The Cult(ure) of Scientific Misdirection
The most used test to determine if someone has COVID-19, known as a PCR test, is either positive or negative, that’s it. But the test does not identify the viral load — the greater the amount of virus, the more likely it is that the patient is contagious.
“In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus,” The New York Times reported Sunday after conducting a review of data.
On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.
Health experts told the paper the current PCR test is too sensitive and should be improved so that it will determine the viral load — which would then rule out those with insignificant amounts of the virus.
Apoorva Mandavilli, the Times reporter who wrote the piece, said on Twitter: “NEW: All these months into the pandemic, we may have been testing the wrong way. Data from some state labs suggest up to 90% (!!) of people who get a positive result are no longer contagious and don’t need to isolate.”
“It turns out that the PCR, that old reliable workhorse, is both too slow and too sensitive for what we need. And it all hinges on a metric called the ‘cycle threshold,'” she wrote in another post.
The current PCR test analyzes genetic matter from the virus using 37 or 40 cycles, but health experts say that is too high because it detects even small amounts of the virus that pose no risk of contagion.
“Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left,” Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the paper. More
An interesting article from the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is gaining increased attention as questions about asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, the baseline for all COVID mitigation, is being reconciled with the latest tracing data.
In essence, the larger question being asked is: can people without coronavirus symptoms spread the COVID-19 virus? This question is at the heart of all current COVID mitigation efforts. If there is no asymptomatic spread then what is all of this mask wearing nonsense and shut-down mandates all about?
A research paper published on November 20th highlights a case study of almost 10 million people in China. What the study found was there were 300 cases of Coronavirus in the population being carried without any symptoms at all. So the scientists then tracked the asymptomatic carriers. The contact tracing of 1,174 “close contacts” with the asymptomatic carriers showed ZERO transmission. Not a few, not a couple, but zero -none- not a single transmission of Coronavirus from a person without symptoms.
The conclusion is not that asymptomatic spread is rare or that the science is uncertain. The study revealed something that hardly ever happens in these kinds of studies. There was not one documented case. Forget rare. Forget even Fauci’s previous suggestion that asymptomatic transmission exists but not does drive the spread. Replace all that with: never. At least not in this study for 10,000,000.
It is debatable whether asymptomatic COVID-19 virus carriers are contagious. We report here a case of the asymptomatic patient and present clinical characteristics of 455 contacts, which aims to study the infectivity of asymptomatic carriers.
Material and methods: 455 contacts who were exposed to the asymptomatic COVID-19 virus carrier became the subjects of our research. They were divided into three groups: 35 patients, 196 family members and 224 hospital staffs. We extracted their epidemiological information, clinical records, auxiliary examination results and therapeutic schedules.
Results: The median contact time for patients was four days and that for family members was five days. Cardiovascular disease accounted for 25% among original diseases of patients. Apart from hospital staffs, both patients and family members were isolated medically. During the quarantine, seven patients plus one family member appeared new respiratory symptoms, where fever was the most common one. The blood counts in most contacts were within a normal range. All CT images showed no sign of COVID-19 infection. No severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection was detected in 455 contacts by nucleic acid test.
We will begin our op-ed on the lies of “asymptomatic spread” by using the exact words of Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIAID. Dr. Fauci, previously stated the following as he advocated and moved to shut the society down: “historically people need to realize that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all history of respiratory viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there is a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers”. Soon and without scientific evidence, he and his fellow Task Force people changed the narrative to the contrary.
But what did we know? That he knew yet sought to lie to the nation. In asymptomatic individuals, the viral load is typically very low and the infectious period is also short in duration. They, asymptomatic positive persons (assuming they are ‘actually’ positive and not based on an incorrect test), may still exhale virus particles, which another person may encounter. However, the overall likelihood of transmitting the disease to others is negligible. Vanishingly small. Exceedingly small. Thus, asymptomatic cases are not the major drivers of epidemics.
Dr. Fauci and his staff along with the help of the media repeatedly came to the podium and misled the nation for they repeatedly told us that due to asymptomatic spread, we would have to wear masks, and socially distance, and close schools, and shut everything down. Dr. Fauci’s recent e-mails exposing the issue of asymptomatic spread being a non-issue underscores the misinformation he broadcasted to the public. Recent e-mails uncovered show that Fauci stated that “most transmissions” of virus “occur from someone who is symptomatic” and “not asymptomatic”.
