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- FAQ: Testing for COVID | MIT MedicalLast Updated on January 20, by Shaun Snapp. The tests were never accurate which calls into question the overall pandemic. If you want to see our references for this article and related Brightwork articles, visit this link. COVID statistics is part of our everyday life. We constantly hear that despite so-called COVID measures there is an increase in cases and infections. From the beginning, the assumption was that there is a reliable test for covid. I write this in November of , and I do not recall the accuracy of testing being covered by the establishment media since the pandemic began.
Everyone I speak to has no idea the covid test is not reliable. And I will get into the problematic timeline regarding the covid tests further on in the article. It is necessary since only DNA can be multiplied amplified at the levels which can be detected by fluorescence.
Every multiplication is called threshold cycle or Ct. PCR also made its mark in forensic science. Suddenly there was no need for radioactivity or chemiluminescence-based detection, as the PCR could produce millions of copies of DNA from only a few cells.
This is a bit complex and easy to gloss over. The critical part of this quote to me is that the test requires amplification. So it is not like many other tests where you take blood or other fluids and then the item is either present or not present. This test requires an amplification algorithm before determining either true or false. Then there is a question of how many times you run the algorithm.
Past 35 is not even worthy. This viral genetic material, of course, is subject to the specificity. It appears as if the FDA desired also positives. I will address this later, but the point appears to have been to exaggerate the number of cases to create a pandemic. The tests are very sensitive and can detect traces of the viral RNA. The main problem with mass use of a sensitive test is that it can be contaminated rather easy.
Since the technique is specific and only few people are familiar with it, test companies hire people who have little or even no training to do the sampling and testing. It means that every step from taking the sample to performing the test must be in a sterile environment to avoid contamination. In summary, a positive RT-qPCR test result cannot be accepted as proof that the person in question is currently infected and infectious—even if there is reasonable clinical plausibility of actual COVID infection, as well as a significant community prevalence of the disease.
So this means a positive test will be yielded when the virus is dead. The test cannot distinguish between a live and dead virus. This is simply amazing that it is not more widely covered. If, for example, such a pathogen flies over the nasal mucous membrane of a nurse for a day without them becoming ill or noticing anything, then it is suddenly a MERS case.
Where previously terminally ill were reported, now suddenly mild cases and people who are actually very healthy are included in the reporting statistics. This could also explain the explosion in the number of cases in Saudi Arabia. In the Corman-Drosten paper, we observe unusually high and varying primer concentrations for several primers table 1.
It should be clear that these concentrations are far too high to be optimal for specific amplifications of target genes. There exists no specified reason to use these extremely high concentrations of primers in this protocol. Rather, these concentrations lead to increased unspecific binding and PCR product amplification. No reason if Drosten wanted an accurate test, but a good reason if he wanted a test that produced false positives. To obtain reproducible and comparable results, it is essential to distinctively define the primer pairs.
The letter W means that at this position there can be either an A or a T; R signifies there can be either a G or an A; M indicates that the position may either be an A or a C; the letter S indicates there can be either a G or a C on this position. This high number of variants not only is unusual, but it also is highly confusing for laboratories. Therefore, the confusing unspecific description in the Corman-Drosten paper is not suitable as a Standard Operational Protocol.
These unspecified positions should have been designed unequivocally. These wobbly sequences have already created a source of concern in the field and resulted in a Letter to the Editor authored by Pillonel et al. These errors are self-evident in the Corman et al. PCR test study was performed without a sample of a potential infected person. It means that the laboratories which perform the test must use the exact same reagents and perform the test in the exact the same way.
The technique which is used is not only complicated, and requires well trained personnel but also is very sensitive. However, the way around the fact that the test is not repeatable, is to only run the PCR test once. With only one test run there is no risk of conflicting results.
If 2 of the samples show same result it is valid. Running the sample only one time means that the result could be an error which due to the reasons mentioned above is quite likely. It is one of the most simple rules to clinical and experimental sciences. The genome of the coronavirus is the largest of all RNA viruses that infect humans and they all have a very similar molecular structure.
The performance of this test has not been established for monitoring treatment of nCoV infection. This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens. There should be a Standard Operational Procedure SOP available, which unequivocally specifies the above parameters, so that all laboratories are able to set up the identical same test conditions.
