Claim COVID virus has never been isolated is ‘entirely false’

AAP FACTCHECK – False claims that the COVID-19 virus has never been isolated and therefore does not exist continue to spread on social media.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the disease COVID-19, has been isolated multiple times.

The claim is based on a Freedom of Information (FoI) request sent to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The request used a definition of “isolation” for which there is no evidence any virus exists.

This definition appears to derive from an outdated criteria for determining whether a microbe causes a disease developed in 1890, before viruses had been discovered.

The claim was made in a Facebook post captioned “The greatest scam in medical history” that shares a screenshot of a post on X reading: “The CDC Confirmed that Covid Virus Has Never Been Isolated.

“The CDC officially proved there Is no proof of Covid’s existence in response to an FOIA [FoI] request. What was experienced by people starting in 2000 could very well have been the common flu which interestingly disappeared in 2020.

“Without isolating the virus and then comparing it to what is in diseased tissue and non diseased tissue, we cannot prove that a certain microbe caused a certain disease.”

The X post includes a screenshot of an FoI request sent to the CDC in 2021 that asked for all studies or reports held by the institution that describe the isolation of the virus “directly from a sample taken from a diseased human, where the patient sample was not first combined with any other source of genetic material”.

The CDC responded that it has no records related to the request and that the “CDC does not purify or isolate any COVID-19 virus in the manner requester describes”.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has been isolated multiple times. Experts told AAP FactCheck that viruses are only isolated when grown on genetic material.

University of Auckland senior virology lecturer John Taylor told AAP FactCheck that viruses require a host to survive, and only multiply to levels where they can be isolated and studied when they infect the cells of another organism.

“A question about isolating a virus that requires that it ‘was not first combined with any other source of genetic material’ ignores this basic principle of biology,” Dr Taylor said.

“Neither the CDC nor any other organisation has any evidence for the existence of any type of virus that was ‘not first combined with any other source of genetic material’.

“So if you buy into this idea, you’re essentially saying there’s no evidence for the existence of any virus – no HIV, no measles, no herpes.”

Dr Taylor explained that viruses are amplified by growing them on specific cell lines, including human cells and monkey kidney cells. These cells are used because they are able to survive and grow indefinitely in a laboratory environment.

While it could be technically possible to amplify a virus on cells taken directly from an infected patient, Dr Taylor said this would require taking a large amount of tissue from a patient, which is impractical and potentially dangerous. The cells that the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects also don’t survive well outside of the body.

In practice, this method of isolating a virus is almost never used because there is no advantage when other methods are easier, more effective and better understood, Dr Taylor said.

University of Sydney virologist Associate Professor Timothy Newsome told AAP FactCheck no virus has ever been isolated using the criteria in the FoI request.

He said when cultivated via living cells, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been isolated multiple times from patients, including in urine, and has been used to cause infection in humans in controlled studies.

Dr Taylor added SARS-CoV-2 and influenza “are definitely not the same virus”, as the post claims. They have different genetic material and structures and are made of different proteins.

University of Otago virologist Professor Jemma Geoghegan told AAP FactCheck “the claims in the post are entirely false”.

“There are hundreds of published articles describing the isolation of SARS-CoV-2 and it has been isolated in most research labs that work on this virus,” Prof Geoghegan said.

Similar information requests have been made to health departments in New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

University of Auckland microbiology Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles has written that these requests appear to be driven by an outdated criteria for disease developed by German scientist Robert Koch in 1890, known as “Koch’s postulates“.

These are four conditions that must be met for a microbe to be considered the cause of a disease.

Postulate two states “the organism must be isolated from a host containing the disease and grown in pure culture”, while postulate three states “samples of the organism taken from pure culture must cause the same disease when inoculated into a healthy, susceptible animal in the laboratory”.

However, Assoc Prof Wiles wrote, these postulates were developed before viruses were discovered which, as mentioned, require a host to exist.

The other postulates have also been superseded by new discoveries regarding the nature of microbes and disease, which don’t fit with these 130-year-old rules.

AAP FactCheck has previously debunked a similar claim that SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t been isolated, and similar claims have been debunked by Full Fact, AP and Reuters.

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