Do We Really Catch a Cold or Flu?
Did you know that no one has ever seen a virus? Not even with the strongest electron microscope or other technology at our disposal. What we call a virus is actually a concept developed in the early 20th century at the height of the germ theory debate that spawned a whole field of medicine called virology.
But if no one has ever seen a virus or isolated it in a living cell according to strict scientific protocols, how do we know that they exist at all, let alone make someone sick or pass a sickness from one person to another?
The concept of contagion and illness coming from germs is so engrained in our upbringing and day to day life these days you may be thinking this issue isn’t up for debate but in fact there’s a reason we refer to germ “theory” of disease. It has never been proven scientifically and there are many scientists and doctors (currently and through the ages) who do not think it holds water at all.
The Fear of Contagion
When I was 11 or 12 I was suspected of catching typhoid while on vacation with my family in Portugal. Typhoid is allegedly caused by the salmonella typhi bacteria and can be a serious condition. Back in the UK I was sent to the isolation ward of a large hospital and kept there for a week where I was confined to a room alone with very little contact even with nurses. One night I heard a terrible commotion in another room and came to find out a baby had died. My parents were allowed to visit for short periods but had to wear a full mask and gown outfit and not come too close. The whole ordeal was rather traumatic.
Typhoid, cholera, and syphilis are some of the bacterial illnesses of old that were said to have caused many deaths and drove the development of germ theory. The understanding of good hygiene and nutrition was starting to gather steam around the same time but the blaming of a foreign entity as the cause of disease entered the imagination and took hold of the narrative.
Germ Theory was originally developed by Louis Pasteur towards the end of the 19th century. It’s why we refer to pasteurization as the process of heating food to high temperatures to kill microbes that might harm us. But the history books tell a more nuanced story about a competing theory at the time called Terrain Theory, developed by Antoine Béchamp, which stated that the health of the body (the terrain) is what drives disease.
Pasteur was better connected than Béchamp and used some underhanded tactics to maintain his position –revealed years after his death when his journals were released to the public by his ancestors.
The veracity of Pasteur’s methods were questionable and it is even reported that he refuted germ theory on his death bed and admitted the terrain is everything. But the seed had been planted and with the superior marketing of chemical-based pharmaceuticals led by J.D. Rockefeller in the early 20th century, and the rising status of the allopathic field of medicine (what we today call conventional or western medicine) germ theory became the lens that most doctors looked through.
There was actually a third theory around that time called Zymotic Theory or “chemical” theory of disease. The central premise was that diseases like tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid were caused by toxic chemicals or poisons known as zymas.
There were two sources of zymas: exogenous sources such as those produced when microbes broke down raw sewage, animal carcasses and landfill that could be harmful when ingested or absorbed by humans; and endogenous waste products produced inside the body such as metabolic waste.
This theory fell somewhere between germ theory and terrain theory as poor sanitation and nutrition were certainly major factors. Microbes were seen as friends not foes with bacteria assumed to migrate to diseased tissue to decompose it enabling the body to eliminate it as pus.
Over time zymotic theory merged into germ theory and they replaced the word zymas with germs. But interestingly the word “virus” derives from the Latin for “toxin” or “poison” and used to be defined in English dictionaries as “a poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease”.
Modern virology has now adjusted the definition of a virus to “a small, non-cellular obligate parasite carrying non-host genetic information”. “Small” in this case means sub-microscopic, hundreds of times smaller than human cells, and essentially self-replicating by hijacking the machinery of the cells it infects; though the process has never been seen and only assumed.
Breaking Their Own Rules
One of the other scientists championing germ theory in the late 1800s was Robert Koch who was focused on tuberculosis and experiments with rabbits. Building on the work of others, he established now famous scientific principles that would ensure an accurate application of the scientific method in identifying different diseases. Remember, at this point the thinking was that all disease is the result of a germ.
Known as Koch’s Postulates the principles state:
The same organism must be present in every case of the disease but should not be found in healthy animals.
The organism must be isolated from the diseased host (animal) and grown in a pure culture.
The isolate must cause the disease when inoculated into a healthy susceptible animal.
The organism must be re-isolated from the inoculated diseased animal.
Taken at face value we can agree that Koch’s Postulates do follow the scientific method and are still completely relevant today as any lay person thinking critically will acknowledge.
