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| Aug 4 |
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Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests are used worldwide to "diagnose" Sars-Cov-2 infection. An in-depth investigation reveals clear scientific evidence proving that these tests are not accurate and create a statistically significant percentage of false positives. Positive results more likely indicate "ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold."
In fact, American biochemist Kary Mullis, now deceased, who won the Noble Prize in chemistry for creating PCR technology, repeatedly stated throughout his career that it should not be used to test for viruses. This technology is designed to replicate DNA sequences, not test for coronavirus infections.
EXECUTIVE ACTION REQUIRED
President Trump must take immediate action to investigate and hold members of the FDA, CDC and WHO accountable for scientific fraud and Crimes Against the Humanity.
If he does not take immediate action, he is thereby complicit in what clearly amounts to Crimes Against Humanity, as this report will detail.
Multiple U.S. Intelligence Community contacts have verified the accuracy of the extensive investigative report, conducted by award-winning journalist Torsten Engelbrecht, featured below. While they do take issue with some of the reports verbiage, they corroborate the main findings: PCR tests should not be relied upon for accurate results and create a significant percentage of false positives.
We also feature a New York Times report from 2007, entitled, "Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn't," which also clearly reveals how scientifically inaccurate PCR tests are, featuring many shocking statements from medical experts on the use of these tests, clearly laying out how they result in false positives and lead to dangerous exaggerations and false alarms.
PLEASE NOTE: We are NOT reporting that the coronavirus is a complete hoax. You should take precautions and consult your doctor for best safety practices.
We are reporting, as the evidence reveals, that the number of COVID-positive results and the number of COVID-related deaths have been significantly exaggerated.
Based on our findings, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration should not be trusted or relied upon for accurate information, and needs to be immediately investigated and held accountable for Crimes Against Humanity.
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Before reading Engelbrecht's investigation into the science that proves how fraudulent "COVID-19 testing" is, let's recap the overall state of what can accurately be defined as an "attack" on us.
For your family's sake, please do not instinctively dismiss any of these facts. Please read this entire post before it gets deleted by corrupt censors.
Fact 1) As thousands of Doctors worldwide have proven, there are several effective treatments for this coronavirus. (source one, two, three, four, five, six)
Fact 2) The effective treatments have been censored and suppressed for reasons including but not limited to:
a) They are inexpensive, i.e. Big Pharma can't profit off of them;
b) They completely derail the wider-agenda of those interests who are exploiting this virus to implement the most oppressive economic, "health" and surveillance system ever;
c) There is an FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) law which only allows the mass "vaccination" program to continue if there are no other effective treatments. There is also a EUA "National Security" stipulation that requires a significant percentage of the population to be at risk of death, which is another reason why fraudulent false-positive testing is being used, as you will see below. (source)
For all of these reasons, the effective treatments have been suppressed; leading to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.
Fact 3) The handling of this virus has resulted in an all-out economic disaster that has destroyed the livelihood and financial security of billions of people worldwide, leading to unprecedented rates of debt, depression, drug abuse, overdoses and suicides. Meanwhile, the CARES Act and global central banking operations in response to this "crisis" have resulted in an unprecedented consolidation of wealth by the world's richest 0.01%. (source one, two, three, four)
Fact 4) The lockdown, quarantine and closer of schools, religious services, sports, recreational activities, social events, shopping, food and workplaces, along with social distancing measures and mandatory mask use, in combination with criminally negligent 24/7 mainstream media virus fear propaganda, amounts to psychological torture and abuse on an unprecedented scale, which has torn apart and separated many families, and has done significant damage to the psychological wellbeing of billions of people, particularly young children, worldwide. (source)
Fact 5) Underfunded and cash-strapped hospitals have been financially incentivized to record as many COVID-related deaths as possible, resulting in a statistically significant number of falsely reported COVID-related deaths. On top of that, hospitals have also been heavily incentivized to put people on ventilators, which has also contributed to thousands of additional unnecessary deaths. (source one, two)
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Now that we have a better understanding of the overall situation, of the Crimes Against Humanity that have been strategically implemented thus far, let's look at the science that reveals the fraudulent testing process. Here's is Torsten Engelbrecht's report:
"COVID-19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless"
~ By Torsten Engelbrecht & Konstantin Demeter
Though the whole world relies on RT-PCR to "diagnose" Sars-Cov-2 infection, the science is clear: they are not fit for purpose.
