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Meanwhile, people for whom the swastika is a religious symbol are trying to restore its reputation after the German National Socialists coopted it for their purposes some 90 years ago.

I saw swastikas used as a design motif in Mongolia. I bought a t-shirt that has a tiny swastika on the back. I bought it because it has a very nice artwork of a Mongolian warrior and warhorse on the front. No one has ever noticed the swastika.

In respect for the people for whom the swastika is a religious symbol of peace, I would not recommend that modern leftists who espouse many of Hitler’s values use that symbol. Of course, the right has never embraced Hitler’s socialist ideas.

Uh-huh.

Here is graphene oxide:

Notice how black it is. (The powder, not the jar.)

Here are several vials of Covid vaccines:

Notice how clear and colorless the liquid in them is.

No, these colorless liquids do not contain black graphene, which would make them black.

Let's stop posting baseless claims, mkay?

Oh, yay, another analysis published by the highly respected scientific journal Inforwars. /s

My first comments are on the study itself. First of all, the article is not indexed in Pubmed, which raises doubts as to its credibility. As for the author Brigitte König, her PhD is in Medical Microbiology and Infectious Immunology; from her publications indexed in Pubmed, it appears that she works using cell biology techniques and that she has little to no experience in molecular biology. The other author only has a comment indexed in Pubmed; this is the scientific version of a letter to the editor.

The lack of expertise in molecular biology is significant. There are things a molecular biology would consider, look for, and control for that someone who is not trained in molecular biology would not even think of. For example, the statement that "DNA target sequence is less than just 1% of the originally added DNA template" is irrelevant. If a template is 20,000 nucleotides long and the PCR target is 1% of that, 200, the target is still specific to that target and no other. Each template molecule contains that target; the quantity of PCR product is, therefore, directly proportional to the quantity of template.

In addition, the article Methodological Considerations Regarding the Quantification of DNA Impurities in the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Comirnaty® contains no "Materials and Methods" section. This is crucial for any scientific research publication, as this is the section which states exactly what the researchers did and which manufacturers supplied their reagents and equipment. This information allows other researchers to duplicate their results. All they did was present some graphs which they claim show the quantity of DNA and RNA measured in each sample, but we really don't know since we don't know their methodology.

Next, the patent does not contain any "admissions" as claimed in the Infowars blog.

Removal of DNA fragments in mRNA production process.

The term "insertional mutagenesis" appears nowhere in the patent. It appears that Infowars used that term to imply that the vaccine is capable of causing mutations in the recipients and that the patent holder is aware of this, but this is not the case. Assuming that some intact plasmid is in the vaccine, the worst that could happen would be that the cell could make a bit more mRNA before destroying the plasmid DNA. The patent does describe various types of mutations, but that's a far cry from describing something that is capable of getting into human cells and altering DNA. (You don't need DNA to alter DNA anyway. Smokers get dosed with DNA-altering chemicals every day. And the UV in sunlight is notorious for altering DNA.)

Finally, as for Infowar's claim that "It had already been discovered that DNA in the mRNA COVID vaccines includes a variety of leftover genetic material, including the simian virus 40 cancer-promoting gene and plasmid DNA sequences from E.coli," this is based entirely on misrepresentation of the science involved.

A plasmid is a small piece of DNA which researchers use to cause cells to produce RNA and proteins they don't normally make. We use E. coli to grow the plasmids. In order for the plasmid to grow in E. coli, it has an antibiotic resistance gene and an "origin" which directs the E. coli to make more copies of the plasmid. We can put a gene into the plasmid; in the case of vaccine, it is a spike protein gene. In order for a gene to function, it must have instructions. One of these instructions is the promoter element, which tells the RNA polymerases (enzymes) to attach and start making RNA. For the vaccine, the SV40 promoter element was used, since it functions in cells with nucleuses (like mammalian cells). The fact that this small instruction came from the SV40 virus does not mean that an oncogene is present. The Infowars blog took a huge and unjustified liberty with language when it called the SV40 promoter a "simian virus 40 cancer-promoting gene." A promoter isn't a gene.

