to everyone coming here to inanely quote Kary Mullis on the utility of PCR for diagnosing infection: this piece agrees with him. it makes the same point Mullis made, but in more words.
maybe try to understand that before yelling a lot of things at me.
The widely circulated video of Mullis makes a valid point that applies to all medical tests, where you seek to measure the amount of something (that never reaches zero, so can be "positive" if you can detect small enough quantities of it) in something (of which you have drawn a variable and usually unknown quantity of), and turn that into a yes/no diagnosis, or an index of suspicion that further workup is needed.
It's not doable. You also get "you don't have cancer" results that are wrong and "you do have cancer" results that are wrong.
You cannot ever turn a continuous variable into a discrete variable with 100% correctness.
For a real-world parallel: you cannot ever set a speed limit that optimises the safety/speed trade-off for all roads at all times in all driving conditions.
I don’t want to subject valued commenters to the vitriol of angry ignorant people, so I’ll pin my own comment but otherwise leave it. Happy to engage to some extent, to show good faith.
More than the amount it is about whether the bug is viable or not. In practice they appear to be correlated even though they are not necessarily the same. Also there is the issue of multiple infections or other conditions going on. To think that a diagnosis can begin and end with just one of these assays is nonsense. Nothing new, I know...
the PCR detects fragments of virus RNA. for a certain class of questions and problems *that’s enough*. as for multiple infections and the relationship of any specific virus to symptoms and illness: many studies use PCR data to investigate precisely this question.
The argument that PCR tests must mean something because they could predict deaths in advance can be questioned. Perhaps the connection is that positive tests negatively affected subsequent medical care for these patients.
Iatrogenic harm seems to have been huge during COVID-19. Why would it not be modulated by covid diagnosis?
hospital admissions especially are to a large degree independent of positive PCR results. you test positive, get sent home, and whether or not you end up in hospital depends upon whether you get sick enough to call an ambulance. there’s also the additional evidence of wastewater PCR testing, which a) correlates extremely well with day-by-day PCR positive cases, and b) thus has the same predictive value as these tests. The most parsimonious explanation here has to be that these tests detect the presence of a real pathogen that makes some people seriously ill.
I kept my eye on wastewater testing. Somehow, the ratio between deaths and wastewater RNA dropped by a factor of seven from 2020 to 2021. I've never seen an explanation for that. Usually, medical advances that reduce the death rate due to an illness by sevenfold would be celebrated as a huge success. For some reason, this particular medical advancement was not discussed.
To me, medical care as the largest cause of covid-19 deaths, while uncomfortable, makes sense.
Edit: The sharp drop in death rate per unit of wastewater RNA occurred in summer 2020, before the introduction of vaccines. Maybe I should publish a graph...
Hospital admission testing can be skewed somewhat by people being tested when entering for heart attacks, cancer, broken bones...
It would be a fascinating scientific question to see if there really could be a way to test for viral prevalence in a way which didn't get a bias added somewhere. But I fear such a solution may only embolden the testing maniacs to do anything they could to "get mroe data" so they could "get the numbers to zero".
I simply wsh we'd had a normal pandemic, one where we deal with the diseaes as a disease, the way we always had done before, rather than a global government over-reaction and trial-run of digital-totalitarianism, so we could have tried to answer some of the scientific questions (see my other post on this article) without getting buried under politics and fear-mongering. Maybe if we'd been able to ask and answer those questions with true scientific methods, rather that politicised the-science-tific methods, epidemiology would have had a chance to test and refine their models and might today be a discipline with a passable reputation.
The mortality reduction factor from spring to fall was 8.7, so I think whatever they were doing in the hospitals/care homes was a lot more important than how many viruses were out there.
The Mullis video, coupled with Covid appearing “suddenly everywhere at once,” is a testament to the uncomfortable truth that SC2 was in the population long, long before Feb 2020.
That, to me, is a point that can’t be emphasized enough - because it speaks to how deadly our human interventions were, and how unremarkable this virus really is.
Yes i think the issue is that they intentionally used cycles that they certainly knew were too high to yield meaningful results, and then used propaganda to equate those meaningless quantities with lying in an ICU with a ventilator.
LOL. I’m removing the greater part of your comments, but leaving this one, as a testament to your ignorance. (hint: PCR isn’t a treatment for anything.)
You are right in telling that we can se the big virusses, but I to people say "do the SARAS-2 excist", but thereby actually mening, do the virusses deliver the Covid-19 disease? Among other the HIV virus never has been proved to result in the HIV disease. And as Hippocrates told the diseases don't come from outside, but from inside, and thinking on bad health. And think about the original inhabitans in Austrailia who had no word for disease, as they never had been hit by it, before the Westerns came.
It has always astounded me how true the "bell curve meme" is. People like you or ethical skeptic give some reassurance eugyppius, because there really is a fine line between being a "conspiracy theorist" and actually being a conspiracy theorist. Feels like 90% of the people on "our side" are completely dumb, and somehow wandered into being right just by virtue of being so dumb they'll believe anything contrary to MSM.
I mean, I guess sure, it works, but it's quite painful being an "antivaxer" and seeing all those flat earthers, PCR denying, virus denying, 5G nanochip oxide people you end up lumped with while trying to avoid all the misinformation and grifters floating around...
I'd love to hear if you have any analysis on this phenomenon. This stuff obviously attracts a lot of schizo nutcases which really muddy the waters mixed in with some very smart and analytical people that actually do the work and stick to the facts, while most "normal people" follow the vax herd.
I don't get the broad smear directed at eugyppius you are using this article as evidence for dismissing him. His article isn't a "joke." Ad hominem is not persuasive, reasoning is. I do appreciate the article; the author gave the citation for the paragraphs from the CDC EUA, that states for those who recognize the jargon, that there is zero SARS2 tested for in their pcr.
Nothing Eugyppius asserts in his article or his additional comments is inaccurate or unreasonable Be specific, clear (and preferably civil) in your objections or better to be quiet.
I’m saying they’re misusing established, well-understood and valid techniques to mislead the public about the prevalence and danger of a virus, and you’re screaming that “it’s fraud”. maybe there’s actually no disagreement and you just don’t understand the post.
Although it did come through, I think the misuse of the PCR test did not come though loudly enough in your article for some readers. On the other hand, for those of us who were counter narrative, the misuse of the PCR test by our politicians - as you've just stated - to mislead and terrorize the general public, came through blatantly loudly and clearly and made our stomachs turn.
Your article is great but the pro narrative people needed to see a news piece explaining how a PCR test could be misused but that never happened. Quelle surprise!
The pro-narrative people. most of the educated ones anyway, and the anti-narrative people should all recall the false-positives statistics leson they should have had in school long ago. They always phrase it as looking for a 1 in 10000 cancer among patients, or saboteur among workers, or "terrorist" among passengers. They always work through the numbers using something like a 99% accurate test, no algebra even needed. And the result is that a positive is usually more likely a false positive than a true one. While covid wasn't 1 in 10000 rare the logic still works to find false positives making a sizable fraction of positives. I had friends who had been at uni with me, and I recall a lecturer giving us that lesson at the start of a stats module, a lesson we were being reminded of as I atleast had done it in school and A-levels beforehand. But when I told these "friends" to remember that lesson, they all just shut their ears. The worrying thing with pro-narrative people is they simply ignore evidence and reasoning which disagrees with the-science, however familiar they should be with such evidence or reasoning. I don't know how a news piece could convince them unless the whole news would turn away from the narrative and return to the agreed facts of <=2019, and run a campaign of unbrainwashing. This article would make a chink in their mental armour, if they were able to read it for long enough without the narrative door slamming shut in their mind to block it out.
There was fraud. If you understand the details, you would realize the fraud was in the way the tests were used, not the tests or the technology itself.
These details are very important, because the broad claim that PCR is fraudulent or the related argument that SARS-COV2 doesn't exist are very demonstrably disinformation if you understand the technology at work here and what it's limitations are.
There’s no stronger evidence than repeated personal direct observation.
My family (some unvaxxed some vaxxed) had covid twice.
Of all PCR tests we took over last two years, the only two times the PCR returned positive was when we felt sick with typical flu-like covid symptoms. Not so bad, but real.
Anecdotes aren't evidence. That article has a video from Fauci himself who said the PCR test is useless after 35 cycles. The evidence in that article also shows that every PCR test runs higher than that. It was a lie from start to finish. They needed high case counts to justify their lockdowns and murderous vaccines
That is the threshold for determining a positive. That does not mean that a person with a Ct of 25 would not exist. Do you not understand how that works? They are setting the threshold for positivity using a cycle threshold of anything below those numbers.
The answer is no, they do not understand how PCR works lmao. I personally worked on the development of a SARS-CoV-2 PCR assay, and I can assure anyone here that it works very well. High Cts (>29 or so) are generally not very clinically relevant, but no matter what PCR is a tool. A CLINICIAN has to use it in combination with clinical presentation to make a diagnosis. PCR unambiguously states whether or not the nucleic acid(s) targeted are present in the sample. That's it, and it is extremely effective at doing so.
New Sachs report shows virus 99% likely GOF-engineered by US biotech interests in that Wuhan lab, with explicit cover-up effort run by Fauci et al. in Feb-Mar 2020.
Let’s hope a Republican-led House investigation will expose this fraud Fauci.
