A personal journey I never expected to take.

Most people — whether doctors, scientists, or the average person on the street — believe without hesitation in the idea of infectious disease: that viruses exist, that we “catch” illnesses from others, and that pandemics occur because microbes jump from person to person.

For most of my life, I believed exactly the same.

Even though I’ve spent decades studying health and diving deeply into subjects like nutrition, stress, detoxification and functional medicine, I had never once questioned the foundational assumptions around viruses, pathogens, or contagion. It just seemed like “the way things are.”

But everything changed in 2020.

Before I go further, I want to make something very clear:
My intention isn’t to tell you what to believe.
It’s to share my journey — the questions I began asking, and the books, videos, podcasts, and experts who opened my mind to the possibility that things may not be quite as we’ve been led to believe.

If future pandemics are going to be used as justification for more restrictions, control, and technocratic policies like digital ID, then understanding the scientific foundations of contagion becomes more than academic — it becomes essential.

So, if you’ve ever wondered what this “germ theory debate” is all about, or if you’ve never even heard anyone question viruses before… perhaps this is a useful place to begin.

Before 2020, Terrain Theory & Researching Vaccines was as far as my questioning went

As a functional medicine practitioner, I was always drawn to the idea that our internal “terrain” determines whether we become ill. I believed viruses existed, but that a healthy body could resist infection. That seemed logical, coherent, and in line with clinical experience.

When lockdowns and mask mandates were first mentioned in early 2020, I created a series of videos highlighting the absurdity of these measures — you can still watch them here. At the time, my position was simple: allow healthy people to interact, build herd immunity, and protect the vulnerable.

But once the world locked down in perfect synchrony, something felt very wrong.

Why were governments obsessing over restrictions and fear…
while saying nothing about nutrition, sunlight, sleep, stress, or metabolic health?

Why restrict the healthy instead of empowering them?

And why was debate shut down so aggressively?

I wasn’t convinced a deadly, novel virus had appeared — but I remained open to the possibility. So I did the only honest thing I could do:

I researched — intensely.

For the first seven weeks of lockdown, I worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week, reviewing:

official death statistics
historical pandemics
medical literature on Pubmed
public health archives
early-2020 infection and death data across countries
It quickly became clear that what we were experiencing did not resemble a genuine pandemic — at least not according to the traditional (pre-2009) definition.

I shared what I found in videos, posts, and a free book I wrote, The Coronavirus Survival Guide, which you can still access here.

Responses split into two camps: enormous gratitude from many, and hostility or abuse from others — alongside growing censorship. That alone raised more questions.

The turning point: discovering alternative historical perspectives

Everything shifted when I encountered this book:

1. Béchamp or Pasteur? A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology

by Ethel D. Hume
👉 Read it here

This book opened a door I didn’t know existed.

It describes the scientific conflict between:

Louis Pasteur, champion of germ theory
Antoine Béchamp, who believed tiny life-units inside the body (microzymas) adapt based on internal environment
Whether Béchamp was right or wrong, Hume makes one thing clear:

Germ theory wasn’t the only theory.
It was simply the one that won.

And that alone raised a huge question:
What if medical science took a wrong turn 150 years ago?

The second wave of researchers (2021–2023)

Over the next few years, more scientifically informed voices began entering the conversation — calm, methodical, and evidence-driven. Among them:

Dr Sam Bailey — YouTube
Dr Mark Bailey — The Virus Debate
Mike Stone — Viroliegy.com
Dr Kevin Corbett — LinkedIn
Dr Stefan Lanka
Daniel Roytas — Books
Jamie Andrews — Control Studies Substack

Their work collectively suggested that:
“virus isolation” may not isolate anything
PCR and sequencing rely heavily on assumptions
historical contagion studies failed to demonstrate transmission
environmental and terrain-based explanations may be far stronger
This wasn’t fringe. It was thoughtful, coherent, and data-driven.

Podcasts that deepened the inquiry

I listened extensively to The Way Fwrd Podcast. Two episodes in particular were pivotal:

Alec Zeck — “Reframing Infectious Disease”

👉 Watch here

Alec and the data he presented suggests that many illnesses may not be caused by contagion but by:

toxins
detox processes
environmental shifts
systemic stress
terrain disruption

Jacob Diaz — “Germs Are Friends”

👉 Watch here

Diaz revisits Béchamp’s view that microbes (formed from microzymas, capable of pleomorphism) are often helpers — partners in healing — rather than enemies.

