SMON, the Virus that wasn’t
- deepstateconscious
- 2 days ago
- 12 min read
‘Imagine if Flat Earthers suddenly believed that they were experts in biological sciences. Well, then you’d have the topic of this week’s video: virus deniers.’
‘When I started researching I had no idea that I was going to end up thinking that viruses didn’t exist and that they’d never been scientifically proven.’
‘If I come to the conclusion - honestly - that there are actually no viruses - if that happens - I will not speak word of it. I will never say it.
In no particular order, you’ve just quotations from my previous guest, Daniel Thompson-Mills, describing how he came to believe viruses don’t exist, Dr. Dan Wilson, asserting that people like Daniel are akin to flat earthers, and Ivor Cummings, saying if he ever came to believe such a thing himself, he would never admit to it—which is quite a thing to admit to.
It’s fair to say that a lot of people exited the COVID era with substantially less faith in the scientific establishment in general, and virologists in particular. I recall my own casual acceptance of their pronouncements waning with each shift in the explanation of and recommendation for the great plague.
I also recall my initial prejudice—that the no-virus position must represent the lunatic fringe of mandate resistance—gradually eroding away due to exposure to the logic of its claims. Not something I expected to happen.
With that being said, this is certainly not a topic I’ve ever felt comfortable coming to a conclusion on—and perhaps never will. I’ve been thinking of a way to approach it without relying on expert scientific knowledge acquired from peering down electron microscopes. This is what I’ve come up with.
There are what I’m terming micro arguments; concerning scientific questions over whether viruses have been properly isolated in laboratory settings or not. Perhaps this is craven of me, but I never feel confident commenting on or drawing any conclusions from these.
By contrast, there are also what I’m terming macro arguments. These concern viruses being blamed for the outbreak of novel diseases, when there are potentially more compelling environmental causes. Furthermore, the viral explanation can be employed as a cover so as not to have to address environmental factors.
These arguments I do find compelling. It’s hard to ignore the previously harmless polio virus mutated into a horrific paralysing disease at the exact point we started spraying toxic paralysing chemicals all over our food. It’s equally hard to ignore that COVID became a major killer at the exact moment governments locked down their populations and started dishing out vast quantities of respiratory depressant drugs to vulnerable elderly people.
My question then, is to what extent is it possible to explore questions of virology from a purely macro perspective. Can a strong case be made without resorting to micro factors?
Of course it is important to understand whether viruses exist or not for reasons of our own individual health as well as our collective response to future ‘pandemics’. On another level, this is a profound question in the philosophy and history of science: do we live in a post revolutionary age where the major issues of established science are established. Unlike the Middle Ages, have we advanced to a position where we at least have the basics right, and there will be no further major revolutions upending the very foundations. Are our knowledge systems fundamentally healthy?
Or do they reflect that our scientific institutions are ones that people are initiated into, and are potentially flawed in their foundations, as the foundations are the place that nobody would think to look. They are what is stood on to examine everything else.
How then might we approach the question of virology - in a way that avoids scientific expertise, and rather keeps things on a macro level. So no talking about what is seen down electron microscopes.
One interesting way to begin would be to ask if there’s ever been an example of an environmental illness that’s been mistaken for a virus? This has happened historically, with scurvy and beriberi, of course - understandably so. But what about in the modern electronic microscope era?
It turns out there has.
In this next section I’m going to draw heavily from Peter Duesberg's book, Inventing the AIDS Virus.
The obvious place to start is with the virus that wasn’t: SMON
Subacute myelo-optic neuropathy, or SMON, is a disease that first reared its head in the 1950s, and reached epidemic levels in Japan during the following decade. Cases were reported around the world, but on a smaller scale.
The disease affected the nervous system, leading to disabling paralysis, blindness and death. Estimates vary, but the disease is believed to have affected between eleven and thirty thousand people, with at least nine hundred deaths.
Whilst the condition was distinguishable from poliomyelitis, it was sufficiently similar for researchers to suspect a viral origin. There were other reasons to do so: outbreaks were concentrated in specific towns or cities and in hospitals, and clusters were seen within families.
There was an annual cycle to the disease, peaking in late summer, suggestive of being spread by insects. It was also not limited to affecting certain professions, such as farmers, which would have suggested the effects of a new pesticide or something. It did however affect medical workers more often, again, suggesting infection.
There were also reasons for being skeptical of a viral explanation, the disease disproportionately affected middle aged women and was extremely rare amongst children.
Etsuro Totsuka, who later became a lawyer for victims of the disease, summarized the public mood by saying :
‘Even I was quite worried at the time, as a university student studying physics. The general public, including me, was extremely worried; we didn’t know how to prevent it, and there was no cure.’
In 1964 the Japanese Government funded a formal commission to investigate the epidemic.
Within the year a breakthrough was announced when a commission member announced he had discovered a virus in the excretions of SMON patients.
Dr. Masahisa Shingu speculated that, like polio, this virus had found a way to transition from the digestive to nervous systems, in the same manner polio was said to have done. Dr. Shingu published his results in 1965, claiming to have isolated the SMON’s cause.
