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Comment by drukenemo | Hacker News Reader

This is all fascinating, but apparently the original virus hasn't been yet purified?

https://www.samueleckert.net/isolat-truth-fund/

This (or a similar project) came up in a discussion i've had last week. After a bit of research my conclusion is that their definition of "publications that scientifically prove the process of isolation of SARS-CoV-2" isn't the same as the one used in academic publishing as there are multiple publications that do that. A german one [1] literally has a section titled "Isolation of an infectious SARS‐CoV‐2 virus".

The one I read required a double blind controlled study that injects the isolated alive virus into multiple humans/at least primates which then have to develop symptoms. I guess if somebody did that they would move the goal posts again.

On your page I can't even find a definition of what they would accept as "scientifically prove the process of isolation".

[1] https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embj.2020106230

That's a crank website: it claims that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't even exist.

It claims there's no documented proof of it being isolated and purified.

There are tons of SARS-CoV-2 isolates. It took me about a minute to locate two papers detailing isolation of the virus:

* "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 from Patient with Coronavirus Disease, United States": https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2606.200516

* "Isolation and characterization of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in Turkey": https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238614

The website also has an article titled, "Die Virusexistenzbehauptungen von SARS-CoV-2 sind eindeutig widerlegt," which translates to, "The claims of the existence of the virus SARS-CoV-2 are definitively disproved."

Yeah but their method for proving that you have an isolate is not the same as the one used in academic research.

Typical pseudo-scientific conspiracy theory FUD.

Are you in the field to understand what they are requesting and what the papers you’ve found say? Because I am not making statements here.

The person running that website and making these demands is not in the field. If you want to get a glimpse of a bizarre alternate reality, just take a look at the other articles on that website or scroll through his Twitter feed.

Virology is not my field, but I understand enough to follow the papers I linked to above. They describe the isolation of live/active virus from patient samples. There is active research with cultured SARS-CoV-2 virus in BSL-3 labs around the world. It's just bizarre that there are people who believe the virus doesn't exist, or that it doesn't cause CoVID-19.

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