Posted on 09/03/2020 7:31:57 AM PDT by sickoflibs
In the previous entry, we learned about The New York Times shocking report that the standard PCR tests for COVID-19 everyone’s been rushing out to get are woefully unreliable.
The Times looked at three sets of PCR testing data from Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada and discovered that, because of faulty procedures used at every single testing site in the country, “up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus” at all.
The experts they talked to were astonished that such cases are even getting classified as infections.
Yet for some reason, the Times ran a weak-sauce headline completely downplaying their scandalous discovery: Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.
But those eye-popping stats exposing the pervasive fraud propping up our regime of mass COVID-19 testing aren’t just absent from the headline. Readers don’t find out about the enormous percentage of misdiagnoses the Times discovered until the article’s half over!
The opening paragraph briefly states what they found, but only in very general and decidedly less alarming terms:
Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.
And it’s used as a means to immediately segue into a quite different topic, which the entire first half of the article – aka, the only part anyone’s likely to read – is devoted to:
But researchers say the solution is not to test less, or to skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests…
You may not have heard about those new CDC recommendations to stop testing people without symptoms about which the Times and their anointed experts aren’t thrilled. But they’re significance can’t possibly be overstated because of a crucial feature of any test that somehow never seems to come up in all the media articles pushing for mass COVID-19 testing: the rate of false positives.
Because any test for COVID-19 will produce a certain percentage of positive diagnoses for patients who don’t, in fact, have the virus, mass testing means that alarming numbers of new COVID-19 cases will continue to be reported no matter how few are actually occurring.
The FDA says that one PCR test for COVID-19 in use has a false positive rate of 3%. That means that testing a million people a day with it would still result in 30,000 positive diagnoses being reported each day even if the real number of new infections dropped all the way down to zero!
If everyone in America were tested daily as some have proposed, even a .5% false-positive rate would result in over a million and a half new cases being reported daily in the absence of any actual new infections.
The fact that any test is going to have a non-negligible rate of false positives makes mass COVID-19 testing a means for ensuring that a phony pandemic will persist forever even after the real one has run its course.
It’s important to understand, however, that the massive errors in PCR testing that the Times downplays but uses to push for another kind of mass testing to replace it are not, strictly speaking, false positives. They, instead, represent an additional much larger source of bogus COVID-19 diagnoses.
They don’t occur because the test found something that wasn’t there. They’re a product of the faulty criteria laboratories are using to determine when to label perfectly accurate test results positive.
The problem starts because what the PCR test is designed to find is NOT the COVID-19 virus.
That’s going to surprise a lot of people given what our own public health officials have been telling us:
The CDC says that “A viral test checks samples to find out if you are currently infected with COVID-19.” The Texas Department of Health, The University of Colorado, and a host of other sources that ought to be reliable state: “A positive PCR test means that the person being tested has an active COVID-19 infection.” But these claims represent either deliberate deceptions or the grossest possible incompetence.
“PCR” stands for polymerase chain reaction, the biochemical process developed by a researcher named Kary Mullis in 1983 that the test uses.
Though it was important enough to earn Mullis a Nobel Prize, most are unaware that PCR wasn‘t designed to test for viruses at all.
Mullis invented it to synthesize genetic material for research purposes and, in fact, was strongly opposed to the way it wound up being used to test for the HIV virus.
Mullis’s process takes segments of DNA through a “cycle” that doubles the amount. That might not seem like a big deal, but it starts to add up pretty quickly.
If, for example, you ran a single segment of DNA through just 40 PCR cycles, you’d end up with 1 x 240 segments, which is over a trillion new copies.
Because viruses aren’t much more complicated than strands of DNA, it’s possible to use PCR to amplify any viral byproducts in a sample.
Most people probably think of viruses as microorganisms similar to bacteria. But they’re, in fact, much more primitive than bacteria and usually aren’t even classified as living things. They’re not composed of cells, nor do they create their own energy or grow.
Believe it or not, viruses can’t even reproduce on their own but, instead, have to trick their host organisms into doing all the work. In fact, performing that one trick is pretty much all there is to them.
Viruses are nothing more than small bits of genetic code surrounded by a shell that acts as a “Trojan horse.” Its shell allows a virus to invade the cells of living organisms. Once inside, the genetic code exits the shell, hijacking the cell’s functions to make it produce more copies of the virus.
The genetic material inside a virus’s shell can be either DNA or RNA. The COVID-19 virus contains the latter. Mullis’s process, however, works only on the former. So before it’s applied to test for COVID, another process is used to convert any RNA in the sample to DNA. Once that’s done, the sample is run through a number of PCR cycles to amplify the amount of converted-viral-RNA that was originally in it so that it can be detected.
The problem with using polymerase chain reaction to test for viruses is two-fold.