Some of the side effects are claimed to be due the biochemical or physiological processes distinct from "the immune system": which is itself a pretty nebulous term.

Remember that university STEM textbook reading list I provided you a while back (with helpful links to their Amazon.com listings)?

E.g. NLPs introducing the mRNA to cells which don't express the ACE2 receptor and thus were never envisaged as being a target if the jabs.

Well, perhaps if you would start studying those books, you would understand why natural language processing--for which "NLP" is an acronym--doesn't have a biological function.

Maybe you were trying to abbreviate "nanolipid particles." The actual term is "lipid nanoparticles" and it does not have an acronym, if this Nature review article is any clue: Lasting impact of lipid nanoparticles. Not that you would know it, but when scientists use scientific terms that have an acronym, they spell out the term the first time it appears in the manuscript, then use the acronym for the rest of the article.

It literally is irrelevant that the vaccine nanoparticles are not endocytosed by cells that express the ACE2 receptor. ACE2 receptor binding with subsequent endocytosis is necessary for the virus to establish an infection. But it is not needed for the functions of antigen presenting cells that mediate the adaptive immune response.

The vaccine was *always* intended to be analyzed by immune system cells. No one ever designed the vaccine to target the cells that are targeted by viruses. The purpose of a vaccine is not to mimic the activity of a pathogen on the body; it is to cause the immune system to respond as if there were a pathogen present.

Are the spike proteins whose construction within the cell, simple enough that they will assume the physiologically active, desired conformation, solely br virtue of the amino acid sequence called for by the mRNA? Or do they require helper proteins to reach the "real" 3D structure?

Whatever host proteins within the endoplasmic reticulum assist the wild-type spike protein to fold correctly during infection will also help the vaccine spike protein fold correctly. Typically, the endoplasmic reticulum is the site of considerable protein modification, such as glycosylation, ubiquitination, methylation, etc. In order for the immune system to properly learn to recognize the spike protein, the vaccine spike must be naturally modified in the same way as the virus spike. If these modifications do not happen, then the immune system will not produce antibodies that recognize the spike on the surface of a virus because the protein they are targeting does not have the physicochemical properties of the wild-type spike.

SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Post-Translational Modification Landscape and Its Impact on Protein Structure and Function via Computational Prediction.

Or, for that matter, frame shifting based on ghe modified mRNA?

I'm not sure what "ghe modified mRNA" is. But the effect of frame-shifts is usually to cause the production of short non-functional proteins (which are quickly destroyed) or to prevent protein synthesis at all. It is possible that there are some frame-shifted mRNAs in the vaccine, due to natural errors that occur during the process of translation (making an RNA copy of a sequence from the genome). But they won't have an effect. The ribosome can also shift during translation, leading to the production of altered proteins. Frame shifts happen quite frequently; this is why organisms have evolved mechanisms to identify and destroy incorrect proteins. There are, of course, no intentional frame-shift mutations in the mRNA, since the purpose of the mRNA is to function like the virus mRNA.

Vax trolls don't even have the ghost of a hint of a putative mechanism for the bold clots and myocarditis following the jabs

The blood clots were associated with the adenovirus-based vaccines, the AstraZeneca and the Johnson & Johnson, both of which have been pulled from market. The risk of blood clots from either of those vaccines was low, but still high enough above the background rate of blood clots for there to be concerns about vaccine safety. I suspect that since the blood clots were only observed following vaccination with the adenovirus vectors, the issue was due to the adenovirus backbone, not the DNA copy of the spike gene that had been inserted into the adenovirus.

As for the myocarditis, it is immune-mediated. Most often, it is triggered by infections, but it can also be triggered by other inflammatory processes. (Inflammation is an immune system function.) Here is a review on the current (as of 2020) understanding of myocarditis:

Myocarditis and inflammatory cardiomyopathy: current evidence and future directions.

