A Damning Admission

In August 2025, virologist Ed Rybicki discovered ViroLIEgy.com after I cited one of his blog posts in an article on Tobacco Mosaic “Virus.” Instead of addressing the evidence, he responded with personal insults across multiple comment sections and his own blog, while avoiding every core methodological question. His refusal to engage on substance led me to issue a formal challenge to Rybicki and to the field of virology itself: present foundational, scientifically derived evidence that satisfies Koch’s Postulates and demonstrates the existence and “pathogenicity” of any claimed “virus.”

The Open Challenge

At a minimum, two straightforward questions must be answered:

1. Do you have verifiable evidence of particles—presumed to be “viruses”—that have been directly purified and isolated from the fluids of a sick human or animal, without the use of cell culturing, and then confirmed through electron microscopy and biochemical analysis?
2. ​Do you have evidence that these same purified and isolated particles have been proven “pathogenic” in a natural manner, through strict adherence to the scientific method and satisfaction of Koch’s Postulates?

​I pointed out that if one wishes to directly prove the hypothesis that an invisible microbe within a host causes disease, the strongest scientific proof would require demonstrating that:

• ​Existence: The microbe actually exists directly in the fluids of sick hosts but not in the fluids of healthy hosts.
• ​Isolation: The specific microbe is purified, isolated, and identified via electron microscopy and biochemical analysis as a valid independent variable (the isolated, purified factor that is manipulated or tested to see if it causes an effect) prior to experimentation (establishing time order: the cause must exist before the effect).
• ​Transmission: The microbe is introduced into a healthy host in the manner proposed by the hypothesis (via aerosolization, ingestion, etc.) as the mode of “infection.”
• ​Reproduction: The specific disease associated with the microbe is reproduced following this introduction.
• ​Contagion: The disease is transmissible from a sick host to a healthy host in the hypothesized manner (e.g., through close contact, coughing, sneezing, etc.).
• ​Re-isolation: After transmission, the same microbe can be purified, isolated from the fluids of the newly sickened host, and verified.

​This process must be repeated with a large sample size, utilize proper control experiments, and the results must be independently reproduced by other researchers.

Lowering the Bar

To understand why this challenge goes unanswered, one only has to look at how prominent virologists redefine the word “isolation” to lower the scientific bar.

​When plant virologist Tomas Moravec attempted to bring standard methodological accuracy into the conversation by noting that a “purified virus” requires clearing out impurities via density gradient centrifugation, Ed Rybicki immediately shut the discussion down. Intervening to warn against these foundational questions, Rybicki flatly admitted the field’s departure from strict purification.

By openly acknowledging that a “viral isolate” does not have to be pure, Rybicki confirms the exact structural flaw this challenge highlights. Once “isolation” no longer requires purification, the independent variable ceases to exist as a discrete entity, and any claim of causation becomes logically impossible. If the independent variable is never purified from the complex cocktail of host materials, cellular debris, and metabolic waste, it is logically impossible to declare it the definitive cause of disease. Yet, within the establishment, demanding a pure independent variable is labeled as “denialism” rather than standard scientific practice.

​Since issuing this challenge, I’ve discussed this issue directly with microbiologists and even virologists such as José Esparza, documenting key developments and highlights in ongoing updates. This latest update is on the shorter side, but it involves a rather damning admission directly related to the missing independent variable from prominent Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans that is well worth sharing.

For those unfamiliar, Marion Koopmans is one of the most influential virologists in the world. She is Professor of Public Health Virology at Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands, serves as Scientific Director for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Netherlands Centre for One Health, and was a member of the Dutch Outbreak Management Team that advised the government during the “COVID-19” response. She has authored more than 700 scientific papers and has been cited over 100,000 times. In other words, when Marion Koopmans speaks about virology, she speaks from the very center of the establishment.

Those familiar with the research compiled by Christine Massey may recall a previous exchange featured on her site, where Marion acknowledged that negative controls were not performed in her “SARS-CoV-2” experiments—a remarkable admission in its own right.

The “Dangerous” Tag

​It began with a response to Marion by Frank Stassen, an assistant professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He tagged me in the exchange, noting that my account was “dangerous.”

I ​have had a few interactions with Frank in the past, and his responses always leave much to be desired. For instance, during a discussion about the HIV demonstration by Dr. Robert Wilner—who injected the blood of an HIV-positive man into himself on live television in 1994—Frank tried to argue that because Dr. Wilner died six months later, he must have died of AIDS.