His comments that were reiterated scores of times on national and international media were the cause of many a loss of life, property, liberty and wealth of an entire generation. Equally misleading was the premise that all infections equated to severe illness and potential death. This was not only an untruth but has led to scores of teenagers and 20+ year-olds fearful for their lives. They cower below their beds thinking they, in all their health, are at the same risk as their 85 year-old grandmother who has three grave medical conditions. This not only devastated their outlook to the future but hobbled them into a state of depression which translated to an increase in suicides in that cohort.
We as a nation (and world) were fed mistruths, lies, and half-truths by what we can only describe as “fallen” nonsensical, illogical, irrational and specious medical experts on television, on the stage with their government bureaucratic leaders, and academics.
We knew very early on that COVID was amenable to risk stratification and that your baseline risk was most prognostic for mortality, age and obesity being the principle ones along with renal disease and diabetes as well as heart disease. We realized early on that a more focused ‘targeted’ approach was needed and not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that would be devastating.
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I salute the author [of the above] as being the only individual other than me who, having noticed unsupported statements about this virus, and having proof that at least some people making such statements KNEW THEM TO BE FALSE, has at last written down the essential facts here, that WE HAVE BEEN LIED TO PERSISTENTLY.
When people lie, especially about something as important as this is for all our future, we can be sure of something: they’re hiding something & they intend something other than our best interests at heart. While we cannot be sure why they’re lying, it’s certain that they are.
Let me ask you something. Once a person is proven to be lying, in this case by his own mouth, why would you believe anything they tell you on the same topic? Obviously, you should not.
Best wishes,
Dr Mike Yeadon, Former Pfizer V.P.
In a stunning development, a former Chief Science Officer for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer says "there is no science to suggest a second wave should happen." The "Big Pharma" insider asserts that false positive results from inherently unreliable COVID tests are being used to manufacture a "second wave" based on "new cases."
Dr. Mike Yeadon, a former Vice President and Chief Science Officer for Pfizer for 16 years, says that half or even "almost all" of tests for COVID are false positives. Dr. Yeadon also argues that the threshold for herd immunity may be much lower than previously thought, and may have been reached in many countries already.
In an interview last week Dr. Yeadon was asked:
"we are basing a government policy, an economic policy, a civil liberties policy, in terms of limiting people to six people in a meeting...all based on, what may well be, completely fake data on this coronavirus?"
Dr. Yeadon answered with a simple "yes."
Even more significantly, even if all positives were to be correct, Dr. Yeadon said that given the "shape" of all important indicators in a worldwide pandemic, such as hospitalizations, ICU utilization, and deaths, "the pandemic is fundamentally over."
Yeadon said in the interview:
"Were it not for the test data that you get from the TV all the time, you would rightly conclude that the pandemic was over, as nothing much has happened. Of course people go to the hospital, moving into the autumn flu season ...but there is no science to suggest a second wave should happen."
In a paper published this month, which was co-authored by Yeadon and two of his colleagues, "How Likely is a Second Wave?", the scientists write:
"It has widely been observed that in all heavily infected countries in Europe and several of the US states likewise, that the shape of the daily deaths vs. time curves is similar to ours in the UK. Many of these curves are not just similar, but almost super imposable."
In the data for UK, Sweden, the US, and the world, it can be seen that in all cases, deaths were on the rise in March through mid or late April, then began tapering off in a smooth slope which flattened around the end of June and continues to today. The case rates however, based on testing, rise and swing upwards and downwards wildly.
June 5, 2020, Newport Beach, CA: Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC) Compares COVID-19 to Previous Seasonal and Pandemic Flu Periods
New data on the number of asymptomatic infections dramatically lowers the COVID-19 case-fatality rate (CFR).
The public has been made aware of the number of COVID-19 deaths and reported cases that have occurred since the beginning of the current pandemic; however, the number of unreported cases has not been widely known or publicized. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that more than one-third of SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that can lead to COVID-19) infections are asymptomatic, meaning that initial estimations of its severity were grossly overestimated. Now, for the first time, Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC) has collated data from U.S. antibody studies and produced an educational document outlining how an accurate case-fatality rate (CFR) requires antibody studies in order to guide and measure medical care and public health policies.