However, applying these principles caused germ theory to break down pretty quickly once it became apparent that so called pathogenic bacteria can also be found in healthy people. They break down completely when looking for viruses as we’ll come back to below. But an industry that wants to see the world through germ theory finds ways around these inconvenient truths.
Even champions of germ theory now concede that less than 1 per cent of the millions of bacteria species in existence are potentially pathogenic. For example, helicobacter pylori (H.Pylori for short) was once thought to be the cause of stomach ulcers and was celebrated for being “discovered”. It has since been acknowledged that H. Pylori is regularly found in healthy people, breaking the first postulate.
Salmonella has been blamed for outbreaks of “food poisoning”. But salmonella of all serotypes is also found in healthy people. Poisoning is likely an accurate word with many people ingesting the same toxin at the same time from a single food source.
As our understanding of the importance of our microbiome to health grows (all the microbes found in and on us) we see more references to a healthy balance between “good” and “bad” bacteria. This continues the narrative that bacteria cause disease and that contagion occurs –where illness can pass from one person to another –by the transmission of a microbe.
Blame a Germ Unless Proven Otherwise
There are many examples in history where a germ has been blamed for a disease that had an entirely different root cause. Some examples include:
Now known to be caused by a severe lack of vitamin C, this scourge of naval forces worldwide was thought to be caused by some type of microbe with sailors isolated once they fell sick rather than being offered the fresh fruits and vegetables they had been lacking.
Now known to be caused by a lack of vitamin B3 (niacin) was thought to be contagious as recently as 100 years ago with sufferers deemed “Pellegrins” and shunned from society. Defined by the four D’s of dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and eventual death, it tended to inflict groups of people at the same time and be cyclical in nature. It was ultimately found that seasonal diets were to blame when people ran out of money in the winter months.
Similarly now known to be caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1 (thiamine) and vitamin D respectively, were once considered infectious (contagious) diseases.
In 1956 a large number of people in this small Japanese fishing village fell ill with mystery symptoms including impaired speech, convulsions, difficulty walking and other neurological problems. Due to the germ theory lens of illness it was assumed some new contagious pathogen was at work and the village was ostracized from the surrounding towns and villages; even when fish started washing up on the shores dead and birds were acting strangely. After three years of searching for a microbe, it was discovered that a local fertilizer plant had dumped 27 tons of methylmercury into Minamata Bay where the village fished for its main food source.
I cover this one in detail in my book given the myth still exists today but the polio epidemics of the western world in the last century and allegedly continuing today in countries like India can be traced back to the widespread use of chemical pesticides like DDT (eventually banned in the US in 1972 but still produced in India).
So what if bacteria are just the good guys, migrating to damaged tissue to decompose it, liquifying the compromised tissue into pus so the body can remove the poison? In conventional medicine it would be considered an infection but it may just be the body’s way of fixing what is broken to return it to homeostasis (balance).
It’s a similar story with the demonizing of cholesterol in heart disease. We now know that cholesterol is not the root cause of blocked arteries but instead it’s the repair substance the body sends to fix the problem. (Read my articles on the mystery of heart disease and the stubborn myth of statins and cholesterol for more on this.)
The role of bacteria in our body is probably a lot more complicated than our human brains can comprehend; or at least there’s a lot more to it than science has been able to discover yet.
Virology Unmasked
Within this context of germs and contagion we must dig into where the modern concept of viruses came from.
For centuries people assumed the constellation of symptoms we refer to as “a cold” was a result of cold weather. Hence the name.
“Influenza” is thought to originate from the Italian phrase “un influenza di freddo” which means “the influence of the cold” or another phrase that has been found in historical accounts “influenza coeli” which means “influence of the stars”.
Medical meteorology was a branch of medicine dating back to the days of Hippocrates who believed that changes in air temperature and weather systems was responsible for waves of illness amongst the population. Weather doctors, as they were known at the turn of the 20th century, were convinced that outbreaks of influenza did not behave like a contagious illness but instead followed patterns of meteorological conditions which many people in a geographic area were exposed to at the same time.
One analysis of the 19th century looking at 4 million influenza cases across 11 European countries investigated weather patterns and particularly the wind direction to establish a cause-and-effect. The most interesting finding was actually that in every case the epidemic spread from East to West regardless of which direction the winds blew. This seemed to put a nail in the coffin of person-to-person spread which would suggest an epicenter spreading outwards without a preferred direction of travel.