Lockdowns and hygienic measures around the world are based on numbers of cases and mortality rates created by the SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests used to identify "positive" patients, whereby "positive" is usually equated with "infected."
However, when looking closely at the facts, the conclusion is that these PCR tests are meaningless as a diagnostic tool to determine an alleged infection by SARS-CoV-2.
UNFOUNDED "TEST, TEST, TEST,…" MANTRA
At the media briefing on COVID-19 on March 16, 2020, the WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said:
"We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test."
The message was spread through headlines around the world, for instance by Reuters and the BBC.
Still on May 3, the moderator of the Heute Journal -- one of the most important news magazines on German television -- was passing the mantra of the corona dogma on to his audience with the admonishing words:
"Test, test, test -- that is the credo at the moment, and it is the only way to really understand how much the coronavirus is spreading."
This indicates that the belief in the validity of the PCR tests is so strong that it equals a religion that tolerates virtually no contradiction.
As Walter Lippmann, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and perhaps the most influential journalist of the 20th century said: "Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."
So to start, it is very remarkable that Kary Mullis himself, the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology, did not think alike. His invention got him the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1993.
Unfortunately, Mullis passed away last year at the age of 74, but there is no doubt that the biochemist regarded the PCR as inappropriate to detect a viral infection.
The reason is that the intended use of the PCR was, and still is, to apply it as a manufacturing technique, being able to replicate DNA sequences millions and billions of times, and not as a diagnostic tool to detect viruses.
How declaring virus pandemics based on PCR tests can end in disaster was described by Gina Kolata in her 2007 New York Times article, "Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn't." (full article below)
LACK OF A VALID GOLD STANDARD
Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the PCR tests used to identify so-called COVID-19 patients presumably infected by what is called SARS-CoV-2 do not have a valid gold standard to compare them with.
This is a fundamental point. Tests need to be evaluated to determine their preciseness -- strictly speaking their "sensitivity" [1] and "specificity" -- by comparison with a "gold standard," meaning the most accurate method available.
As an example, for a pregnancy test the gold standard would be the pregnancy itself. As Australian infectious diseases specialist Sanjaya Senanayake, for example, stated in an ABC TV interview in an answer to the question "How accurate is the [COVID-19] testing?":
"If we had a new test for picking up [the bacterium] golden staph in blood, we've already got blood cultures, that's our gold standard we've been using for decades, and we could match this new test against that. But for COVID-19 we don't have a gold standard test."
Jessica C. Watson from Bristol University confirms this. In her paper "Interpreting a COVID-19 test result," published recently in The British Medical Journal, she writes that there is a "lack of such a clear-cut 'gold-standard' for COVID-19 testing."
But instead of classifying the tests as unsuitable for SARS-CoV-2 detection and COVID-19 diagnosis, or instead of pointing out that only a virus, proven through isolation and purification, can be a solid gold standard, Watson claims in all seriousness that, "pragmatically" COVID-19 diagnosis itself, remarkably including PCR testing itself, "may be the best available 'gold standard.'" But this is not scientifically sound.
Apart from the fact that it is downright absurd to take the PCR test itself as part of the gold standard to evaluate the PCR test, there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, as even people such as Thomas Löscher, former head of the Department of Infection and Tropical Medicine at the University of Munich and member of the Federal Association of German Internists, conceded to us. [2]
If there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, COVID-19 diagnosis -- contrary to Watson's statement -- cannot be suitable for serving as a valid gold standard.
In addition, "experts" such as Watson overlook the fact that only virus isolation, i.e. an unequivocal virus proof, can be the gold standard.
That is why I asked Watson how COVID-19 diagnosis "may be the best available gold standard," if there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, and also whether the virus itself, that is virus isolation, wouldn't be the best available/possible gold standard, but she hasn't answered these questions yet – despite multiple requests. She has not yet responded to our rapid response post on her article in which we address exactly the same points, either, though she wrote us on June 2nd: "I will try to post a reply later this week when I have a chance."
[She never replied.]
NO PROOF FOR THE RNA BEING OF VIRAL ORIGIN
Now the question is: What is required first for virus isolation/proof? We need to know where the RNA for which the PCR tests are calibrated comes from.
As textbooks (e.g., White/Fenner. Medical Virology, 1986, p. 9) as well as leading virus researchers such as Luc Montagnier or Dominic Dwyer state, particle purification -- i.e. the separation of an object from everything else that is not that object, as for instance Nobel laureate Marie Curie purified 100 mg of radium chloride in 1898 by extracting it from tons of pitchblende -- is an essential pre-requisite for proving the existence of a virus, and thus to prove that the RNA from the particle in question comes from a new virus.
