Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted in a newly resurfaced video that the widely used PCR tests pick up harmless fragments of the coronarvirus, resulting in many false-positive cases that result in overstating the threat.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was commenting in a July 16 episode of “This Week in Virology” science podcast hosted by Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello, reported Just the News.
The number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 spiked in October, and last Thursday the U.S posted a new one-day record of nearly 120,000 new cases.
The issue with PCR tests – short for polymerase chain reaction – is the “cycle threshold” at which they operate. The tests multiply a virus fragment over a series of cycles until it can reliably detect the virus within a sample. The more cycles needed to detect the virus, the smaller and weaker the original sample was.
That means detecting a virus in a person after a high number of cycles, resulting in a “positive case,” is relatively meaningless, because the person won’t get sick and is not infectious.
Fauci acknowledged in the interview that at 35 cycles or higher, the chances of the test being accurate are “minuscule.”
“It’s very frustrating for the patients as well as for the physicians,” he said, when “somebody comes in, and they repeat their PCR, and it’s like [a] 37 cycle threshold, but you almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle.”
“So, I think if somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it’s just dead nucleotides, period,” said Fauci, the top White House coronavirus adviser.
He pointed out that patients usually are not told their cycle threshold after testing positive.
See Fauci’s remarks about PCR tests in the video podcast:
Researchers demand retraction of major pro-PCR test study
WND reported earlier this month an external peer review concluded a major paper supporting the PCR test for COVID-19 has 10 “serious flaws,” resulting in many false positive cases.
The researchers are requesting a retraction letter from the authors of the January study published by Eurosurveillance, including German scientists Dr. Christian Dorsten and Dr. Victor Corman.
“This paper will show numerous serious flaws in the Corman-Drosten paper, the significance of which has led to worldwide misdiagnosis of infections attributed to SARS-CoV-2 and associated with the disease COVID-19,” the researchers write in their peer review.
“We are confronted with stringent lockdowns which have destroyed many people’s lives and livelihoods, limited access to education and these imposed restrictions by governments around the world are a direct attack on people’s basic rights and their personal freedoms, resulting in collateral damage for entire economies on a global scale.”
In August, the New York Times examined PCR testing data in three states and found “up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.”
Experts who spoke to the Times said they couldn’t understand why such cases were classified as infections.
“Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus,” the Times said.
‘Distorting policy’
The spike in cases in recent weeks, coinciding with an increase in testing, has led to new, stringent lockdown orders in California, New York, Oregon, Washington and other states, mostly led by Democratic governors.
Many businesses devastated by the first round of lockdowns in the spring say they won’t survive the second round.
A briefing published by four British scientists concluded PCR testing is “distorting policy and creating the illusion that we are in a serious pandemic when in fact we are not.”
The paper noted that legal cases and technical challenges to PCR mass-testing are growing across Europe, including in the U.K.
“A false positive pseudo-epidemic is a well described phenomenon in the medical literature which results in an exponential rise in diagnosed cases and deaths but no excess deaths,” the researchers write.
Nevertheless, high-threshold tests are widely used.
The Alaska Department of Health and Human Services says in an informational document that most of its PCR tests utilize cycle thresholds of 37.
In Florida, the Department of Health under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an order last Thursday requiring all labs to report cycle thresholds.
Breaking: @HealthyFla is now requiring all labs to report cycle threshold values pic.twitter.com/j8iTuumU1J
— Jennifer Cabrera (@jhaskinscabrera) December 4, 2020
Doctor: Lockdowns based on ‘faulty testing’
A physician from Omaha, Nebraska, testified to the Papillion, Nebraska, City Council on Dec. 1 that “we’re basing all of these lockdowns, these restrictions, these mandates, on faulty testing.”
“In other words, we don’t have a pandemic of people falling over dead,” he said. “What we have is a pandemic of false positives.”
He explained that the PCR test was not meant to be diagnostic.
“Anyone can test positive for practically anything with a PCR test,” he said. “If you run it long enough … you can find almost anything in anybody. It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick.”
MUST WATCH (edited):
– Dr. Tapper, NB:
– I mean no disrespect, I am a Dr of integrity
– we have a pandemic of false positives
– PCR Test wasn’t meant to be diagnostic, it’s a DNA grab
– Need symptomatology
Very credible! Pls Retweet#NoMoreLockdowns.Org#cdnpoli #onpoli #topoli pic.twitter.com/vL2BDgZTsn— NoMoreLockdowns (@NoLockdowns1) December 4, 2020
Study: No asymptomatic transmission
The Infectious Diseases Society of America’s most updated guidance recommends that only people with symptoms get tested for influenza.
Sweden has based its policy of not imposing lockdowns, masks and universal testing on its belief that asymptomatic spread “accounts for a small proportion” of COVID-19 cases.
WND reported Monday a study published by the peer-reviewed journal Nature found no transmission of the coronavirus among people in close contact with asymptomatic patients.
The study in Wuhan, China, identified 300 asymptomatic coronavirus cases and followed 1,174 of their close contacts. None of the contacts tested positive for COVID-19.
“Compared with symptomatic patients,” the researchers said, “asymptomatic infected persons generally have low quantity of viral loads and a short duration of viral shedding, which decrease the transmission risk of SARS-CoV-2.”
Being asymptomatic is not the same as being presymptomatic. An asymptomatic carrier is infected with the virus but never displays symptoms. Presymptomatic describes a phase in which a person has yet to show symptoms and can transmit the virus.
“This study confirms what physicians have known and non-scientists have suspected for millennia: namely, that asymptomatic transmission has never been the primary cause of outbreaks,” Dr. Simone Gold, the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, told the Epoch Times in an email.
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