Basically, if a pathogen can cause a condition like myocarditis, there is a small possibility that the vaccine against that pathogen will trigger myocarditis. This is because the immune response to a vaccine is so similar to the immune response to a pathogen.

The problem is that you are writing at a 6th grade level for people you take to be bewildered breeland peasants: to the point that you think people can't read and comprehend outside of their formal training: e.g. the CEO of Pfizer is a veterinarian, the CEO of Moderna was a Chem Engineer, and Francis Collins had a PhD in physical chemistry.

First of all, you yourself have complained that the scientific/medical research articles I have posted in the past were gibberish. After that complaint, do you really think I'm going to provide you the same highly technical descriptions I would give to people who hold PhDs in STEM fields similar to my major? No, writing at a sixth grade level is a tool to communicate to people who do not have a STEM education.

And don't feel bad. I was advised once, when I had to write a report of scientific research for Congress, to keep it at the sixth-grade level so that they could read it. On this forum, I actually write at above a sixth grade level.

FYI, your mentions of CEOs and Francis Collins really don't make the point you seem to think it makes. Even Nobel Prize winners can be spectacularly wrong when it comes to areas outside of their fields of expertise.

But you are projecting your own ineptitude and ignorance when you imply that only those with a formal degree in a field are capable of understanding it.

Really? When did I imply that? I have, in fact, spoken with quite a few lay people who, through their own efforts, have learned the science and can hold their own quite well in a highly technical discussion. But that's the thing--they actually read real scientific material, which is not the type of stuff you see on antivax sites.

And you ignore the fact that anyone who had a loved one drop dead or get turbo cancers after the clot shots, is not going to be assuage by your kind loftily dismissing them as kooks or hysterically imagining things because they JUST. DON'T. UNDERSTAND. SCIENCE.TM

Why should I give any scientific credence to things that were outright invented by professional antivaxxers (e.g. "turbo cancer") or deliberately presented out-of-context by said antivaxxers with the intent of convincing people that the vaccine is worse than the disease? I know full well that people who don't understand science are their primary targets for their propaganda. People who understand science or at least have enough of an understanding recognize the competence of those who make science their career.

Could you please post where exactly you’re working as a Dr.?
You’re a infectious disease and vaccines research specialist?? Where ?

In my home, since I am retired now.

And if you really expect me to give out identifying information, forget it. I'll provide it just as soon as you and all those spreading antivax propaganda give their personal contact information.

You worked for Fauci, correct?

Never met him.

Fauci's job was to correlate all of the scientific data from scientists all over the world and present it to the public in a comprehensible format.

I've provided similar information to other government officials, but never to Fauci, to my knowledge.

The article quotes her as complaining that she had to buy two seats.

She is too heavy to move her own body, yet she expects someone else to move it for her?

This should give her a clue. Maybe it’s time to shed that tonnage. I’ve heard that semaglutide helps people lose weight. It seems to be that magical weight loss pill that everyone always wants.

THIS is the “one” you ALWAYS get seated next to, in coach flights from NY to LAX.......They don’t need a wheelchair to board, they need a forklift.

We were seated apart on a flight (cheaper tickets for not sitting together). I overheard a woman say, when she saw my son heading for the empty middle seat next to her, "Oh, thank God, it's the skinny guy!"

So, how did American armadillos catch it from European squirrels?

This is an interesting topic to look into!

I will try to be as diplomatic as possible.

When people post anecdotal stories of a major medical condition that was diagnosed right after vaccination, and that medical condition is not associated with immune system function, I am highly skeptical.

Immune system function has been studied for over 200 years, since the first vaccine became available. By now, infectious disease and immunology specialists have a pretty good idea of what kinds of side effects occur following immune system challenge with an immunogen.

I have read several anecdotal stories which are frankly unbelievable. And I will not say more on this subject.

For those not familiar with Dr. McCullough, he is a highly respected cardiologist with extensive advanced publications - the most for those in his field and then he told the truth about the Covid 'vaccines' and now shills like exDemMom treat him as if he is a mark of failure.

Ugh.