The reason for this is that PCR is extremely sensitive, which means it can detect even the smallest pieces of DNA or RNA -- but it cannot determine where these particles came from. That has to be determined beforehand.
Because the PCR tests are calibrated for gene sequences (in this case RNA sequences because SARS-CoV-2 is believed to be a RNA virus), we have to know that these gene snippets are part of the looked-for virus. And to know that, correct isolation and purification of the presumed virus has to be executed.
Hence, we have asked the science teams of the relevant papers which are referred to in the context of SARS-CoV-2 for proof whether the electron-microscopic shots depicted in their in vitro experiments show purified viruses.
But not a single team could answer that question with "yes" -- and nobody said purification was not a necessary step. We only got answers like "No, we did not obtain an electron micrograph showing the degree of purification."
We asked several study authors "Do your electron micrographs show the purified virus?", they gave the following responses:
Study 1: Leo L. M. Poon; Malik Peiris. "Emergence of a novel human coronavirus threatening human health," Nature Medicine, March 2020
Replying Author: Malik Peiris
Date: May 12, 2020
Answer: "The image is the virus budding from an infected cell. It is not purified virus."
Study 2: Myung-Guk Han et al. "Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19," Osong Public Health and Research Perspectives, February 2020
Replying Author: Myung-Guk Han
Date: May 6, 2020
Answer: "We could not estimate the degree of purification because we do not purify and concentrate the virus cultured in cells."
Study 3: Wan Beom Park et al. "Virus Isolation from the First Patient with SARS-CoV-2 in Korea," Journal of Korean Medical Science, February 24, 2020
Replying Author: Wan Beom Park
Date: March 19, 2020
Answer: "We did not obtain an electron micrograph showing the degree of purification."
Study 4: Na Zhu et al., "A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China," 2019, New England Journal of Medicine, February 20, 2020
Replying Author: Wenjie Tan
Date: March 18, 2020
Answer: "[We show] an image of sedimented virus particles, not purified ones."
Regarding the mentioned papers it is clear that what is shown in the electron micrographs (EMs) is the end result of the experiment, meaning there is no other result that they could have made EMs from.
That is to say, if the authors of these studies concede that their published EMs do not show purified particles, then they definitely do not possess purified particles claimed to be viral.
[In this context, it has to be remarked that some researchers use the term "isolation" in their papers, but the procedures described therein do not represent a proper isolation (purification) process. Consequently, in this context the term "isolation" is misused.]
Thus, the authors of four of the principal, early 2020 papers claiming discovery of a new coronavirus concede they had no proof that the origin of the virus genome was viral-like particles or cellular debris, pure or impure, or particles of any kind. In other words, the existence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA is based on faith, not fact.
We have also contacted Dr Charles Calisher, who is a seasoned virologist. In 2001, Science published an "impassioned plea… to the younger generation" from several veteran virologists, among them Calisher, saying that:
[Modern virus detection methods like] "sleek polymerase chain reaction... tell little or nothing about how a virus multiplies, which animals carry it, [or] how it makes people sick. [It is] like trying to say whether somebody has bad breath by looking at his fingerprint.." [3]
And that's why we asked Dr Calisher whether he knows one single paper in which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated and finally really purified. His answer:
"I know of no such a publication. I have kept an eye out for one." [4]
This actually means that one cannot conclude that the RNA gene sequences, which the scientists took from the tissue samples prepared in the mentioned in vitro trials and for which the PCR tests are finally being "calibrated," belong to a specific virus -- in this case SARS-CoV-2.
In addition, there is no scientific proof that those RNA sequences are the causative agent of what is called COVID-19.
In order to establish a causal connection, one way or the other, i.e. beyond virus isolation and purification, it would have been absolutely necessary to carry out an experiment that satisfies the four Koch's postulates. But there is no such experiment, as Amory Devereux and Rosemary Frei recently revealed for OffGuardian.
The necessity to fulfill these postulates regarding SARS-CoV-2 is demonstrated not least by the fact that attempts have been made to fulfill them. But even researchers claiming they have done it, in reality, did not succeed.
One example is a study published in Nature on May 7. This trial, besides other procedures which render the study invalid, did not meet any of the postulates.
