From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the clarion call has been to test, test and test some more. However, right from the start, serious questions arose about the tests being used to diagnose this infection, and questions have only multiplied since then.
Positive reverse
transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests have been used as the
justification for keeping large portions of the world locked down for the
better part of 2020.
This, despite the fact that
PCR tests have proven remarkably unreliable with high false result rates, and
aren’t designed to be used as a diagnostic tool in the first place as they
cannot distinguish between inactive viruses and “live” or reproductive ones.
Dr. Mike Yeadon, former vice president and scientific
director of Pfizer, has even gone on record stating1 that false
positive results from unreliable PCR tests are being used to “manufacture a
‘second wave’ based on ‘new cases,'” when in fact a second wave is highly
unlikely.
Understanding PCR Tests
Before his death, the
inventor of the PCR test, Kary Mullis, repeatedly yet unsuccessfully stressed
that this test should not be used as a diagnostic tool for the simple reason
that it’s incapable of diagnosing disease. A positive test does not actually
mean that an active infection is present. As noted in a U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and prevention publication on coronavirus and PCR testing dated
July 13 2020:2
- Detection
of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that
2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms.
- The
performance of this test has not been established for monitoring treatment
of 2019-nCoV infection.
- This
test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral
pathogens.
Mullis, KaryBest Price: $5.52Buy
New $15.17(as
of 02:58 EDT - Details)So, what does the PCR test actually tell us? The
PCR swab collects RNA from your nasal cavity. This RNA is then reverse
transcribed into DNA. However, the genetic snippets are so small they must be
amplified in order to become discernible. Each round of amplification is called
a cycle.
Amplification over 35 cycles is considered unreliable and
scientifically unjustified, yet Drosten tests and tests recommended by the
World Health Organization are set to 45 cycles.
What this does is amplify any, even insignificant sequences of
viral DNA that might be present to the point that the test reads “positive,”
even if the viral load is extremely low or the virus is inactive. As a result
of these excessive cycle thresholds, you end up with a far higher number of
positive tests than you would otherwise.
We’ve also had problems with faulty and contaminated tests. As
soon as the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 became available in January 2020,
German researchers quickly developed a PCR test for the virus.
In March 2020, The New
York Times3 reported the initial test kits developed by the CDC
had been found to be flawed. The Verge also reported4 that this flawed
CDC test in turn became the basis for the WHO’s test, which the CDC ended up
refusing to use.
PCR Tests Cannot Detect
Infection
Perhaps most importantly of all, the PCR tests cannot
distinguish between inactive viruses and “live” or reproductive ones. What that
means is that PCR tests cannot detect infection. Period. It cannot tell you
whether you’re currently ill, whether you’ll develop symptoms in the near future,
or whether you’re contagious.
The tests may pick up dead debris or inactive viral particles
that pose no risk whatsoever to the patient and others. What’s more, the test
can pick up the presence of other coronaviruses, so a positive result may
simply indicate that you’ve recuperated from a common cold in the past.
An “infection” is when
a virus penetrates into a cell and replicates. As the virus multiplies,
symptoms set in. A person is only infectious if the virus is actually
replicating. As long as the virus is inactive and not replicating, it’s
completely harmless both to the host and others.Visser, FrankBuy New $7.99(as of 05:07 EST
- Details)
Chances are, if you have no symptoms, a positive test simply
means it has detected inactive viral DNA in your body. This would also mean
that you are not contagious and pose no risk to anyone.
For all of these
reasons, a number of highly respected scientists around the world are now
saying that what we have is not a COVID-19 pandemic but a PCR test pandemic. In
his September 20, 2020, article5 “Lies, Damned
Lies and Health Statistics — The Deadly Danger of False Positives,” Yeadon
explains why basing our pandemic response on positive PCR tests is so
problematic.
In short, it appears
millions of people are simply being found to carry inactive viral DNA that pose
no risk to anyone, yet these test results are being used by the global technocracy to implement a brand
new economic and social system based on draconian
surveillance and totalitarian controls.
Artificially Created Justifications
for Totalitarian Controls
As reported by The
Vaccine Reaction, September 29, 2020:6
“The test’s threshold is so
high that it detects people with the live virus as well as those with a few
genetic fragments left over from a past infection that no longer poses a risk.
It’s like finding a hair in a room after a person left it, says Michael Mina,
MD, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.7
In three sets of testing data
that include cycle thresholds compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York
and Nevada, up to 90% of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a
review by The New York Times found8 …
‘We’ve been using one type of
data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,’ Dr. Mina
said. ‘We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy
decision-making.’
