Let me explain it clearer:

The photon, according to the model, is one or more electromagnetic waves.
The photon is the packet transfer of energy, Can also transfer momentum.
It is used to model the change of an electron-shell in an atom, called the photo-electric effect.
Without the wave there is no photon.

But a photon is also claimed to be a force-particle that transfers force.
But that is a complete different thing.
In a constant electric field, there is no wave and no transfer of energy.
So no photon exists.

To solve this problem, the "virtual photon" was invented.
And the idea is that these come and disappear from random interaction with the quantum foam.
There need to be infinite amounts of virtual photons to make an electron follow a
well defined path around an atom.
Finite random interactions can never create a constant well defined force.
To make the hypothesis work in practice you need a field of virtual photons.

If quantum-foam "randomness" would cause a force, it is not random at all.
But caused by some field, making one direction happen more often than others.
So we get a form of a circular reasoning.
First the photon is used to explain the electric field.
But now we also need random virtual photons that follow a different field of randomness.
So where does that field of randomness come from?
Are there quantum-foam randomness-particles spreading the different distributions of randomness?

Why not simply use the electric field to begin with?

And based on all observational data from experiments:
Why ever use photons at all?

The only experiment that was used to claim the existence of photons
was falsified using high-energy photons.
The photo-electric effect does not work anymore at high energy levels.
So photons do not exist..