For instance, the alleged "infected" laboratory mice did not show any relevant clinical symptoms clearly attributable to pneumonia, which according to the third postulate should actually occur if a dangerous and potentially deadly virus was really at work there. The slight bristles and weight loss, which were observed temporarily in the animals are negligible, not only because they could have been caused by the procedure itself, but also because the weight went back to normal again.
Also, no animal died except those they killed to perform the autopsies. And let's not forget: These experiments should have been done before developing a test, which is not the case.
Revealingly, none of the leading German representatives of the official theory about SARS-Cov-2/COVID-19 -- the Robert Koch-Institute (RKI), Alexander S. Kekulé (University of Halle), Hartmut Hengel and Ralf Bartenschlager (German Society for Virology), the aforementioned Thomas Löscher, Ulrich Dirnagl (Charité Berlin) or Georg Bornkamm (virologist and professor emeritus at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Munich) -- could answer the following question:
If the particles that are claimed to be to be SARS-CoV-2 have not been purified, how do you want to be sure that the RNA gene sequences of these particles belong to a specific new virus?
Particularly, if there are studies showing that substances such as antibiotics that are added to the test tubes in the in vitro experiments carried out for virus detection can "stress" the cell culture in a way that new gene sequences are being formed that were not previously detectable -- an aspect that Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock already drew attention to in her Nobel Lecture back in 1983.
It should not go unmentioned that we finally got the CharitĂ© – the employer of Christian Drosten, Germany's most influential virologist in respect of COVID-19, advisor to the German government and co-developer of the PCR test, which was the first to be "accepted" (not validated!) by the WHO worldwide – to answer questions on the topic.
But we didn't get answers until June 18, 2020, after months of non-response. In the end, we achieved it only with the help of Berlin lawyer Viviane Fischer.
Regarding our question: "Has the Charité convinced itself that appropriate particle purification was carried out?," the Charité concedes that they didn't use purified particles.
Although they claim "virologists at the Charité are sure that they are testing for the virus," in their paper (Corman et al.) they state:
"RNA was extracted from clinical samples with the MagNA Pure 96 system (Roche, Penzberg, Germany) and from cell culture supernatants with the viral RNA mini kit (QIAGEN, Hilden, Germany)."
That means they just assumed the RNA was viral.
Incidentally, the Corman et al. paper, published on January 23, 2020 didn't even go through a proper peer review process, nor were the procedures outlined therein accompanied by controls -- although it is only through these two things that scientific work becomes really solid.
IRRATIONAL TEST RESULTS
It is also certain that we cannot know the false positive rate of the PCR tests without widespread testing of people who certainly do not have the virus, proven by a method which is independent of the test (having a solid gold standard).
Therefore, it is hardly surprising that there are several papers illustrating irrational test results.
For example, already in February the health authority in China's Guangdong province reported that people have fully recovered from illness blamed on COVID-19, started to test "negative," and then tested "positive" again.
A month later, a paper published in the Journal of Medical Virology showed that 29 out of 610 patients at a hospital in Wuhan had 3 to 6 test results that flipped between "negative," "positive" and "dubious."
A third example is a study from Singapore in which tests were carried out almost daily on 18 patients. The majority went from "positive" to "negative" back to "positive" at least once, and up to five times in one patient.
Even Wang Chen, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, conceded in February that the PCR tests are "only 30 to 50 per cent accurate;" while Sin Hang Lee from the Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory sent a letter to the WHO's coronavirus response team and to Anthony Fauci on March 22, 2020, saying that:
"It has been widely reported that the RT-qPCR [Reverse Transcriptase quantitative PCR] test kits used to detect SARSCoV-2 RNA in human specimens are generating many false positive results and are not sensitive enough to detect some real positive cases."
In other words, even if we theoretically assume that these PCR tests can really detect a viral infection, the tests would be practically worthless, and would only cause an unfounded scare among the "positive" people tested.
This becomes also evident considering the positive predictive value (PPV).
The PPV indicates the probability that a person with a positive test result is truly "positive" (ie. has the supposed virus), and it depends on two factors: the prevalence of the virus in the general population and the specificity of the test, that is the percentage of people without disease in whom the test is correctly "negative" (a test with a specificity of 95% incorrectly gives a positive result in 5 out of 100 non-infected people).
With the same specificity, the higher the prevalence, the higher the PPV.
In this context, on June 12 2020, the journal Deutsches Ă„rzteblatt published an article in which the PPV has been calculated with three different prevalence scenarios.