Unfortunately, Frank’s responses no longer appear online; as noted by his new profile, his old account was hacked and eventually suspended.

Fortunately, I screenshotted one of Frank’s responses prior to the “hack” because it was so absurd that I felt the need to capture it. After informing Frank that Dr. Wilner did not die of AIDS, but rather from a heart attack, Frank insinuated that Dr. Wilner did die of AIDS…even though Frank simultaneously claimed there was no proof Wilner had actually injected himself with HIV-positive blood. Naturally, I called him out on the inherent contradiction.

In his defense, Frank did eventually admit to his error in reasoning. However, it remains a perfect demonstration of the illogical loops that defenders of the mainstream narrative trap themselves in to maintain their positions—especially when their careers and identities depend on it.

In that exchange, I issued the same challenge to Frank that I had previously laid out for Ed Rybicki. Unfortunately, it went unanswered.

Apparently, the few interactions I had with Frank left an indelible impression, prompting him to warn Marion about how “dangerous” my account is. I decided to quote-tweet him to highlight the absurdity of labeling an account seeking empirical evidence as “dangerous.” I also linked the challenge again to see if Frank would take the bait. Sadly, it once again went unanswered.

A Damning Admission

However, remembering a tweet about Marion Koopmans that I had posted two years prior, I took the opportunity to re-highlight it since Frank had brought her into the discussion. It is a very revealing insight from Marion, where she admitted that German virologist Christian Drosten based his PCR test on a presumed “viral genetic code” rather than on an actual “viral isolate.”

This was not exactly news to anyone who had actually read Drosten’s paper, as he openly admitted as much, stating “We aimed to develop and deploy robust diagnostic methodology for use in public health laboratory settings without having virus material available.”

Drosten himself has laid bare the extreme difficulty and rare nature of obtaining physical material, noting in a 2021 NDR interview:

Isolating viruses in cell cultures is very difficult to impossible.

“We ourselves have worked quite a lot on SARS conspecifics in Europe; they occur in southeastern Europe and southwestern Europe. We have also been trying to isolate viruses in cell cultures for a long time. We never succeeded. This is the case with many laboratories around the world that have tried this. Zhengli Shi is actually the only laboratory in Wuhan at the time that managed to isolate a virus for once. It seems to be rare that this works. And to achieve something like that you usually have to use culture cells that are, we would say, particularly permissive. So they are particularly willing to allow the virus to replicate.”

However, it is damning that those within the field see no issue with claiming they can create a test to detect unicorns without ever having a physical unicorn on hand to calibrate and validate the assay. This is the structural insanity that the entire “SARS-CoV-2 pandemic” was built upon—a computer-code pandemic—and Marion saw absolutely nothing wrong with it.

While I tagged Marion in the post, I had no expectation that she would engage. To my surprise, she actually did respond, and it was an absolute whopper. Marion challenged my point by doubling down on her previous admission, noting that working without “viral isolates” is standard fare in virology. In fact, she explicitly highlighted the entire “norovirus” research field as having worked “without virus isolates forever” due to the magic of modern technology and volunteer studies.

“Norovirus” is not an isolated exception. Modern virology increasingly relies upon genomic sequencing, molecular detection methods, and computational reconstruction in situations where traditional “virus isolation” (e.g. cell culturing) is unavailable, impractical, or absent, including in research involving “hepatitis C virus” (HCV), “human papillomavirus” (HPV), and “Epstein-Barr virus” (EBV). Marion’s admission therefore reflects a broader methodological trend rather than a unique characteristic of “norovirus” research.

For those unfamiliar, as defined by virologist Vincent Racaniello, a “virus isolate” is “a virus that we have isolated from an infected host and propagated in culture.” He further noted that it is “a very basic term that implies nothing except that the virus was isolated from an infected host.” Thus, in her responses regarding both “SARS-CoV-2” and “norovirus,” Marion was openly admitting that researchers were running studies, mapping genomes, and creating diagnostics for particles that—by virology’s own definition—had never been physically isolated from a host and propagated.

What makes this admission particularly striking is that Marion herself previously acknowledged the importance of isolation. In November 2021, during the “COVID-19” era, she expressed frustration that one of the most common questions she received was, “Do you have an isolate?” Yet in the same post, she referred to “our need for virus isolation,” implicitly recognizing that isolation remained an important requirement. This raises an obvious question: if there is a recognized need for “virus” isolation, how can entire fields of virology operate indefinitely without it?