But ‘yes’ or ‘no’ isn’t good
enough, he added. It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected
patient’s next steps. ‘It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the
recognition that this is a quantitative issue,’ Dr. Mina said.”
Coleman, Dr VernonBuy New $14.71(as of 04:43 EST
- Details)Again, medical experts agree any cycle threshold over 35 cycles
makes the test too sensitive, as at that point it starts picking up harmless
inactive DNA fragments. Mina believes a more reasonable cutoff would be 30 or
less.
Changing the cycle
threshold from 40 cycles to 35 cycles eliminated about 43% of the positive
results. Limiting it to 30 cycles eliminated a whopping 63%.
According to The New
York Times,9 the CDC’s own calculations show it’s extremely
unlikely to detect live viruses in samples that have gone through more than 33
cycles, and research10 published in April 2020
concluded patients with positive PCR tests that had a cycle threshold above 33
were not contagious and could safely be discharged from the hospital or home
isolation.
Importantly, when officials
at the New York state laboratory, the Wadsworth Center, reanalyzed testing data
at The Times’ request, they found that changing the threshold from 40 cycles to
35 cycles eliminated about 43% of the positive results. Limiting it to 30
cycles eliminated a whopping 63%.11 The Vaccine
Reaction adds:12
“In Massachusetts, from 85 to
90% of people who tested positive in July with a cycle threshold of 40 would
have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said. ‘I
would say that none of those people should be contact-traced, not one,’ he
said.
‘I’m really shocked that it
could be that high — the proportion of people with high CT value results,’ said
Ashish Jha, MD, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. ‘Boy, does it
really change the way we need to be thinking about testing’13 …
In late August, the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first rapid coronavirus test that
doesn’t need any special computer equipment. Made by Abbot Laboratories, the
15-minute test [BinaxNOW] will sell for U.S. $5 but still requires a nasal swab
to be taken by a health worker.14
The Abbot test is the fourth
rapid point-of-care test that looks for the presence of antigens rather than
the virus’s genetic code as the PCR molecular tests do.15“
Massive Waste of Resources
As noted by Dr. Tom
Jefferson and professor Carl Henegan in an October 31, 2020, article in the
Daily Mail,16 mass PCR testing has been a massive waste or
resources, as it doesn’t provide us with the information we actually need to
know — who’s infectious, how far is the virus spreading and how fast does it
spread?Betrus,
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Instead, it has led to economic devastation from business
shutdowns and isolating noninfectious people in their homes for weeks and
months on end. Jefferson and Henegan claim they shared their pandemic response
plan with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson over a month ago, and just
presented it to him again. “We urge him to pay attention and embrace it,” they write,
adding:
“There are only two things
about which we can be certain: first, that lockdowns do not work in the long
term … The idea that a month of economic hardship will permit some sort of
‘reset’, allowing us a brighter future, is a myth. What, when it ends, do we
think will happen? Meanwhile, ever-increasing restrictions will destroy lives
and livelihoods.
The second certainty is this:
that we need to find a way out of the mess that does no more damage than the
virus itself … Our strategy would be to tackle the four key failings.”
These four areas are:
1. Addressing the
problems in the government’s mass testing program
2. Addressing “the blight
of confused and contradictory statistics”
3. Protect and isolate
the vulnerable — primarily the elderly, but also hospitalized patients in
general and staff — while allowing the rest to maintain “some semblance of
normal life”
4. Inform the public
about the true and quantifiable costs of lockdown that “kill people just as
surely as COVID-19”
“If we do these things, there is real hope that we can learn to
live with the virus. That, after all, was supposed to be the plan,” Jefferson
and Henegan note. With regard to testing, the pair call “for a national program
of testing quality control to ensure that results are accurate, precise and
consistent.”
Importantly, we must
not rely on positive/negative readings alone. The results must be assessed in
relation to other factors, such as the age of the subject and whether they are
symptomatic, to determine who actually poses an infectious risk. You can review
the full details of their proposed plan at the end of their Daily Mail article.17
Lockdown Dangers Have Been Kept
Out of Public Discussion
Jefferson and Henegan
aren’t the only ones highlighting the fact that the global lockdown strategy is
causing more harm and destruction than the virus itself. In a June 16, 2020
article in The Federalist, James Lucas, a New York City attorney, wrote:18
“If we’re going to allow models
and modelers to dictate the entire nature of our society, one would hope that
the models are as complete as possible. Yet the epidemiological models that
have so transformed our world are seriously incomplete, and therefore
fundamentally inadequate.
Any medical therapy is supposed
to be tested for both efficacy and safety. There have been several
studies19 examining the effectiveness of the lockdowns in combating
the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with mixed conclusions.