The results must, of course, be viewed very critically, first because it is not possible to calculate the specificity without a solid gold standard, as outlined, and second because the calculations in the article are based on the specificity determined in the study by Jessica Watson, which is potentially worthless, as also mentioned.
But if you abstract from it, assuming that the underlying specificity of 95% is correct and that we know the prevalence, even the mainstream medical journal Deutsches Ă„rzteblatt reports that the SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests may have "a shockingly low" PPV.
In one of the three scenarios, figuring with an assumed prevalence of 3%, the PPV was only 30 percent, which means that 70 percent of the people tested "positive" are not "positive" at all. Yet "they are prescribed quarantine," as even the Ă„rzteblatt notes critically….
All this fits with the fact that the CDC and the FDA, for instance, concede in their files that the "SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests" are not suitable for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis.
In the "CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel" file from March 30, 2020, for example, it says:
"Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms."
And:
"This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens."
And the FDA admits that: "positive results... do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with other viruses. The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease."
Remarkably, in the instruction manuals of PCR tests we can also read that they are not intended as a diagnostic test, as for instance in those by Altona Diagnostics and Creative Diagnostics. [5]
To quote another one, in the product announcement of the LightMix Modular Assays produced by TIB Molbiol -- which were developed using the Corman et al. protocol -- and distributed by Roche, we read:
"These assays are not intended for use as an aid in the diagnosis of coronavirus infection."
And:
"For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures."
WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE THAT THE TESTS CAN MEASURE THE "VIRAL LOAD"?
There is also reason to conclude that the PCR test from Roche and others cannot even detect the targeted genes.
Moreover, in the product descriptions of the RT-qPCR tests for SARS-COV-2 it says they are "qualitative" tests, contrary to the fact that the "q" in "qPCR" stands for "quantitative."
If these tests are not "quantitative" tests, they don't show how many viral particles are in the body.
That is crucial because, in order to even begin talking about actual illness in the real world not only in a laboratory, the patient would need to have millions and millions of viral particles actively replicating in their body.
That is to say, the CDC, WHO, FDA or the RKI may assert that the tests can measure the so-called "viral load," i.e. how many viral particles are in the body. "But this has never been proven. That is an enormous scandal," as the journalist Jon Rappoport points out.
This is not only because the term "viral load" is deception. If you put the question, "What is viral load?", at a dinner party, people take it to mean viruses circulating in the bloodstream. They’re surprised to learn it's actually RNA molecules.
Also, to prove beyond any doubt that the PCR can measure how much a person is "burdened" with a disease-causing virus, the following experiment would have had to be carried out, which has not happened yet:
You take, let's say, a few hundred or even thousand people and remove tissue samples from them. Make sure the people who take the samples do not perform the test. The testers will never know who the patients are and what condition they're in.
The testers run their PCR on the tissue samples. In each case, they say which virus they found and how much of it they found.
Then, for example, in patients 29, 86, 199, 272, and 293 they found a great deal of what they claim is a virus. Now we un-blind those patients. They should all be sick, because they have so much virus replicating in their bodies. But are they really sick -- or are they fit as a fiddle?
With the help of the aforementioned lawyer Viviane Fischer, I finally got the Charité to answer the question of whether the test developed by Corman et al. -- the so-called "Drosten PCR test" --- is a quantitative test.
But the Charité was not willing to answer this question "yes." Instead, the Charité wrote:
"If real-time RT-PCR is involved, to the knowledge of the Charité in most cases these are... limited to qualitative detection."
Furthermore, the "Drosten PCR test" uses the unspecific E-gene assay as preliminary assay, while the Institut Pasteur uses the same assay as confirmatory assay.
According to Corman et al., the E-gene assay is likely to detect all Asian viruses, while the other assays in both tests are supposed to be more specific for sequences labelled "SARS-CoV-2."
Besides the questionable purpose of having either a preliminary or a confirmatory test that is likely to detect all Asian viruses, at the beginning of April the WHO changed the algorithm, recommending that from then on a test can be regarded as "positive" even if just the E-gene assay (which is likely to detect all Asian viruses!) gives a "positive" result.
This means that a confirmed unspecific test result is officially sold as specific.
That change of algorithm increased the "case" numbers. Tests using the E-gene assay are produced for example by Roche, TIB Molbiol and R-Biopharm.
