Does this article make a valid claim that SARS-CoV-2 isolation hasn't been demonstrated yet?

Question

This is the article:

Lordchewy: "Exposing the Core Tenets of the Covid 1984 Regime, Part 2: Koch’s Postulates, Lack of Sars Cov 2 Isolation and of its Presence in Autopsy Reports", Medium, Jan 1, 2021

It claims that there is no evidence (i.e. a conclusive demonstration) that the SARS-CoV-2 pathogenic virus has been properly isolated as per either the Koch's or Rivers' postulates and no symptom specific to Covid-19 has been demonstrated in animals that have been infected with a SARS-CoV-2 isolates.

I like to know if the reasoning and the claims made in this article are valid. What's misleading here in the way the argument is presented? The article gives a number of references and seems well-written. It seems like there has been a lot of time invested in this article.

I quote from the article "scientific establishment has not been able to conclusively confirm that Sars Cov 2 causes Covid 19" Yet the World Health Organization named 'Covid 19' the disease caused by the SARS-COV-2 virus. Looks like a very poorly documented article. — bradbury9, Jul 15 '21 at 07:30
The “article” is an anonymous post on Medium by the user “lordchewy”. Hardly what you’d call notable… — Dan Romik, Jul 15 '21 at 08:05
@Dan Romik the arguments in general are, I think, extremely popular. I think the other Q is basically a dup, though. — 0xDBFB7, Jul 15 '21 at 08:08
I note that one of lordchewy's other articles starts with "In light of my debunking of the germ theory of disease". That seems to confirm him as a crank :-( — hdhondt, Jul 15 '21 at 09:49
Denialist claims that a virus hasn't been shown to follow Koch's Postulates has come up repeatedly here, and is repeatedly debunked for the same reason: Koch's Postulates pre-date the discovery of the first virus, and have since been replaced with more appropriate tests. — Oddthinking, Jul 15 '21 at 21:22

0xDBFB7 · Answer 1 · 2021-07-15T08:33:15.373

This claim seems to have originated from a profound misunderstanding of the word "quantified", perhaps an unfortunate consequence of the technical shorthand that scientists like to use.

The culture and isolation of SARS-CoV-2 was successful from the very first patient studied^[q1] and is trivial and done all over the globe; here is just one of many protocols. Moreover, with CryoEM and synchrotron imaging, we have scans of the entire SARS-CoV-2 virion to a literally sub-atomic level - "isolation" is not very meaningful in this case.

Here is the paper verifying Koch's criteria for the original SARS-1 by infecting macaques. Here is the same procedure for CoV-2. Note the almost identical symptoms versus human hosts.

There is no ambiguity as to the relationship between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2.

[q1]: "Three bronchoalveolar-lavage samples were collected...Virus isolation from the clinical specimens was performed with human airway epithelial cells and Vero E6 and Huh-7 cell lines. The isolated virus was named 2019-nCoV..."

Take care,

One could add that human challenge trials have been performed in the meantime (in the UK) as well, so there's that level of verification too. Here's a participant's account. — the gods from engineering, Oct 18 '21 at 17:48

Does this article make a valid claim that SARS-CoV-2 isolation hasn't been demonstrated yet?

1 Answers1