How Reliable Is The PCR Test
CDC is mandating a Ct of 28 and below for the vaccinated and 40 for everyone else (Yale study page 6 shows CDC lab 40 Ct). Does that sound like an honest organization to you?
I am not going to come out and say that someone at CDC has a financial or other interest in Moderna or Pfizer.
It's not like it never happened before:
In 2016 a group of more than a dozen senior scientists at the CDC lodged an ethics complaint alleging that that the CDC was being influenced "by corporate and political interests in ways that shortchange taxpayers." They noted "the pervasive nature of unethical practices throughout all levels at the CDC."
What does it mean? It means there are far more "breakthrough" cases than they will ever admit. Maybe even to the point that "efficacy" is null for all practical purposes.
The Plot
The PCR test is being used globally in diagnosing SARS-CoV-2.
But According to Kary Mullis (deceased), inventor of the test, there are problems with using PCR as a diagnostic tool:
In 2020 a landmark court case in Portugal ruled that four German tourists had been illegally detained due to having been declared COVID positive based upon the results of PCR testing:
In view of the current scientific evidence, this test is, in itself, unable to determine, beyond reasonable doubt, that such positivity corresponds, in fact, to the infection of a person by the SARS-CoV-2 virus...
The
study referenced by the judges in the above case (and others like it) have been misinterpreted by many on
social media:
Since the beginning of the epidemic,we have performed in our institute 250,566 SARS-CoV-2RT-PCR for 179,151 patients, of which 13,161(7.3%) tested positive. Up to the end of May, 3790 of these samples reported positives on naso-pharyngeal samples were inoculated and managed for culture as previously described [8]. Of these 3790 inoculated samples, 1941 SARS-Cov-2 isolates could be obtained after the first inoculation or up to blind subcultures. The correlation between the scanner values and the positivity of the culture allows us to observe that the image obtained with ten times more isolates than our preliminary work (1941 versus 129) does not change significantly (Figure 1). It can be observed that at Ct=25, up to 70% of patients remain positive in culture and that at Ct=30 this value drops to 20%. At Ct=35, the value we used to report positive result for PCR, less than 3% of culture are negative.
This study is NOT stating that 97% of cases are false positive. These cases all have the coronavirus. It is a matter of whether they can be considered clinically infectious.
However, as the Ct increases a positive result does become more likely and in the video above Kary Mullis does state that (paraphrase) [you are likely to find just about any molecule just about anywhere if you amplify the sample enough times].
So what is an appropriate Ct value?
In January 2021, when the Philippines was concerned about inbound passengers that might be infected with the UK COVID-19 variant (B.1.1.7) the DOH was using a Ct cutoff of 29:
Actually, what we were doing before was random. But of late, we checked all those who tested positive for COVID-19, those who have less than 30 CT value, they sent their specimen for sequencing. That's why we were able to find out the UK COVID-19 variant in a passenger from Dubai.
The Indian Council of Medical Research recommends a Ct cutoff of 35 in determining who is "COVID-19 positive":
All patients with a CT value of equal to or less than 35 may be considered positive, while those with a CT value greater than 35 may be considered negative. All samples with a CT value equal to or less than 35, which is seen as a poor sigmoidal curve, should be essentially retested. Implementing a CT value cut-off of 24 is not at all advisable as this would lead to missing of several infectious patients and increase disease transmission...
Health authorities should have a very good explanation for whatever Ct value they are using, especially if they are using a Ct above 35, considering this has a potentially great impact on the persons being tested.
Dr Bernard La Scola, infectious disease scientist at IHU Mediterranee Infection-Aix Marseille University in France stated that pursuing cases with a Ct above 35 “is a waste of time to consider these rare cases.”
The bottom line on using the PCR test as a diagnostic tool:
The RT-PCR test also appears to have its problems. Its inventor, Kary Mullis, who received the Nobel Prize for inventing the PCR manufacturing technique, is reported to have said that it was for research purposes only and not for medical diagnosis. An 80% false positive rate was reported from China in March 2020 (4).
The opinion of Dr. Mullis on the United States COVID-19 Task Force leader, Anthony Fauci, sheds some light on the handling of the pandemic in general:
Guys like Fauci get up there and start talking, you know, he doesn’t know anything really about anything and I’d say that to his face. Nothing. The man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there you’ll know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine and he should not be in a position like he’s in. Most of those guys up there on the top are just total administrative people and they don’t know anything about what’s going on in the body. You know, those guys have got an agenda, which is not what we would like them to have being that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way. They’ve got a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go. They change them when they want to. And they smugly, like Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera...
"They’ve got a personal kind of agenda"
And from Principia Scientific, WHO admits high Ct produces false positives:
In August of last year, The New York Times published an article stating that as many as 90% of COVID-19 tests in three states were not indicative of active illness (archive). In other words, they were picking up viral debris incapable of causing infection or being transmitted because the cycle threshold (Ct) of the PCR testing amplified the sample too many times.
Labs in the United States were using a Ct of 37-40. Epidemiologists interviewed at the time said a Ct of around 30 was probably more appropriate. This means the CDC’s COVID-19 test standards for the PCR test would pick up an excessive number of false positives. The Times report noted the CDC’s own data suggested the PCR did not detect live virus over a Ct of 33. The reporter also noted that clinicians were not receiving the Ct value as part of the test results.
Yet a PCR test instruction document from the CDC that had been revised five times as of July 13, 2020, specified testing and interpretation of the test using a Ct of 40. On September 28, 2020, a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases from Jaafar et al. had asserted, based on patient labs and clinical data involving nearly 4,000 patients, that a Ct of 30 was appropriate for making public policy. An update to the CDC instructions for PCR testing from December 1, 2020, still uses a Ct of 40.
From the NYT article referenced above:
In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90 percent 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.
Note: I see a lot of criminal conspirators on the Internet calling Principia Scientific "fringe", but the excerpt above references the NYT and peer reviewed research.
In Closing
PCR testing does not detect virus. It detects molecules that might be associated with a viral infection, such as might be caused by SARS-CoV-2.
NAATs [nucleic acid amplification tests - like the RT-PCR] detect one or more viral ribonucleic acid (RNA) genes and indicate a current infection or a recent infection but, due to prolonged viral RNA detection, are not always direct evidence for the presence of virus capable of replicating or of being transmitted to others.
When a person tests positive for SARS-COV-2, the lower the Ct is the higher the probability that they have an ongoing infection. The higher the Ct for a positive result the lower the probability is for an ongoing infection.
Health authorities must select a Ct value that maximizes the ability to detect those who are likely infected with COVID-19, while avoiding the agenda of selecting a higher value in order to guarantee higher rates of positive cases.
The timing of the test is also important. Ct may be high at the early onset of infection and missing this key piece of data can lead to spread of the virus.
So, how reliable is the PCR test?
PCR test reliability is highly dependent upon who is doing the testing and the methods and practices they are using.
The PCR test can be used by those who seek to give the color of legitimacy and process to the commission of a fraud.
But the test is not the problem in such cases.
The problem is unscrupulous people who have an agenda and will use whatever tools are available to perpetrate it and cover it up.
You can take people who are sick with flu, pneumonia, black plague or whatever and run a PCR test on them with a jacked up Ct and call them COVID positive.
People who have died in car accidents etc are having PCRs run on them and the families never get the body because it is cremated due to being deemed COVID positive.
In some cases no test at all is done. People are ruled COVID positive on observation alone. This is a travesty, as observable symptoms of COVID can be attributed to any number of ailments. To take away a person's liberty based on this flimsy evidence is a crime.
Such things are being done in the world. People need to educate themselves en masse so that they cannot be railroaded by such practices.