HIGH CQ VALUES MAKE THE TEST RESULTS EVEN MORE MEANINGLESS
Another essential problem is that many PCR tests have a "cycle quantification" (Cq) value of over 35, and some, including the "Drosten PCR test," even have a Cq of 45.
The Cq value specifies how many cycles of DNA replication are required to detect a real signal from biological samples.
"Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported," as it says in the MIQE guidelines.
MIQE stands for "Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments," a set of guidelines that describe the minimum information necessary for evaluating publications on Real-Time PCR, also called quantitative PCR, or qPCR.
The inventor himself, Kary Mullis, agreed, when he stated:
"If you have to go more than 40 cycles to amplify a single-copy gene, there is something seriously wrong with your PCR."
The MIQE guidelines have been developed under the aegis of Stephen A. Bustin, Professor of Molecular Medicine, a world-renowned expert on quantitative PCR and author of the book A-Z of Quantitative PCR, which has been called "the bible of qPCR."
In a recent podcast interview Bustin points out that "the use of such arbitrary Cq cut-offs is not ideal, because they may be either too low (eliminating valid results) or too high (increasing false "positive" results)."
According to him, a Cq in the 20s to 30s should be aimed at, and there is concern regarding the reliability of the results for any Cq over 35.
If the Cq value gets too high, it becomes difficult to distinguish real signal from background, for example due to reactions of primers and fluorescent probes, and hence there is a higher probability of false positives.
Moreover, among other factors that can alter the result, before starting with the actual PCR, in case you are looking for presumed RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, the RNA must be converted to complementary DNA (cDNA) with the enzyme Reverse Transcriptase -- hence the "RT" at the beginning of "PCR" or "qPCR."
But this transformation process is "widely recognized as inefficient and variable," as Jessica Schwaber from the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine in Toronto and two research colleagues pointed out in a 2019 paper.
Stephen A. Bustin acknowledges problems with PCR in a comparable way.
For example, he pointed to the problem that in the course of the conversion process (RNA to cDNA) the amount of DNA obtained with the same RNA base material can vary widely, even by a factor of 10 (see above interview).
Considering that the DNA sequences get doubled at every cycle, even a slight variation becomes magnified and can thus alter the result, annihilating the test's reliable informative value.
So how can it be that those who claim the PCR tests are highly meaningful for so-called COVID-19 diagnosis blind out the fundamental inadequacies of these tests -- even if they are confronted with questions regarding their validity?
Certainly, the apologists of the novel coronavirus hypothesis should have dealt with these questions before throwing the tests on the market and putting basically the whole world under lockdown, not least because these are questions that come to mind immediately for anyone with even a spark of scientific understanding.
Thus, the thought inevitably emerges that financial and political interests play a decisive role for this ignorance about scientific obligations. NB, the WHO, for example has financial ties with drug companies, as the British Medical Journal showed in 2010.
Experts criticize "that the notorious corruption and conflicts of interest at WHO have continued, even grown" since then. The CDC as well, to take another big player, is obviously no better off.
Finally, the reasons and possible motives remain speculative, and many involved surely act in good faith; but the science is clear: The numbers generated by these RT-PCR tests do not in the least justify frightening people who have been tested "positive" and imposing lockdown measures that plunge countless people into poverty and despair or even drive them to suicide.
A "positive" result may have serious consequences for the patients as well, because then all non-viral factors are excluded from the diagnosis and the patients are treated with highly toxic drugs and invasive intubations.
Especially for elderly people and patients with pre-existing conditions such a treatment can be fatal, as we have outlined in the article "Fatal Therapie."
Without doubt excess mortality rates are caused by the therapy and by the lockdown measures, while the "COVID-19" death statistics comprise also patients who died of a variety of diseases, redefined as COVID-19 only because of a "positive" test result whose value could not be more doubtful.
NOTES:
[1] Sensitivity is defined as the proportion of patients with disease in whom the test is positive; and specificity is defined as the proportion of patients without disease in whom the test is negative.
[2] E-mail from Prof. Thomas Löscher from March 6, 2020
[3] Martin Enserink. Virology. Old guard urges virologists to go back to basics, Science, July 6, 2001, p. 24
[4] E-mail from Charles Calisher from May 10, 2020
[5] Creative Diagnostics, SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Multiplex RT-qPCR Kit
Report Authors:
~ Torsten Engelbrecht is an award-winning journalist and author from Hamburg, Germany. In 2006, he co-authored Virus-Mania with Dr Klaus Kohnlein, and in 2009, he won the German Alternate Media Award. He has also written for Financial Times Deutschland, Rubikon, SĂĽddeutsche Zeitung, and many others.
