Well, you are certainly leading me to delve further into the lingo of virology. I have now read a number of scientific articles on the subject (and even listened to a video on the subject of virus isolation and purification). I also reviewed Koch's postulates, since this seemed to be the primary sticking point for the German guy I was discussing this with. But I'll skip on a discussion of that, unless you're really interested, since it is not a point you are bringing up.
The language of your argument closely matches with the off-guardian.org article, so I'm presuming this is the source which mostly informs your thinking on this subject. As a warm up to discussion of the actual arguments made there, it is worth pointing out that the very emotional tone of this article (and his insults to other researchers) does not match that used in a traditional scientific paper. When you are looking for purely scientific information, spotting this sort of language can be a useful way of estimating the bias level of the author. Next, I'd like to point out the authors are:
Both of these descriptions should immediately raise some red flags. Neither of the authors is a scientist (which probably goes a long way towards explaining the rhetorical tone).
The first guy, and probably the source for most of the scientific interpretation in this article, has written a book called "Virus Mania". I looked up the full title for this book: Virus Mania: How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense. The title and description of this book in conjunction with the arguments made by him in the article suggest to me that he doesn't believe in many of the human-hosted viruses that most other scientists claim exist. In other words, he appears to hold a scientific position about viruses in general that is not shared by a huge majority of scientists in this area.
But just because someone is riled up doesn't always mean they are wrong, nor does holding a scientific position that goes against most accepted theory, so lets move on to the meat of their arguments.
First I think it is useful to look at an article written for laymen by someone that I strongly believe matches closer to mainstream scientific thinking on viruses:
https://www.virology.ws/2021/02/25/understanding-virus-isolates-variants-strains-and-more/
While I recommend reading the entire article (it has some other interesting information about virology), this is the most important excerpt for this discussion:
Let’s start with the term virus isolate, because it’s the easiest to define. An isolate is the name for a virus that we have isolated from an infected host and propagated in culture. The first isolates of SARS-CoV-2 were obtained from patients with pnemonia in Wuhan in late 2019. A small amount of fluid was inserted into their lungs, withdrawn, and placed on cells in culture. The virus in the fluid reproduced in the cells and voila, we had the first isolates of the virus.
Virus isolate is a very basic term that implies nothing except that the virus was isolated from an infected host. An isolate comes from a single host. We can have my virus isolate, or yours, or the neighbor’s down the street. Most patients do not get to have virus isolates taken from them. Even though SARS-CoV-2 has infected millions, we do not have millions of isolates, probably just thousands. We do have genome sequences from many people, and those can be inferred to represent the isolate from each person – however in most cases infectious virus is not isolated from individual patients.
I additionally highlighted one portion, because it strengthens my earlier argument that the Chinese doctors would not have likely tried to isolate and sequence the virus from the first people infected.
But taking the excerpt as whole, we can start to see where the off-guardian article and the scientific papers diverge in their opinions. The off-guardian guys are demanding that the isolate be purified (i.e. completely separated from other material) in order to sequence it. But from other readings, I have found that this is not typically done for animal-hosted virus (because good techniques don't exist for doing so for many types of viruses).
It is done for plant-based viruses, because it can often be done through means such as centrifugation because of the different nature of plant cells. Also, from what I can deduce, viral purification isn't mainly done in order to genetically sequence a virus. It is actually done to produce a virus in large quantities (it is much more efficient for production of some viruses than an expensive transcription process).
As a final precursor to the main discussion, we should note that viruses don't replicate on their own (unlike bacteria cells), instead they take over a host cell and use it to reproduce. This means you can only"grow" a culture of a virus by including host cells that the viral particles can use. As a side point, I've actually seen anti-vax articles that argue that this is bad science (recognizing the virus by adding human cells and observing the death of the human cells) because they think the virus should be able to grow on its own, but if you believe that viruses exist at all (as opposed to only bacteria being real), then that doesn't make much sense as it is part of the fundamental definition of a virus.
So lets move on to the ultimate point of contention. Mainstream virologists contend that they can identify which are the viral particles to sequence by finding anomalous DNA or RNA sequences in samples taken from infected patients that can then be introduced into a healthy cell culture, which then end up replicating the anomalous DNA/RNA sequences (the anomalous sequence multiplies). Whereas the off-guardian guys are claiming this is bad science and you must first purify to where you have a sample of only the anomalous DNA/RNA before you introduce it to the healthy cell culture.
While it would certainly be desirable to do so, I don't see it as a necessary step. These are DNA/RNA sequences that aren't found in samples of the original healthy cell culture. But they are replicated once injected into those cultures. This basically matches the definition of a virus.
Now, it is still possible to argue that this is just "a virus" and not the virus causing covid 19. In other words, the scientists have indeed mapped a "coronavirus", but maybe this coronavirus is not the cause of covid-19 symptoms, maybe there is some undetected virus that is riding along with coronavirus that is causing the harmful effects to humans. But statistically, that appears on its face to be a very improbable argument to make.
And this argument falls apart further because many vaccines have been created based on the genetic mapping of this coronavirus and these vaccines have been shown in large study trials to be effective at reducing the rate of infection from coronavirus. All of these vaccines ultimately result in the introduction of genetic material into the human body that is somewhat similar to the coronavirus but that doesn't continually replicate like the actual virus, giving our autoimmune system time to learn and proactively create antibodies for viruses with similar genetic characteristics. If the genetic mapping was wrong, these vaccines wouldn't have any benefit.
RE: Covid-Con