"An isolate is a virus that we have isolated from an infected host.. you grow virus in culture and then you have an isolate."

Presentation by Vincent Racaniello co author of Principles of Virology

An isolate is something you have isolated, and then you have an isolate.

Can anyone else see the problem with this?

Racaniello admits that they do not actually have isolates in dishes, they only have sequences in computers. They can have no idea where the fragments of RNA that they use to cut and paste these ‘genomes’ have come from. They have not isolated anything.

Thanks to Amandha Vollmer for the amazing graphic.

From the first coronavirus Fan Wu paper on how they ‘sequenced’ an unpurified sample from a patient with common symptoms said to be ‘covid’.

‘Sequencing reads were first adaptor and quality trimmed using the Trimmomatic program. The remaining 56,565,928 reads were assembled de novo using both Megahit and Trinity with default parameter settings. Megahit generated a total of 384,096 assembled contigs (overlapping short sequences) (size range of 200–30,474 nucleotides), whereas Trinity generated 1,329,960 contigs (with a size range of 201–11,760 nucleotides)’

In other words they found 56 million short reads from the unpurified sample from the patient with symptoms synonymous with pneumonia. These reads generated over a million possible overlapping sequences or ‘genomes’, with nucleotide lengths of between 200 and 30,000. The sequence chosen was from Megahit; how did they know it was the right one? The putative ‘genome’ had some more nucleotides added to make it look more like a previously guessed at bat virus ‘genome’. It has never been sequenced end to end in a sample (neither Sanger nor whole genome sequencing sequence end to end), it only exists as a possible, unproven assembly in a computer.

The PCR ‘test’ was developed from the in silico sequence. It detects short fragments of RNA that have never been shown to come from a virus nor to cause disease.

The mRNA ‘vaccine’ codes for a protein which has never been shown to come from a virus.

“Isolation and purification are jargon words in virology. They mean different things to different people.” Robin Weiss Viral Oncologist UCL

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