Harness the power of analogies. Without analogies our explanations are like if your speedboat broke down at sea and you have a donkey to pull it back to shore, but using analogies is like yolking 100 unicorns with flippers and gills to the the speed boat, they will be many times more effective than the donkey. 

Send us your analogies by email or post them on our telegram channel (virologybusters) so we can build this analogosaurus into something rare as a flesh-eating dodo bird.  Get the virologybusters app for a fuller interactive analogosaurus
 

Contagion

"If it's not a virus, what is it?......if you can't give me one definitive, intentional causal agent as an alternative, then it must be a virus" 

I was sat at home with my friend when a policeman called in and told me that my car had been stolen and used in a robbery only 10 minutes ago, the prime suspect is my friend. "But he's been with me here all day officer, it can't be my friend", "OK then" replied the officer, "If your friend didn't steel your car, then who did?"  "I don't know who stole my car". The officer did not reply "see, then it must be your friend", he felt his reasoning was so brilliant and blindingly obvious, it went without saying.

I had long suspected I was adopted as I looked different to my parents. On my 16th birthday they showed me my birth certificate and it confirmed my suspicion. Later that day, I shared the news with my best friend. "I don't believe it" he said "If those are n't your real parents, then where are they?" "I don't know exactly, They aren't from this country" "Well unless I see these other parents,  I am going to stick with my belief that the first people who you introduced me to are your real parents"

Disease

If you find a pod of dolphins washed up on the beach would you assume that a disease had passed between them or that their habitat was polluted? 

Electron Micrographs of viruses

You own a pet shop and in some of the cages mice have been getting sick. You gave them antibiotics but they still get sick, so you assume the disease must be caused by invisible objects passing from one mouse to another in the air.  You devise a cunning way to see if this is true. You take sick mice and put them in an empty fish tank, you pour quick-setting liquid resin into the tank, it solidifies in seconds. You then remove the block of resin and cut it into thin slices, you photograph these slices. In some of the photos you notice circular objects which appear to be coming out of the mice's mouths, these must be causing the disease in the mice. You repeat the experiment with healthy mice and observe the same circular objects coming out of their mouths, you ignore this and never experiment on healthy mice again. You get a bit of a reputation as a pet health expert and sell a medicine to prevent this new disease. 

Genomes (viral genome)

You notice the leaves in a woodland are showing signs of damage and some trees with this damage are dead. You look closely on the leaves but can't see any caterpillars or beetles. You assume it must be really tiny beetles that you can't see with you magnifying glass. You take one of the sick trees and put it through a chipper, you blast the area at the base of the tree with a fire hose and collect this in a bag. You mix all of this material together, add a few antibiotics for good measure, then add chemicals to break down cell membranes so you can extract genetic material from your sample. You chop the genetic material into sections a few hundred nucleotides long and sequence these to get them onto your computer. A computer programme produces over 1 million possible genomes from this genetic material. You pick one of these and declare that it belongs to the microscopic beetle which is nibbling the leaves. This confirms that the tree disease is caused by the invisibeetle. You definitely don't repeat this process on healthy trees to see if you get the same genomes. If you repeat it on diseased trees and get a different genome, you declare that the beetle has mutated and you have a variant of the invisibeetle

 .. ......PCR tests ....You create a test to amplify and detect sections of this genome, if damaged trees test positive then the damage is caused by the beetle, if they test negative then you keep testing until you get a positive test, which proves the damage is caused by the beetle.

You get rich selling a spray you have created to deter the invisibeetle, but the pesky pest keeps mutating which scientifically explains why your spray doesn't always work, and means woodland owners need to buy a new spray every year.

Isolation

If I want to isolate a hammer from a box of tools I have to take the hammer out of the box and separate it from the other tools, and then I have only the hammer and I can say, "it's isolated, it's the only thing there". Believe it or not, in virology, isolation does not mean separating alleged viruses from other things so you only have viruses. Virologists can point at a box full of different tools and say, "there is an isolated hammer" . Furthmore, virologists can imagine a hypothetical tool such as a bobby wrench and point at a box of tools and claim they have isolated a bobby wrench. 

Pathogens

Observing particles, even identifiable organisms such as bacteria, near damaged cells does not prove they caused the damage. It's like saying firemen cause fires, because every time I see a fire there are a bunch of firemen there.

PCR Tests 

(See Genomes)

This is event really happened and shows how looking for something, can make it appear, apparently. In 1954 in Washington state, someone noticed tiny pitting on their car wind sheild. The police department began to examine cars and found similar pitting on thousands of cars. Sand fleas and fallout from nuclear bomb testing were blamed. Eventually, they realised that the windshields always had these minute pits, but nobody had ever looked closely at many car wind shields before. 

PCR tests are like arriving at and explosion at a library, finding some pieces of paper and constructing a sentence such as "it was the best" or "It is a far far greater..." then blaming Charles Dickens Novels for the explotion. Going further to look for the same senentences in other libraries, and even if the librabry has n't exploded, diagnosing it as "pre-exploded". 

Vaccines

See if you can work out what this is analogous for.  I used to get wet when it rained so I bought an expensive rain coat which the shop keeper assured me was scientifically proven to keep me dry. The next time it rained I went for a walk with my friends, none of them had rain coats. I got just as wet as I used to get before I wore my new rain coat, and I wetter than some of my friends who had no rain coat. But thank god I was wearing that rain coat, imagine how much wetter I would have got if I wasn't, I might have even drowned. 

Additionally, the raincoat was green, and I noticed the skin on my arms had turned a bit green after wearing it in the rain. I asked the shop keeper if this was anything to do with the dye running out of the rain coat. He told me that the rain coat was scientifically proven to have no negative effects and that scientists were now saying that rain can make your skin go green.