Germ theory denialism is the flat Earth of biology
These wee beasties are less welcome at your picnic than wasps. This is a scanning electron micrograph of Salmonella Typhimurium invading cultured human cells. It’s so weird that we can easily get many and much better pictures of bacteria than any blurry bogus UFO or Sasquatch, and yet many people believe in the latter more than the former.
We live in an age of surreal denial of reality.
I wrote about cholesterol denialism earlier this year, which can get pretty strange — but that’s nothing compared to the weirdness of germ theory denialism.
Much like the flat Earth thing, it’s hard for many people to believe that there’s a germ denying thing. But there really are people who either don’t think bacteria and viruses exist, or that they don’t cause disease! And there are substantial numbers of them now.
They are the extremist tip of a more general rejection of science with broad implications … including our ability to understand how pain work, and spot ill-conceived treatments for it.
A plague of plague deniers
The germ deniers been there all along — since the dawn of germ theory! — but in modern history they got a bit of a boost in the 90s with HIV denialism … and then they really took off during the Covid pandemic.
Pretending viruses don’t exist is a pillar of antivax garbage, spewing from many of the most toxic influencers, and now even from some more mainstream sources, like Joe Rogan. It tips over into conspiracy theories, because they think germ theory is a Big Pharma scam. Germs are just a pretext to sell drugs, sheeple!
Dr. Andrea Love tries to explain this bizarre phenomenon in detail here (the post that inspired my exasperated analogy to flat Earth inanity). My goal is just to demolish a few key germ-denial talking points …
How to talk like a germ theory denialist
Card-carrying germ deniers are common enough that, when I talked about this on Facebook, they showed up to crank and complain. For instance (actual comment):
“No virus has ever been isolated … according to Koch’s postulates.”
The idea that viruses have never been isolated isn’t just a little bit wrong, or even a lot wrong, it’s completely and utterly wrong, about as wrong as anything can be — kind of like believing that the Earth is flat because it looks flat from the ground. There is a lot about viruses yet to learn, of course. For a thousand episodes, the This Week In Virology podcast has mostly talked about what we’re learning, and still hope to learn, and it’s a lot! Virology is a deep field.
But “isolating” viruses? That is not something we still need to learn. We’ve been doing that for decades, in many ways.
To the unwary, the reference to Koch’s postulates might make this denier sound like she might know what she was talking about. Do not be fooled! The only people taking the “Koch’s postulates” argument seriously are the deniers. It’s just a slightly more specific form of the germ theory denying propaganda. Koch’s postulates are way over a century old, and Koch himself came to understand that they were wrong. They were part right, an important early step in understanding viruses, but it simply wasn’t the whole story, and science has moved waaaay on since then. Citing Koch today in service of denying the existence of viruses or the need for vaccines is… well, I’d say “cute” if it hadn’t all gotten so much more serious in 2020. 😠 (If you’d like to learn more about how weird and silly citing Koch’s postulates is, David Gorski goes into detail, as he always does.)
This is MERS-CoV, a much less famous member of the coronavirus family than SARS-CoV-2, but notorious in its own right. Yes, it is a bit blurry — but we’re talking about something that’s the size of a big molecule. There are some fancy and very precise-looking models of viruses, but for this piece I wanted an actual “photo” of a virus, to emphasize that viruses have not just been “isolated” but actually directly imaged, by specific people — in this case, Mareen Metcalf and Azaibi Tamin (and it’s in the public domain). Coronaviruses were originally imaged by June Almeida decades ago … who got very little credit for her work for a long time. June spins in her grave every time someone says “viruses have never been isolated.”
Deniers will bring up “Terrain Theory” just as predictably as Koch’s postulates. The idea here is that disease results not from external pathogens but from an unhealthy internal environment — your biological “terrain,” which is kind of a weird metaphor. They reject the now obvious reality that it’s both. Terrain theory is great for selling snake oil to fix your terrain (especially detox scams). Gorski discusses this in more detail too.
Germ theory denialism is all rather orthogonal to pain and its treatment, obviously. The connection is clear to me, though. Pain treatment is a world of mostly nonsense and quackery — because that’s always what fills the gaps in medicine. And it’s hard to see through the silliness to ideas that actually matter when you’ve got doubts like “maybe viruses aren’t even real!” banging around your brain and clouding your thinking.
Not only are viruses all-too real, they are much likelier to explain your pain problems than backpacks, blocked qi, or unspecified toxins. Because I think we’re all constantly underestimating how much pain is caused by pathology, and how much of that pathology is driven by pathogens and “collateral damage” from our battles with them — and much of that error is attributable to a pandemic of underestimating disease itself.
So I’m using germ theory denialism as a dramatic example of that more general, low-grade, slow-motion disaster.