PCR is used in many, many contexts, well beyond the field of SARS-2 diagnosis, and all kinds of cycle thresholds are employed or deemed significant in these different contexts.
With SARS-CoV-2, a positive result - irrespective of the presence or severity of symptoms, and often at high ct levels - was deemed “significant” enough by public health and elected officials to justify illegal quarantines and other restrictions of movement, liberty, etc.
In this post, you’re largely addressing whether these tests are valid (measure what they claim to measure) & reliable (measure consistently) - which is important to address.
But, as you know, these tests were weaponized against the populace (including children, at least in the US) and became tools of mass destruction.
The (lack of) ethics governing the interpretation & significance of the PCR test result are, for many, the real issue.
You can debate what anecdotal evidence is evidence of—, but when anecdote reports true facts observed, it is evidence of something.
If you doubt the virus is real (for what is real can be detected) then how will you explain the inevitable exposé of its lab origin (see latest Sachs report) engineered for GOF by US biotech money including NIH Fauci, who directed explicit cover-up pushing natural-origin lie?
Sorry. You are wrong. See the latest report from Jeffrey Sachs investigation on SARS-Cov-2 origin: It was almost certainly created in that Wuhan lab by US biotech industry cartel, including Fauci & NIH, who engaged in explicit coverup by pushing lie of natural origin.
A real engineered virus that can be detected by testing.
"There’s no stronger evidence than repeated personal direct observation."
No, its a great place to make a hypothesis from, a good call to start investigating, but it isn't evidence. Thousands of such observations, with control group type considerations also and comparisons among the grid of uninfected-asymptomatic"Infection"-mildInfection-seriousInfection-actuallyInfectedWithSomethingElse vs testedPos-testedNeg-testedInconclusive would be evidence, one family with observations where PCR isn;lt compared to any other measure isn't evidence (though it is worthwhile to make a hypothesis from). Also, evidence of the quality I've descriebd would be better than the quality used for most of the the-science dring the pandemic, so your anecdotes are probably better "evidence" than the-science type "evidence", but they arenlt enough to be real evidence for actual science. Don't feel bad about this, science starts with observations before proper evidence is sought, and as I said, you're still doing better than Neil Ferguson, your '"data" points' are real, even if there aren't enough of them, his weren't despite the amount of fancy maths he did afterwards.
say I want to market a garbage and dangerous rhinovirus vaccine, so I mass test the population for rhinovirus. I find a lot of rhinovirus infections and this helps me sell my garbage vaccine. it is simultaneously true that a) my rhinovirus tests contain real information, and that b) they were used as propaganda to get people to buy a worthless pharmaceutical. my critics, realising that a) is true, could even study my statistics to develop arguments against my propaganda.
Right now there is an apparent upswing in cases in Germany (and in my area here in New England), but they aren't updating the PCR positivity tests anymore... Why not? Are we in a different news swing cycle- less emphasis on covid armageddon (and all of the sins associated with the policies/lockdowns/mandates/needless deaths) and instead now pivot to nuclear armageddon and energy blackout armageddon? Seems like the harms from the entire covid debacle just keeping getting higher and higher and now there is a discernible and marked pivot away.
Do we know how "case" is being defined these days in Germany and New England? I'm also in N.E., but I don't pay any attention to what passes for "the news". My only Covid-related activity is to mock people still wearing masks in my windy seacoast village, and to write the occasional bitter reprimand to the director of our library, who "requires" masks for events there.
It does, because we know they can't be trusted to do objective testing, even if they work, as your lone voice claims. Its well documented that the vaxxed didn't have Covid because they were run at 23 cycles or so, while the unvaxxed were all sick because the test was run at +38 cycles.
This is precisely why I don’t believe any conclusions can be made based on PCR testing. They weren’t transparent OR consistent on how they were conducted.
I honestly don't think I saw/read people saying that all PCR tests are worthless. With regards to covid, the PCR test was horribly misused. Please remember that many, if not most of us never heard of a PCR test before this sad 2+ year episode. It's kind of hard to see the good of something when you've only been exposed to the bad of it.
Where were the standards that made them worthwhile? Where were RCT blinded trials and with a neutral placebo that would have shown that PRC testing would prove worthwhile? Because people tested positive for something does not mean it was covid. These many symptoms are common with dozens of afflictions.
PCR is like BMI. It’s good on a population level but it is often enough wrong in significant ways on an individual level as to be dangerous in the wrong hands.
I am 6 foot tall, 185 pounds, muscular, with a 32 inch waist. And according to BMI, I am overweight (not obese as previously written)
Which would be absurd even to the most uneducated observer.
PCR is the same. You’re dangerously ill even though to the most untrained it’s clear you’re not sick at all.
yes, exactly. if a patient is sick, it can help the doctor narrow the diagnosis. or, you can use it population-wide, to determine roughly how much virus is out there at the moment, and whether infections in general (not in any specific individual) are rising or falling or staying the same.
Exactly. BMI can tell you roughly how obese a population is without worrying too much about the population it labels poorly. It’s directional and gives you some idea what population size recommendations to make.
But using it as a primary diagnostic tool without relying on any secondary corroborators (like your eyes) is a misuse of its function
"Health or Healthy" determinations should never (IMO) be anything less than on an Individual basis. Far too many factors to be taken into consideration about this amazing Human body (and Mind). Outlook/Attitude determines much of health.
Seeing how much virus is out there TELLS YOU ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THE DIS-EASE!!! Also, these PCR tests have never been calibrated to calculate the false positive and false negative rates. You can’t have a test without first knowing the false positive/negative rate!! Why do you think the PCR only received an emergency use authorization? Because they don’t know the false/negative rates!!
Even if it’s overweight instead of obese (which I’ve corrected), the example is still accurate.
Any health professional who would call me overweight based on BMI alone would be overlooking obvious facts like broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and visible abdominal muscles.
I’m no more overweight than I am obese. The BMI is not meant to label healthy, muscular people overweight. The creators didn’t consider muscle mass to be the problem with body mass.
this is true, but your BMI can easily be read as normal rather than overweight, as it is right on the line. It is a wholly inadequate test for many people. I wonder why it still exists and has not been improved or replaced. Any health provider who would rather rely on that number than look at you, should not be your provider. Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes.
The damage these test results enabled is incalculable. What is the purpose of this article, other than to muddy the waters of the clear misuse of PCR to create conditions that caused so much incredible damage to people, young and old, all over the world?
the purpose of this post is to explain precisely what is wrong with how PCRs have been misused, and that the technology itself is not fundamentally fraudulent or fake. this is not “muddying waters,” it’s a crucial distinction.
Thanks for this. I’ve grown tired of arguing with people about PCR where the Dunning-Kruger effect has kicked in hard since the pandemic was declared.
I’m a clinical microbiologist and have used PCR as a day-to-day technique for years. Since microbiology labs all have PCR platforms these days it was natural that we should be asked to take on Covid screening since the workload would have overwhelmed the small number of specialist virology laboratories.
There are a few key differences in the way the SARS-CoV-2 PCR has been used which are at variance with normal clinical testing and these account for a lot of the illusion of the pandemic.
Firstly, we normally use PCR as a screening test which is confirmed by culture, where possible, or whole genome sequencing in a specialist laboratory. If PCR is not confirmed, the usual practice is to disclaim the result with a comment to the effect that a positive PCR test does not necessarily indicate the presence of viable organisms. Even where confirmatory testing has been used (in hospital labs but not in the public screening centres) for Covid this caveat has not been used. Given the small but not negligible false positive rate of PCR tests this is problematic…
… especially since most of the people who have been screened are asymptomatic. As Prof. Norman Fenton has demonstrated, a small percentage of false positives in a large population of negative cases can easily swamp a larger percentage of false negatives in the real infected population, exaggerating the case rate by a factor of greater than 10.
We don’t use PCR to screen asymptomatic people for any other pathogen. As an illustration of how problematic this could be, consider Epstein-Barr virus which is carried by 25-30% of the population at any given time without serious consequences. If we were to screen everyone for EBV irrespective of symptoms it would be associated with 25-30% of deaths where it played no part in the patient’s demise. If correlation were confused with causation as it was with SARS-CoV-2, we would conclude that EBV is a killer virus which it isn’t.
Finally, in spite of Kary Mullis’ advice to the contrary, PCR has come to be used as a diagnostic test even in the absence of other signs and symptoms of disease. While it is not uncommon in my lab to have the clinical staff request a repeat PCR where a patient is symptomatic but the test negative, it never happens that they ask us to repeat a positive test in an asymptomatic patient. This is because they are compelled to err on the side of caution due to their responsibility for avoiding cross-infection. However, it does mean that false positives go unchecked while false negatives are challenged further exaggerating the bias pointed out by Prof. Fenton.
The shortcomings of PCR are limited and well known. The real problems come from the way in which it has been applied and interpreted in relation to Covid.
This is a great post. Normally for a diagnosis with a positive test there is usually a follow up to rule out a false positive when the prevalence of a disease is very low since even with a test that has very high specificity, if one tests a large number of people, the number of false positives can easily overwhelm the number of true positives even though there are not that many positives generated.
