"...poisons do exist."

In fact everything is a poison - at the right dose. Too much water kills people by causing hydrolysis. Too much O2 causes people to spontaneously combust.

My point about consilience suggesting that viruses do exist should be carefully considered. I once spoke to Carlos Santana on social media. I pointed out that life was an act of war. Every blade of grass is locked in a fight to the death with every other blade of grass for nutrients, light, water, and space, even blades of grass on the same plant. Every living thing feeds either on the living or the dead. After ~4B years of opportunities being taken advantage of every possible mechanism that could exist has arisen, and that includes snippets of genetic code that cause themselves to be replicated by organisms, which is all virii are. Carlos pointed out that of all living things, only we can make peace, and he reckoned that's why we are here. Changed my life.

Were there no such things as virii, CRISPR would not exist, because CRISPR is a mechanism taken from bacteria that cuts such genetic code out of their DNA. The preponderance of circumstantial evidence, such as the existence of thousands of different CRISPR mechansims in a wide variety of bacteria, strongly suggests that viruses are an actual thing. This isn't a comment about HIV or SARS2 virii in particular, and some fraud or another being perpetrated is not everything in that field being proved a fraud. Lots of people are perfectly happy with their banks, despite we know that banks commit frauds all the time, and I won't even use them.

I am glad you keep an open mind. That is how to become right when we are wrong, and like you I share that desire to be proved wrong, because if I'm wrong I want very much to find out so I can stop being wrong. The majority of claims that viruses don't exist say that they've never been isolated in the lab, or been proven to replicate, etc. These are problematic with parasitic mechanisms as small as viruses to achieve, and our incompetence to provide such evidence doesn't mean that such things don't exist.

I am not betting my life that viruses exist, but I strongly suspect they do, because such a parasitic mechanism has to have arisen after ~4B years of genetic stews globerating in slimy potholes. Biology is just that complex. I'm more certain fraud exists, because I have seen that pack my fudge. When I got Chicken Pox, or the Mumps, all I know is that I was sick, and I couldn't see the little buggers causing me misery, unlike evil banks.