Expertise in cardiology does not confer expertise in immunology, infectious disease, vaccinology, or any other field in which people who develop vaccines work.

I don't pretend to be an expert in cardiology, since that is not what my PhD studies focused on. My PhD studies and subsequent career focused on immune system function, especially the process of antibody production following antigen challenge.

Many antivax scammers use their doctorate level degrees to fool people into thinking they have expertise that they don't. McCullough does this. So does Naomi Wolf, PhD in English Literature. So have several other MDs whose specialties were in fields like orthopedic medicine.

People who are experts in infectious disease do not typically spread antivax nonsense.

Wow, that is quite the success story. Congratulations!

I have read recent reports that people must continue to take the semaglutide in order to maintain the weight loss permanently. But is that really a problem if you tolerate the drug well?

COVID-19 has been associated with coagulopathy with increased risk of venous thrombosis, which may, in the presence of PFO, lead to paradoxical embolism and ischaemic stroke.

I have not personally known someone who has died from Covid (it still has killed less than 0.5% of the US population, despite its 1% case fatality rate). But I did speak with someone whose cousin died of blood clots caused by Covid.

As the article you linked pointed out, despite the fact that the majority of the population had received at least one dose of vaccine, they only had six patients (out of 28) who had a stroke within 35 days of vaccination. Eleven of the patients did not have Covid and were not vaccinated. The authors said that "A potential cause–effect relationship may only be hypothesised." However, what it looks like to me is that they really did not find a difference between the rate of PFO associated stroke that occurred in temporal proximity with either Covid or Covid vaccination.

That would be interesting.

I have not seen data on fertility rates across different regions within a nation (except for state-level US data).

Worldwide, the birth rate has been dropping since the 1960s. The US birth rate had a slight rebound during the pandemic, jumping from 1.66 (in 2021) to 1.7 (in 2023) births per woman. But this is still far below the replacement rate of about 2.3 births per woman. Turkey has a higher birth rate than the US, but is still below replacement level.

The highest birth rates are in African countries, but those are also the countries with the highest child mortality rates. People have more children to offset high child mortality rates.

Total fertility rate

List of countries by total fertility rate.

For the most part, I just scroll past your screed. It's not worth my time to read what basically is a rehash of things already posted.

But I do have to respond to this:

But you just had to smear him - provide the old CIA talking points? Cause why? When he said not to use the PCR for diagnostic purposes because it can't, that really brought out your memory of his drug use? But you feel the PCR is valid, right? Let's look at the validity of the man who hailed the benefits of the RT PCR test which went on to provide the statistical basis for the “Pandemic.”

Questioning whether someone really made a highly dubious statement that is credited to him by antivax misinformationists is not smearing him. On the contrary, it's helping to protect his reputation, because it would be extremely damaging to the reputation of a Nobel Prize winning scientist to make such an unscientific claim. Various fact-checkers have looked into this claim and reported that Kary Mullis did not, in fact, say it.

Fullfact.org wrote this: The inventor of PCR never said it wasn’t designed to detect infectious diseases. Quote from this article: "He didn’t say PCR testing couldn’t be used for testing for any diseases, as some social media posts claim. Confusion seems to have arisen from quotes of his in a 1996 article about HIV and AIDS. In this, neither the author of the article, nor Dr Mullis said PCR testing does not work or only identifies the DNA or RNA of the person being tested.

The author actually quotes Dr Mullis as saying “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron” within the context of testing viral load (the amount of virus present) in people with HIV. This doesn’t mean he thought PCR testing didn’t work at all, but that there are limitations in detecting the specific levels of a virus from a sample using PCR testing.

USA Today also debunked this claim: Fact check: Comments from PCR test creator lacking context in social media post. Others have also debunked it. Kary Mullis did not, in fact, make a completely scientific and untrue claim that PCR cannot detect infectious organisms.

