scientific controlled studies of contagion where they're trying to use various techniques to pass an illness from one person to another. . . .
They had a variety of different body fluids, bronchial fluid, saliva, nasal secretions. even blood from patients in the hospital during Spanish Flu outbreaks and they put them in a bunch of volunteers, in many, many different ways: they squirted it up their nose, they had them get really close to each other and one exhaled and the other inhaled. And they did this on a Spanish Flu ward where everyone had the Spanish Flu. They even did experiments where they injected the fluid into healthy recipients and they could not make anyone sick, whatsoever. And they mention, even in this paper, that there was another site with a different investigators doing a similar series of experiments. They couldn't get anyone sick and it turns out, like I said, there's over 90 studies just on the cold and flu contagion that essentially demonstrate that it is not a contagious illness whatsoever.
At one point, Kirsch appears to not understand Dr. Kaufman's assertion that viruses pictured by electron microscopes are indistinguishable from exosomes, and thus may themselves be mere exosomes, carrying out the same transport function as other exosomes. Kirsch asked Dr. Kaufman whether he believes that exosomes cause Covid, to which Dr. Kaufman responded:
A.K.:
No, exosomes don't cause anything; they're a result of diseased cells.
Watch the entire "debate" in the video below:
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