COVID garbage in, COVID garbage out

by Ted Noel MD, October 30, 2020 in Healthcare, Opinions, Science

https://noqreport.com/2020/10/30/covid-garbage-in-covid-garbage-out/

One of the truisms in computer work is “garbage in, garbage out.” In plain English, if the numbers you put into a calculation are wrong, nothing else matters. All you’re going to get is garbage that doesn’t mean anything. COVID is no exception. In the middle of the noise about the “COVID-19 Pandemic,” some real scientific questions are left hanging. In fact, there are so many that we’ll have to leave a lot of them for another time. So, before you declare me insane, please look up the articles in the links. If you’re going to throw golf shoes, 12-wide, please.

Let’s start with a bit of history that’s been hidden from our inquiring minds. We first learned the genome of the “novel coronavirus” in February of this year. Supposedly a Chinese group isolated it from lung fluid suctioned from sick patients. They deduced that the virus probably began in bats. It was noted to be remarkably similar to SARS-CoV, the virus thought to cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. That led the World Health Organization to formally name it “SARS-CoV-2.”

All would be well and good, but there’s a small fly in this ointment. In July of 2006, fourteen years ago, a virology lab two provinces removed from Wuhan published a paper about a viral RNA engineering task. This group used “SARS-CoV-2” as one of its raw materials. Since we know the Chinese Communist Party is not exactly honest, we have to consider the possibility that they knew the genome in 2006 and just told us now.

As the pandemic progressed, a panicked press and academia blindly demanded more testing for COVID-19. President Trump obliged by pushing the FDA to scrap useless regulations and approve more tests. But… A test is not a test is not a test. It turns out there was no need for millions of tests.

“COVID tests” are being used like weather reports to tell you if it’s safe to go outside. But that’s a criminal misuse of testing. There are only two valid uses for testing among the general public. The first is to consider changing your treatment if you’re sick. The other is epidemiologic surveillance, such as “track and trace” or population prevalence measurements. Trying to determine if you have the bug is not a proper use of the test. In fact, the Nobel Prize winning inventor of the process said that RT-qPCR is inappropriate to detect a viral infection.

In this “gold standard” test, RNA in a sample is doubled a number of times to make it detectable. Unfortunately, there are no standards for this “standard” test. You read that right. Labs can run any number of cycles they think is good. This “cycle quantification” (CQ) value commonly varies between 35 and 45, which is a huge problem. A CQ of 35 says that you need 1024 times as much RNA to be positive as a CQ of 45. But, the MIQE guidelines for RT-qPCR say “Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported.” If you use a CQ of 50, you may find that everyone is “positive.”

Scientific guidance gets even more difficult, because RT-qPCR tests are “only 30 to 50 percent accurate.” In March, as the testing furor became loud, Dr. Sin Hang Lee told Dr. Fauci that many RT-qPCR tests “are generating many false positive results and are not sensitive enough to detect some real positive cases.” This led a German journal to examine the data, suggesting that as many as 70% of all “positives” are false positives. It’s entirely possible that none of these tests are even looking for COVID-19, since the true gold standard test, virus isolation, hasn’t been done.

And it gets worse. Orlando TV station Fox35 uncovered the fact that for a while, every lab in Florida was reporting a COVID-positive rate of 100%. Once this fraud was exposed, the real number of positives was corrected, with about 10% being the typical rate. This raises a very real question. Why would any lab want to report an incorrect result? Enter the Law of Subsidy.


-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Good article! Very clear.