As for his drug use, I heard this directly from someone who knew him. According to his friend, Kary Mullis credited coming up with the idea of PCR while under the influence of a mind-altering drug. Kary Mullis had told him that the idea came into his head while he was going home from a party after partaking. While I cannot provide a reference to what a guest lecturer said to my graduate student group, I *can* provide references that corroborate the fact that Mullis was into mind-bending hallucinogenics: Intolerable Genius: Berkeley’s Most Controversial Nobel Laureate. While this article does mention Mullis' drug use and the epiphany he had while driving which led to the invention of PCR, it does not put the two together the way Mullis' friend described.

Quote: “I had read a lot about astrophysics and had taken some psychoactive drugs, which enhanced my perceived understanding of the cosmos,” Mullis recalled in his memoir, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.

Fittingly, Mullis’s epiphany came in his car, while driving through the hills of Mendocino County. He reasoned that by attaching two oligonucleotides to a split strand of DNA, he could isolate a desired section, such as the segment of DNA that determines sickle cell anemia.

Since Kary Mullis himself freely admitted to using hallucinogenic drugs, I hardly think that reporting this is "smearing" him. Also, I can greatly admire his work while acknowledging his personal faults.

PCR is an extremely difficult technique to learn, with a very sharp learning curve. It took me many tries before I could get it to work. When I finally overcame that barrier, it worked for me all the time. But getting there was difficult. I used to tell students that in order to get PCR to work, one must make sacrifices, preferably of something cute like an undergraduate student or a butterfly, ideally under the light of a full moon. So, yeah, I am in complete awe of the mind that not only thought of the idea but persevered to make it work.

Finally, I will end this with some links to descriptions of how PCR works. I hope they are not too technical for you.

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) This Khan Academy article is meant to give an overview to freshman level college students.

Basic Molecular Biology: PCR and Real-Time PCR – Principle of PCR. This short (2m23s) video is meant to explain PCR to laypeople.

The upshot of both of these links is that without the sequence that the PCR is designed to detect, nothing happens during the PCR reaction. PCR can *only* detect something that is there.

A beginner’s guide to RT-PCR, qPCR and RT-qPCR This guide describes the differences between Reverse Transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR), quantitative PCR (qPCR) and Reverse Transcriptase quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR). The terminology can be confusing, since we usually call qPCR "real-time" PCR since the quantitative reaction is measured in real time.

No one who understands even the basics of PCR would ever believe that PCR cannot be used to identify virus species and variants within those species. But antivax screeds aren't aimed at people who have basic understanding of science, are they? They're aimed at people who barely scraped by in their high school science classes.

I’ll have to try that!

63% of the total population in Turkey is fully (China Virus) vaccinated.

And what does that have to do with a fertility decline that has been going on since 2001?

Nothing.

Fertility rates have been dropping world wide. Very few countries are having enough children to replace their populations. I doubt this has anything to do with biological factors.

Look up youtube videos on the mouse utopia experiments. It's a societal disease going on.

The best way to eat caviar is on crackers with cream cheese. I’ve never actually seen people eat it plain.

The CDC report has revealed that almost 500,000 Americans aged between 0 and 44 years old died from the dangerous side effects of the Covid mRNA injections.

Do people EVER even consider fact-checking before they post this stuff?

The CDC has never reported that vaccines containing mRNA have killed massive numbers of people, and neither has any other reliable source.

Whoever wrote this is pretty confident that the target audience has no clue how to fact-check. Annual mortality figures for the US are published by the CDC, usually several months after the year ends because it takes time to compile and analyze the data.

What we find by looking at the mortality data for 2020 and 2021 is that there was a slight increase in mortality in 2021. In 2021, the Biden administration took over and started dropping the pandemic control measures implemented by the Trump administration. But much of the population was not even vaccinated yet. Furthermore, when the vaccines were rolled out, they were prioritized to people at greatest risk of dying from Covid--a group which does not include children.

In addition to failing to provide references, this blog plays very loosely with the numbers. It seems to be taking excess death data and attributing it all to Covid vaccines when, in reality, most excess deaths since 2020 are caused by Covid. It also omitted any mention of 2022, when significant numbers of people were getting vaccinated.

