30/10/2020
Recently, I was chatting with a friend about the "severity" of the COVID pandemic. The question, I keep coming back to is this---how can we continue to judge the severity of a pandemic, using a test, that is TOTALLY questionable?
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Why are positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests not a good metric when discussing the severity of COVID-19?
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A few reasons...
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1. LACK of VALID GOLD STANDARD
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The PCR test has never been tested against a gold standard. You have to test the test to make sure it is accurate. This NEVER happened.
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Tests need to be evaluated to determine their preciseness — strictly speaking their “sensitivity”[1] and “specificity” — by comparison with a “gold standard,” meaning the most accurate method available.
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"If we had a new test for picking up [the bacterium] golden staph in blood, we’ve already got blood cultures, that’s our gold standard we’ve been using for decades, and we could match this new test against that. But for COVID-19 we don’t have a gold standard test.”
2. NO PROOF FOR THE RNA BEING OF VIRAL ORIGIN.
Essential you have to purify the object/virus you are testing for, meaning you have separate the object/virus from everything else that is not the object/virus.
"The reason for this is that PCR is extremely sensitive, which means it can not detect even the smallest pieces of DNA or RNA — but it cannot determine where these particles came from. That has to be determined beforehand." BUT IT WAS NOT, and HAS NOT HAPPENED!
"Modern virus detection methods like sleek polymerase chain reaction tell little or nothing about how a virus multiplies, which animals carry it, or how it makes people sick. It is like trying to say whether somebody has bad breath by looking at his fingerprint.”
-Dr. Charles Calisher
In addition, there is no scientific proof that those RNA sequences are the causative agent of what is called COVID-19.
3. IRRATIONAL TEST RESULTS
"We cannot know the false positive rate of the PCR tests without widespread testing of people who certainly do not have the virus, proven by a method which is independent of the test (having a solid gold standard)." Again this has NEVER been done!
In the “CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel“ file from March 30, 2020,
"Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms”
And:
"This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.”
And the FDA admits that:
Positive results do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with other viruses. The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease.”
4. NO EVIDENCE THE PCR TEST CAN ACTUAL TEST "VIRAL" LOAD
"This is crucial because, in order to even begin talking about actual illness in the real world not only in a laboratory, the patient would need to have millions and millions of viral particles actively replicating in their body.
That is to say, the CDC, the WHO, the FDA or the RKI may assert that the tests can measure the so-called “viral load,” i.e. how many viral particles are in the body. “But this has never been proven."
5. HIGH “CYCLE QUANTIFICATION” (Cq) VALUES MAKE THE TEST EVEN MORE QUESTIONABLE.
The Cq value specifies how many cycles of DNA replication are required to detect a real signal from biological samples.
The higher the Cq value gets, the more unreliable it becomes. The PCR test becomes difficult to distinguish real signal from background, for example due to reactions of primers and fluorescent probes, and hence there is a higher probability of false positives.
It is suggested to keep the Cq around 20-30 for testing reliability, anything over 35 should be noted as unreliable.
In the US, where positive tests are HIGH, some labs have used a Cq as high as 40 -- which means 90% of these tests are barely showing any virus.
It is believed if you test up to 50, everyone would test positive, and if you test only to 20, almost everyone would be negative.
Ultimately, a positive test should never equate to a "case". 50K, 60K, 80K cases a day looks scary--yet, what does this actually mean? The verbiage, during this pandemic, has changed, a case used to mean a sick person, now a "case" is a positive test. And since we know a positive test could mean very little, we have to start asking, what is really going on here?
And yes, mortality is going up in some areas. The question is, is it going up MORE than any other year? You have to remember we are in the "flu" season, it is NORMAL for mortality to go up in colder months. If I had to bet, we will have a very mild flu season (and other causes) this year, as COVID deaths will take over due to ALL the testing.
If you would like to read the full article I summarized in this post, message me...
