I blogged about this book over here, including a link to a podcast review about it, by my friends Larry and Angie Law. It’s been renamed The Truth About Contagion, instead of the previous name, The Contagion Myth. (See the last comment on this post here at the WAPF page.)

Guess what? You can listen to it for free over here, where it has its original title.

I’ve been listening to it on that site. I’m impressed that the synthetic voice almost sounds like a real person. If you find yourself being stuck at the beginning, feeling bogged down about all the talk about germs and pandemics (it is a book about illness after all so don’t expect a riveting novel), then I suggest you skip to Chapter 8 about Exosomes, read through to the end and then start at the beginning and go finish out that way. Chapter 8 has the thesis. It will make the first part more interesting to wade through. This is amazing information! You can also read it in scribd.com. To learn more about scribd, go here. In scribd.com, it is called by its former name, The Contagion Myth.

It is answering my questions as to why, if it’s true that illness isn’t contagious, how do diseases like chicken pox spread? My own experience with that is this:

About 10 years ago I heard that a girlfriend’s children had the pox. I arranged a chicken pox party. I took my oldest child who had not got it yet (#3 of 7 children) over there. When my oldest two got it he was a baby and didn’t get it. I had one of the children with pox breathe on my child a LOT. I had them talk to each other and sit close together. We stayed for over an hour. My “exposed” child never got sick. Fast forward to months later. Another girlfriend’s kids got it. I had my son stay at her home for like 30 minutes upstairs, waiting for me to come pick him up after a homeschoolers’ Shakespeare play. All the infected children were downstairs. They never touched or breathed on each other. That was a Saturday. Two Mondays later, that son started showing the pox. We had to cancel our homeschool group going to a Shakespeare play performance camp for fear of spreading it! All the younger children then got it. (Btw, if your kids get it, oregano oil diluted with coconut oil is a great reliever of the itch and makes the pox not be as bad. They will scab over in a day. I figured that out after the last child got it. Taking baths with water that comes through oatmeal put in an old nylon sock helps too.)

So learning from this book answers my question about how those two experiences could happen. It’s interesting to note that the book says that children who have chicken pox are less likely to get cancer.

Anyway, here are the preface and introduction, copied below from its amazon page. Let’s have a discussion in zoom about it! I’m thinking of June, after the discussion on Live Not By Lies, in May. Who’s in? Comment below if you want the Zoom link.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PREFACE to the Truth about Contagion by Sally Fallon Morell
 
Since the dawn of the human race, medicine men and physicians have wondered about the cause of disease, especially what we call “conta­gions.” Numerous people become ill with similar symptoms, all at the same time. Does humankind suffer these outbreaks at the hands of an angry god or evil spirit? A disturbance in the atmosphere? A miasma? Do we catch the illness from others or from some outside influence?
 
With the invention of the microscope in 1670 and the discovery of bacteria, doctors had a new candidate to blame: tiny one-celled organisms that humans could pass from one to another through contact and exhala­tion. But the germ theory of disease did not take hold until two hundred years later with celebrity scientist Louis Pasteur and soon became the explanation for most illness.
 
Recognition of nutritional deficiencies as a cause of diseases like scurvy, pellagra, and beriberi took decades because the germ theory became the explanation for everything that ails the human being. As Robert R. Williams, one of the discoverers of thiamine (vitamin B1) lamented, “all young physicians were so imbued with the idea of infec­tion as the cause of disease that it presently came to be accepted as almost axiomatic that disease could have no other cause [other than microbes]. The preoccupation of physicians with infection as a cause of disease was doubtless responsible for many digressions from attention to food as the causal factor of beriberi.”
 
During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest example of a contagion in recent history, doctors struggled to explain the world­wide reach of the illness. It sickened an estimated five hundred million people—about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed between twenty to fifty million people. It seemed to appear spontaneously in different parts of the world, striking the young and healthy, including many American servicemen. Some communities shut down schools, businesses, and theaters; people were ordered to wear masks and refrain from shaking hands, to stop the contagion.
 
But was it contagious? Health officials in those days believed that the cause of the Spanish flu was a microorganism called Pfeiffer’s bacillus, and they were interested in the question of how the organism could spread so quickly. To answer that question, doctors from the US Public Health Service tried to infect one hundred healthy volunteers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five by collecting mucous secretions from the noses, throats, and upper respiratory tracts of those who were sick. They transferred these secretions to the noses, mouths, and lungs of the volunteers, but not one of them succumbed; blood of sick donors was injected into the blood of the volunteers, but they remained stubbornly healthy; finally they instructed those afflicted to breathe and cough over the healthy volunteers, but the results were the same: the Spanish flu was not contagious, and physicians could attach no blame to the accused bacterium.
 
