Weekend edition, April 19-20. After all that I have written about SARS, it is time to insist that the WHO.CDC researchers who came up with the coronavirus supply the scientific community and public with more information.

Specifically, all the details pertaining to their initial discovery and isolation of the virus.

Why? Because, for all we know, they have never isolated it.

Is there a precedent for such a scandal?

Some months ago, reporter Nick Regush, who at the time was working for ABC, began to investigate the so-called hepatitis C virus.

He wrote: "...to this day, no one has ever been able to isolate such a virus [for hepatitis C] in an intact form, nor has anyone been able to grow it in a culture....They [researchers] began by injecting blood from hepatitis patients into chimps. In half of the animals, they noted signs of infection in the form of a biological marker of hepatitis called alanine aminotransferase. The injected blood, however, did not cause hepatitis..."

Regush goes on: "What they [the researchers] found, with the use of high-tech amplification tools [like the PCR test], was essentially a small piece of genetic information...On the basis of tests to reconstruct pieces of what they believed was a virus, they presumed that this bit of RNA was foreign and viral---even though they had no basic evidence that their 'catch' behaved like a virus. But never mind. Just clone the pieces of genetic information; work out the genetic sequences; using indirect methods, generate proteins presumably coming from a virus's genetic code; create an antibody test against this genetic information; test many patients who turn out to be positive against this genetic information---and lo and behold, you have an epidemic."

We are talking about a highly complex set of operations here, studded with questionable inferences at every crucial juncture.

In the case of SARS, whatever operations took place are encased within a closed and private Internet structure run by 11 elite labs around the world.

We only get the press releases that come after the scientists have made their choices and decisions.

Yes, we hear that the coronavirus was injected into an unknown number of chimps, and that some of them developed a pneumonia. But what really happened? Were the researchers, in fact, making the same sorts of speculations Regush outlines in his analysis of hepatitis C?

We do have one clue, dropped by Dr. Frank Plummer, who heads up the Canadian WHO lab, one of the elite 11 facilities. In diagnosed SARS patients, he was only able to detect tiny amounts of coronavirus---and this genetic material had to be amplified by the PCR test to obtain "something" he could identify in any way at all.

We naively assume that virus hunters have some kind of soup composed of a patient's blood, and they place a sample under a microscope and look around and see a floating creature.

As you can see from Regush's description, things don't always work that way. In fact, we know very little about how these viruses are first discovered and isolated. And we know very little about what the researchers mean when they say "the chimps got sick." Maybe they really mean they saw esoteric biological markers they assume indicate the presence of a certain virus.

I have queried several scientists on this subject. I have asked them how a new virus is found and isolated. I have gotten nothing back. At first, I thought I was receiving a brush-off. Now I'm beginning to think these people don't really know how it's done. They are as much in the dark as we are.

And here is another clue. Every new "outbreak" coming down the pipeline in recent years seems to be caused by a virus. Not a bacteria. Not a parasite. Why is that? Is it because the people who have a chokehold on the research happen to make their living hunting for viruses?

There is a huge simmering scandal here. The lid has to be removed from the secrecy. The rituals of the virus hunters have to be brought into the light and translated down into terms we can understand. Not for academic reasons alone, but because what these hunters are carrying back from their private expeditions are having enormous health and political consequences for us.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com