Let's look at actual death data for 2020, 2021, and 2022 for those age 0 to 44:

2020 total deaths: 242,526; Covid deaths: 10,122.

2021 total deaths: 275,231; Covid deaths: 26,515.

2022 total deaths: 250,778; Covid deaths: 8,786.

Hmm. It looks like the number of deaths actually declined when Covid vaccines became more widely available.

Sources:
Provisional Mortality Data — United States, 2021.

Provisional Mortality Data — United States, 2022.

The death data for 2020 is contained in the 2021 report. I would have liked to compare the death data from 2019 for the groups age 44 and below, but the only reports I could find gave deaths per 100,000 population, not total deaths.

Overall, 66% of the excess deaths in 2020 were caused by Covid. The other 34% were caused by the typical top causes of death (heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, etc.) because people were unwilling or unable to access medical care. If, within the 44 and below age groups, there was a similar number of excess deaths, then there were a total of 15,259 excess deaths in 2020. In 2021, with 32% of the excess deaths being from causes other than Covid, total excess deaths at 38,758. And in 2022, 42% of the excess deaths were non-Covid; this puts the total excess deaths at 15,022.

And if we add up all of the excess deaths of those aged 44 and below from 2020 through 2022, we get 69,039--which isn't anywhere close to the 500,000 claimed in this blog.

Now for some science:

Vaccine: contains a single mRNA that directs the production of a single viral protein for a couple of days.

Viruses: literally bags of RNA that enter and take over the function of cells all over the body. The viruses force every infected cell to make thousands of copies of 29 different virus mRNAs encoding 29 different virus proteins. Every cell that gets infected produces thousands of new viruses which infect even more cells and turn them into virus factories. It takes the immune system two weeks to analyze the virus and start producing antibodies to destroy it. Meanwhile, the virus causes all kinds of tissue damage, because infected cells die or are killed by the immune system. During infection, before the immune system kicks in, trillions of viruses and the many trillions of mRNA molecules that they produce are distributed throughout the body.

The idea that having your body flooded with trillions of viruses each making many copies of 29 different mRNA molecules and 29 different proteins is somehow less dangerous than a small dose of vaccine containing one kind of mRNA molecule which only lasts for a few hours once in the body is ludicrous.

I do have one thing to say for you, which is not applicable to most of those who read antivax websites and repeat the disinformation here. You, at least, make an effort to provide a scientific framework, even though you are completely wrong on the science. (I actually do think you are capable of understanding that damage due to immune system activation is independent of the exact identity of the activator; you just choose to believe or promote an unscientific version which advances the antivax agenda.) That said, I am going to skip most of your misrepresentation of science and skip to a couple of things that jumped out at me:

The effects of Covid-19 have been exagerated and distorted so that we don't know that it leads to any disease in pregnant mothers. We don't even know who really had 'covid'.

CDC Withdraws Use of PCR Test for COVID and Finally Admits the Test Can Not Differentiate Between the Flu and COVID Virus

12/29/2021 10:20:04 AM PST · by Hojczyk · 110 replies

(I'm not going to remake that link.)

The quote from the CDC given at that link does not "admit" that a PCR test cannot tell the difference between Covid and influenza. (For one of the most specific tests known to be unable to differentiate between two unrelated viruses would be a stunner, indeed.) I copied this excerpt from that link:

In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season.

What that says is that the CDC is encouraging laboratories to use a PCR assay that is able to detect both Covid and influenza. This is because both Covid and influenza present as respiratory diseases with similar symptoms, such that a health care provider cannot diagnose the patient based on symptoms alone. Such a PCR assay, which is called a multiplex assay, uses dyes to differentiate between the PCR results. So, for example, they can attach blue dye to the Covid primers and red dye to the influenza primers. When the PCR machine runs the test, it can tell whether the amplified PCR product is Covid or influenza by its color. By using dyes of different colors, a PCR machine is able to distinguish between several different genomes contained in the same sample.

So, yes, whether the Covid is detected by a singleplex assay or a multiplex assay, the PCR is the most accurate type of assay known.

