There’s a meme circulating (I’ve seen it in several different iterations, and I don’t intend to repeat it here) that boils down to a claim that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has never been isolated, so how do we even know it exists?
Which claim I find interesting. How was it sequenced it if never was isolated? Because it was known to have been sequenced early on. Chinese scientists who were alarmed that their government was clamping down on information provided the sequencing data to Western scientists clear back in early 2020 (if not late 2019). (Yes, I’d have to go find the sources for that, but I’ve seen them cited multiple times. Sorry, go do your own research; I’m busy editing a book.)
[EDIT TO ADD: OK, here you go: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/sequencing-of-SARS-CoV-2.pdf
Very first paragraph (my emphasis in bold):
In January 2020, a previously unknown coronavirus strain was identified as the cause of a respiratory infection and death in humans [1]. The first viral genome was sequenced using high throughput sequencing (HTS) from a sample collected in Wuhan, China. This virus, belonging to the viral species Severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronavirus, has been subsequently named SARS-CoV-2 and the associated disease coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) [2].
The first reference ([1]) is “Zhu N, Zhang D, Wang W, Li X, Yang B, Song J, et al. A novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in China, 2019. N Engl J Med. 2020.” This is the report the Chinese government didn’t want to get out.
This happened BEFORE SARS-CoV-2 became epidemic in the United States and much of the rest of the world. END EDIT]
I don’t necessarily trust fact-checkers, certainly don’t generally trust Reuters, but the reasoning behind this claim seems rather weak, and there’s a discussion of why and how the report that led to this claim was misinterpreted here: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-cdc-idUSKBN27633R
Here’s another one: https://fullfact.org/health/Covid-isolated-virus/
I’ll make the point that I have never claimed that the virus doesn’t exist. I’ve taken its existence seriously from day one. My claim is that all of the hysteria over the virus that translated into lockdowns and masking mandates was total bullshit and intended only to destroy the economy and get Biden elected — and now the morons in charge can’t figure out how to back out of their totalitarian stance without being destroyed by the very people they convinced to fear a “deadly” virus that ended up being entirely survivable by well over 99% of the population — if they hadn’t pooh-poohed things like Vitamin D, zinc, HCQ, and ivermectin. [Edit: Sorry, I misspelled “HCQ” as “HCL” in the original post.]
I really hate it when our side pushes narratives that can be demonstrated to be untrue. It’s bad enough when the other side does it; we know they lie six times before their morning coffee anyway. We should have more restraint and spend more time checking our stories (and memes) before we put them out there.
The virus exists. Why pretend it doesn’t? Who gains? CDC, FDC, WHO, NIH/NIAID, Fauci, Birx, et al., and the rest of the medical establishment have already destroyed their reputations and authority, we don’t need to spread a patent falsehood to make that clear.
We claim to be better than that. We should prove it.