Interestingly enough, the only place I have seen where they retested people with positive samples was at Cambridge university. The entire student body was tested and the first test generated ~40 positives who were then retested and only 6 were positive the second time. This is the normal course for disease testing - a first screening which is often cheaper but generates quite a few false positives while the second is often a more costly technique but is only applied to the positives generated from the first screening. However, for covid they assumed all the positives are cases since there was no cost to assuming the person is a case since that person would be required to abide by the mitigation measures. It would be seen as erring on the side of caution. Better to have some quarantine who were not infectious than to have some truly infectious spreading the virus.
The PCR test was used to support a myth that a person who was not sick (no symptoms) was a person to be concerned about. No one should have been dull witted enough to accept that.
I think you're forgetting just how much deliberate confusion was being propagated during the early months of the covid scam. Combined with the inherent human characteristic to seek answers from confident authority figures, it's not an issue of "dull wits", more of well executed manipulation of the majority using ancient techniques.
I've been trying to determine what is the common factor of those who realized that this was indeed a scam and, frankly, I don't think there is a single commonality. Or even a few.
I think we all remember quite clearly the events that took place. There are the truly dull witted and those who chose to disconnect their common sense due to other motivations ( having a scapegoat for their problems, not having to work , other personal financial benefits) , In the early months of the scam a church posted on their outdoor board “Jesus died to take away your sins, not your mind”.
Agreed. As someone who works in clinical research and has conducted pcr testing on everything from porcine fecal samples to mRNA-transfected lymphoblastoid cells, it has been difficult to explain to those who would jump on these misinformed opinions to support otherwise good research. On the other end, it has been equally difficult to get through to some of my colleagues the impact that setting the Ct threshold so high has on interpreting population level data. And I'm certainly no expert in PCR-based experiments but it is amazing to see how fear and political motivations color the thoughts of otherwise brilliant people and cause them to develop these wild theories that are rooted in the processes of groupthink. It's imperative that we address these discrepancies head on as you have done here. Thanks again for another great post.
Sooooo tired of some of the crazy ideas being pushed as click bait on “our side”... there’s SO MUCH to understand about the lies and manipulations that DID happen - we don’t need to run down stupid rabbit holes. :)
Mass testing was used to traumatize the neurotic for the purpose of control. SARS-Cov-2 was equivalent to a bad flu strain, with respect to deaths, with the odd characteristic is that it didn't kill young people like a bad flu.
Testing results where used by totalitarians to lockdown cities, states and entire nations. To destroy small businesses, a locus of conservative values. And worst of all, to first convince people to take the mRNA therapeutics, that we still don't know what is in them, then later mandate them. Because that is what the totalitarians wanted for reasons we still don't fully understand.
My beef with the pcr is I have a feeling, could be wrong, that those who were PCR positive were then not screened for flu and possibly twindemic patients who may have been treated for flu were shoved into isolation on a ventilator and left to die. Maybe not tho.
I think this indeed happened in some edge cases, but probably not very often, given how rare influenza was between March 2020 and the start of this year.
this is assuming "rare influenza was between march..." did you see how many flu cases we had coming into the corona-pandemic? it was on fire... and then disappeared?
this entire premise is assuming a lot for a universal fall-off of flu globally which I'm going to have to call bs
Show me a flu panel that covers all the H and all the N which were administered to all the corona positive patients to exhaust any possibility that while they test for corona they also don't have the flu, they did not do this. Not everyone who tested for corona was tested for the flu.
it’s pretty clear flu was rare since march 2020, because it has a distinct signature in hospitalisations: seasonal flu causes a small bump in infant/young child hospitalisations and deaths, alongside the deaths/hospitalisations among the olds. suddenly in the 2020/21 flu season, the child hospitalisation/death signature was gone. there was just hardly any flu. this is confirmed by influenza surveillance in many countries.
it seems more like someone was like "stop counting flu" and then the data showed zeros more than "oh wow somehow for 1 year we magically made the flu disappear" which is highly suspect
There is no money in a death due to flu but heaps for covid. D'ont you think this will explain the suden disappearance of flu. How independent from Fauci et al is the flu surveillance system? The answer is obvious and selfexplanatory
Very early on in 2020, when I was puzzled about the odd disappearance of the flu, I remember reading a detailed article about how multiple flu viruses could arise but one would lkely be dominant and mostly suppress the others from spread. So the theory was that the covid virus was strong enough to become quickly dominant and basically stamp out further spread of the lesser viruses it was competing with at the time. It all made some degree of sense to me since I knew little about viruses at the time I read the article. I've looked for this article but can't find it now, wish I'd saved it.
Possible explanation re influenza "disappearance":
A couple years ago I first encountered the concept of "viral interference", a phenomenon that has apparently been observed for many years, in which some viruses appear to be suppressed by the prevalence of others.
because we know from separate influenza surveillance statistics (a whole separate testing program, independent of the mass SARS-2 PCR testing initiatives) that influenza was very rare after about April 2020. multiple separate pieces of evidence confirm this. and so we’re asking, how often the same person had two near-simultaneous infections with one virus that was super rare (influenza) and another virus that was also rather rare until recently (SARS-2).
U.S. Influenza Surveillance System: Purpose and Methods, stating that because of COVID-19, it will suspend data collection for regular influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season.
How can you state that with any certainty? Nobody was ever tested for flue because a covid infection could bring up to 400.000$, for an US hospital and aabout 60.000Euro in Germany.
I understood that Corona indeed replaced it. And there really was no flu in the 2020/1, at least none I know of. Virus interference is a weird thing. For example, I never got chicken pox till my 20ies, even when heavily exposed. Doctors were sure I must have had it without knowing, but I was sure I hadn't. Then, eventually I got it. Thing is, as young I used to suffer from fever blisters almost on monthly basis, and the two viruses interfere with each other. The first time I was exposed, but without fever blisters, I got them.
I have wondered about this, but I haven't seen any hard data on the number of tests runs across multiple years. From what I can tell, is there was some disease displacement, which is not unheard of.
if they didn't test for flu with a negative result while assuming they didn't have influenza is not robust sciencing but i'm not a doctor it just seems obvious
My impression is that at least here in Canada they would run PCR tests in hospitals and perhaps other health care settings as a proxy for what was going on in the population.
There were a lot of pneumonia deaths and bacterial versus viral pneumonia is not so easy to distinguish. I remember a paper that indicated many covid deaths were probably due to bacterial pneumonia. The stated conclusion was something about interaction between pathogens, but I think they were just covering up misdiagnosis. I'll post the reference when I can.
The study data was from Kaiser in California. I know for a fact that later their standard covid treatment included azithromycin antibiotic.
Pneumococcal vaccination prevented 30% of COVID deaths, but the effect disappeared among recent antibiotic recipients, i.e. the antibiotics seemed even more protective, although that effect was obfuscated.
hold up are you saying early on there was no azithromycin in the protocol? and now it is there? hmmm can we overlay deaths onto treatment protocols over time charts?
All I know is what I heard from a doctor there. Sometime later in the pandemic they started giving patients nasal Oxygen plus azithromycin. It is my understanding that the earlier treatment protocol was different.
thanks for sharing 🙏 all i know is here where I am we had testing drive throughs and local testing telling patients who tested negative for coronavirus that they were "presumptive positive" but the only test administered was the covid pcr... oops so they could have had any number of thing from flu to pick something and we didn't exhaust any of it but spent billions on the covid test...gg
Interesting. This is what Denis Rancourt has said - that doctors were urged to not prescribe antibiotics because it's a virus and not bacterial.
It's a long clip but he states that the south usually dispenses antibiotics in the summer but didn't do so in the summer of 2020. You may be able to find the paper he wrote:
Well, if covid is viral, they would say antibiotics can't help so dispensing them is not only wasteful but can increase antibiotic resistance. However, some seem to know that flu can lead to secondary bacterial infections which do kill far more than the virus itself so if Denis Rancourt is correct, I don't see why the experts would assume that this wouldn't happen with covid too?
Apparently, the source for most deaths during Spanish flu was actually the secondary bacterial infections which led to pneumonia. The data from the 1957 and 1968 pandemics were also consistent with these findings.
Anthony Fauci is listed as an author on this paper:
Predominant Role of Bacterial Pneumonia as a Cause of Death in Pandemic Influenza: Implications for Pandemic Influenza Preparedness
The postmortem samples we examined from people who died of influenza during 1918–1919 uniformly exhibited severe changes indicative of bacterial pneumonia. Bacteriologic and histopathologic results from published autopsy series clearly and consistently implicated secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory–tract bacteria in most influenza fatalities.
Conclusion
The majority of deaths in the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory–tract bacteria. Less substantial data from the subsequent 1957 and 1968 pandemics are consistent with these findings. If severe pandemic influenza is largely a problem of viral-bacterial copathogenesis, pandemic planning needs to go beyond addressing the viral cause alone (e.g., influenza vaccines and antiviral drugs). Prevention, diagnosis, prophylaxis, and treatment of secondary bacterial pneumonia, as well as stockpiling of antibiotics and bacterial vaccines, should also be high priorities for pandemic planning.
This is definitely interesting. My son and his girlfriend caught what we now know was Covid in November 2019. They were students at UC Davis in California, and that campus had/has a huge population of students from China, notably Wuhan area. Students were getting sick even before my son got it, and the doctors were befuddled by the nature of it. They would say things such as "Something weird is going around but we don't know exactly what it is." So my son was sick, but better within 2 weeks. His girlfriend has asthma and she had a harder time. At one point she had breathing problems, went to the ER and was given inhalation therapy wtih steroids, and for good measure they gave her ivermectin. She got a nebulizer to take home and use daily for awhile, and things got better. She was completely fine by 3 or 4 weeks after they first got sick.
