Is Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) caused by a virus?

Reviewing foundational papers by Loeffler and Frosch from 1897.

This post is a summary of my offline debate with Mees Baaijen, who insisted that causality of the FMD by a virus was established by these German scientists. All subsequent claims about FMD being a viral illness rest on these foundational papers from the 19th century. As is very typical in virology, all “science papers” refer to the “foundational disco…