Pasteur believed that the healthy human body was sterile and became sick only when invaded by bacteria—a view that dominated the practice of medicine for over a century. In recent years we have witnessed a complete reversal of the reigning medical paradigm—that bacteria attack us and make us sick. We have learned that the digestive tract of a healthy person contains up to six pounds of bacteria, which play many beneficial roles—they protect us against toxins, support the immune system, help digest our food, create vitamins, and even produce “feel good” chemicals. Bacteria that coat the skin and line the vaginal tract play equally protective roles. These discoveries call into question many current medical practices—from antibiotics to hand washing. Indeed, researchers have become increasingly frustrated in their attempts to prove that bacteria make us sick, except as coactors in extremely unnatural conditions.
 
Enter viruses: Louis Pasteur did not find a bacterium that could cause rabies and speculated about a pathogen too small for detection by microscopes. The first images of these tiny particles—about one-thousandth the size of a cell—were obtained upon the invention of the electron microscope in 1931. These viruses—from the Latin virus for “toxin”—were immediately assumed to be dangerous “infectious agents.” A virus is not a living organism that can reproduce on its own, but a collection of pro­teins and snippets of DNA or RNA enclosed in a membrane. Since they are seen in and around living cells, researchers assumed that viruses rep­licate only inside the living cells of an organism. The belief is that these ubiquitous viruses “can infect all types of life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea.”
 
Difficult to separate and purify, viruses are a convenient scapegoat for diseases that don’t fit the bacterial model. Colds, flu, and pneumo­nia, once considered exclusively bacterial diseases, are now often blamed on a virus. Is it possible that scientists will one day discover that these particles, like the once-maligned bacteria, play a beneficial role? Indeed, scientists have already done just that, but old ideas, especially ideas that promise profits from drugs and vaccines—the “one bug, one drug” men­tality—die hard.
 
Today, the premise that coronavirus is contagious and can cause dis­ease has provided the justification for putting entire nations on lockdown, destroying the global economy and throwing hundreds of thousands out of work. But is it contagious? Can one person give coronavirus to others and make them sick? Or is something else, some outside influence, caus­ing illness in the vulnerable?
 
These questions are bound to make public health officials uncom­fortable—even angry—because the whole thrust of modern medicine derives from the premise that microorganisms—transmittable microor­ganisms—cause disease. From antibiotics to vaccines, from face masks to social distancing, most people submit willingly to such measures in order to protect themselves and others. To question the underlying principle of contagion is to question the foundation of medical care.
 
I am delighted to join my colleague Tom Cowan in creating this exposé of the modern medical myth—that microorganisms cause disease and that these diseases can be spread from one person to another through coughs, sneezes, kisses, and hugs. Like Tom, I am no stranger to contro­versial views. In my book Nourishing Traditions, first published in 1996, I proposed the heretical idea that cholesterol and saturated animal fats are not villains, but essential components of the diet, necessary for normal growth, mental and physical well-being, and the prevention of disease.
 
In Nourishing Traditions and in other writings, I presented the rad­ical notion that pasteurization—collateral damage of the germ the­ory—destroys the goodness in milk and that raw whole milk is both safe and therapeutic, especially important for growing children. It is the  most obvious substitute for breast milk when mothers are having trouble nursing their babies, a proposition that makes health officials squirm. In subsequent publications I have argued the dissenting view that it is a nutrient-dense diet and not the administration of vaccines that best protects our children from illness. Over the years these views have found increasing support with both laypeople and health professionals.
 
Error has consequences. The result of the notion that our diets should be devoid of animal fats, that children should grow up on processed skim milk, and that it’s fine to vaccinate them dozens of times before the age of five has resulted in immense suffering in our children, an epidemic of chronic illness in adults, and a serious decline in the quality of our food supply. There are economic consequences as well, including the devasta­tion of rural life as small farms, especially dairy farms prohibited from selling their milk directly to customers, give in against the price pressures of “Big Ag” (Big Agriculture/corporate farming), and parents of children with chronic illness (estimated to be as high as one child in six) struggle with the costs of caring for them.
 
