Last week, I reported on a landmark ruling from Portugal, where a court had ruled against a governmental health authority that had illegally confined four people to a hotel this summer. They had done so because one of the people had tested positive for Covid in a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test – but the court had found the test fundamentally flawed and basically inadmissible.
Now the PCR testing supremacy under which we all now live has received another crushing blow. A peer review from a group of 22 international experts has found 10 “major flaws” in the main protocol for such tests. The report systematically dismantles the original study, called the Corman-Drosten paper, which described a protocol for applying the PCR technique to detecting Covid.
The Corman-Drosten paper was published on January, 23, 2020, just a day after being submitted, which would make any peer review process that took place possibly the shortest in history. What is important about it is that the protocol it describes is used in around 70 percent of Covid kits worldwide. It’s cheap, fast – and absolutely useless.
The 10 deadly sins
Among the fatal flaws that totally invalidate the PCR testing protocol are that the test:
is non-specific, due to erroneous primer design
is enormously variable
cannot discriminate between the whole virus and viral fragments
has no positive or negative controls
has no standard operating procedure
does not seem to have been properly peer reviewed
Oh dear. One wonders whether anything at all was correct in the paper. But wait – it gets worse. As has been noted previously, no threshold for positivity was ever identified. This is why labs have been running 40 cycles, almost guaranteeing a large number of false positives – up to 97 percent, according to some studies.
The cherry on top, though, is that among the authors of the original paper themselves, at least four have severe conflicts of interest. Two of them are members of the editorial board of Eurosurveillance, the sinisterly named journal that published the paper. And at least three of them are on the payroll of the first companies to perform PCR testing!
The 22 members of the consortium that has challenged this shoddy science deserve huge credit. The scientists, from Europe, the USA, and Japan, comprise senior molecular geneticists, biochemists, immunologists, and microbiologists, with many decades of experience between them.
They have issued a demand to Eurosurveillance to retract the Corman-Drosten paper, writing: “Considering the scientific and methodological blemishes presented here, we are confident that the editorial board of Eurosurveillance has no other choice but to retract the publication.’’ Talk about putting the pressure on.
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