To have a validated universal SOP is essential, because it facilitates data comparison within and between countries. It is very important to specify all primer parameters unequivocally. We note that this has not been done. Further, the Ct value to indicate when a sample should be considered positive or negative is not specified. As shown above, the test cannot discern between virus and virus fragments, so the Ct value indicating positivity is crucially important.
This Ct value should have been specified in the Standard Operational Procedure SOP and put on-line so that all laboratories carrying out this test have exactly the same boundary conditions. It points to flawed science that such an SOP does not exist. The laboratories are thus free to conduct the test as they consider appropriate, resulting in an enormous amount of variation.
Laboratories all over Europe are left with a multitude of questions; which primers to order? How many PCR cycles to run? At what Ct value is the sample positive? And when is it negative? And how many genes to test? Should the N gene be tested as well? And what is their negative control? What is their positive control? Any molecular biologist familiar with RT-PCR design would have easily observed the grave errors present in the Corman-Drosten paper before the actual review process.
We asked Eurosurveillance on October 26th to send us a copy of the peer review report. To date, we have not received this report and in a letter dated November 18th , the ECDC as host for Eurosurveillance declined to provide access without providing substantial scientific reasons for their decision.
A final point is one of major concern. It turns out that two authors of the Corman-Drosten paper, Christian Drosten and Chantal Reusken, are also members of the editorial board of this journal [19]. Hence there is a severe conflict of interest which strengthens suspicions that the paper was not peer-reviewed. It has the appearance that the rapid publication was possible simply because the authors were also part of the editorial board at Eurosurveillance.
This practice is categorized as compromising scientific integrity. We find severe conflicts of interest for at least four authors, in addition to the fact that two of the authors of the Corman-Drosten paper Christian Drosten and Chantal Reusken are members of the editorial board of Eurosurveillance. Both are responsible for the virus diagnostics there [21] and the company operates in the realm of real time PCR-testing. RT-PCR is not recommended for primary diagnostics of infection.
These are severe design errors, since the test cannot discriminate between the whole virus and viral fragments. The test cannot be used as a diagnostic for SARS-viruses. I am the co-developer of two quantitative methods that were painstakingly developed for quantitating glyphosate molecules in food, and for cannabinoid concentrations in hemp extracts. I am intimately familiar with instrument calibration, external standards, curve fit equations and quantitative analysis.
PCR instruments are not capable of any of this. They are useless for diagnosing infectious disease, as they cannot produce viral load concentration results from a given sample. None of the tests can tell if someone is sick i. Hmmm…so we do not have and have never had a test to determine if someone has covid — while there has been enormous focus on the aggregated numbers of cases that were accumulated through tests that do not work. This kind of test shows if you have antibodies against the virus.
It could be used as a proof that you are already immune to coronavirus but could react to the other four common cold coronaviruses cross-reactivity. Antibody test cannot tell if you currently have a virus. This test as the PCR should not be used to put someone in quarantine.
The test shows if you have an antigen against a protein from the virus. Tests are promoted as good to be taken by everyone including kids. Because of the many false positive results rapid antigen test cannot be considered as reliable test.
- Rapid PCR Test for Travel | Fly COVID Test Center
It could be used as a proof that you are already immune to coronavirus but could react to the other four common cold coronaviruses cross-reactivity.
Antibody test cannot tell if you currently have a virus. This test as the PCR should not be used to put someone in quarantine. The test shows if you have an antigen against a protein from the virus. Tests are promoted as good to be taken by everyone including kids. Because of the many false positive results rapid antigen test cannot be considered as reliable test. At this point, it appears that the entire discussion about a usable test is a waste of time. Observe the date on this tweet, it is March of That is a number of months ago as I write this.
Again, I never recall anyone reporting that all of these tests are inaccurate. Despite the many appeals from virologists and other scientists to report only the people who are real cases or infections, and really can spread the virus, authorities still report all positive PCR tests as cases. Mixing the real cases with the people who are healthy creates an unrealistic and scarier picture of the pandemic.
In fact if we counted only the real cases or infections the pandemic would be called off. However, the article above was published in November of That is two months before the WHO disavowed the test. This person who wrote the quotes above has a Ph. In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. This is amazing, as the FDA would have had to have known that by allowing high numbers of cycles in the PCR test that enormous numbers of false positives were being generated.