What are the possible consequences of the premise that microorgan­isms, especially viruses, cause disease? The “coronavirus pandemic” gives us many clues: forced vaccinations, microchipping, prescribed social distancing, lockdown, mandatory masks, and negation of our right to assemble and practice our religion whenever an illness appears that can be media hyped into a public health emergency.
 
Until we base our public policies on the truth, the situation will only get worse. The truth is that contagion is a myth; we need to look else­where for the causes of disease. Only when we do so will we create a world of freedom, prosperity, and good health.
 
 
INTRODUCTION to the Truth About Contagion by Thomas S. Cowan, MD
 
I am no stranger to controversial views, particularly controversial posi­tions in the field of medicine. In my latest series of three books, I have denounced several sacred icons that form the basis of our attitudes toward disease and its treatment.
 
In Human Heart, Cosmic Heart, I clearly demonstrated that the heart is not a pump and that blocked arteries are not the predominant cause of heart attacks.
 
Then, in Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness, I proposed the theory that acute illness is not caused by an infec­tion that attacks us from the outside but rather represents a cleansing of our watery, cellular gels. A corollary to this position is that any interven­tion that interferes with this cleansing response, in particular vaccines, is bound to create untold harm that manifests in skyrocketing rates of chronic disease.
 
In what I thought would be my third and final book, Cancer and the New Biology of Water, I show why the “war on cancer” is an utter failure. I argue that the modern chemotherapeutic approach to cancer is useless and that an entirely new way of looking at this problem must emerge. I postulated that this new way of looking at medicine and biology must put the question of “what actually causes disease” squarely in the fore­front of our thinking.
 
I thought I was done with writing controversial books (at least about medicine) and that I could turn my attention to finishing out my career as a practicing physician; spending more time in the garden; and creating a healing place for myself, my friends, and my family. I knew I would continue doing occasional interviews and maybe some online classes or mentoring. I would still talk about the nature of water and the increasing pollution of our earth; but I also hoped that interest in my work would wane and simply become part of the general consciousness, a new way of thinking that would change our attitude toward disease and rehumanize the practice of medicine. I did have a nagging thought—which had been there for years—that I needed to delve into the HIV/AIDS affair, but I was content to let that be—it was more like an itch that only occasionally begged to be scratched.
 
Not long ago I had lunch with a homeopathic physician, and we were joking about our respective long careers in medicine, and how much things have changed over the years. For some reason, the conversation turned to immunology, and we asked each other what we remembered learning in medical school about immunology—that was back in the early 1980s. We both jokingly concluded that the only thing we remem­ber was being taught that if you wanted to know whether a patient was immune to a particular viral disease, you could test antibody levels. If the antibodies were high, that meant they were immune.
 
Just as people remember for the rest of their lives the moment they heard that JFK was shot, or about the World Trade Center towers coming down on September 11, I have a vivid memory of hearing the announce­ment by Robert Gallo in 1984 that they had found the cause of AIDS. It was caused by a virus called HIV, and the reason they knew it caused AIDS is that they found elevated antibody levels in some (not all) AIDS patients. I remember turning to a fellow medical student at the time and saying, “Hey, who changed the rules?” In other words, after having spent the previous four years learning that people with antibodies to a virus were immune to that particular virus, we were now being told—with no explanation whatsoever—that antibodies meant that the virus was actually causing the disease!
 
I didn’t buy it then, and I don’t buy it now. For more than thirty-five years, I have read countless articles, books, papers, and documents about the lack of connection between HIV and AIDS. This naturally led me to investigate the connection between “viruses” and other diseases, and what I discovered was shocking, to say the least. That is the background of my now-famous ten-minute video about the cause of the coronavirus “pandemic.”
 
Even though I have been aware for decades that the virus king is naked, I was hoping that others would take up the challenge to relay this information to the general public. But a ten-minute video thrust me onto the stage. It happened like this: in early 2020, I received an invitation to speak at a health conference in Arizona. I knew almost nothing about the group that invited me, but they gave me a first-class airplane ticket, so I agreed. I wasn’t clear on what topic they wanted me to speak, but since I never speak with slides or notes, I figured I would improvise, as usual. Interestingly, a few times in the weeks leading up to this event my wife asked me where I was going, to whom I was speaking, and what the sub­ject was. I just shrugged and said they seemed like nice, earnest people.
 
A few weeks earlier, the whole “coronavirus” event started to domi­nate the news. At first, I didn’t think much of it, figuring that this was just another in a long line of viral scares—remember SARS, MERS, avian flu, Ebola, swine flu, and Zika? These were going to kill us all, but then just faded away.
 
