I knew that there was a controversy about whether viruses are life forms or not but if not living beings what the heck would they be?
I remain in the camp that viruses aren’t alive. They don’t eat or metabolize at all, they don’t reproduce, and they do nothing if there aren’t other living things around for them to subvert. They can only trick other living things into making more copies of themselves. Being able to passively defeat an immune system changes nothing. To me, they aren’t living beings, they’re loophole-like pathological special cases of replication gone wrong.