The bits of genetic material whose amount is being amplified ARE NOT viruses. They’re just the small segments of the inert genetic material found inside a virus’s shell. Without the shell, they don’t have any ability to infect a cell and reproduce. The PCR test, so to speak, doesn’t detect “live” viruses, at best it only detects their “remains.” And even that depends upon assuming that the testing company has accurately sequenced the COVID-19 virus’s genetic code and identified a small segment that’s unique to it and will remain so as the virus mutates. But even supposing you’re willing to trust that they’ve really done all that, the detection of viral remains involves massively amplifying the amount in the original sample by running it through successive PCR cycles. And nothing about the PCR test itself will tell you if there was actually any “live” virus in the original sample at all, let alone how much. As the CDC itself has noted:
[R]ecovered patients can continue to have [the COVID-19 virus’s] RNA detected in their upper respiratory specimens for up to 12 weeks” after the onset of symptoms.
The actual “live” virus, on the other hand, hasn’t been found beyond “3 weeks after symptom onset.”
Moreover, even if you could be sure that you’d found sufficient quantities of viral remains to indicate the presence of the virus itself, determining how much is crucial.
You have all kinds of minute viral traces in your body that never rise to the level of infection. Even if PCR testing could tell you that the remains it amplified indicate the presence of a “live” virus, you’d still need to know the amount or viral load in order to tell if the person the sample came from has enough to be classified as infected.
That’s why Mullis objected to turning the process he created for generating research samples into a test for viruses by famously saying:
Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.
PCR can’t detect quantity. At best, it can detect the presence of a virus, not the amount.
But, even detecting its presence will depend upon inferring there’s some live virus based on the detection of viral remains. And that’s the source of the massive amount of bad PCR diagnoses the Times reports in the articles second half. If you run a sample with minute traces of viral remains through enough cycles, you’ll wind up with enough to be detected.
And it turns out that laboratories have been running the samples their testing through so many cycles that those that don’t have nearly enough viral remains to indicate the presence of a live virus are, nonetheless, being amplified enough to produce a positive test result.
Moreover, the CDC has been telling them to do it.
Barely any? Isn't that like "mostly dead" from Princess Bride? "Barely any" is "some" and the test finds it. It might not be enough to be infectious... yet. But it still is "really positive" and not a "false positive". Without multi-day tracking of viral load you wouldn't know if it is someone who is getting sick, just getting over it, or as sick as they are going to get because their body fights it well.
No one gets out of here alive. People die every day. How many people have died from COVID-19? Certainly not 180,000. Probably a heck of a lot less.
Is the virus “real”?
Are people “dying from COVID”?
The answer is “yes” but it’s not a good answer because it glosses over how completely unecessary the shutdown has been. And people knew this from the beginning. This whole thing is about politics, not virology.
Related: https://youtu.be/wY-_dMpD03M
Dr. Mina is starting to get a lot of traction with this..
How many people die each year from accidental falls?
How many from car accidents?
How many from accidental electrocution?
How many from any OTHER common virus?
Probably as many as have died from this Covid alone...
It’s a hyped phony pandemic.
But they had to justify using the two million dead meme to scare the bm out of us, to throw millions out of work, and to close thousands of businesses.
We now can sue for damages. Stores unjustly thrown out of business. Property owners prevented from getting their rent by an unjust decree.
BTTT!!
Utterly irrelevant. It works.
The problem with PCR is that it can't be done on the cheap like this because you need fastidious laboratory technique from collection of sample through laboratory handling and to the interpretation of results to ensure that the results are reliable, that you have not contaminated your sample etc.
I am amazed that anyone thought you could make this work with a cheap and quick test.
Did you read the article?
Yeah, it's a complete mystery why the Slimes would do that just before the election...
“problem starts because what the PCR test is designed to find is NOT the COVID-19 virus.”
This article veers off course and goes around in circles after this line.
“problem starts because what the PCR test is designed to find is NOT the COVID-19 virus.”
Exactly. PCR is an irreplaceable tool, but all it does is give you data that is subject to all sorts of further questions? Was the sample taken correctly? Was the collection process contaminated? Is the laboratory clean? Is the result repeated by an independent laboratory using independent methods and equipment? Does the result make sense? [e.g. 2 million asymptomatic cases suggests all kinds of scientific issues].
I do think the government (at state and local level) has unconstitutionally deprived people of the use of their property. Little $1200 checks are not enough to undo the damage to landlords and small business owners.
Probably no more than 15,000 people have died from the virus directly. That’s A FLU SEASON. Certainly did not justify the HELL we’ve put the country through.
I'm sick of hearing the daily reports of new infections without an accompanying report of how many of them have little or no symptoms at all.
It DOES NOT WORK. Liar. My wife is a scientist. Bring on your counter arguments. You don’t have any.
This was basically IGNORED a while back when CHAMPUS (for Military retirees- the FREE lifetime benefits...hmm) revealed a ‘slight mistake’ of 600 THOUSAND misreads on the beerflu
600 THOUSAND is not a mistake, it is damn near a CRIMINAL act.
You can have your product but you can only choose two - cheap, quick, good.
CANCEL CULTURE ALERT "We have a free-thinker!"
We keep hearing about virus clusters, on sports teams in particular lately, but I don’t recall ever hearing that those “clusters” turned into clusters of people actually getting sick. After this news, I wonder if many of these are just clusters of positive tests that were triggered by incidental levels of the virus being present.
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