The Baileys and the Control Studies Project

1. “Settling the Virus Debate” — Mark Bailey

👉 Read it here

This document argues that viruses have:

not been isolated
not been purified
not been proven to cause disease
in any controlled scientific experiment.

2. The Final Pandemic: An Antidote to Tyranny

👉 Read here

This book suggests that pandemics may often be:

social constructions
driven by flawed testing
reinforced by fear
not caused by contagion

3. Jamie Andrews & The Control Studies Project: What Happens When You Test Virology Itself?

While many researchers critique the assumptions of virology, Jamie Andrews went further: he replicated the exact experimental steps used by virologists to claim “virus isolation” — but introduced the one control mainstream virology never uses.

He left out the virus.

His goal was simple but profound:

To determine whether the typical virological result — cytopathic effects and the appearance of “virus-like particles” — would still occur without any virus present.

How mainstream virology “isolates” a virus:

The standard method (used for measles, polio, HIV, SARS-CoV-2, and more) works like this:

Take a fluid sample from a sick person (mucus, sputum, etc.).
Add it to a culture of monkey kidney cells (Vero cells).
Add a nutrient source, often ox blood or fetal bovine serum.
Add two powerful antibiotics, which are themselves toxic to kidney cells.
Reduce or remove nutrients, causing the cells to slowly starve.
When the cells begin breaking down (cytopathic effects), examine the debris under an electron microscope.
Label any small extracellular particles as “the virus.”
Conclude that the virus caused the cytopathic effects — and therefore causes disease.

The fundamental flaw?
This experiment has no proper control.
Virologists do not run the same procedure without the sick person’s sample.

Jamie Andrews decided to provide the missing controls.

Jamie’s control experiments — identical results, no virus

Andrews repeated the entire virology protocol:

same Vero kidney cells
same nutrient source
same antibiotics
same timing
same nutrient starvation
same microscopy methods

The only difference was that he did not add any material from a sick person.

The results?

The exact same cytopathic effects occurred.
The cells broke down in the same way.
Under electron microscopy, the same “virus-like” particles appeared — including structures indistinguishable from images published as SARS-CoV-2, measles, polio, and others.

This happened repeatedly, across multiple labs and experiments.

No virus was present.
Yet the results were identical.

What this implies

Jamie concluded — reasonably — that:

The cytopathic effects are caused by the experimental conditions themselves (toxins, antibiotics, starvation), not by a virus.
The “virus particles” observed are normal debris and extracellular vesicles from dying kidney cells.
Modern virology cannot distinguish a virus from cell breakdown caused by stress, toxicity, or malnutrition.
Therefore, “virus isolation,” as performed today, does not isolate a virus — it manufactures predictable cellular destruction.

Jamie’s work doesn’t just question one virus.
It calls into question the entire methodological foundation of modern virology.

Daniel Roytas and the Spanish Flu: an overlooked chapter in medical history

Roytas’ book also explores an aspect of 20th-century history that rarely gets mentioned in discussions about contagion: the conditions surrounding the 1918–1919 “Spanish Flu.” After reviewing historical records, he highlights that the pandemic unfolded immediately after World War I — a period during which millions of tons of chemical agents, munitions, and industrial pollutants were deployed across Europe and ultimately dispersed into the soil, water systems, and surrounding environment.[1] According to Roytas, the people most severely affected by the Spanish Flu were military-aged men, the same demographic most heavily exposed to wartime chemicals, trenches, contaminated water, and — in many cases — the after-effects of chemical warfare.

One detail that stands out is that the reported symptoms of the Spanish Flu — including sudden respiratory collapse, cyanosis, internal bleeding, and pulmonary tissue damage — often mirrored the clinical presentations of mustard gas exposure, not the symptom pattern typical of seasonal influenza.[2] Mustard gas, widely used during WWI, is known to produce hemorrhaging in the lungs, rapid suffocation, and fluid accumulation — all characteristic findings in many Spanish Flu autopsies. This raises a reasonable question: were these individuals suffering from a viral illness, or from the toxic aftermath of industrial warfare and chemical contamination?

In addition to toxicological explanations, some researchers have noted an interesting correlation between the Spanish Flu and the global rollout of early radio technology. The construction of radio towers and the introduction of long-range electromagnetic communication systems occurred between 1917 and 1918, overlapping almost perfectly with the onset of the Spanish Flu.[3] While correlation does not prove causation, the sudden worldwide introduction of a new electromagnetic field — especially among populations already weakened by malnutrition, stress, and toxic exposures — has led some to wonder whether EMF changes may have played a role in the physiological stress responses observed during the pandemic.

