Hat tip to Itchy Bootmore of the Hulk who spotted this yesterday on RT.
Landmark legal ruling finds that Covid tests are not fit for purpose. So what do the MSM do? They ignore it: (link, https://www.rt.com/op-ed/507937-covid-pcr-test-fail)
The court didn’t quite use these words, but pointed out the inference of disease was not scientific fact, and certainly not beyond reasonable doubt. ‘Reasonable doubt’ is the threshold of criminal law - I’m not sure if this is the case in Portugal, but I would have thought that if there was thought to be a genuine and serious public health issue different thresholds would apply and Portugal uses pcr tests on its own citizens.
But doubt there was. Interestingly, they referred to the gauging-paper that came from Raoult’s team, who examined samples from 250,000 of their pcr-tests and found that when the number of cycles (Ct) was 25, 75% of the samples were genuinely positive. When Ct was 30 the positivity dropped to 20% and for Ct=35 it dropped to 3%.
One genuine problem the court highlighted is that the number of cycles wasn’t reported. It’s about time this was made an issue - a year into a pandemic probably almost everyone would be ‘a case’ if Ct was high enough.
On that headline…the RT story links to an earlier one by the same writer, for whom this is a bit of a thing:
" Sensitive tests mean that many who test positive for Covid barely carry any virus, making it hard to grasp true reach of disease" (link https://www.rt.com/op-ed/499816-positive-covid-virus-contagious/)
This contains an Editor’s note that the story and headline was toned down.
Here is the original headline, and it’s a bit of a lol:
" Up to 90% of people who test positive for Covid barely carry any virus & are not contagious. Every stat about the disease is bogus"
Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200904021646/https://www.rt.com/op-ed/499816-positive-covid-virus-contagious/
The Marseille team were confirming an open secret. Here’s the CDC and Tony Fauci (comments are highwire’s):
(Around 12/11/20) From the NY Times: “Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37…The C.D.C.’s own calculations suggest that it is extremely difficult to detect any live virus in a sample above a threshold of 33 cycles. Officials at some state labs said the C.D.C. had not asked them to note threshold values or to share them with contact-tracing organizations.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci recently echoed the previous findings, long-reported by the independent media and other lone voices. Despite open knowledge of false positives from high testing cycles, Dr. Fauci made the unfathomable claim that it’s now “Sorta evolving into a bit of a standard.” Why is he now openly admitting what has been known for years?
Fauci added, “If you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more that the chances of it being replication competent are miniscule.” Got that, minuscule. Fauci didn’t stop there. “You almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle. So I think if someone does come in with a 37…38, even 36, ya gotta say, ya know, it’s just dead nucleotides. Period.”
Non-pcr tests have been creeping in to the UK’s testing programme. These don’t suffer from the same science-removing drawback of the pcr tests. Though they don’t, I assume, tell you anything about symptoms, they have a degree of reliability that the pcr tests lack.
What might the effects be on the number of ‘cases’? Well an obvious one is to reduce the number of ‘cases’ reported. This is now happening, with a fall over the past week.
Political effect? Well what about that lockdown? Began 5 Nov, and is getting the credit for the fall in cases.
Meanwhile,
9/11/20 More rapid COVID-19 tests to be rolled out across England [NB timing, see above! L/D 5th. Nov]
600,000 lateral flow tests to be sent out this week to kick-start the significant expansion of testing, followed by weekly local allocations.
… This initial 600,000 batch will then be followed up with a weekly allocation of lateral flow antigen tests. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has now written to all upper-tier local authority leaders, confirming that all directors of public health will be offered this weekly allocation, equivalent to 10% of their population.
Link: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/more-rapid-covid-19-tests-to-be-rolled-out-across-england
Though we don’t have the details of the test roll-out it seems highly likely they would have an impact on ‘cases’.
And, presumably, on covid-19 deaths - for although the same number of people will die, fewer will be labelled as covid-19.
Oh I dunno, E. That original RT headline looks about right to me. No need to tone it down. 