Covid was certainly around by December in the USA. Not sure why they only looked as far back as December and not earlier as I wouldn't be surprised if it was around months before:
There is a big quasi-political push to reduce antibiotic prescriptions. Harms from antibiotic resistance are constantly hyped, while harms from undertreatment are never mentioned.
It took a bunch of veterinary researchers to find:
"Emergence of methicillin resistance predates the clinical use of antibiotics
[...]
This research shows that hedgehogs are a natural reservoir of zoonotic mecC-MRSA lineages that predate the antibiotic era, which is inconsistent with the commonly accepted view that widespread resistance in clinical pathogens is a modern phenomenon that is driven by our use of antibiotics in human and veterinary medicine." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04265-w
Pneumococcal vaccination prevented 30% of COVID deaths, but the effect disappeared among recent antibiotic recipients, i.e. the antibiotics seemed even more protective, although that effect was obfuscated.
this may inform why we are currently seeing more flu + pneumonia deaths (cdc categorizes flu + pneumonia together, very weird?) than we are coronavirus deaths (not the only point in history where this happened)
By "treated for flu" I take it you mean not treated with remdesivir and vented. That is to say no treatment. What flu treatments do we have? The antivirals largely don't work, and even if they did, our healthcare system isn't set up to administer them early, which is when they could theoretically be helpful. The point of course is that not doing anything was better than the hospital Covid-19 treatment.
Stuffing them into isolation on ventilators has never been an appropriate or acceptable treatment for someone suffering from influenza induced pneumonia or maybe it is? seems like it probably wasn't the best course of action if we look at early deaths in 2020 while these protocols were being practiced. How are those with flu treated today? the same or different? are the deaths still following the treatment or did they stop?
sure, and we can talk about the meaning or relevance of PCR-generated statistics for any given discussion. with the emergence of Omicron, PCR-generated stats have lost their relevance for a lot of discussions and debates.
Omicron or no Omicron, the biggest problem with most «discussions and debates» is most people being totally unable to tell the difference between «necessary cause» and «sufficient cause».
Take cold sores, for example. To get those, presence of Herpes simplex virus is necessary but not sufficient; one also needs epithelium microdamage (cold works well, they aren't called cold sores for nothing), and high arginine/lysine ratio, and there might be other factors as well.
In a similar manner, having contact with SARS-CoV-2 RNA alone is not sufficient to make one sick or a spreader; but instead of investigating other contributing factors, most people behave as it was a sufficient cause.
yes, viruses are seen in culture all the time. they are literally observed with the human eye. read about the discovery of mimivirus, the largest virus so far known. it was at first mistaken for a bacterium. it infects ameoba and its activity can be observed under an optical microscope.
The most inaccurate perception of the COVID PCR is that it's exceptionally sensitive, which we tend to focus on because we're well aware of the false positives caused by dead virus, old infections, etc. However, the main problem with the PCR is its high false NEGATIVE rate, which makes it completely unfit for the purpose of catching infections early.
In my own case, I was infected with Delta in a foreign country three days before my flight back (I later learned, obviously I didn't know at the time) . If Day 1 was the day of my infection, I took a pre-travel PCR on Day 3, which was negative. The next day I flew, and my symptoms started during the flight, mainly a dry cough. I wasn't sure if it was just the dry air of the plane, but I knew that since my home country makes everyone arriving by plane take a PCR at the airport, that if it really was COVID it would be caught then.
The plane arrived and I took my airport PCR, which was also negative. By this point I was sure that the two PCRs would have caught it if it was COVID, because like every other critic of COVID restrictions I had an idea of the PCR as being ridiculously, even overly sensitive. So waking up the next day I felt a bit ropey but not too bad, so I went into work and worked a full day, annoyed by a persistent cough and congestion.
The next morning I had a low-grade fever, so I decided that even if it was just the flu, I should stay home until it passed, to avoid freaking people out at work. Long story short, I only finally tested positive on the sixth day after my symptoms started, or the tenth day after I was infected. By the time I tested positive, my fever had already gone away.
I thought my experience must be one in a million, but when I actually looked up the PCR false negative rate I was stunned to see that even the day before symptoms start, the false negative rate is 67%, meaning two out of three people who actually have COVID test negative. On the day that symptoms start, still 38% test negative, or more than 1 out of every 3. The lowest the false negative rate EVER gets is 20% on Day 8, after the person has already had full Covid symptoms for more than 3 days!
Clearly, a test which misses the majority of people who are presymptomatic but infectious, and still misses 1 in 5 who have symptoms, can NEVER be effeftively used to stop a virus from spreading in the population. If 10,000 actually infected people get tested on a particular day, at minimum 2,000 of those infected people will recieve false negative tests, whereupon they will go out in public or to gatherings and infect others. The PCR seemed to have been seized upon because it was the most accurate testing method available, without stopping to think whether it was in fact accurate enough for the purpose it was being used for.
Fascinating info. It seems like even with colds or flu, there is unsettled discussion about exactly when one is infectious, and then when you are no longer infectious. My daughter is a nurse in a rehab/nursing facility. She got Covid in Nov. 2020, did test positive although I don't know on what day of it she tested, was sick a about 10 days, and never sick since then except with a couple of minor colds. As a nurse, she is forced to test twice a week. Despite being around lots of covid patients and illness for the past 2 years, she never caught it again (she is still unjabbed), and despite all the constant testing, she only tested positive once. A subsequent test the next day was negative, so that was clearly a false positive.
to everyone coming here to inanely quote Kary Mullis on the utility of PCR for diagnosing infection: this piece agrees with him. it makes the same point Mullis made, but in more words.
maybe try to understand that before yelling a lot of things at me.
The widely circulated video of Mullis makes a valid point that applies to all medical tests, where you seek to measure the amount of something (that never reaches zero, so can be "positive" if you can detect small enough quantities of it) in something (of which you have drawn a variable and usually unknown quantity of), and turn that into a yes/no diagnosis, or an index of suspicion that further workup is needed.
It's not doable. You also get "you don't have cancer" results that are wrong and "you do have cancer" results that are wrong.
You cannot ever turn a continuous variable into a discrete variable with 100% correctness.
For a real-world parallel: you cannot ever set a speed limit that optimises the safety/speed trade-off for all roads at all times in all driving conditions.
this is totally right.
Quick suggestion: pin the better comments, and ignore the hyperventilators. Your time is too valuable for policing the wilfully difficult.
I don’t want to subject valued commenters to the vitriol of angry ignorant people, so I’ll pin my own comment but otherwise leave it. Happy to engage to some extent, to show good faith.
I would personally have no qualms if you decided to impose Jim's Blog levels of comment censorship in order to preserve discussion quality.
"I would personally have no qualms if you decided to impose Jim's Blog levels of comment censorship in order to preserve discussion quality.''
Right. More censorship is the answer!
More than the amount it is about whether the bug is viable or not. In practice they appear to be correlated even though they are not necessarily the same. Also there is the issue of multiple infections or other conditions going on. To think that a diagnosis can begin and end with just one of these assays is nonsense. Nothing new, I know...
the PCR detects fragments of virus RNA. for a certain class of questions and problems *that’s enough*. as for multiple infections and the relationship of any specific virus to symptoms and illness: many studies use PCR data to investigate precisely this question.
Sure, it has its scope.
The argument that PCR tests must mean something because they could predict deaths in advance can be questioned. Perhaps the connection is that positive tests negatively affected subsequent medical care for these patients.
Iatrogenic harm seems to have been huge during COVID-19. Why would it not be modulated by covid diagnosis?
hospital admissions especially are to a large degree independent of positive PCR results. you test positive, get sent home, and whether or not you end up in hospital depends upon whether you get sick enough to call an ambulance. there’s also the additional evidence of wastewater PCR testing, which a) correlates extremely well with day-by-day PCR positive cases, and b) thus has the same predictive value as these tests. The most parsimonious explanation here has to be that these tests detect the presence of a real pathogen that makes some people seriously ill.
I kept my eye on wastewater testing. Somehow, the ratio between deaths and wastewater RNA dropped by a factor of seven from 2020 to 2021. I've never seen an explanation for that. Usually, medical advances that reduce the death rate due to an illness by sevenfold would be celebrated as a huge success. For some reason, this particular medical advancement was not discussed.
To me, medical care as the largest cause of covid-19 deaths, while uncomfortable, makes sense.
Edit: The sharp drop in death rate per unit of wastewater RNA occurred in summer 2020, before the introduction of vaccines. Maybe I should publish a graph...
Hospital admission testing can be skewed somewhat by people being tested when entering for heart attacks, cancer, broken bones...
It would be a fascinating scientific question to see if there really could be a way to test for viral prevalence in a way which didn't get a bias added somewhere. But I fear such a solution may only embolden the testing maniacs to do anything they could to "get mroe data" so they could "get the numbers to zero".