The C. All of this means that the fact the tests were useless was known for many months before the WHO disavowed the PCR tests. The way the test was run brings up another problem.
Lidiya Angelova goes on to explain how the PCR test needed to be run. Drosten and his coworkers used sequence from China to create the primers for the test. It has multiple flaws which were discussed before but one seems never got a spotlight — reproducibility. How did they determine the PCR test should have been used in the first place if they were never able to use it to identify covid?
Tests must be performed in sterile conditions as the sampling. In reality none of it is done: different reagents, real samples, since the mass of the testing unqualified personnel, no sterile environment during taking the sample and after it. This means that the test was really entirely experimental and designed to be run from a lab environment rather than from the field.
The result is unreliable. There is no evidence if those samples are positive or negative! The diagnostic procedure most widely used for this purpose is based on the polymerase chain reaction PCR. The PCR is a very powerful and versatile method that lends itself to numerous applications in molecular biology, and also in the laboratory diagnosis of viral infections.
However, exactly because it is so powerful, PCR is very difficult to get right even at the best of times; it will yield accurate results only in the hands of highly trained and disciplined personnel. The enormous scale on which the method has been deployed during the COVID pandemic has meant that it was entrusted to untrained and insufficiently supervised personnel; in such circumstances, the mass manufacture of false-positive results due to the cross-contamination of samples is a disaster waiting to happen see for example [37].
Another thing that the WHO did not declare or admit is what the inventor Dr. Kary Mullis himself stated that the PCR is not really meant for diagnosing a viral disease or any disease as it is only for identifying nucleotides, very small fragments of DNA or RNA, for replication and enlargement so then experts can identify what they need to identify.
So the question here is… what is the WHO trying to identify when there is no actual genetic sequence to be modelled in the first place? Mike Yeadon, along with others, has published a scientific paper. Yeadon stated:. In addition, in his video testimony, Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, a high profile German-American lawyer who already filed a class action suit together with another expert Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg also stated:.
Yeadon, in agreement with the professors of immunology Kamera from Germany, Kappel from the Netherlands, and Cahill from Ireland, as well as the microbiologist Dr. Arve from Austria, all of whom testified before the German Corona Committee, explicitly points out that a positive test does not mean that an intact virus has been found.
The authors explain that what the PCR test actually measures is — and I quote:. Towards the end of the video, it describes that the PCR test provides false positives, which means nearly all the people who were declared to have died of covid did not die of covid, as they did not have covid. They had a false positive from a test that was never designed to be used to test if a person had covid. Hmmmm…so the test is meaningless.
Yet we breathlessly observe the test numbers as reported by media outlets and websites like world o meter. This is a very popular website. I checked it many times. However, I had no idea that the number of cases is unknown as it relies on a test that does not work. Furthermore, the number of covid deaths is also greatly exaggerated as I cover in the article How the Covid 19 Mortality Rate Was Irresponsibly Exaggerated.
There are a lot of very nice graphs on this website, like the one above. The directive does not allow the counting of co-morbidities. Applied on April 16, , this directive was conducive to an immediate sharp increase in the number of deaths attributed to Covid One can tell by reading the documentation, or the Covid Test Fact Sheet that is given to those that are tested. Therefore, it is also likely that you may be placed in isolation to avoid spreading the virus to others.
There is a very small chance that this test can give a positive result that is wrong a false positive result. Your healthcare provider will work with you to determine how best to care for you based on the test results along with medical history, and your symptoms. This is not true, as has been covered already. Is this test FDA-approved or cleared? The PCR test standard was used for the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. However, this undermines all of the math in all of the tests discussed so far.
How do we know the use of PCR testing at cycles was known by authorities to be fraudulent? Because now that the vaccine program has been rolled out the vaccinated are only given PCR tests at a reasonable 28 cycles, while the unvaccinated continue to be subjected to the fraudulent cycle PCR testing.
This of course deceptively insures that the unvaccinated continue to generate completely asymptomatic false positives, and can then be made to appear to be driving the spread of the illness. Meanwhile the vaccinated are much less likely to test positive given their testing is now, indefensible by any scientific measure, conducted at the lower 28 cycle threshold when compared to the unvaccinated conducted at cycles. Yes, so that could explain any difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.