To those who understand the methodological criticisms of virology, the fact that these researchers do not work with actual “viruses” is not shocking. They have never purified and isolated the presumed “viral” particles directly from a sick host without culturing. Even within culturing, the literature openly admits that it is functionally impossible to separate and distinguish presumed “viral” particles from host materials and extracellular vesicles that share the exact same size, density, and morphology. In other words, virologists never begin their experiments with a purified and independently verified causal agent. Instead, they begin with a complex mixture and assume the existence of the very entity they seek to prove. This creates a fundamental problem of experimental design: the independent variable—that is, the purified and independently verified causal agent presumed to produce the disease—is assumed rather than established prior to experimentation. The assumption is then treated as fact and used to validate itself through downstream assays.

Dismantling the Substitutes

​To truly understand the depth of the circular reasoning on display, one has to look at what Marion points to as a valid substitute for an isolate: “volunteer studies.” In the context of “norovirus” literature, when researchers conduct “volunteer challenge studies,” they are not giving volunteers a purified, isolated independent variable. Instead, they take crude, unfiltered or coarsely filtered fecal matter from a sick patient, dilute it, and have healthy volunteers ingest it. When the volunteers inevitably get sick from ingesting someone else’s biological waste, virologists declare success, claiming they have proven the “pathogenicity” of the “virus.”

​This is a complete illusion of science. Because the sample is never purified down to an isolated independent variable, there is absolutely no way to determine if the symptoms were caused by a hypothetical “virus,” or by the cocktail of bacteria, metabolic waste products, cellular debris, and toxicity inherent to the foreign fecal sample itself.

​By relying on these studies, Marion inadvertently exposes the entire methodology: they use an unpurified mixture to cause sickness, use uncalibrated PCR tests based on computer models to “detect” a sequence within that mixture, and then claim the circle is complete. However, to those who understand the scientific method, this clearly is not science—it is an institutional shell game.

​When Marion claims that these fields can be studied “very well, using modern technologies,” she is relying on the audience’s blind trust in the word “technology.” In reality, “modern technology” in virology is a euphemism for in silico genomic sequencing.

​They take a crude, unpurified sample containing billions of genetic fragments from the host, bacteria, and external environment, run it through a sequencing machine, and feed the resulting data into a computer algorithm. The software is then instructed to stitch together a “consensus sequence” based on an existing template of what they assume the “virus” looks like.

​This is exactly how Christian Drosten manufactured the blueprint for the “SARS-CoV-2” PCR test. He did not have a physical, purified “virus isolate” to analyze; he used a computer simulation based on a hypothetical genetic code sent to him digitally.

The Closed Loop of Virology

This reveals the ultimate loop of circular logic underpinning modern virology:

• ​Step 1: ​They use “modern technology” (computers) to construct a purely theoretical genetic sequence without ever physically isolating a “virus.”
• Step 2: They build a PCR test calibrated exclusively to detect that theoretical computer model.
• Step 3: They run the test on a patient, it flags a matching genetic fragment, and they claim they have “detected” the “virus.”

The problem for virology is that this is not empirical validation; it is a closed loop of digital modeling validating digital modeling. Marion let the cat out of the bag: virologists are not studying nature, but rather their own digital code.

Getting institutional virologists to understand and admit that they lack a valid independent variable is an uphill battle. That is why it is so remarkable to see a prominent virologist flatly admit that entire research fields operate without one. The fact that it was stated so nonchalantly, as if it is simply a matter of course, is the most revealing part of the entire exchange.

The Sound of Silence

Unfortunately, my response to Marion about the lack of an independent variable in virology went unanswered. I also issued her the same challenge given to Rybicki, Esparza, and others. That, too, went unanswered.

In a last-ditch effort to get a response, I reached out to Marion a few days later to see if she would provide one. Sadly, this has also been met with silence.

Thus far, my open challenge to virologists has been met with either insults or silence. While it is frustrating to say the least, these responses say more than any substantial engagement ever could. When pushed to defend their profession through strict adherence to the scientific method, virologists simply have no answer.

​Fortunately, the nuggets gleaned from these interactions—from Rybicki affirming that Koch’s Postulates are “regarded as the best proof that an infectious agent—cellular or viral—is responsible for a specific disease,” to Koopmans’ admission that the “norovirus research field has worked without virus isolates forever”—serve as damning evidence for exactly why they have no answers.

My door remains open. If Marion Koopmans, Ed Rybicki, or any other virologist wishes to step forward and substantively address this open challenge, I am completely willing and ready to host the discussion and present their arguments fairly to my readers. Until then, the silence speaks for itself.