I simply wsh we'd had a normal pandemic, one where we deal with the diseaes as a disease, the way we always had done before, rather than a global government over-reaction and trial-run of digital-totalitarianism, so we could have tried to answer some of the scientific questions (see my other post on this article) without getting buried under politics and fear-mongering. Maybe if we'd been able to ask and answer those questions with true scientific methods, rather that politicised the-science-tific methods, epidemiology would have had a chance to test and refine their models and might today be a discipline with a passable reputation.
Here is the graph: https://norstadt.substack.com/p/pre-vaccine-reduction-in-covid-19
The mortality reduction factor from spring to fall was 8.7, so I think whatever they were doing in the hospitals/care homes was a lot more important than how many viruses were out there.
The Mullis video, coupled with Covid appearing “suddenly everywhere at once,” is a testament to the uncomfortable truth that SC2 was in the population long, long before Feb 2020.
That, to me, is a point that can’t be emphasized enough - because it speaks to how deadly our human interventions were, and how unremarkable this virus really is.
Well said. This was nothing more than a bad virus for those over the age of 70.
banned for 24 hours for - yes, inanely, - spamming my comments with dumb ignorant arguments.
Yes i think the issue is that they intentionally used cycles that they certainly knew were too high to yield meaningful results, and then used propaganda to equate those meaningless quantities with lying in an ICU with a ventilator.
Show us the (non-existent) double blind studies proving your convoluted case.
LOL. I’m removing the greater part of your comments, but leaving this one, as a testament to your ignorance. (hint: PCR isn’t a treatment for anything.)
You are right in telling that we can se the big virusses, but I to people say "do the SARAS-2 excist", but thereby actually mening, do the virusses deliver the Covid-19 disease? Among other the HIV virus never has been proved to result in the HIV disease. And as Hippocrates told the diseases don't come from outside, but from inside, and thinking on bad health. And think about the original inhabitans in Austrailia who had no word for disease, as they never had been hit by it, before the Westerns came.
What an absurd article. Here is the truth about the fraudulent PCR testing:
https://tritorch.com/PCRFraud
After you read that you will never look at eugyppius the same, and rightly so. This article is a joke.
can you see that many of the arguments in that post *agree with* what I’m saying here?
It has always astounded me how true the "bell curve meme" is. People like you or ethical skeptic give some reassurance eugyppius, because there really is a fine line between being a "conspiracy theorist" and actually being a conspiracy theorist. Feels like 90% of the people on "our side" are completely dumb, and somehow wandered into being right just by virtue of being so dumb they'll believe anything contrary to MSM.
I mean, I guess sure, it works, but it's quite painful being an "antivaxer" and seeing all those flat earthers, PCR denying, virus denying, 5G nanochip oxide people you end up lumped with while trying to avoid all the misinformation and grifters floating around...
I'd love to hear if you have any analysis on this phenomenon. This stuff obviously attracts a lot of schizo nutcases which really muddy the waters mixed in with some very smart and analytical people that actually do the work and stick to the facts, while most "normal people" follow the vax herd.
I don't get the broad smear directed at eugyppius you are using this article as evidence for dismissing him. His article isn't a "joke." Ad hominem is not persuasive, reasoning is. I do appreciate the article; the author gave the citation for the paragraphs from the CDC EUA, that states for those who recognize the jargon, that there is zero SARS2 tested for in their pcr.
Nothing Eugyppius asserts in his article or his additional comments is inaccurate or unreasonable Be specific, clear (and preferably civil) in your objections or better to be quiet.
Clearly you don't understand how PCR works.
You clearly can't see fraud, not only when it is staring you directly in the face, but when it is also screaming at you the word, "fraud".
You have something to dispute? Make your case. Otherwise take your smug BS and go.
I’m saying they’re misusing established, well-understood and valid techniques to mislead the public about the prevalence and danger of a virus, and you’re screaming that “it’s fraud”. maybe there’s actually no disagreement and you just don’t understand the post.
Although it did come through, I think the misuse of the PCR test did not come though loudly enough in your article for some readers. On the other hand, for those of us who were counter narrative, the misuse of the PCR test by our politicians - as you've just stated - to mislead and terrorize the general public, came through blatantly loudly and clearly and made our stomachs turn.
Your article is great but the pro narrative people needed to see a news piece explaining how a PCR test could be misused but that never happened. Quelle surprise!
The pro-narrative people. most of the educated ones anyway, and the anti-narrative people should all recall the false-positives statistics leson they should have had in school long ago. They always phrase it as looking for a 1 in 10000 cancer among patients, or saboteur among workers, or "terrorist" among passengers. They always work through the numbers using something like a 99% accurate test, no algebra even needed. And the result is that a positive is usually more likely a false positive than a true one. While covid wasn't 1 in 10000 rare the logic still works to find false positives making a sizable fraction of positives. I had friends who had been at uni with me, and I recall a lecturer giving us that lesson at the start of a stats module, a lesson we were being reminded of as I atleast had done it in school and A-levels beforehand. But when I told these "friends" to remember that lesson, they all just shut their ears. The worrying thing with pro-narrative people is they simply ignore evidence and reasoning which disagrees with the-science, however familiar they should be with such evidence or reasoning. I don't know how a news piece could convince them unless the whole news would turn away from the narrative and return to the agreed facts of <=2019, and run a campaign of unbrainwashing. This article would make a chink in their mental armour, if they were able to read it for long enough without the narrative door slamming shut in their mind to block it out.
There was fraud. If you understand the details, you would realize the fraud was in the way the tests were used, not the tests or the technology itself.
These details are very important, because the broad claim that PCR is fraudulent or the related argument that SARS-COV2 doesn't exist are very demonstrably disinformation if you understand the technology at work here and what it's limitations are.
There’s no stronger evidence than repeated personal direct observation.
My family (some unvaxxed some vaxxed) had covid twice.
Of all PCR tests we took over last two years, the only two times the PCR returned positive was when we felt sick with typical flu-like covid symptoms. Not so bad, but real.
Anecdotes aren't evidence. That article has a video from Fauci himself who said the PCR test is useless after 35 cycles. The evidence in that article also shows that every PCR test runs higher than that. It was a lie from start to finish. They needed high case counts to justify their lockdowns and murderous vaccines
it’s just not true that every PCR test has a higher cycle threshold than 35. but, you’re going to believe what you want to believe.
Here ya go, all over 35:
[6a] https://archive.is/osMTZ Page: 1 28 Cycle Threshold for Breakthrough Cases (archived version - original has been removed by the CDC)
[6b] https://www.gkcmo.com/_files/ugd/3e64ae_5b987768893942e5b456d3a1cb6d0e2f.pdf Page 13: GK PCR Test with 40.00 Cycle Threshold
[6c] https://inbios.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/LBL-0109-08-900251-EUA-CE-Smart-Detect-SARS-CoV-2-rRT-PCR-Kit-Package-Insert.pdf Page 14: InBios PCR Test with 45 Cycle Threshold
[6d] https://www.fda.gov/media/136231/download Page 10: Quest Diagnostics 50 cycles
you know there are many, many PCR panels in use not addressed by your links, right?
I certainly hope so eugyppius. Can you provide any that are less than 35?
That is the threshold for determining a positive. That does not mean that a person with a Ct of 25 would not exist. Do you not understand how that works? They are setting the threshold for positivity using a cycle threshold of anything below those numbers.
The answer is no, they do not understand how PCR works lmao. I personally worked on the development of a SARS-CoV-2 PCR assay, and I can assure anyone here that it works very well. High Cts (>29 or so) are generally not very clinically relevant, but no matter what PCR is a tool. A CLINICIAN has to use it in combination with clinical presentation to make a diagnosis. PCR unambiguously states whether or not the nucleic acid(s) targeted are present in the sample. That's it, and it is extremely effective at doing so.
Every Canadian province used a CT >=38. This was documented on the Justice Center For Constitutional Freedoms (lawyers) website.
There are also issues differentiating between debris and live virus, according to my GP and other articles I've read.
Isn't a PCR test is supposed to be used along with clinical analysis in order to diagnose?
New Sachs report shows virus 99% likely GOF-engineered by US biotech interests in that Wuhan lab, with explicit cover-up effort run by Fauci et al. in Feb-Mar 2020.
Let’s hope a Republican-led House investigation will expose this fraud Fauci.
"Let’s hope a Republican-led House investigation will expose this fraud Fauci."
That there's funny, I don't care who you are!
What is real can be detected.
The University of Illinois’ saliva test uses ct 38.
They administered over 2 millions tests on campus - and the test was used for 6 million tests beyond campus.
Just giving one example.
PCR is used in many, many contexts, well beyond the field of SARS-2 diagnosis, and all kinds of cycle thresholds are employed or deemed significant in these different contexts.
“Deemed significant” is the key phrase.
With SARS-CoV-2, a positive result - irrespective of the presence or severity of symptoms, and often at high ct levels - was deemed “significant” enough by public health and elected officials to justify illegal quarantines and other restrictions of movement, liberty, etc.
In this post, you’re largely addressing whether these tests are valid (measure what they claim to measure) & reliable (measure consistently) - which is important to address.
But, as you know, these tests were weaponized against the populace (including children, at least in the US) and became tools of mass destruction.
The (lack of) ethics governing the interpretation & significance of the PCR test result are, for many, the real issue.
Anecdotes ARE evidence - but like all evidence they have to be evaluated according to their merits.
