Smallpox

we’ve never actually watched infection, but, IIRC, the Tuskegee project, vile as it was, documented the progress of syphilis when untreated, did it not? (unfortunately, for some reason, sites about Tuskegee seem to be blocked here at work…maybe IT thinks they are racist sites…).

And haven’t there been, in the past, other experiments where group A was exposed/given the bacteria/virus and group B was not? And wasn’t the development of antibodies noted during the experiments?

So how can punter say what he/she said? Or am I missing something (possible since I read this all on my short break)?

Doctors… have never seen a virus in vitro do pathogenic things or seen particularly types of T-cells stick to specific antigens and then rapidly multiply then magically create memory cells.

Have we actually watched infection? No, technically. But …

We have snapshots of T4 viruses sitting on a bacteria, then later more viruses bursting out.

Many techniques in molecular biology use viruses as a vector to transmit constructed genetic material into cells.

Memory cells are often used to create antibodies for immunocytochemistry labeling for highly specific tissue labeling.

If germ theory and current immunology are wrong, then these wouldn’t work. Or some of it would work, and other parts wouldn’t. It’s the same as a creationist claiming that we haven’t directly observed the evolution of one species to another, expecting to witness something akin to a lizard changing into a dinosaur, then a dino into an avian. We have plenty of evidence outside of direct visualization that this theory is as good as fact. It would take a revolutionary finding to change current understanding.

Homeopathy might attempt to claim to provoke an activation of the body’s immune response (“Healing crisis”) but what is being activated there at best is the “placebo response.”

That is a kind of weird magical notion of immune system provocation, one step removed from a healing incantation.

I know the term “denial” is popular among skeptics, though I steer clear of it personally for two reasons. One is that it immediately puts the people who most need to hear what you’re saying on the defensive. The other is that it presumes the person is aware of, understands, and accepts the evidence against them in order to deny it. Hell, I don’t understand much of the evidence myself! At least not for the detailed stuff.

Here’s another quote from that punter post which has been a recurring theme:

“Doctors… have never seen a virus in vitro do pathogenic things or seen particularly types of T-cells stick to specific antigens and then rapidly multiply then magically create memory cells.”

I simply don’t have the medical background to be able to comment intelligently on this. Sounds like rubbish. Is it rubbish? How do we know all that detail about the immune system? I would think that these days we probably can indeed watch this stuff happen under a microscope, in vitro, but don’t really know. I looked on YouTube but keep just finding animations of it, or anti-vax stuff!

So I wonder, if this person does not believe that germs cause disease, does he wash his hands *ever*? Does he cover his mouth when he coughs or sneezes? I think we are all lucky that this person can be dealt with at the remove of the Internet.

From my personal experience when learning of new paradgism (sorry, buzz word I know) people have, generally, one of two reactions

A person open to learning, skeptic or not, would ask “could the world really be like that?’

A denliast may react and say “no way the world could ever be like that”