Review of the PCR Test

 

In early October, I decided to sit down at my computer and see what I could find out about the “PCR” test since it is at the core of the “surge in cases”. The results are shocking and disturbing!

To start, the “Real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction” (RT-PCR) process was originally developed by Kary Mullis for which he won a Nobel Prize. The process amplifies the rare segments of RNA and DNA being looked for to a point that they are then present in enough quantity to be studied. A common use is to confirm the presence of a pathogen. If you want to find out if someone with symptoms has the flu or Covid-19, then a PCR test is done to confirm or deny it is due to Covid-19. But even used this way it has been well demonstrated that the results can be very misleading. As a result, it should not be used as a screening agent. And there lies the rub. Mullis himself was very vociferous in being against it being used as a diagnostic tool.  This is all because the method is very sensitive to the smallest pieces of DNA and RNA but it is unable to determine where those pieces came from and this last critical step has not been done.

Because scientists have yet to isolate the virus, they still do not know for certain what “fragment” to use that really is unique to Covid-19. It is for this very reason there are a lot of false negatives and false positives with PCR tests which make it totally inappropriate for diagnostics and screening. For example, in the paper “Epidemiologic Features and Clinical Course of Patients Infected With SARS-CoV-2 in Singapore” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) they detailed how multiple PCR tests were conducted on 18 people who had Covid-19 symptoms. Of those tests 30% were false negatives (the test was negative but since they knew the patient had the virus, they knew it was false).

False Positives are harder to nail down but there is data available where we can make an approximation. The Diamond Princess cruise ship had a Covid-19 outbreak and was quarantined. Almost all on board were tested using the PCR test. Of the 21% who tested positive about 50% developed symptoms. The balance was attributed to being “asymptomatic” (not exhibiting any symptoms of disease) when they likely were just false positives. The USS Theodore Roosevelt also experienced an outbreak, was quarantined and almost all on board tested using the PCR test. They had similar results: of the 18% who tested positive about 50% were classified as “asymptomatic”. This indicates that 30 to 50% of PCR test results are false. Wang Chen, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences has publicly acknowledged that the PCR tests are “only 30 to 50 per cent accurate” confirming this analysis.

For any test to be trusted you also need to verify by using a standard. In the mineral industry there are various tests to determine what the quantity of an element of interest is. As part of the normal procedure samples with certified quantities of relevant elements are also inserted in each batch as well as blanks and duplicates, all in the effort to make sure the results are trustworthy; a “standard” should result in an analysis within measurement error of the known quantity, a “blank’ should not show the presence of the element in question and a “duplicate” is the same sample analysed twice and thus should produce the same result as the other sample . For the PCR test there is no known documented means of validating the results. This, combined with the fact that the proportions of false positives and negatives are so high, prove that this process is inappropriate for use, especially for “screening”.

Now that we know that the foundation of this process is very unreliable the only conclusion is this focus on “cases” is also unreliable; we are not given any information as to what portion actually have symptoms and which are just highly suspect PCR test results. The real sad part of this is that this same bogus “test” is being used to screen people for job purposes. We have now replaced racial and sex discrimination with a similarly inappropriate form of discrimination that has no place in a just society.

What has troubled me for a long time, now into its third decade, is the increasing and incessant fear mongering based on the flightiest of concepts with little, if any actual factual backing. When I was much younger “The National Inquirer” and other similar grocery store tabloids were popular with, then, a minority of people who thrived on sensationism and were not interested in truth. Now that genre has ballooned and is overwhelmingly mainstream.

While the associated degradation of “politics” is becoming another negative I think both are consequences and not causes. Why has this happened? Are we seeing the manifestation of an aspect of human nature? We consider ourselves “civilised” but is our biology-based drive to “fight or flight” becoming replaced by just “flight”? Fear mongering is feeding the desire to be afraid and more and more of us want to be afraid. Promoting bad science is compounding the issue.