Now, since you posted the details of the PCR protocol as an image, I cannot copy/paste the text. However, I can still comment on, specifically, the text you highlighted in yellow.

If you are developing a PCR assay (which I've done hundreds of times), you would normally choose a biological sample that contains the nucleic acid you are trying to detect. For example, if I want to develop an assay to detect cytochrome P450 1A1 (CYP1A1) in samples, I use as my positive control a sample that I already know contains CYP1A1. But if I don't have such a sample but I know the sequence of the CYP1A1 gene, I can make a copy of that gene synthetically and use the synthetic copy to test my PCR assay. (And, in real life, this is what I did.) The CDC had the sequence of the virus genome. They can chemically synthesize any portion of that genome for use as a positive PCR control, and this is what they did. A synthetic copy of a gene contains the exact same nucleotides in the exact same order as the actual gene; the difference is that the nucleotides were put together using chemistry instead of enzymes.

The inventor of the original PCR technique said it was not appropriate to use for any diagnostic purpose because you may have small amounts of virus in your body without ever becoming ill from it.

That's true for any bacterial or viral illness. Whether you get sick or not is a function of what we call the "infectious dose," or "ID." A person who has been exposed to a quantity of pathogen that is less than the ID will have no symptoms and isn't going to be tested, so no one would ever know if they were exposed. This makes the statement that "you may have small amounts of virus in your body without ever becoming ill from it" irrelevant because only symptomatic people are typically tested. I do not know why Kary Mullis would have said that PCR is not appropriate to use for diagnostic purposes, since even at the time he died (long before Covid appeared), PCR was being used for diagnostics.

(Editorial note: Kary Mullis is the inventor of the PCR technique. He was simultaneously an absolute genius and a total kook. He had said that he came up with the idea of PCR after attending a party in which mind-altering drugs had been freely distributed; said drugs opened his mind to new avenues that he would not have considered while sober. Despite his quirks, my experience with PCR leads me to conclude that his was a rare sort of genius.)

In general, assays are rated on two characteristics: specificity and sensitivity. Specificity is a measure of how well the assay differentiates between two similar conditions (for instance, between two different clades of influenza H3N2). Sensitivity is a measure of how accurately the assay detects a condition (i.e. how many false negatives and false positives there are). There are a lot of nuances in this area which I am not going to delve into. The bottom line is that the Covid PCR assays are both specific and sensitive enough to be FDA approved for the diagnosis of Covid. And the PCR assays are updated to detect the newest strains of Covid that are circulating.

But wait - there's more! They often ran the PCR test results at 40 cycles, which even Fauci admitted would be excessive resulting in breaking down samples to mere nucleotides.

Molecular biologists (such as myself) are well aware of the limitations of increasing the number of PCR cycles. It does not, as you think, break down samples to mere nucleotides. The PCR test cannot do that. Furthermore, a sample that only contained nucleotides would come up negative on any PCR test. In order to perform PCR, we have to add nucleotides to the reaction mix. These nucleotides are used up to make the PCR product if the sample contains the nucleic acid we are trying to detect. So, if only nucleotides are present after the PCR has run, the sample is negative. The problem with extending PCR beyond 30-35 cycles is that, in the absence of the gene the PCR was designed to detect, the primers themselves can dimerize (attach to each other) and create PCR products. With subsequent cycles of PCR, these spurious products can get longer and actually reach the limit of detectability of the PCR machine. This is why those of us who design PCR experiments always define a cut-off where the PCR stops. I always put the cut-off at 35 cycles, but, realistically, if I do not see a product by 25 cycles, I consider the test negative. We analyze PCR by how few, not how many, cycles it takes to detect the product. If the product is detected after 15 cycles, that is a pretty strong positive. If the product is only visible after 34 cycles, then we have to question whether it is even a real product.

And shills, the law should also apply to pharma shills...on FR

That is so funny, especially considering that I have never worked for a pharmaceutical company! Consider me, instead, as a shill for the scientific/infectious disease/public health community.