The Covid-19 virus has been isolated many times in Spain—and elsewhere
15 October 2021
What was claimed
Spain’s Health Ministry said that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has never been isolated.
Our verdict
This is not true. Spain’s Health Ministry said that it did not have its own samples of the virus, or a register of labs that culture them. The virus has in fact been isolated many times.
Facebook users have shared an article claiming that Spain’s Ministry of Health “Admits Covid-19 Has Never Been Isolated”.
This story is false. The ministry did not say this.
As we have said before, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, has been isolated many times. We’ve also seen similar false claims about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US.
What the article says
The article on a website called Plandemic claims that the Ministry of Health in Spain said the SARS-CoV-2 virus “has never been isolated to their knowledge”.
The article also says: “This shocking revelation has been brought to the media’s attention after an independent association, Asociación Liberum, Biologists for the Truth and an unnamed individual, demanded that the Ministry of Health deliver in-depth information regarding the existence of the virus.”
In reality, the Ministry said in a (translated by Google) freedom of information release that it “does not have culture of SARS-CoV-2 for testing, and does not have a registry of the laboratories with culture and isolation capacity for tests.”
This does not mean that it believes the virus has never been isolated. In reality, Spanish fact checkers have confirmed that the virus has been isolated in Spain, and elsewhere, many times. One of these fact checkers, Newtral, reports that level 3 biosafety labs conduct the process in Spain, and quotes a scientist there who says: “The virus is routinely cultivated.”
Nevertheless, a Spanish group called Biologists for the Truth, which was mentioned in the Plandemic article, distributed a press release saying (translated by Google): “The fact that the Ministry of Health does not have viral cultures from RT PCR patients positive means that YOU HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO DEMONSTRATE that the SARS CoV 2 virus is the cause of the COVID 19 disease”.
However, we know that the SARS-CoV-2 virus does cause the Covid-19 disease.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the Spanish Healthy Ministry did not say this, and the virus has been isolated many times.
*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Full Fact can be found here ***