But with “coronavirus,” things started to intensify, particularly the dramatic, draconian responses by the authorities. Still, I didn’t think much about it, although I did wonder whether the illnesses were the ini­tial consequences of the planned 5G rollout—or perhaps a cover-up for the rollout. I thought about skipping the conference in Arizona, mostly because I was afraid of being quarantined there and not allowed to return home. I decided I was being paranoid and that I might as well honor my agreement to speak.
 
When I arrived at the conference, I discovered that there were only twenty or thirty attendees. The three other speakers had all canceled or decided to do their talks via Skype or Zoom. I was scheduled to do one talk each day of the two-day conference. The first day’s talk was on acute illness and vaccines (my usual stump speech on that subject), with a talk on heart disease on the second day.
 
That night we started to hear more about quarantines and grounded planes. Given the sparse attendance, I spent part of that first night online to see whether I could catch an earlier flight home and just skip my sec­ond talk. I slept fitfully, worried about whether I should catch the 7 a.m. flight instead of my scheduled 1 p.m. flight. I decided that was crazy, and as long as I was there, I would do my talk on the heart and maybe end with a few comments about “viruses” and the current situation.
 
To say I didn’t know I was being taped is not accurate, as I obviously wore a microphone and a guy in the back of the room seemed to be film­ing me, at least some of the time. But in my mind, I was clearly speaking to that group of twenty or thirty people. At the end of the talk, I made a few off-the-cuff remarks about why viruses do not cause illness. I said my piece and left for the airport. I was one of ten or so people on the plane, and I made it safely home, very glad to be there.
 
A few days later, I got an email from Josh Coleman, the guy who filmed the video, saying he had posted my remarks on viruses somewhere online, and it was getting a huge response. I thought that this might be interesting but not much more. The rest, as they say, is history. I have no idea how widely circulated that ten-minute video has become or how many people have seen it—Josh tells me that it has had more than one million views. I only knew that I needed to speak more about this sub­ject, even if only to clarify what I had said at the conference.
 
Interest in my comments came from people all over the world. Overnight I had become the point person for an alternative view of viruses, the germ theory, the current health situation, and a lot more. This led to a few podcast interviews, including one with Sayer Ji on GreenMedInfo.com, and my own webinars.
 
Of course, I was criticized and even received some shocking threats, but I have also received support in ways I could never have imagined. I meant no harm to anyone. I am one man with a certain perspective, hopefully correct in some things—and, if incorrect in other things, I ask my readers only to understand that any errors come out of a place of seeking the truth and my ability to understand the situation.
 
Two things press me forward. The first is to make it possible for all of us to live in a world where everyone can speak their minds and hearts freely without fear of recrimination or abuse. What could possi­bly be wrong with having an open and honest debate about the nature and cause of illness and disease? This is a complex question, and no one person or group has all the answers. But isn’t that what real science, as opposed to scientism, is supposed to be about?
Second, I am concerned that if my understanding of the current sit­uation is even close to correct—an understanding for which we intend to make a clear and convincing case in these pages—then humanity is at a crossroads right now. There will be profound, even unimaginable con­sequences for all life on earth if we fail to heed the messages that emerge from the current situation. My contention is that if we fail to understand the true causes of the “coronavirus pandemic,” we will go down a bitter path from which there will be no turning back. That is what is driving me to write this book.
 
I am happy to be writing this book with fellow iconoclast Sally Fallon Morell. Sally and I have been friends, collaborators (this is our third book together), and (I dare say) spiritual partners for over two decades. With a small contribution from me, Sally founded the Weston A. Price Foundation in 1999, perhaps the single best resource available for bringing truth in food, medicine, and farming to a world starving for that truth.
 
I sincerely wish this to be the last book Sally and I work on together. We have enjoyed collaborating, but I expect that the current “pandemic” we are living through will be a profound turning point in the history of humanity. It is my hope that out of this event, a new way of life will emerge in a world free of poisoned food, poisoned water, and the poison­ous and false germ theory.
 
In this world, I envision no need for Sally and myself to write books. People will just know how to live; they will know that to poison their food, water, air, and the electric sheath of the earth is something only madmen can contemplate. We both look forward to the day when we can forget about warning people about this or that and spend more time growing and cooking food and sharing it in joy and laughter with our families, friends, and neighbors. No more books; after this, dear friends, you will know all you need to know.
Buckle up, folks, we are in for the ride of our lives.