Most people assume that the scientific foundations of pandemics, viral disease, and vaccines have been thoroughly tested and verified. Two New Zealand medical doctors, Dr Mark Bailey and Dr Samantha Bailey, spent years examining the primary literature and found that many of the foundational claims are far weaker than official sources suggest. This post covers what the evidence actually shows, and why it matters for how we understand public health.

How a pandemic can be declared and sustained without a new disease spreading
Why the PCR test is not a reliable way to diagnose infectious disease
What happened when researchers tried to transmit the 1918 Spanish flu between people
The difference between disease declining and vaccines being credited for that decline
How financial relationships between pharmaceutical companies and health institutions shape what gets reported

The problem with pandemic case counts

When a government or the WHO reports a rising number of COVID-19 cases, most people assume this means more people are getting sick. But a "case" in modern public health often just means a positive test result. The person may have no symptoms at all.

The PCR test works by amplifying a fragment of genetic material from a sample until it becomes detectable. The number of amplification rounds is called the cycle threshold, or Ct. The higher the Ct, the smaller the quantity of material the test is looking for. At a Ct of 40 or above, which was standard during the COVID-19 period, the test can return a positive result from a quantity so small that experts say no live, transmissible virus could be recovered from it.

What this means in practice: as PCR tests are rolled out more widely, the number of positive results rises. This looks like a spreading pandemic. But it may simply be a spreading test. The Baileys document several cases where apparent outbreaks, including a widely reported whooping cough cluster at a US hospital and swine flu cases in multiple countries, largely disappeared when culture-based confirmation replaced PCR as the diagnostic method.

The 1918 transmission experiments nobody talks about

In 1919, at the height of the Spanish flu, US Navy and Public Health Service researchers ran a series of deliberate transmission experiments. They took sick patients and brought them into direct contact with healthy volunteers. Volunteers received secretions from the nose, throat, and bronchia of sick individuals placed directly into their own airways. In some experiments, blood from sick patients was injected into healthy subjects. In others, volunteers were simply asked to sit face to face with a patient and breathe the same air.

None of the healthy subjects became ill.

The researchers tried every method they could think of. They ran the experiments in multiple locations, with multiple patient and volunteer groups. In every case, the result was the same. The lead researcher wrote at the time that he could not explain why transmission was not occurring. The experiments were not hidden: they were published in medical journals. They simply were not widely discussed in the century that followed.

This is not a minor footnote. If the 1918 flu was as contagious as commonly described, direct exposure to patient secretions in controlled conditions should have produced illness in the volunteers reliably. The fact that it did not is a significant finding, and it sits in the scientific record waiting to be engaged with.

When diseases declined and who got the credit

The historical charts are striking. Measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, whooping cough, diphtheria: all of these diseases declined by 90 to 99 percent in the United States and United Kingdom before their vaccines were introduced. The charts come from official government mortality data, compiled in the book Dissolving Illusions by Dr Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, and the same data is publicly available from health agencies.

The declines tracked closely with improvements in nutrition, clean water, sanitation, and living conditions. The vaccines were introduced near the bottom of curves that had already fallen sharply. Whether the vaccines contributed to the final tail of the decline is debated. Whether they caused the major declines is not supportable by the data, though that claim is frequently made.

The Baileys also document requests made by the authors of Virus Mania to multiple national health institutions, asking them to provide evidence that vaccinated populations have better overall health outcomes than unvaccinated populations. Not one institution was able to provide it.

How financial relationships shape what gets published

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been the second-largest donor to the World Health Organisation in multiple recent years. It is the founding funder of GAVI, the vaccine alliance, which in turn funds the WHO and coordinates vaccine procurement globally. Gates Foundation grants have also reached Imperial College London (whose modelling was used to justify COVID-19 lockdowns), Johns Hopkins University (a primary source of pandemic statistics), and major media organisations including CNN, NPR, PBS, and The Atlantic, totalling over $319 million to news outlets alone.

A 2021 New Zealand publication on vaccine misinformation, written by an academic presented by media as an independent expert, disclosed in its final paragraph that it was funded by an unrestricted grant from GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Seqirus. Those three companies control combined assets of around $290 billion. The same expert had publicly dismissed the deaths of two New Zealanders temporally associated with the Pfizer vaccine as "not in any way related to the vaccine" before investigators had finished their work.

This is not a claim that everyone is corrupt. It is a structural observation: when the same organisations fund the research, the institutions that assess the research, the media that report on it, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it, the independence that gives science its credibility is compromised at the root.

What happens to doctors who publish findings that conflict with these narratives

US paediatrician Dr Paul Thomas published a peer-reviewed study in 2020 comparing health outcomes in 3,324 patients from his own practice over ten years. Vaccinated children in his practice had markedly higher rates of asthma, allergic rhinitis, sinusitis, and other inflammatory conditions than unvaccinated children. The Oregon Medical Board suspended his medical licence without filing charges shortly after publication. No scientific rebuttal of his methodology was offered.

In New Zealand, the Medical Council issued a statement in 2021 telling all registered doctors that there was "no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice." It cited one source to support this position: a government webpage explaining how to book a vaccine appointment. The statement was withdrawn quietly in September 2023 after a judicial review application was filed, with no notification sent to the doctors it had been used to discipline.

The Perth Group, a scientific research group formed in 1981, has spent over four decades publishing detailed critiques of the HIV/AIDS research establishment's foundational evidence. Their papers have been rejected by journals on grounds unrelated to their scientific content. Their work remains largely unknown to practising clinicians.

The upstream question

The Baileys argue that most debates about pandemic policy, vaccine mandates, and public health restrictions are downstream arguments: they take for granted that the viral pathogens in question exist and cause disease, then debate what should be done about them. The more fundamental question, they argue, is whether that foundational claim is supported by the evidence. If it is not, every downstream argument rests on an unproven assumption.

This does not mean illness is not real, or that people do not suffer and die from the conditions attributed to viruses. It means the explanation for why they become ill may be different from what is currently assumed, and that different explanation may point toward different and more effective responses.

If you want to go further than what a blog post can cover, the full analysis is available to query on tryit.tv. You can ask specific questions about any aspect of the evidence and get a personalised answer drawn from the complete source material, without having to work through the full document yourself. It takes seconds rather than hours.