Similar to CDC estimations, PIC’s analysis results in a COVID-19 CFR of 0.26%, which is comparable to the CFRs of previous seasonal and pandemic flu periods. “Knowing the CFR of COVID-19 allows for an objective standard by which to compare both non-pharmaceutical interventions and medical countermeasures,” said Dr. Shira Miller, PIC’s founder and president. “For example, safety studies of any potential COVID-19 vaccine should be able to prove whether or not the risks of the vaccine are less than the risks of the infection. More
Natural News: The World Health Organization (WHO) declared that COVID-19 almost never spreads through asymptomatic carriers, all at once wiping out the entire justification for mandatory vaccines and contact tracing. As CNBC.com reported:
“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said at a news briefing from the United Nations agency’s Geneva headquarters. “It’s very rare.”
Asymptomatic spread was the entire reason why world authorities demanded lockdowns, social distancing and masks, too. It was also the underlying justification for demanding mandatory vaccinations and contact tracing. After all, if the spread of coronavirus were limited to only those who obviously showed symptoms — and could therefore be easily identified and avoided — there would be no logical need for lockdowns, social distancing, masks, contact tracing or mandatory vaccines, since spreaders of the pandemic could be easily identified and avoided (or isolated with selective stay-at-home orders only for the symptomatic).
All at once, the WHO has just exploded all these narratives that were so aggressively pushed by the CDC, Democrat governors, Dr. Fauci at the White House and even the WHO itself. Now, based on the WHO’s new admission, not only should every lockdown be immediately ended; any government effort to initiate new lockdowns should be vehemently rejected as being utterly groundless and anti-science.
Now that the WHO is claiming there’s virtually no risk of catching the coronavirus from someone who isn’t showing any symptoms, mandatory vaccines are impossible to medically justify since symptomatic carriers can be easily identified and isolated from others.
Simultaneously, the argument that the lockdowns need to continue “until there’s a vaccine” have just been decimated, too. In reality, the WHO just admitted that lockdowns aren’t necessary at all, except among those who are actively showing symptoms (which is a very tiny percentage of the population, probably far less than 1% on any given day). More
This comprehensive article by Patrick Woods is probably the best single article on this topic to share with your friends, family or anyone. Here's a small excerpt:
The American public is being spoon-fed a steady diet of pseudo-science in order to justify the wearing of face masks, social distancing and contact tracing. Yet, the actual science points in the polar opposite direction.
Furthermore, those who try to present the real science are shamed, ridiculed and bullied for having such narrow-minded views.
This is a clear sign of Technocrats-at-work. Instead, these are the ones who should be exposed, shamed and ridiculed.
In sum, these dangerous and destructive policies are designed to curtail economic activity, break down social cohesion and control people. Moreover, they fit the original mission statement of Technocracy as far back as 1938:
Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population…
It is highly doubtful that most state and local leaders understand the lack of real and verified science behind their actions and mandates. Nevertheless, they are implementing policies that are destructive to our economic system, harmful to our personal health and ruinous to personal liberty.
This writer suggests that you print multiple copies of this report and deliver it to every political leader, every commercial establishment, all family and friends, etc.
In a recent article, Dr. Michael Yeadon, who spent over 30 years leading new allergy and respiratory medicines research in some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and retired from Pfizer with the most senior research position in this field, wrote:
There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic. I’ve never heard such nonsense talked about vaccines. You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects.
While Pfizer pharmaceutical made headlines announcing the imminent release of their COVID-19 vaccine, to much fanfare, the former Vice President and Chief Scientific Advisor for the company has flatly rejected the need for any vaccines to bring the COVID-19 pandemic to an end.
by Jason Christoff: 10 Things You Should Know About COVID Testing
1. The process used for COVID testing has always been deemed “an invention”, as it was never qualified as a test. This invention is called PCR, standing for polymerase chain reaction.
2. The inventor of PCR, Kary B. Mullis, said “these PCR tests cannot detect infectious free viruses at all.” That’s direct from the inventor of PCR.
3. The PCR was invented to merely have bits of genetic material in a sample multiply until those small broken pieces were numerous enough to see under a microscope. PCR just helps scientists observe small things in greater quantity. Where those bits of genetic material came from, what they do, do they make people sick etc…..the PCR process is not involved in that determination what so ever.
4. In order to finger any virus as the cause of someone’s illness, the entire virus (the complete genetic sequence) must be isolated in its entirety. This has not yet been done with COVID 19. This is correct. No complete virus has yet to be isolated and that’s supposed to be the first step before any other steps are taken in such a process that ends with a viral declaration…let alone a pandemic declaration.