Another virologist on the commission, Dr. Reisaku Kono, in spite of suspecting a virus was behind SMON, resisted jumping to conclusions. He researched the virus for three years before announcing that he had not isolated the virus from patients, nor could he find even indirect evidence that the patients had previously been infected. It would be another four years before other researchers arrived at the same conclusion. Peter Duesberg writes that:
‘Kono’s better judgment saved Japanese science from stampeding in the wrong direction’.
In 1968 two more researchers issued reports claiming to have found another new virus in the tissues of SMON patients, this one proved to be an accidental laboratory contamination.
With the failure to find a cause, the initial commission was wound up, only for a new one to be launched after a disturbing rise in cases in 1969. This one had ten times the funding of its predecessor. Virologist Reisaku Kono, was named as chairman.
In spite of being a virologist himself, Dr. Kono saw the need to explore alternative hypotheses. He therefore divided the commission into four subsections studying different areas.
In spite of some members of the commision cautioning that SMON did not resemble a virus and appeared not to be contagious, the virus hunt continued. It was spurred on by publications on ‘slow viruses’, which are said to produce disease long after the initial infection. It became less possible to say something wasn’t a virus.
Dr. Kono injected unpurified fluids from SMON patients into the brains of
experimental mice and monkeys, but was unable to reproduce the virus's effects. A search for a bacterial cause was equally fruitless.
At this point, this disease has been observed for fifteen years, and the subject of serious scientific research for at least six, all of which has been completely fruitless. Bear that in mind.
During the 1964 Commission it had been observed that SMON patients had all been taking one of two diarrhea drugs, labelled as Entero-Vioform and Emaform. This rather unlikely coincidence was dismissed as a potential cause, due to the fact that two different drugs should not cause the same disease. As it transpired, Entero-Vioform and Emaform were actually both a drug called clioquinol branded under different names.
This fact was discovered in 1969. In 1970 it was discovered that clioquinol was turning SMON sufferers' tongues and urine green. This indicated that clioquinol was being absorbed into the body, and not just killing bacteria in the intestines as it was supposed to do. Laboratory tests on mice proved fatal.
Doctors were resistant to an iatrogenic explanation.
Victim lawyer Etsuro Totsuka stated that:
‘Doctors and scientists wanted to believe in a virus because they prescribed clioquinol. One of the drug’s main side effects was constipation and abdominal pain. Now, because the drug caused pain, doctors again prescribed the drug.’
Peter Duesberg comments that doctors, ignorant of clioquinol’s side effects, assumed the stomach pains resulted from the primary sickness and kept increasing the dose in a vicious cycle.
Neurology professor Tadao Tsubaki organised a study of hospitalised SMON patients, where he found that:
‘96% of SMON victims had definitely taken clioquinol before the disease appeared, and those with the most severe symptoms had taken the highest doses of the medication. The number of SMON cases throughout Japan, moreover, had risen and fallen with the sales of clioquinol.’
The clioquinol hypothesis explained all the features of the SMON syndrome that had made it appear to be a virus. Its tendency to appear in hospital patients, to cluster in families, to afflict medical workers, and to break out more heavily in the summer—all of these reflected the patterns of clioquinol use. It also explains why SMON had been a particularly Japanese phenomenon, as sales of the drug were much higher there.
In September of 1970 the Japanese government banned all sales of the drug, and the epidemic quickly came to a complete end.
So why did this take so long?
Virologist and head of the second commission Reisaku Kono reflected that doctors were reluctant to recognise the possibility of iatrogenic disease. It seems to be a place they were just not incentivised or were unwilling to look for ideological reasons. They disliked the idea.
Kono also expressed that:
‘We were still within grasp of the ghosts of Pasteur and Koch!’
Coming out of the war against polio, with its seeming successful conclusion, a certain momentum had built towards virology. This created certain assumptions which constrained where people would look.
Peter Duesberg comments that:
‘Had it not been for Kono’s foresight in also appointing non-virologists to the commission, the epidemic might have lasted much longer.’
Amazingly the virus debate didn’t end there, it had built too much momentum to be stopped.
Just prior to the discovery of the clioquinol connection, Assistant Professor Shigeyuki Inoue at Kyoto University’s Institute for Virus Research, claimed discovery of a virus in the spinal fluid and excretions of SMON patients. He was able to isolate this particular virus from nearly all SMON patients he tested, more than forty in all, and found antibodies against the virus in other victims.
Reisaku Kono confirmed that this ‘virus’ was able to kill cells, but only those which were extremely sensitive and prone to death. Kono suspected that the virus was harmless or even that it did not exist at all.
Many scientists were unable to reproduce Profesor Inoue’s findings, whilst others claimed that they were able to do so. Inoue claimed he had been able to reproduce the exact symptoms of SMON in mice—something clioquinol did not do (it just killed them)—by injecting it into their brains. Inoue also claimed to have photographed the virus with an electron microscope—a claim his colleague later retracted.
The momentum was such that, again, in spite of the disappearance of the disease, the 1974 edition of the Review of Medical Microbiology, an American textbook, incorporated Inoue’s virus hypothesis of SMON. One standard textbook even went so far as to adopt the viral theory as confirmed. Contradictory information was not published outside of Japan.