So far, however, none of these
studies or models have analyzed the safety side of the lockdown therapy. In
response to questions from physician Sens. Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy, Dr. Anthony
Fauci admits20 this side of the equation has not been accounted for in the
models now driving our world.
As noted in an open
letter21 recently signed by more than 600 health-care professionals, the
public health costs from the lockdowns — described as a ‘mass casualty
incident’ are real and growing.
These models are estimations
based on existing research. The constantly changing projections of coronavirus
deaths are extrapolations from research on previous epidemics. Yet modelers
have no excuse for leaving evaluations of the lockdowns’ massive costs to
public health out of their models.”
The Hidden Costs of Lockdowns
How does the “lockdown
therapy” affect public safety? In his article, Lucas highlights the following:22
•Increased chronic disease
rates due to unemployment, poverty and putting non-COVID medical care on hold — Research23 by the Veterans Administration has shown delaying
cancer treatment for just one month led to a 20% increase in mortality. Another
study24 found each one-month delay in breast cancer
diagnosis increased mortality by 10%
•Increased rates of mental
health problems due to unemployment and isolation
•Increased mortality rates
from suicide — In one study,25 being unemployed
was associated with a twofold to threefold higher relative risk of suicide. A
more recent study26 estimates “deaths of despair” linked to lockdowns
may be around 75,000 in the U.S.
•Reduced collective life
span — Extended
unemployment is also associated with shorter, unhealthier lives. Hannes
Schwandt, a health economics researcher at Northwestern University, estimates
an extended economic shutdown could shorten the lifespan of 6.4 million
Americans entering the job market by an average of about two years.27 Lucas notes:
“If epidemiologists don’t care
to take account of this toll, another profession must. A study28 just
released by a group of South African actuaries estimates that the net reduction
in lifespan from increased unemployment and poverty due to a national lockdown
will exceed the increased lifespan due to lives saved from COVID-19 by the
lockdown by a factor of 30 to 1.
In other words, each year of
additional life attributable to isolating potential coronavirus victims in the
lockdown comes at a cost of 30 years lost due to the negative public health effects
of a lockdown …”
Lack of education is
also associated with significantly shorter life spans and poorer health. High
school drop-outs die on average nine years sooner than college graduates,29 and school closings disproportionally affect poorer
students.
Who Pays the Most?
As noted by Lucas, in addition to calculating the overall costs
on society, modelers must also determine “on whom those costs fall,” because
the costs are not borne equally by all. The consequences of the lockdowns
disproportionally affect those who are already the most vulnerable —
financially and health wise — such as those living near the poverty line, the
chronically ill, people with mental illness and minorities in general.
“Contrary to the PR slogan, we
are NOT all in this together,” Lucas writes.30 “We need less insipid
pro-lockdown propaganda extolling the virtues of the ‘essential’ workers, and
more serious analysis of the enormous public health toll the lockdowns are
imposing on them. Otherwise, we may come to see the era of coronavirus as
simply the time where pro-lockdown elites sacrificed the working
class31 to protect themselves.”
A Pandemic of Fearmongering
An October 28, 2020,
article featured by the Ron Paul Institute points out that:32
“Ever since the alleged
pandemic erupted this past March the mainstream media has spewed a non-stop
stream of misinformation that appears to be laser focused on generating maximum
fear among the citizenry.
But the facts and the science
simply don’t support the grave picture painted of a deadly virus sweeping the
land. Yes, we do have a pandemic, but it’ a pandemic of ginned up
pseudo-science masquerading as unbiased fact.”
Nine facts that can be backed up with data “paints a very
different picture from the fear and dread being relentlessly drummed into the
brains of unsuspecting citizens,” the article states. In addition to the fact
that PCR testing is practically useless, for all the reasons already mentioned,
these data-backed facts include:
1.A positive test is NOT a
“case” —
As explained by Dr. Lee Merritt in her August 2020 Doctors for Disaster
Preparedness33 lecture, featured in “How Medical Technocracy Made the Plandemic Possible,”
media and public health officials appear to have purposefully conflated “cases”
or positive tests with the actual illness.
Medically speaking, a “case” refers to a sick person. It never
ever referred to someone who had no symptoms of illness. Now all of a sudden,
this well-established medical term, “case,” has been completely and arbitrarily
redefined to mean someone who tested positive for the presence of viral RNA. As
noted by Merritt, “That is not epidemiology. That’s fraud.”
2.According to the CDC34 and other research data,35 the COVID-19
survival rate is over 99%, and the vast majority of deaths occur in those over
70, which is close to normal life expectancy.