However, with germ theory proponents gaining power the medical elite insisted that cold and flu type illnesses must be the result of a microbe. They further reasoned as groups of people tended to get sick at once, there must be an element of contagion. Never mind that person-to-person spread doesn’t account for simultaneous outbreaks across regions, rapid spread across continents, the coordination with atmospheric conditions nor the East to West direction of travel.
In actual fact it is mind boggling how scientists “identify”, “discover” or “isolate” new viruses. It’s a complex (some would say convoluted) process but here’s a simplified overview:
Nevermind that none of this bears any relation to what might occur in the real world, but a rigorous scientific method would at least require some type of control to make sure there is absolutely no other reason for the cells to break down. With so many substances in the mix and processing involved we have no way to know if a sub-microscopic particle we have dubbed a virus was involved at all.
One virology argument is that the concentration of virus “particles” can be measured using plaque assays (a zone of cell death) but the assumptions involved require a huge leap of faith in the original premise of an organism of some sort being involved at all.
Virologists also admit that there are something like 400 trillion virus particles in the human body including many different families of viruses present in the oral cavity and respiratory track of healthy people. But here we must mention another particle called an exosome which are simply particles that exist outside of cells in the human body but are also found in cell cultures as cells release exosomes when they are dying!
Exosomes are so similar in size, shape and density to what virologists call viruses they are generally referred to as non-infectious viruses. (I’m really not making this up, go ask a virologist!)
So in actual fact, what scientists refer to as viruses today are simply fragments of DNA that have appeared in some soup of their choosing using computer programs to identify “new” combinations. There is no proof those fragments cause disease nor that they can be passed from one person to another.
So are all virologists working some big cover up? There are likely a few bad actors as is human nature but the majority of scientists and doctors are well-meaning and either haven’t thought to question what they were taught or are too afraid to challenge the establishment.
The field of virology is so complex that it makes it difficult even for scientists in a related field to grasp fully all the assumptions and suppositions that hold up the story. With so much to understand there is simply no time for a particular scientist entering the field to go back and review the basis for the foundational principles the whole house of cards is based on.
Scientific Protocols Tell a Different Story
In stark contrast to the convoluted science of modern virology, there have been hundreds of real world experiments over the centuries to try to prove human to human contagion of so-called infectious illnesses due to alleged microbes. A critical review of the literature reveals that no proof has ever been shown. In fact, the opposite conclusion is generally made: a distinct lack of contagion.
In 1946 the British Government set up an entire unit called the Common Cold Research Unit (CCRU) tasked to discover the cause and treatments for the common cold. Volunteers were paid a small stipend to come and stay at the CCRU where they were subjected to all sorts of experiments trying to monitor purposefully induced colds and potential transmission. It was eventually shut down two decades later as a colossal failure stating a poor ability to induce colds in subjects (despite the mantra that colds are “highly infectious and readily transmissible”).
Long before the CCRU was conceived scientists have tried to prove contagion of various diseases with human to human transmission experiments usually injecting blood or other bodily fluids of sick people into healthy people and comparing outcomes with a control group.
In the 1800s at least 50 transmission studies were done trying to find the source of colds and flu-type illnesses with none successful in replicating an illness in an exposed person.
During and after the great pandemic we call the Spanish flu (more on this below) doctors and scientists were desperate to identify the cause of the illness. All sorts of different efforts were made to induce Spanish flu in volunteers including US Navy experiments on sailors at Deer Island and Gallups Island (both in Boston) and Angel Island (San Francisco). Through various experiments at each location, doctors and scientists were at a loss in being unable to infect healthy men with influenza.
Contagion studies are rarely done nowadays, perhaps due to ethics committees or perhaps due to a concern at how poorly these types of experiments fared in the past.
Other Explanations for Illness
One positive outcome of the failed contagion studies is that it opened up a curiosity into the cause of illnesses and the possibility that a germ was not to blame.
Toxins are a likely culprit in so many cases of illness today both those attributed to “a virus” and the more chronic conditions of our modern world. Plus nutrient deficiencies from poor diets leading to a depleted “terrain” and impaired detoxification systems.
