Despite the devastating effect it has had on most sectors of our economy, our social connections, our leisure activities and even our sanity, we’re locking down, wearing masks and socially distancing in the firm belief in that most basic tenet about viruses: they get spread by human contact.

But Dr. Tom Jefferson, a senior associate tutor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, is the latest in a long line of outliers to disagree.
Rather than spreading from person to person, claims Jefferson, viruses are latent microorganisms, ever present in us and other living things, a sleeping Frankenstein that gets sprung into life by some change in the environment that makes conditions ripe for their emergence.
But what’s the trigger? Various researchers have put forward ideas about frozen food or water or even human feces.
A field effect
Dr. Edgar Hope-Simpson, a general doctor in the UK responsible for the discovery that shingles is caused by a reactivated chickenpox virus, became convinced that the answer lay not in anything remotely earthbound, but by sudden spikes in the sun’s radiation, as did a Danish physician named Johannes Mygge after tracking pandemics over the years and discovering a close correlation with sunspot activity.
The sun is a furious star – essentially a cluster of unimaginably hot hydrogen and helium the size of approximately one million Earths crossed with a layer of unstable magnetic fields.
Not surprisingly, this volatile combination results in periodic volcano-style eruptions, propelling gas into space as vortices of concentrated fields – the dark blobs on the sun’s surface that we call ‘sunspots’ – pull apart and reconnect in new arrangements.
Despite this potentially anarchic combination, the sun carries out this activity according to a fairly predictable timetable; regular solar cycles consist of 11 years, during which time sunspots build up, discharge and begin to wane.
During the waxing stage, the sun begins to hurl its gaseous explosions our way.
This activity causes extreme geomagnetic storms in space, which, during moments of intense solar activity, create a powerful effect on the Earth’s magnetic field.
The Earth is essentially a giant magnet, with its North and South poles the two poles of the magnet, surrounded by a donut-shaped magnetic field.
Up until recently, scientists discounted the idea that this faint magnetic field (a thousand times weaker than a standard high school horseshoe magnet) had any effect on basic biological processes, particularly as all living things on Earth are now exposed to much stronger electromagnetic and geomagnetic fields every moment of our modern technologically dependent lives.
Nevertheless, the latest discoveries have unveiled that living things have a small window through which subtle geomagnetic and electromagnetic fields, such as those generated by the Earth, rather than the artificial kind generated by technology, have the most profound effect upon all cellular processes in living things.
Changes in this faint charge profoundly influence virtually all biological processes in living things — particularly the two major engines of the body, the heart and the brain.
Magnetic fields arise from the flow of electrons and atoms with charge, which are known as ions. When magnetic forces change direction, as they often do on the surface of the sun, they shift the direction of the flow of atoms and particles.
As all living things--including us humans--are made of the same basic material, any change of magnetic force will alter our own internal atomic and subatomic flow.
Heart of the matter
Of all the systems in the body, changes in solar geomagnetic conditions most profoundly disturb the activity of the heart.
When geomagnetic activity increases, the blood gets much thicker — sometimes doubly so — and the bloodstream slows down— a recipe for a heart attack, which can occur in susceptible people.
Heart attack rates and cardiovascular death swell whenever there are increases in solar cycle geomagnetic activity, with the largest number of sudden deaths from heart attacks occurring within a day of a geomagnetic storm.
Let’s start joining the dots.
First: microorganisms are highly sensitive to changes in solar activity. Old and new evidence shows that certain levels of solar radiation or changes in concentrations of ions can change microbial activity (Front. Microbiol., 22 November 2016),
When Russian scientists at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences explored the effects of space weather on cosmonauts being sent into space, they discovered that protein synthesis in bacteria cells is highly susceptible to changes in geomagnetic fields.
So attuned are plants and micro-organisms to these changes that the Russian researchers made use of them as a sensitive barometer for geomagnetic disturbances.
Second dot: Dr. William Li, president of the angiogenesis Society, and a host of other doctors now believe that COVID-19 is not a respiratory illness at all, but a vascular disease, one reason that doctors treating it see widespread clotting and damage to the heart.
The final dot: the sun is behaving weirdly at the moment. It began its new 11-year cycle last year, where sunspots slowly build up, but for 100 days in 2020 our sun has also been in lockdown, evidencing no sunspot activity at all 76 percent of the time.
This is the second year of a record low in sunspot activity – the last time the Earth experienced this phenomenon was 1645-1715.
Furthermore, last year NASA predicted that in 2020 during this especially deep solar minimum of no solar flares or sunspots, coronal mass ejections will tear through the sun’s magnetosphere, releasing vast amounts of charged particles and solar radiation toward Earth — a billion tons worth of gas and magnetic fields with the force of billions of atomic bombs, all made airborne and aimed toward Earth through the electrified gas of the solar wind, traveling some five million miles per hour.
So: COVID-19 is a disease of blood vessels. The sun’s activity has a profound effect on the heart and circulatory system – as well as on microbes. The sun is behaving weirdly.
Does that mean that the sun is responsible for this pandemic? We’ll never know until we take off our masks and ask the question.