3.CDC analysis reveals 85% of
patients testing positive for COVID-19 wore face masks “often” or “always” in the two weeks
preceding their positive test. As noted in the Ron Paul article,36 “The only rational conclusion from this study is
that cloth face masks offer little if any protection from Covid-19 infection.”
4.There are inexpensive, proven
successful therapies for COVID-19 — Examples include various regimens
involving hydroxychloroquine with zinc and antibiotics, quercetin-based protocols, the MATH+ protocol and nebulized hydrogen peroxide.
5.The death rate has not risen
despite pandemic deaths — Data37,38 show the overall
all-cause mortality has remained steady during 2020 and doesn’t veer from the
norm. In other words, COVID-19 has not killed off more of the population than
would have died in any given year anyway.
As noted in the Ron
Paul article,39 “According to the CDC as of early May 2020 the
total number of deaths in the US was 944,251 from January 1 — April 30th. This
is actually slightly lower than the number of deaths during the same period in
2017 when 946,067 total deaths were reported.”
15,000 Doctors and Scientists
Call for End to Lockdowns
All in all, there are
many reasons to suspect that continued lockdowns, social distancing and mask mandates are completely unnecessary
and will not significantly alter the course of this pandemic illness, or the
final death count.
And, with regard to
universal PCR testing where individuals are tested every two weeks or even more
frequently, whether they have symptoms or not, this is clearly a pointless
effort that yields useless data. It’s just a tool to spread fear, which in turn allows for
the rapid implementation of the totalitarian control mechanisms required to
pull off The Great Reset. Fortunately, more and more
people are now starting to see through this plot.
About 45,000
scientists and doctors worldwide have already signed the Great Barrington
Declaration,40 which calls for the end to all lockdowns and
implementation of a herd immunity approach to the pandemic, meaning governments
should allow people who are not at significant risk of serious COVID-19 illness
to go back to normal life, as the lockdown approach is having a devastating
effect on public health — far worse than the virus itself.41,42 The declaration states:43
“Coming from both the left and
right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people.
Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and
long-term public health …
The most compassionate approach
that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow
those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up
immunity to coronavirus through natural infection, while better protecting
those who are at highest risk. We call this focused protection.”
The declaration points
out that current lockdown policies will result in excess mortality in the
future, primarily among younger people and the working class. As of November 5,
2020, The Great Barrington Declaration44 had been signed
by 11,791 medical and public health scientists, 33,903 medical practitioners
and 617,685 “concerned citizens.”45
Sources and References
- 1 The Huntingtonian October 6,
2020
- 2 CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel
July 13, 2020 (PDF)
- 3 New York Times, March 20, 2020
- 4 The Verge, March 17, 2020,
Current Gold Standards
- 5 Lockdownskeptics September 20,
2020
- 6, 11, 12 The Vaccine Reaction September
29, 2020
- 7 Daily Mail August 30, 2020
- 8, 9, 13 The New York Times August 29,
2020
- 10 Clinical Microbiology and
Infectious Diseases April 27, 2020; 39(6): 1059-1061
- 14 Abbott
Press Release August 26, 2020
- 15 Business Insider September 21,
2020
- 16, 17 Daily Mail October 31, 2020
- 18, 22, 30 The Federalist June 16, 2020
- 19 National Review May 22, 2020
- 20 WSJ Opinion May 13, 2020
- 21 Letter from Doctors to
President Donald Trump May 19, 2020
- 23 Health Services Research 2007
Apr; 42(2): 644–662
- 24 The ASCO Post April 14, 2016
- 25 Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 2003;
57: 594-600
- 26 Well Being Trust Projected
Deaths of Despair During COVID-19
- 27 Reuters April 3, 2020
- 28 Pandemic Data and Analytics —
Quantifying Years of Lost Life
- 29 Center on Society and Health
February 13, 2015
- 31 The Federalist May 4, 2020
- 32, 36, 39 Ron Paul Institute October 28,
2020
- 33 Doctors
for Disaster Preparedness
- 34 CDC.gov Pandemic Planning
Scenarios Updated September 10, 2020
- 35 Annals of Internal Medicine September 2, 2020 DOI:
10.7326/M20-5352
- 37 YouTube, SARS-CoV-2 and the
rise of medical technocracy, Lee Merritt, MD, aprox 8 minutes in (Lie No.
1: Death Risk)
- 38 Technical Report June 2020
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.24350.77125
- 40, 43, 44 Great Barrington Declaration
- 41 Sky News October 7, 2020
- 42 Washington Times October 8,
2020
- 45 Great Barrington Declaration Signatures
Copyright © Dr. Joseph
Mercola
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/11/joseph-mercola/why-covid-19-testing-is-a-tragic-waste/