We touched on the effects of weather systems and other natural phenomenon above –these are also likely factors. Just think about how our health is affected by our circadian rhythm (influenced by sunlight) which dictates our sleep-wake cycles, digestion and overall metabolism. Or how a woman’s menstrual cycle is influenced by the moon. Or how we came up with health problems like “Seasonal Affective Disorder”. All the while trying to ignore the intimate connection humans have to the rest of the natural world.
Another factor that must not be underestimated is the power of the mind and what we call social contagion.
It is true that groups of people tend to become sick at the same time. But it may be no different to groups of people living specific lifestyles sharing attitudes, ideas and beliefs (mental content), thinking, feeling or behaving a certain way (sharing psychological processes) or having similar weight or hormonal outcomes (sharing physiological states) such as women who start living together synchronizing their periods.
Yawning is another example of social contagion. Despite much study scientists are still unable to pinpoint why if one person in a group yawns, others tend to do so as well.
Mass psychogenic illness is also well documented in the literature such as the mass dancing epidemics of the 1500s and the uncontrollable laughter epidemic in Tanzania in 1962.
Studies have shown how pain and illness can be generated through nothing more than suggestion. We call it the nocebo effect. From the volunteers told they were receiving chemotherapy (in fact it was inert saline) and their hair fell out, to patients who were assigned to a sham arthroscopic surgery (a superficial skin incision only) experiencing the same improvement as those who received the real surgery.
Layer on top consistent messaging from governments, healthcare workers and the mass media it doesn’t take much for an epidemic to take hold.
A study in 2020 showed that the more a person expected to develop Covid-19 symptoms (measured at timepoint one), the more they actually ended up with symptoms (measured at timepoint two). The self-fulfilling prophecy was clearly evident.
Human to human connections are powerful (just think back to the last time you fell in love). It seems to me the whole idea of contagion is a ploy to keep humans apart as an isolated human is a vulnerable human.
Dispelling Fear
Coming full circle now you have a few of the arguments for the “no-virus” side of the debate, how do we reconcile three of the highest profile pandemics of the last 100 years?
The Spanish flu of 1918 is said to be one of the most notorious pandemics of modern times with estimates quoting 50-100 million people dying of the disease. Much of the narrative is shrouded in mystery though such as the first cases occurring at various military sites and the speed with which it spread across Europe, Asia, North America and Africa. It was said to have started in Bombay (India) and Boston (US) on the same day but took over three weeks to travel to New York. It seems a stretch to assume only human to human contact as the source.
Another peculiarity of the Spanish flu is that it struck young adults (specifically males aged 20-40) worse than any other demographic and that healthcare workers had some of the lowest rates despite their constant exposure to the sick and dying.
The symptoms of Spanish flu were so diverse some doctors were said to have mistaken it for bubonic plague, typhoid, dengue or cholera. The most extreme cases included bleeding from the eyes, nose and mouth, with hair and teeth falling out and many became cyanotic turning blue.
Looking back we might want to take into account what else was going on in 1918 at the height of World War I? Other than the terrible unsanitary conditions soldiers were subjected to which doubtlessly contributed to poor health, it was the first time in history we saw the extensive use of chemical warfare particularly the agents known as Battle Gas. The military was understandably tight-lipped about the details but we know that phosgene was the preferred agent due to its ease to manufacture and difficulty to detect. It was generally colorless and odorless. While official records indicate 90,000 soldiers died from Battle Gas exposure (with 85% being due to phosgene) it is curious how tightly the symptoms of phosgene exposure align with those of the Spanish flu or how badly “poison gas workers” were affected by the “flu”.
HIV/AIDS is said to have killed 44 million people with another 41 million “living with HIV” at the end of 2025. First reported in 1981 it took until 1984 for scientists to announce they have “found the probable cause of AIDS”, a virus they named HIV (for human immunodeficiency virus) with the word “probable” quickly dropped by the news media.
Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier were hailed as co-discoverers though there is much controversy in the back story and Montagnier was said to have renounced HIV as the cause of AIDS later in life.
Many highly respected scientists have disagreed with the HIV-AIDS connection almost from the get go with a 1991 petition signed by over 600 PhDs challenging the claim. Hundreds of cases have been documented of patients meeting the WHO’s definition of AIDS who test negative for HIV.
