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hi Rhisiart, if you, are anybody else, know of any good critique of this point of view I’d like to read it, because it makes a lot of sense to me but it’s very difficult to judge such a technical procedure as a PCR test. It’s rather easy to accept that they cannot determine infection. However they apparently CAN confirm infection, can’t they? If you go to the doctor with an existing respiratory illness can’t the PCR test, run at correct ct’s (like up to 25) confirm that the infection is Covid, based on viral load and presence of Covid RNA?
thanks, if you know of any response to this article from an PCR expert;
E.
The most that I can offer about this abstruse matter in which I’m not at all expert is Kary Mullis’s several vid appearances where he states that his procedure can’t be used to test for infection. Others - quite a lot of them - say the same, but I’ve no idea of their fitness to make the judgement. Personally, I have to do what all the lay-person onlookers have to do: test the wind constantly, and use your common sense; with a fulsome helping of street-wise cynicism, and a gambler’s feel for the likely odds.
That always seems to work as well as anything. 
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PS: Using that same appraisal method, I’d judge that the Off-G crew, particularly Catte, take care to inform themselves as deeply as needed before making any flat, unqualified statements such as this one that they’ve published on Catte’s byline.
Again, I’d put a sovereign on it. It’s always a gamble, though. Absolute certainty about anything at all is a daft dream of bigots.
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Hi Everyman. I think the Off-G take is fine for rabble-rousing (de-rousing then re-rousing? 
) and I can see where they got the dice analogy - but a little inaccurate, the real logical problem being the new definition of medical terms like infection, disease, having a virus. And of course, a ‘case’.
Yeah, the PCR test is meant to confirm cases where the viral disease is suspected from medical history (usually symptoms). Even then it only confirms a past exposure with the sars-cov2 virus; you could have viral fragments from past infections or from a light brush with the virus. If you have recently caught flu after a light covid (sars2) exposure only the sars2 will show and you will be a covid case, probably called symptomatic. (This is IMO a likely part explanation for the disappearing flu last year).
So the test as used (with high Ct values) is evidently biased towards flagging up covid (sars-cov2) fragments over other viruses, and also biased towards diagnosing ‘disease’ from non-infectious viral fragments.
FWIW I think the Ct value leads to more errors than only looking for the one virus.
I’m not medically qualified but then I’m not sure if any meds would have qualified using the new covid definitions! Unless they want doctors who don’t know what a virus is.
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I think you are correct. My understanding is that the PCR test is a tool for confirming a suspected illness when presented with clinical symptoms consistent with that suspicion.
It cannot in and of itself be used diagnostically which might make you suspicious of the convenience of asymptomatic cases. In the absence of other clinical presentations and according to Mullis, it can tell you very little.
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