So both this test, and all other tests, including the tests submitted by Pfizer and Moderna and others to obtain emergency use authorization are now invalid. None of the math I went through makes any difference as the PCR tests were never legitimate. Covid is not the first time the PCR tests created a number of false positives. The following occurred back in For months, nearly everyone involved thought the medical center had had a huge whooping cough outbreak, with extensive ramifications.
Nearly 1, health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N. 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.
At Dartmouth the decision was to use a test, P. It is a molecular test that, until recently, was confined to molecular biology laboratories. Kathryn Edwards, an infectious disease specialist and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. We are trying to figure out how to use methods that have been the purview of bench scientists. So even though the PCR tests failed in the field rather than a controlled and sterile lab environment and created a faux mini pandemic, they were introduced and accepted to test covid, where they failed once again.
Curiously I found another article linked to the above article in the New York Times which carried ridiculous and false information about the PCR tests and proposed an even less accurate test be used. During this pandemic, that has meant relying heavily on PCR testing, an extremely accurate but time- and labor-intensive method that requires samples to be processed at laboratories.
As we have established, the PCR test may be time and labor intensive, but it is not accurate, much less extremely accurate. But as the virus continues its rampage across the country and tests remain in short supply in many regions, researchers and public health experts have grown increasingly vocal about revising this long-held credo. This is amazing. It means that many people had no idea the PCR tests were incredibly inaccurate.
Outside of rolling dice or tarrot cards, there is no test less accurate than a PCR test. Health System. It is a catastrophe. Again this is another microbiologist who has no idea PCR tests are not effective tests. There is really no excuse for this ignorance by a person who works in the field. And these tests are still relatively scarce nationwide. Government officials have pledged to astronomically scale up the number of point-of-care tests by fall, increasing by millions the weekly tally of tests conducted.
The entire covid pandemic was driven by the faulty PCR test, and that generated the majority of its results as false positives. However, this is all based upon the belief in a test that never worked. A better option, Dr. Mina said, might be antigen testing, which identifies pieces of protein. Two such tests, made by BD and Quidel, have received emergency authorization from the F. According to Dr. Angelova this test does not work for covid. And It was not broadly adopted.
Daily testing? This shows the insanity of pandemic thinking. Furthermore, all of these topics might be of interest, but none of this ever happened. Concerns over accuracy bogged down the approval process for simple, speedy tests. That should not be difficult. Butler-Wu said. Katherine J. Wu is a reporter covering science and health. She holds a Ph. More accurate results occur when patients are tested five to seven days after exposure, and this is due to the virus having ample time to replicate.
Researchers have also discovered that, along with testing five to seven days after exposure, they are more likely to detect COVID when the patient is displaying symptoms. False negative results can occur in both antigen and PCR tests—and typically this is a result of a poor sample, or the sample did not contain enough genetic material from the virus to be detected. Even with a low viral load sample, PCR tests duplicate the small amount of genetic material to be able to better detect infection.
They noted the possibility of inaccuracy during batch mode testing, where multiple samples were being tested, and when cross-contamination was a potential risk for false positives. The likelihood of false negatives and false positives in PCR testing is fairly low. While PCR may require more resources and time, the benefit of having an accurate way of detecting COVID infection is instrumental for learning how and where the virus spreads.
Not only do we learn more about it, but we can more quickly help individuals and communities isolate and quarantine to stop the spread. We understand the importance of testing, and we were already developing COVID tests prior to the pandemic. Thank you for sharing superb informations. Your web-site is very cool. It reveals how nicely you understand this subject. Bookmarked this web page, will come back for more articles. You, my friend, ROCK! I found simply the information I already searched everywhere and simply could not come across.
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Which test is best for COVID? - Harvard Health
How reliable is PCR testing? PCR was first invented in and is a well-established, common, standard laboratory practice for molecular biology, genetics and medical diagnostics.
Occasionally, false negatives or positives will arise. Regardless, the rates are extremely low and usually happen because of a low quality or old sample — the problem is the sample collection, rather than the test itself. Thankfully, it is usually easy to flag which results might be a false negative because low quality samples are visible to experts, and they are able to retest the sample.
The test is also very sensitive and only needs tiny volumes of sample, such as what is on a swab, where other techniques need a higher volume eg blood. It is also a relatively quick test. It only takes a couple of hours to run, and multiple samples can be run together. The speed, ease, sensitivity, and accuracy of PCR is very fine-tuned, and is therefore an unshakeable standard in the world of molecular biology.