~ Konstantin Demeter is an independent researcher. Together with the journalist Torsten Engelbrecht he has published articles on the "COVID-19" crisis in the online magazine Rubikon, as well as contributions in Swiss Italian newspapers.
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This next report by the NY Times, published in 2007, features many timely and shocking statements from medical experts on the use of PCR tests, which clearly lay out how they result in false positives and lead to dangerous exaggerations and false alarms.
Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn't
~ by Gina Kolata, NY Times
Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing. For two weeks starting in mid-April last year, she coughed, seemingly nonstop, followed by another week when she coughed sporadically, annoying, she said, everyone who worked with her.
Before long, Dr. Kathryn Kirkland, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth, had a chilling thought: Could she be seeing the start of a whooping cough epidemic? By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing, and severe, intractable coughing is a whooping cough hallmark. And if it was whooping cough, the epidemic had to be contained immediately because the disease could be deadly to babies in the hospital and could lead to pneumonia in the frail and vulnerable adult patients there.
It was the start of a bizarre episode at the medical center: the story of the epidemic that wasn’t.
For months, nearly everyone involved thought the medical center had had a huge whooping cough outbreak, with extensive ramifications. Nearly 1,000 health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N.H., were given a preliminary test and furloughed from work until their results were in; 142 people, including Dr. Herndon, were told they appeared to have the disease; and thousands were given antibiotics and a vaccine for protection. Hospital beds were taken out of commission, including some in intensive care.
Then, about eight months later, health care workers were dumbfounded to receive an e-mail message from the hospital administration informing them that the whole thing was a false alarm.
Not a single case of whooping cough was confirmed with the definitive test, growing the bacterium, Bordetella pertussis, in the laboratory. Instead, it appears the health care workers probably were afflicted with ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold.
Now, as they look back on the episode, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists say the problem was that they placed too much faith in a quick and highly sensitive molecular test that led them astray.
Infectious disease experts say such tests are coming into increasing use and may be the only way to get a quick answer in diagnosing diseases like whooping cough, Legionnaire's, bird flu, tuberculosis and SARS, and deciding whether an epidemic is under way.
There are no national data on pseudo-epidemics caused by an overreliance on such molecular tests, said Dr. Trish M. Perl, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and past president of the Society of Health Care Epidemiologists of America. But, she said, pseudo-epidemics happen all the time. The Dartmouth case may have been one the largest, but it was by no means an exception, she said.
There was a similar whooping cough scare at Children's Hospital in Boston last fall that involved 36 adults and 2 children. Definitive tests, though, did not find pertussis.
"It's a problem; we know it's a problem," Dr. Perl said. "My guess is that what happened at Dartmouth is going to become more common."
Many of the new molecular tests are quick but technically demanding, and each laboratory may do them in its own way. These tests, called "home brews," are not commercially available, and there are no good estimates of their error rates. But their very sensitivity makes false positives likely, and when hundreds or thousands of people are tested, as occurred at Dartmouth, false positives can make it seem like there is an epidemic.
"You're in a little bit of no man's land," with the new molecular tests, said Dr. Mark Perkins, an infectious disease specialist and chief scientific officer at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, a nonprofit foundation supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "All bets are off on exact performance."
Of course, that leads to the question of why rely on them at all. "At face value, obviously they shouldn't be doing it," Dr. Perl said. But, she said, often when answers are needed and an organism like the pertussis bacterium is finicky and hard to grow in a laboratory, "you don't have great options."
Waiting to see if the bacteria grow can take weeks, but the quick molecular test can be wrong. "It's almost like you're trying to pick the least of two evils," Dr. Perl said.
At Dartmouth the decision was to use a test, P.C.R., for polymerase chain reaction. It is a molecular test that, until recently, was confined to molecular biology laboratories.
"That's kind of what's happening," said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, an infectious disease specialist and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. "That's the reality out there. We are trying to figure out how to use methods that have been the purview of bench scientists."
The Dartmouth whooping cough story shows what can ensue.
To say the episode was disruptive was an understatement, said Dr. Elizabeth Talbot, deputy state epidemiologist for the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.
"You cannot imagine," Dr. Talbot said. "I had a feeling at the time that this gave us a shadow of a hint of what it might be like during a pandemic flu epidemic."