In Africa in particular, the symptoms suddenly identified as AIDS were no different than classical diseases of poor nutrition and unsanitary living conditions.
Part of the narrative on AIDS involves the gay demographic who tended to live a certain lifestyle that involved recreational drugs such as poppers that were separately known to severely damage the immune system as well as lungs, liver, heart and brain with carcinogenic properties. In fact prior to the announcement of a novel virus, the CDC had assumed poppers were the cause of AIDS in the US.
There is much more to the story of AIDS which you can read about here and in some of the resources listed below. Interest has been reignited by the Covid-19 fiasco with some of the AIDS playbook being incorporated into the narrative such as the redefining of disease not as a constellation of symptoms but as the score on a convoluted test.
Covid-19 ushered in a whole new level of virus mania in 2020 with the sequencing of the alleged genome of SARS-CoV-2 in record time. The paper identifying the novel virus refers to the genome “assembled in silico” which is essentially a computational model which doesn’t exist in real life at all.
A 2021 article on the CDC’s website titled “Difficulties in Differentiating Coronaviruses from Subcellular Structures in Human Tissues by Electron Microscopy,” admits to the problems with electron microscopy images of SARS-CoV-2.
As with HIV “infection” you were deemed to have Covid-19 if a PCR test (never designed as a clinical diagnostic) detected a certain genome sequence whether or not you actually had any symptoms. “Asymptomatic infection” became a new term boosting the scary numbers and driving quarantines and fear.
Even people who do still believe in infectious viruses acknowledge the travesty of so many aspects of the Covid-19 saga. While it is true many people were sick and loved ones died, the underlying cause and how the illness should have been addressed remains controversial.
So Where Does This Leave Us?
For me at least, it’s an interesting debate but doesn’t change my approach to health. The terrain has always been the most important aspect and as long as we keep a God’s eye view of the human body and its synergy with the natural world, we will be guided to the root cause of any illness and how best to address it.
I will probably still use the words “virus” and “infection” so that people understand what types of symptoms I’m referring to. Natural remedies that are considered “anti-viral” like garlic, vitamin C or L-Lysine are still beneficial in restoring health, we just may not be fully understanding their mode of action.
Ivermectin, the Nobel-prize-winning drug, is known as an anti-parasitic (we can see parasites which do cause illness) and won its standing as a World Health Organization essential medicine for its role in stamping out parasitic infections in Africa; but through the Covid saga has been recognized as an antiviral as well. Ivermectin is derived from a bacteria so it may be just one of the good guys addressing the constellation of symptoms we attribute to a virus.
I recently returned from a two-week trip to Europe that involved five plane rides including two transatlantic excursions. I did find myself much more relaxed around the person coughing up a lung in the seat behind, and a colleague in a meeting managing what she called a cold sneezing away beside me. Even though it was an intense trip with little down-time and poor sleep due to jet lag, as well as some unhealthy food, I returned with no symptoms of illness whatsoever. I’m thinking my own belief that human contagion does not exist certainly had a part to play.
Final Word
I don’t know for sure whether or not there are sub-microscopic particles we’ve called viruses that can pass from one individual to another, I very much doubt it. But here’s what I do know:
God created the world and humans to live synergistically in all of creation.
There is infinitely more we don’t know about health, disease and how the human body functions than all the scientists over hundreds of years have already documented or proposed.
The terrain of our body and environment is far more important to our health than whether the person beside us is sneezing or has a belly ache.
Man-made chemicals we call pharmaceuticals are not the answer to disease. They may address some of the symptoms in some people some of the time but the environment and lifestyle are critical.
Natural organisms created by God including plants, animals and fungi, as well as nature itself including sunlight, air and connecting with the earth (grounding) and connecting with other humans are the key to good health.
If we focus on what we do know, perhaps the virus debate doesn’t even matter. But I do find it a fascinating subject.
Additional References and Sources
A History of Experimental Virology by Alfred Grafe (can be viewed here)
The Pathology of Influenza by M.C. Winternitz et al (can be viewed here)
An End to Upside Down Medicine by Mark Gober
Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History and Human Experiments by Daniel Roytas
The Final Pandemic: An Antidote to Medical Tyranny by Drs. Mark Bailey and Samantha Bailey
The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Websites: DrSamBailey dot com and ViroLIEgy dot com