You can debate what anecdotal evidence is evidence of—, but when anecdote reports true facts observed, it is evidence of something.
If you doubt the virus is real (for what is real can be detected) then how will you explain the inevitable exposé of its lab origin (see latest Sachs report) engineered for GOF by US biotech money including NIH Fauci, who directed explicit cover-up pushing natural-origin lie?
Evidence of confirmation bias.
Sorry. You are wrong. See the latest report from Jeffrey Sachs investigation on SARS-Cov-2 origin: It was almost certainly created in that Wuhan lab by US biotech industry cartel, including Fauci & NIH, who engaged in explicit coverup by pushing lie of natural origin.
A real engineered virus that can be detected by testing.
"There’s no stronger evidence than repeated personal direct observation."
No, its a great place to make a hypothesis from, a good call to start investigating, but it isn't evidence. Thousands of such observations, with control group type considerations also and comparisons among the grid of uninfected-asymptomatic"Infection"-mildInfection-seriousInfection-actuallyInfectedWithSomethingElse vs testedPos-testedNeg-testedInconclusive would be evidence, one family with observations where PCR isn;lt compared to any other measure isn't evidence (though it is worthwhile to make a hypothesis from). Also, evidence of the quality I've descriebd would be better than the quality used for most of the the-science dring the pandemic, so your anecdotes are probably better "evidence" than the-science type "evidence", but they arenlt enough to be real evidence for actual science. Don't feel bad about this, science starts with observations before proper evidence is sought, and as I said, you're still doing better than Neil Ferguson, your '"data" points' are real, even if there aren't enough of them, his weren't despite the amount of fancy maths he did afterwards.
PCR tests were not used to save people. They were used to control people. That’s the point.
I don’t disagree, but that doesn’t mean all PCR test results everywhere are worthless.
What did they accomplish, in a practical sense?
Socialisation of Compliance...
...with "public health measures" is a power trip of the Big Pharma cartel and the bureaucrats big and small, on the back of our health and our rights.
https://live2fightanotherday.substack.com/p/socialisation-of-compliance
say I want to market a garbage and dangerous rhinovirus vaccine, so I mass test the population for rhinovirus. I find a lot of rhinovirus infections and this helps me sell my garbage vaccine. it is simultaneously true that a) my rhinovirus tests contain real information, and that b) they were used as propaganda to get people to buy a worthless pharmaceutical. my critics, realising that a) is true, could even study my statistics to develop arguments against my propaganda.
Right now there is an apparent upswing in cases in Germany (and in my area here in New England), but they aren't updating the PCR positivity tests anymore... Why not? Are we in a different news swing cycle- less emphasis on covid armageddon (and all of the sins associated with the policies/lockdowns/mandates/needless deaths) and instead now pivot to nuclear armageddon and energy blackout armageddon? Seems like the harms from the entire covid debacle just keeping getting higher and higher and now there is a discernible and marked pivot away.
Do we know how "case" is being defined these days in Germany and New England? I'm also in N.E., but I don't pay any attention to what passes for "the news". My only Covid-related activity is to mock people still wearing masks in my windy seacoast village, and to write the occasional bitter reprimand to the director of our library, who "requires" masks for events there.
"my critics, realising that a) is true, could even study my statistics to develop arguments against my propaganda."
And be smeared by the establisment as a dangerous person spreading fake news extremely harmfull for the well-being of society
It does, because we know they can't be trusted to do objective testing, even if they work, as your lone voice claims. Its well documented that the vaxxed didn't have Covid because they were run at 23 cycles or so, while the unvaxxed were all sick because the test was run at +38 cycles.
This is precisely why I don’t believe any conclusions can be made based on PCR testing. They weren’t transparent OR consistent on how they were conducted.
I honestly don't think I saw/read people saying that all PCR tests are worthless. With regards to covid, the PCR test was horribly misused. Please remember that many, if not most of us never heard of a PCR test before this sad 2+ year episode. It's kind of hard to see the good of something when you've only been exposed to the bad of it.
Where were the standards that made them worthwhile? Where were RCT blinded trials and with a neutral placebo that would have shown that PRC testing would prove worthwhile? Because people tested positive for something does not mean it was covid. These many symptoms are common with dozens of afflictions.
PCR is like BMI. It’s good on a population level but it is often enough wrong in significant ways on an individual level as to be dangerous in the wrong hands.
I am 6 foot tall, 185 pounds, muscular, with a 32 inch waist. And according to BMI, I am overweight (not obese as previously written)
Which would be absurd even to the most uneducated observer.
PCR is the same. You’re dangerously ill even though to the most untrained it’s clear you’re not sick at all.
yes, exactly. if a patient is sick, it can help the doctor narrow the diagnosis. or, you can use it population-wide, to determine roughly how much virus is out there at the moment, and whether infections in general (not in any specific individual) are rising or falling or staying the same.
Exactly. BMI can tell you roughly how obese a population is without worrying too much about the population it labels poorly. It’s directional and gives you some idea what population size recommendations to make.
But using it as a primary diagnostic tool without relying on any secondary corroborators (like your eyes) is a misuse of its function
"Health or Healthy" determinations should never (IMO) be anything less than on an Individual basis. Far too many factors to be taken into consideration about this amazing Human body (and Mind). Outlook/Attitude determines much of health.
Seeing how much virus is out there TELLS YOU ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THE DIS-EASE!!! Also, these PCR tests have never been calibrated to calculate the false positive and false negative rates. You can’t have a test without first knowing the false positive/negative rate!! Why do you think the PCR only received an emergency use authorization? Because they don’t know the false/negative rates!!
bad example, your BMI on a standard calculator is 25, which is the threshold between normal and overweight; obesity is at 30
Wow. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
I didn't, I just said the example was poor, it is not a fact.
Even if it’s overweight instead of obese (which I’ve corrected), the example is still accurate.
Any health professional who would call me overweight based on BMI alone would be overlooking obvious facts like broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and visible abdominal muscles.
I’m no more overweight than I am obese. The BMI is not meant to label healthy, muscular people overweight. The creators didn’t consider muscle mass to be the problem with body mass.
this is true, but your BMI can easily be read as normal rather than overweight, as it is right on the line. It is a wholly inadequate test for many people. I wonder why it still exists and has not been improved or replaced. Any health provider who would rather rely on that number than look at you, should not be your provider. Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes.
Even if I was 195 I wouldn’t be overweight by any standard and I’d be 26.4
There are health insurance policies that offer discounts based on BMI which would penalize me for my muscle.
My whole point is that it is inadequate for individual level analysis, just like PCR
It hasn’t been replaced because it has a role. What needs to be replaced is the thinking that allows lazy people to use tools improperly.
If you want to look at large groups, BMI is fine because it’s never the final analysis.
In the case of PCR, it was used as the final analysis to lock people down
"I wonder why it still exists..."
Lots of useless tests are still out there. Why, for example, is the largely useless, discredited, Myers-Briggs personality test still in use.?
The damage these test results enabled is incalculable. What is the purpose of this article, other than to muddy the waters of the clear misuse of PCR to create conditions that caused so much incredible damage to people, young and old, all over the world?
the purpose of this post is to explain precisely what is wrong with how PCRs have been misused, and that the technology itself is not fundamentally fraudulent or fake. this is not “muddying waters,” it’s a crucial distinction.
why are you not 'liking' (licking) this post OP?
Thanks for this. I’ve grown tired of arguing with people about PCR where the Dunning-Kruger effect has kicked in hard since the pandemic was declared.
I’m a clinical microbiologist and have used PCR as a day-to-day technique for years. Since microbiology labs all have PCR platforms these days it was natural that we should be asked to take on Covid screening since the workload would have overwhelmed the small number of specialist virology laboratories.
There are a few key differences in the way the SARS-CoV-2 PCR has been used which are at variance with normal clinical testing and these account for a lot of the illusion of the pandemic.
Firstly, we normally use PCR as a screening test which is confirmed by culture, where possible, or whole genome sequencing in a specialist laboratory. If PCR is not confirmed, the usual practice is to disclaim the result with a comment to the effect that a positive PCR test does not necessarily indicate the presence of viable organisms. Even where confirmatory testing has been used (in hospital labs but not in the public screening centres) for Covid this caveat has not been used. Given the small but not negligible false positive rate of PCR tests this is problematic…
… especially since most of the people who have been screened are asymptomatic. As Prof. Norman Fenton has demonstrated, a small percentage of false positives in a large population of negative cases can easily swamp a larger percentage of false negatives in the real infected population, exaggerating the case rate by a factor of greater than 10.
We don’t use PCR to screen asymptomatic people for any other pathogen. As an illustration of how problematic this could be, consider Epstein-Barr virus which is carried by 25-30% of the population at any given time without serious consequences. If we were to screen everyone for EBV irrespective of symptoms it would be associated with 25-30% of deaths where it played no part in the patient’s demise. If correlation were confused with causation as it was with SARS-CoV-2, we would conclude that EBV is a killer virus which it isn’t.
Finally, in spite of Kary Mullis’ advice to the contrary, PCR has come to be used as a diagnostic test even in the absence of other signs and symptoms of disease. While it is not uncommon in my lab to have the clinical staff request a repeat PCR where a patient is symptomatic but the test negative, it never happens that they ask us to repeat a positive test in an asymptomatic patient. This is because they are compelled to err on the side of caution due to their responsibility for avoiding cross-infection. However, it does mean that false positives go unchecked while false negatives are challenged further exaggerating the bias pointed out by Prof. Fenton.