If you need medical advice, please consult your doctor or other appropriate medical professionals. Just how reliable is it? Sars-Cov2, like many other viruses, contains genetic material called RNA which are so small they are difficult to detect.
PCR tests doubles the fragments called 'cycle thresholds C. 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. At Dartmouth the decision was to use a test, P. It is a molecular test that, until recently, was confined to molecular biology laboratories.
Kathryn Edwards, an infectious disease specialist and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. We are trying to figure out how to use methods that have been the purview of bench scientists.
So even though the PCR tests failed in the field rather than a controlled and sterile lab environment and created a faux mini pandemic, they were introduced and accepted to test covid, where they failed once again. Curiously I found another article linked to the above article in the New York Times which carried ridiculous and false information about the PCR tests and proposed an even less accurate test be used.
During this pandemic, that has meant relying heavily on PCR testing, an extremely accurate but time- and labor-intensive method that requires samples to be processed at laboratories.
As we have established, the PCR test may be time and labor intensive, but it is not accurate, much less extremely accurate. But as the virus continues its rampage across the country and tests remain in short supply in many regions, researchers and public health experts have grown increasingly vocal about revising this long-held credo.
This is amazing. It means that many people had no idea the PCR tests were incredibly inaccurate. Outside of rolling dice or tarrot cards, there is no test less accurate than a PCR test.
Health System. It is a catastrophe. Again this is another microbiologist who has no idea PCR tests are not effective tests. There is really no excuse for this ignorance by a person who works in the field.
And these tests are still relatively scarce nationwide. Government officials have pledged to astronomically scale up the number of point-of-care tests by fall, increasing by millions the weekly tally of tests conducted.
The entire covid pandemic was driven by the faulty PCR test, and that generated the majority of its results as false positives.
However, this is all based upon the belief in a test that never worked. A better option, Dr. Mina said, might be antigen testing, which identifies pieces of protein. Two such tests, made by BD and Quidel, have received emergency authorization from the F. According to Dr. Angelova this test does not work for covid.
And It was not broadly adopted. Daily testing? This shows the insanity of pandemic thinking. Furthermore, all of these topics might be of interest, but none of this ever happened.
Concerns over accuracy bogged down the approval process for simple, speedy tests. That should not be difficult. Butler-Wu said. Katherine J. Wu is a reporter covering science and health. She holds a Ph. Well, none of that did any good.
This article is filled with false assumptions and nowhere does this reporter use her domain expertise to check on these assumptions. In addition to all of these problems, the CDC has the following problems in rolling out the tests.
The faulty coronavirus testing kits developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the early weeks of the pandemic were not only contaminated but had a basic design flaw, according to an internal review by the agency. Health officials had already acknowledged that the test kits were contaminated, but the internal report, whose findings were published in PLOS ONE on Wednesday, also documented a design error that caused false positives. Benjamin Pinsky, the director of clinical virology for Stanford Health Care.
What is curious is that while this document was published in May , many months later, we are still using antibody tests. It only detects antibodies against the virus [2]. Simply amazing. But not surprising. This raises several serious questions.
And the answer to that question is obvious. If the FDA did develop such a test, then—in terms of conventional vaccine theory—it would be easy to see how well the vaccine is working, or not working.
And THAT is not a goal public health officials want to achieve. That is not a risk worth taking. Suppose, after testing 20, vaccinated people, it turns out that only have produced antibodies against the spike protein? This latest foray shows the FDA is both criminal and insane. There is no evidence that the PCR test ever worked. Skip to content. These tests were never reliable.
Our References for This Article If you want to see our references for this article and related Brightwork articles, visit this link. Go to top. Contact Us. While PCR may require more resources and time, the benefit of having an accurate way of detecting COVID infection is instrumental for learning how and where the virus spreads. Not only do we learn more about it, but we can more quickly help individuals and communities isolate and quarantine to stop the spread.
We understand the importance of testing, and we were already developing COVID tests prior to the pandemic. Thank you for sharing superb informations. Your web-site is very cool. It reveals how nicely you understand this subject. Bookmarked this web page, will come back for more articles. You, my friend, ROCK!
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