During 1970, the Japanese media prematurely publicised Inoue’s results, creating the widespread impression that the cause of SMON was indeed viral. Etsuro Totsuka talked about the hysteria this set off, with people avoiding contact with their infected relatives:
‘Patients were isolated, many committed suicide, and there was national panic…I met families who lost relatives. I heard from most or all of my 900 clients; most of the patients said they very much feared and dreaded the disease. Everybody told me about that, about those sufferings. Once they found out about the drug, they were somewhat relieved, because it was not infectious.’
Totsuka led a successful lawsuit against Ciba-Geigy, the international producer
of the drug, after demonstrating that they had received warnings of its dangers years prior to the Japanese epidemic. The lawsuit swelled to include the Japanese Government, fifteen other distributors of the drug, and twenty-three doctors and hospitals. Etsuro Totsuka described the difficulties of the legal battle:
‘We were the only team gathering information outside Japan, inviting foreign experts to testify in Japanese courts, discovering the United States FDA had restricted clioquinol ten years before Japan, and waging an international campaign against Ciba-Geigy… We found many foreign doctors who had reported clioquinol side effects before. They were contacted by Ciba-Geigy, and except in one or two instances were persuaded not to help us. By the time I saw the doctors, they had already been contacted by the other side. They had been invited on trips, some to Ciba-Geigy’s headquarters…We felt they were already compensated, under the condition not to tell us anything.’
***
So what can we learn from this?
On the one hand, the Knowledge System did sort of work, in that it got there in the end and identified clioquinol as the cause and not a virus.
On the other, this really doesn’t feel like something that should have taken fifteen years and almost a thousand lives—not to mention tens of thousands of disabilities—to figure out. By that standard—which is doubtlessly the one we should use—the Knowledge System was a complete and total failure. Its devotion to viruses meant it missed the most blindingly obvious cause.
How would we know if we are safe from this happening again?
Well, one way would be to ask if virologists have gotten better since the 1970s. Are they better at either confirming or dismissing the presence of viruses? This takes us into the area I’m calling micro, however, and into requiring knowledge of technical science.
Another way would be to examine the Knowledge System itself. The reason the cause of SMON was ultimately identified was due to the inclusion of different perspectives in the committee. Non-virologists were allowed a seat at the table. Essentially, pluralism was employed. Different perspectives were allowed to co-exist.
Now it is conceivable that if the head of the second commission, Reisaku Kono, been a more dogmatic and egotistical man, such a position would not have been allowed and this tragedy would have gone on for longer. Also, considering that doctors, hospitals, major pharmaceutical corporations and ultimately the Japanese government stood to lose both money and face through the iatrogenic hypothesis, it is conceivable they could have applied pressure to obscure the truth coming out and keep the focus on virus hunting.
How long could this have gone on for? Years? Decades? Would SMONs inability to travel outside of Japan have alerted the virus hunters there was something wrong, or would that have been explained as a genetic factor? Could things have gotten so far as to develop a vaccine for a non-existent virus?
So how pluralistic are our virology Knowledge Systems?
In the COVID era we of course saw the massive suppression of dissenting voices, irrespective of how well credentialed they were. At the extremes of Clown World, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins labelled the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration—academics from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford—‘fringe epidemiologists’. That takes a considerable redefining of what it means to be fringe.
[At this point, the podcast episode contains an insert from this interview with documentary filmmaker Michael Wallach, where he provides an anecdote about academics refusing to acknowledge flaws with the PCR test due do carrier pressure].
Of all the controversial COVID questions the most scorned is that of whether the virus existed or not. It’s actually probably more controversial in alternative circles, as it’s just not touched by the mainstream. I opened this article with a clip of COVID dissident Ivor Cummings saying how he wouldn’t admit to such a thing even if it were true. That quote was taken from a longer presentation by Sam Bailey, called Viruses Don't Exist and Why It Matters, where Dr. Bailey highlights this attitude as being a consistent theme.
To give one further example; mathematics professors Norman Fenton and Martin Neil have advanced the case that COVID era excess deaths were entirely iatrogenic. They proposed debating this hypothesis in various alternative outlets. Will Jones of the Daily Sceptic—an often excellent publication—declined to host saying:
‘We don't publish articles that question whether COVID-19 was due in large part to a novel virus spreading because our editorial line doesn't regard this view as a theory with merit.’
Given what we know about SMON, and in the evident absence of pluralism, what reason do we have to be confident of the claims of virologists? Even if you think that COVID was far too big an event to pull the wool over the whole world’s eyes, does it really sound like the virology establishment running the show would pick up on iatrogenic deaths?
***
Thank you for reading. In this article I’ve overwhelmingly drawn on Peter Duesberg's book Inventing the AIDS Virus. I would actually acknowledge a weakness in that I’m probably too reliant on Professor Duesberg as a source. In spite of it being both highly relevant and incredibly interesting, it’s hard to find much material on SMON. Duesberg suggests this is not a coincidence, as the virology establishment finds the whole episode rather embarrassing.
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