Taken together, these interpretations suggest that the Spanish Flu might have been far more complex than a simple viral contagion narrative. Environmental toxicity, wartime stress, chemical exposures, contaminated water, poor nutrition, and even electromagnetic shifts could all have contributed to the illness patterns seen during that period. None of these theories rely on viral transmission to explain the widespread disease burden. Instead, they point toward a multi-layered environmental event affecting populations already pushed to the brink.

This perspective doesn’t dismiss the suffering of the era — quite the opposite. It simply broadens the lens through which we interpret historical disease, and adds weight to the possibility that what we’ve traditionally labelled “infectious” may, in fact, have environmental and toxicological roots.

Additional historical evidence pointing to environmental causes of disease

Three more books strongly suggest environmental factors were the primary drivers of historical disease — not contagion.

1. The Moth in the Iron Lung — Forrest Maready

👉 Book link

Suggests polio may have been linked to:

lead-arsenate pesticides
other toxins
neurological poisoning
rather than a virus.

2. Dissolving Illusions — Humphries & Bystrianyk

👉 Get the book

In Dissolving Illusions, Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk present extensive historical evidence showing that the dramatic decline of deadly diseases like measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough and tuberculosis happened long before vaccines and antibiotics became widely available. Through meticulously sourced mortality graphs, medical journals, government health reports, and photographs of living conditions from the 1800s to the mid-1900s, they show that disease rates dropped in direct parallel with improvements in sanitation, nutrition, clean water, waste management, hygiene, housing quality, and labour conditions.

Their analysis strongly suggests that these diseases were driven primarily by environmental toxicity, contaminated water, malnutrition, overcrowding, and poor living conditions — not by highly contagious pathogens spreading from person to person. According to the authors, as society cleaned up its environment and improved basic living standards, these “infectious” diseases virtually disappeared on their own. The book encourages readers to reconsider whether microbes were ever the root cause of these illnesses, or whether environmental deprivation and toxicity were actually the central forces shaping historical patterns of disease and mortality.

3. The Real Anthony Fauci — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

👉 Book link

Kennedy documents:

the toxicity of AZT – pharmaceutical used to treat patients known for it’s fatal side-effects
the suppression of alternative explanations
institutional reliance on pharmaceutical narratives
Some argue AIDS may have been driven by environmental factors, lifestyle, toxicity, or treatments themselves — rather than a virus.

My own podcast conversations

I’ve interviewed several of the key researchers myself:

Contagion Theory & The Virus Debate — Dr Mark Bailey
👉 W atch here
Exploring the Science Behind Germ Theory — Daniel Roytas
👉 Watch here
Were Vaccines Really the Reason Disease Declined? — Roman Bystrianyk
👉 Watch here
Are Viruses Real? — Jamie Andrews
👉 Watch here
Rethinking Germ Theory, Parasites, Fungus & Microbiome — Daniel Roytas
👉 Watch here

Each of these added depth, nuance, and clarity to areas I once took for granted.

Where I stand today:

After years of deep investigation, the conclusions I’ve reached — for now — are:

The existence of viruses, as traditionally described, is not conclusively proven.
Contagion theory is unproven.
The idea that pathogens “cause disease” is very much open to question.
Environmental, nutritional, toxicological, psychological and systemic factors appear to fit disease patterns far better.
These aren’t dogmatic beliefs — simply my current understanding based on the evidence I’ve studied.

Why this matters

If people continue to unquestioningly believe the virus–contagion–pathogen model, it makes it easier for:

governments to enforce sweeping restrictions
industries to promote profitable interventions
media to drive fear-based narratives
society to accept authoritarian measures
individuals to fear one another unnecessarily
While digital ID may be the most pressing issue right now, understanding the belief systems that enable medical authoritarianism is equally important.

Final thoughts

Exploring this topic hasn’t been comfortable.
It challenged beliefs I’d held all my life.
It led to censorship, criticism, and uncomfortable conversations.

But it also led to empowerment, clarity, and a deep respect for the body’s innate wisdom.

I’m not asking you to believe everything I’ve shared.
I’m not asking you to reject mainstream science.

All I’m asking is that you stay open, stay curious, and look at the evidence for yourself.

Because your health, your sovereignty, and your freedom may one day depend on it.

Footnotes / Supporting Sources

Harrison, M. (1999). The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War. Oxford University Press.
Cook, T. (2006). No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War. UBC Press.
Firstenberg, A. (2017). The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life.Chelsea Green Publishing.This Substack is reader-supported.

Viruses, Pathogens & Contagion Theory: Have We Been Tricked All Along?