The shortcomings of PCR are limited and well known. The real problems come from the way in which it has been applied and interpreted in relation to Covid.
This is a great post. Normally for a diagnosis with a positive test there is usually a follow up to rule out a false positive when the prevalence of a disease is very low since even with a test that has very high specificity, if one tests a large number of people, the number of false positives can easily overwhelm the number of true positives even though there are not that many positives generated.
Interestingly enough, the only place I have seen where they retested people with positive samples was at Cambridge university. The entire student body was tested and the first test generated ~40 positives who were then retested and only 6 were positive the second time. This is the normal course for disease testing - a first screening which is often cheaper but generates quite a few false positives while the second is often a more costly technique but is only applied to the positives generated from the first screening. However, for covid they assumed all the positives are cases since there was no cost to assuming the person is a case since that person would be required to abide by the mitigation measures. It would be seen as erring on the side of caution. Better to have some quarantine who were not infectious than to have some truly infectious spreading the virus.
The PCR test was used to support a myth that a person who was not sick (no symptoms) was a person to be concerned about. No one should have been dull witted enough to accept that.
This was one of the most insidious lies invented to sustain public fear of Covid. People are, on the whole, dull witted, unfortunately.
I think you're forgetting just how much deliberate confusion was being propagated during the early months of the covid scam. Combined with the inherent human characteristic to seek answers from confident authority figures, it's not an issue of "dull wits", more of well executed manipulation of the majority using ancient techniques.
I've been trying to determine what is the common factor of those who realized that this was indeed a scam and, frankly, I don't think there is a single commonality. Or even a few.
I think we all remember quite clearly the events that took place. There are the truly dull witted and those who chose to disconnect their common sense due to other motivations ( having a scapegoat for their problems, not having to work , other personal financial benefits) , In the early months of the scam a church posted on their outdoor board “Jesus died to take away your sins, not your mind”.
Agreed. As someone who works in clinical research and has conducted pcr testing on everything from porcine fecal samples to mRNA-transfected lymphoblastoid cells, it has been difficult to explain to those who would jump on these misinformed opinions to support otherwise good research. On the other end, it has been equally difficult to get through to some of my colleagues the impact that setting the Ct threshold so high has on interpreting population level data. And I'm certainly no expert in PCR-based experiments but it is amazing to see how fear and political motivations color the thoughts of otherwise brilliant people and cause them to develop these wild theories that are rooted in the processes of groupthink. It's imperative that we address these discrepancies head on as you have done here. Thanks again for another great post.
thanks bro.
All doctors who have done harm must be held accountable: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-do-no-harm-part-2
Simply: thank you 😊
Sooooo tired of some of the crazy ideas being pushed as click bait on “our side”... there’s SO MUCH to understand about the lies and manipulations that DID happen - we don’t need to run down stupid rabbit holes. :)
Mass testing was used to traumatize the neurotic for the purpose of control. SARS-Cov-2 was equivalent to a bad flu strain, with respect to deaths, with the odd characteristic is that it didn't kill young people like a bad flu.
Testing results where used by totalitarians to lockdown cities, states and entire nations. To destroy small businesses, a locus of conservative values. And worst of all, to first convince people to take the mRNA therapeutics, that we still don't know what is in them, then later mandate them. Because that is what the totalitarians wanted for reasons we still don't fully understand.
Yep
My beef with the pcr is I have a feeling, could be wrong, that those who were PCR positive were then not screened for flu and possibly twindemic patients who may have been treated for flu were shoved into isolation on a ventilator and left to die. Maybe not tho.
I think this indeed happened in some edge cases, but probably not very often, given how rare influenza was between March 2020 and the start of this year.
this is assuming "rare influenza was between march..." did you see how many flu cases we had coming into the corona-pandemic? it was on fire... and then disappeared?
this entire premise is assuming a lot for a universal fall-off of flu globally which I'm going to have to call bs
Show me a flu panel that covers all the H and all the N which were administered to all the corona positive patients to exhaust any possibility that while they test for corona they also don't have the flu, they did not do this. Not everyone who tested for corona was tested for the flu.
it’s pretty clear flu was rare since march 2020, because it has a distinct signature in hospitalisations: seasonal flu causes a small bump in infant/young child hospitalisations and deaths, alongside the deaths/hospitalisations among the olds. suddenly in the 2020/21 flu season, the child hospitalisation/death signature was gone. there was just hardly any flu. this is confirmed by influenza surveillance in many countries.
it seems more like someone was like "stop counting flu" and then the data showed zeros more than "oh wow somehow for 1 year we magically made the flu disappear" which is highly suspect
https://time.com/5758953/flu-season-2019-2020/
so rare it was staging to be the deadliest in at least a decade... that's not very rare my friend.
There is no money in a death due to flu but heaps for covid. D'ont you think this will explain the suden disappearance of flu. How independent from Fauci et al is the flu surveillance system? The answer is obvious and selfexplanatory
Very early on in 2020, when I was puzzled about the odd disappearance of the flu, I remember reading a detailed article about how multiple flu viruses could arise but one would lkely be dominant and mostly suppress the others from spread. So the theory was that the covid virus was strong enough to become quickly dominant and basically stamp out further spread of the lesser viruses it was competing with at the time. It all made some degree of sense to me since I knew little about viruses at the time I read the article. I've looked for this article but can't find it now, wish I'd saved it.
I don't think this makes any sense unless there is cross immunity
Has anyone figured out why flu disappeared? My fear is that the masks and lockdowns that proved futile against covid actually worked for the flu.
Possible explanation re influenza "disappearance":
A couple years ago I first encountered the concept of "viral interference", a phenomenon that has apparently been observed for many years, in which some viruses appear to be suppressed by the prevalence of others.
WP article as a starting point with references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_interference
"2019-2020 Flu Season on Track to Be Especially Severe, New CDC Data Suggests"
maybe they were full of shit here too? or maybe not?
https://time.com/5758953/flu-season-2019-2020/
"flu season on track to be more deadlier than '17-'18 which was deadliest in a decade"
and it just disappeared... how magical
Probably not very often? How could you possibly know that?
because we know from separate influenza surveillance statistics (a whole separate testing program, independent of the mass SARS-2 PCR testing initiatives) that influenza was very rare after about April 2020. multiple separate pieces of evidence confirm this. and so we’re asking, how often the same person had two near-simultaneous infections with one virus that was super rare (influenza) and another virus that was also rather rare until recently (SARS-2).
Aren’t the flu tests also PCR?
some of them, but they test for different gene targets
U.S. Influenza Surveillance System: Purpose and Methods, stating that because of COVID-19, it will suspend data collection for regular influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/virus-requests.html
How can you state that with any certainty? Nobody was ever tested for flue because a covid infection could bring up to 400.000$, for an US hospital and aabout 60.000Euro in Germany.
I understood that Corona indeed replaced it. And there really was no flu in the 2020/1, at least none I know of. Virus interference is a weird thing. For example, I never got chicken pox till my 20ies, even when heavily exposed. Doctors were sure I must have had it without knowing, but I was sure I hadn't. Then, eventually I got it. Thing is, as young I used to suffer from fever blisters almost on monthly basis, and the two viruses interfere with each other. The first time I was exposed, but without fever blisters, I got them.
That's right.
Molecular biologists say the threshold would be 25-30 cycles.
Thresholds vary from country to country, and even within each country, they vary from administrative district to administrative district.
I don't understand anything.
I have wondered about this, but I haven't seen any hard data on the number of tests runs across multiple years. From what I can tell, is there was some disease displacement, which is not unheard of.
if they didn't test for flu with a negative result while assuming they didn't have influenza is not robust sciencing but i'm not a doctor it just seems obvious
then let's talk about all the Flu that is tested for vs what is in existence and what Walter Reed is doing with what strains?
Didn’t they lower the PCR testing cycles when biden was inaugurated?
Just curious here, but pre-Covid, how much testing was actually done to diagnose flu? I have never had a test to diagnose flu.
My impression is that at least here in Canada they would run PCR tests in hospitals and perhaps other health care settings as a proxy for what was going on in the population.
There were a lot of pneumonia deaths and bacterial versus viral pneumonia is not so easy to distinguish. I remember a paper that indicated many covid deaths were probably due to bacterial pneumonia. The stated conclusion was something about interaction between pathogens, but I think they were just covering up misdiagnosis. I'll post the reference when I can.
The study data was from Kaiser in California. I know for a fact that later their standard covid treatment included azithromycin antibiotic.
Edit:
The reference is https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/225/10/1710/6164926?login=false
Pneumococcal vaccination prevented 30% of COVID deaths, but the effect disappeared among recent antibiotic recipients, i.e. the antibiotics seemed even more protective, although that effect was obfuscated.
hold up are you saying early on there was no azithromycin in the protocol? and now it is there? hmmm can we overlay deaths onto treatment protocols over time charts?