Yet, epidemiologists say, one of the most troubling aspects of the pseudo-epidemic is that all the decisions seemed so sensible at the time.
Dr. Katrina Kretsinger, a medical epidemiologist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who worked on the case along with her colleague Dr. Manisha Patel, does not fault the Dartmouth doctors.
"The issue was not that they overreacted or did anything inappropriate at all," Dr. Kretsinger said. Instead, it is that there is often is no way to decide early on whether an epidemic is under way.
Before the 1940s when a pertussis vaccine for children was introduced, whooping cough was a leading cause of death in young children. The vaccine led to an 80 percent drop in the disease's incidence, but did not completely eliminate it. That is because the vaccine's effectiveness wanes after about a decade, and although there is now a new vaccine for adolescents and adults, it is only starting to come into use. Whooping cough, Dr. Kretsinger said, is still a concern.
The disease got its name from its most salient feature: Patients may cough and cough and cough until they have to gasp for breath, making a sound like a whoop. The coughing can last so long that one of the common names for whooping cough was the 100-day cough, Dr. Talbot said.
But neither coughing long and hard nor even whooping is unique to pertussis infections, and many people with whooping cough have symptoms that like those of common cold: a runny nose or an ordinary cough.
"Almost everything about the clinical presentation of pertussis, especially early pertussis, is not very specific," Dr. Kirkland said.
That was the first problem in deciding whether there was an epidemic at Dartmouth.
The second was with P.C.R., the quick test to diagnose the disease, Dr. Kretsinger said.
With pertussis, she said, "there are probably 100 different P.C.R. protocols and methods being used throughout the country," and it is unclear how often any of them are accurate. "We have had a number of outbreaks where we believe that despite the presence of P.C.R.-positive results, the disease was not pertussis," Dr. Kretsinger added.
At Dartmouth, when the first suspect pertussis cases emerged and the P.C.R. test showed pertussis, doctors believed it. The results seem completely consistent with the patients' symptoms.
"That's how the whole thing got started," Dr. Kirkland said. Then the doctors decided to test people who did not have severe coughing.
"Because we had cases we thought were pertussis and because we had vulnerable patients at the hospital, we lowered our threshold," she said. Anyone who had a cough got a P.C.R. test, and so did anyone with a runny nose who worked with high-risk patients like infants.
"That's how we ended up with 134 suspect cases," Dr. Kirkland said. And that, she added, was why 1,445 health care workers ended up taking antibiotics and 4,524 health care workers at the hospital, or 72 percent of all the health care workers there, were immunized against whooping cough in a matter of days.
"If we had stopped there, I think we all would have agreed that we had had an outbreak of pertussis and that we had controlled it," Dr. Kirkland said.
But epidemiologists at the hospital and working for the States of New Hampshire and Vermont decided to take extra steps to confirm that what they were seeing really was pertussis.
The Dartmouth doctors sent samples from 27 patients they thought had pertussis to the state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control. There, scientists tried to grow the bacteria, a process that can take weeks. Finally, they had their answer: There was no pertussis in any of the samples.
"We thought, Well, that's odd," Dr. Kirkland said. "Maybe it's the timing of the culturing, maybe it's a transport problem. Why don’t we try serological testing? Certainly, after a pertussis infection, a person should develop antibodies to the bacteria."
They could only get suitable blood samples from 39 patients -- the others had gotten the vaccine which itself elicits pertussis antibodies. But when the Centers for Disease Control tested those 39 samples, its scientists reported that only one showed increases in antibody levels indicative of pertussis.
The disease center did additional tests too, including molecular tests to look for features of the pertussis bacteria. Its scientists also did additional P.C.R. tests on samples from 116 of the 134 people who were thought to have whooping cough. Only one P.C.R. was positive, but other tests did not show that that person was infected with pertussis bacteria. The disease center also interviewed patients in depth to see what their symptoms were and how they evolved.
"It was going on for months," Dr. Kirkland said. But in the end, the conclusion was clear: There was no pertussis epidemic.
"We were all somewhat surprised," Dr. Kirkland said, "and we were left in a very frustrating situation about what to do when the next outbreak comes."
Dr. Cathy A. Petti, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah, said the story had one clear lesson.
"The big message is that every lab is vulnerable to having false positives," Dr. Petti said. "No single test result is absolute and that is even more important with a test result based on P.C.R."
As for Dr. Herndon, though, she now knows she is off the hook.
"I thought I might have caused the epidemic," she said.
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