All I know is what I heard from a doctor there. Sometime later in the pandemic they started giving patients nasal Oxygen plus azithromycin. It is my understanding that the earlier treatment protocol was different.
thanks for sharing 🙏 all i know is here where I am we had testing drive throughs and local testing telling patients who tested negative for coronavirus that they were "presumptive positive" but the only test administered was the covid pcr... oops so they could have had any number of thing from flu to pick something and we didn't exhaust any of it but spent billions on the covid test...gg
Interesting. This is what Denis Rancourt has said - that doctors were urged to not prescribe antibiotics because it's a virus and not bacterial.
It's a long clip but he states that the south usually dispenses antibiotics in the summer but didn't do so in the summer of 2020. You may be able to find the paper he wrote:
https://rumble.com/v1kylpt-denis-rancourt-interview-data-proves-covid-19-is-actually-an-illusion.html
UK may have also reduced antibiotics but I don't have any sources to cite.
ime when they "don't know" they throw everything including kitchen sink at it, speaking about CDC interested cases of meningitis
Well, if covid is viral, they would say antibiotics can't help so dispensing them is not only wasteful but can increase antibiotic resistance. However, some seem to know that flu can lead to secondary bacterial infections which do kill far more than the virus itself so if Denis Rancourt is correct, I don't see why the experts would assume that this wouldn't happen with covid too?
Apparently, the source for most deaths during Spanish flu was actually the secondary bacterial infections which led to pneumonia. The data from the 1957 and 1968 pandemics were also consistent with these findings.
Anthony Fauci is listed as an author on this paper:
Predominant Role of Bacterial Pneumonia as a Cause of Death in Pandemic Influenza: Implications for Pandemic Influenza Preparedness
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2599911/
Results
The postmortem samples we examined from people who died of influenza during 1918–1919 uniformly exhibited severe changes indicative of bacterial pneumonia. Bacteriologic and histopathologic results from published autopsy series clearly and consistently implicated secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory–tract bacteria in most influenza fatalities.
Conclusion
The majority of deaths in the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory–tract bacteria. Less substantial data from the subsequent 1957 and 1968 pandemics are consistent with these findings. If severe pandemic influenza is largely a problem of viral-bacterial copathogenesis, pandemic planning needs to go beyond addressing the viral cause alone (e.g., influenza vaccines and antiviral drugs). Prevention, diagnosis, prophylaxis, and treatment of secondary bacterial pneumonia, as well as stockpiling of antibiotics and bacterial vaccines, should also be high priorities for pandemic planning.
This is definitely interesting. My son and his girlfriend caught what we now know was Covid in November 2019. They were students at UC Davis in California, and that campus had/has a huge population of students from China, notably Wuhan area. Students were getting sick even before my son got it, and the doctors were befuddled by the nature of it. They would say things such as "Something weird is going around but we don't know exactly what it is." So my son was sick, but better within 2 weeks. His girlfriend has asthma and she had a harder time. At one point she had breathing problems, went to the ER and was given inhalation therapy wtih steroids, and for good measure they gave her ivermectin. She got a nebulizer to take home and use daily for awhile, and things got better. She was completely fine by 3 or 4 weeks after they first got sick.
There is some evidence which suggests taht covid was already circulating by September 2019 including Italy.
https://news.yahoo.com/covid-italy-since-sept-2019-122919069.html
Covid was certainly around by December in the USA. Not sure why they only looked as far back as December and not earlier as I wouldn't be surprised if it was around months before:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/01/health/covid-antibody-blood-december-study/index.html
There is a big quasi-political push to reduce antibiotic prescriptions. Harms from antibiotic resistance are constantly hyped, while harms from undertreatment are never mentioned.
It took a bunch of veterinary researchers to find:
"Emergence of methicillin resistance predates the clinical use of antibiotics
[...]
This research shows that hedgehogs are a natural reservoir of zoonotic mecC-MRSA lineages that predate the antibiotic era, which is inconsistent with the commonly accepted view that widespread resistance in clinical pathogens is a modern phenomenon that is driven by our use of antibiotics in human and veterinary medicine." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04265-w
I added this reference above: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/225/10/1710/6164926?login=false
Pneumococcal vaccination prevented 30% of COVID deaths, but the effect disappeared among recent antibiotic recipients, i.e. the antibiotics seemed even more protective, although that effect was obfuscated.
this may inform why we are currently seeing more flu + pneumonia deaths (cdc categorizes flu + pneumonia together, very weird?) than we are coronavirus deaths (not the only point in history where this happened)
By "treated for flu" I take it you mean not treated with remdesivir and vented. That is to say no treatment. What flu treatments do we have? The antivirals largely don't work, and even if they did, our healthcare system isn't set up to administer them early, which is when they could theoretically be helpful. The point of course is that not doing anything was better than the hospital Covid-19 treatment.
Stuffing them into isolation on ventilators has never been an appropriate or acceptable treatment for someone suffering from influenza induced pneumonia or maybe it is? seems like it probably wasn't the best course of action if we look at early deaths in 2020 while these protocols were being practiced. How are those with flu treated today? the same or different? are the deaths still following the treatment or did they stop?
This is a worthy effort, for which many thanks and much respect. There's a truism that no good deed goes unpunished. I can see that happening already.
This is a great article, from a different angle from many years back when the NY Times was a decent newspaper:
About a pandemic that never was - created by testing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/health/22whoop.html?smid=url-share
Any average can be valid, representative, precise and still be meaningless.
Example:
The average German* has slightly less than one ball.
*Equally true re: Americans, Russians, etc.
sure, and we can talk about the meaning or relevance of PCR-generated statistics for any given discussion. with the emergence of Omicron, PCR-generated stats have lost their relevance for a lot of discussions and debates.
Omicron or no Omicron, the biggest problem with most «discussions and debates» is most people being totally unable to tell the difference between «necessary cause» and «sufficient cause».
Take cold sores, for example. To get those, presence of Herpes simplex virus is necessary but not sufficient; one also needs epithelium microdamage (cold works well, they aren't called cold sores for nothing), and high arginine/lysine ratio, and there might be other factors as well.
In a similar manner, having contact with SARS-CoV-2 RNA alone is not sufficient to make one sick or a spreader; but instead of investigating other contributing factors, most people behave as it was a sufficient cause.
Franc, your arguments just aren’t reasonable. viruses exist in culture in labs all over the world, not on computers.
yes, viruses are seen in culture all the time. they are literally observed with the human eye. read about the discovery of mimivirus, the largest virus so far known. it was at first mistaken for a bacterium. it infects ameoba and its activity can be observed under an optical microscope.
The most inaccurate perception of the COVID PCR is that it's exceptionally sensitive, which we tend to focus on because we're well aware of the false positives caused by dead virus, old infections, etc. However, the main problem with the PCR is its high false NEGATIVE rate, which makes it completely unfit for the purpose of catching infections early.
In my own case, I was infected with Delta in a foreign country three days before my flight back (I later learned, obviously I didn't know at the time) . If Day 1 was the day of my infection, I took a pre-travel PCR on Day 3, which was negative. The next day I flew, and my symptoms started during the flight, mainly a dry cough. I wasn't sure if it was just the dry air of the plane, but I knew that since my home country makes everyone arriving by plane take a PCR at the airport, that if it really was COVID it would be caught then.
The plane arrived and I took my airport PCR, which was also negative. By this point I was sure that the two PCRs would have caught it if it was COVID, because like every other critic of COVID restrictions I had an idea of the PCR as being ridiculously, even overly sensitive. So waking up the next day I felt a bit ropey but not too bad, so I went into work and worked a full day, annoyed by a persistent cough and congestion.
The next morning I had a low-grade fever, so I decided that even if it was just the flu, I should stay home until it passed, to avoid freaking people out at work. Long story short, I only finally tested positive on the sixth day after my symptoms started, or the tenth day after I was infected. By the time I tested positive, my fever had already gone away.
I thought my experience must be one in a million, but when I actually looked up the PCR false negative rate I was stunned to see that even the day before symptoms start, the false negative rate is 67%, meaning two out of three people who actually have COVID test negative. On the day that symptoms start, still 38% test negative, or more than 1 out of every 3. The lowest the false negative rate EVER gets is 20% on Day 8, after the person has already had full Covid symptoms for more than 3 days!
These numbers are from the UK govts study of false negatives here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gos-impact-of-false-positives-and-negatives-3-june-2020/impact-of-false-positives-and-false-negatives-in-the-uks-covid-19-rt-pcr-testing-programme-3-june-2020
Clearly, a test which misses the majority of people who are presymptomatic but infectious, and still misses 1 in 5 who have symptoms, can NEVER be effeftively used to stop a virus from spreading in the population. If 10,000 actually infected people get tested on a particular day, at minimum 2,000 of those infected people will recieve false negative tests, whereupon they will go out in public or to gatherings and infect others. The PCR seemed to have been seized upon because it was the most accurate testing method available, without stopping to think whether it was in fact accurate enough for the purpose it was being used for.
Fascinating info. It seems like even with colds or flu, there is unsettled discussion about exactly when one is infectious, and then when you are no longer infectious. My daughter is a nurse in a rehab/nursing facility. She got Covid in Nov. 2020, did test positive although I don't know on what day of it she tested, was sick a about 10 days, and never sick since then except with a couple of minor colds. As a nurse, she is forced to test twice a week. Despite being around lots of covid patients and illness for the past 2 years, she never caught it again (she is still unjabbed), and despite all the constant testing, she only tested positive once. A subsequent test the next day was negative, so that was clearly a false positive.