5. In order to finger any virus as the cause of someone’s illness, the entire virus (which has never been isolated for COVID) must be transferred over to another animal or human host…..and that virus MUST cause the exact same illness in the host. This has not yet been done with COVID-19. The COVID19 virus has not yet been proven to cause disease, person to person. Why are these steps being bypassed?
6. In order to finger any virus as the cause of someone’s illness, the entire virus (which has never been isolated for COVID-19) must not only infect the host with the exact same disease, you must also find the complete genetic viral sequence in the infected tissue of the host and then re-isolate the entire genetic sequence from infected tissues of the host. This has not yet been done with COVID-19. Disease transmission person to person, has not been proven for COVID-19. This is the easiest criteria to organize yet it remains undone.
7. In order to finger any virus as the cause of someone’s illness, you must also have a control group, so you can make sure that what you call a virus isn’t just regular human genetic material, shared by all humans. If you find the exact same 80% genetic material strand in the samples of HEALTHY CONTROLS, what you’re looking at CAN’T be the cause of the disease because it’s just regular genetic material found in all humans…both sick and healthy. In order to finger any virus as the cause of someone’s illness, you need to find that particular complete viral sequence IN THE SICK ONLY and not in the healthy. This has not yet been done for COVID-19. Why is the gold standard of testing (having a control group) being bypassed?
8. In the case of COVID-19, scientists have indeed found a string of genetic material (not a complete sequence) that shares 80% similarities with SARS-COVID (a sequence said to cause SARS) and therefore the original Chinese scientists have declared that this string of material reflects a COVID infection. (but also did that without testing any healthy people, to see if healthy people also have the same genetic material) Humans share 97% genetic material with chimpanzees, 80% genetic material with cats and 50% genetic material with a banana and that’s why shared genetic material IS NEVER the standard used to diagnose any disease. This is why the Tanzanian President recently found positive PCR results when he secretly tested a goat, fruit and motor oil….because most things on earth share similar genetic sequences. http://tiny.cc/1vryoz We share 61% genetic material with fruit flies and 85% genetic material with mice. Shared material is never good enough to declare anything as concrete in real science. To declare viral disease you always need a full 100% viral genetic match to a past 100% viral genetic sequence in the past. This so far has not been done for COVID19. Why?
When the administrator of the Saugus Rehab and Nursing Center in Saugus, Massachusetts, heard that a new Medicare website reported her facility had 794 confirmed cases of COVID-19 -- the second highest in the country -- and 281 cases among staff, she gasped.
"Oh my God. Where are they getting those numbers from?" said Josephine Ajayi. "That doesn't make any sense."
Those weren't the numbers that her facility reported to the CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network, under new rules from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), she said.
Ajayi said her 80-bed facility actually reported 45 residents have tested positive and five residents died, although the CMS website showed no Saugus deaths. About 19 staff members tested positive for the virus, and most have returned to work, she said.
Officials at skilled nursing facilities around the country said Monday they were shocked to see their data reported inaccurately -- wildly so in some cases, as at the Saugus home -- on the new CMS public website launched Thursday. The numbers are scaring families, harming their reputations, and in some cases are physically impossible, given the number of beds or staff in their facilities, they said.
CMS approved an interim final rule May 1 requiring more than 15,000 nursing homes receiving Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement to report COVID data by May 31, and weekly going forward.
The data fill 56 columns detailing COVID-19 infected residents, staff, testing, and equipment, going back to at least May 1. As of Thursday, CMS said 88% of the nursing homes in the country had reported. Going forward after a grace period ended June 7, they risk fines of $1,000 and up for every week they fail to update their data.
The FDA considers flu shots to be effective if one person out of 71 had a positive effect. That means that 70 flu shot recipients would have zero benefit but still have the risk of adverse side-effects, including permanent disability such as GBS.
This explains why studies have shown that flu shots do NOT reduce death from, hospitalization for, or transmission of influenza. Also, the claim that they are safe is just as unsupported. The only safety study that exists is 30 years old and even that one is highly suspect due to how adverse effects were hidden.
Poisoning Adults and Children with Hand Sanitizer
"I’m surprised at the US situation because the smartest people on epidemiology in the world, by a lot, are at the CDC. I would have expected them to do better. You would expect the CDC to be the most visible, not the White House or even Anthony Fauci. But they haven’t been the face of the epidemic. They are trained to communicate and not try to panic people but get people to take things seriously. They have basically been muzzled since the beginning. We called the CDC, but they told us we had to talk to the White House a bunch of times. Now they say, “Look, we’re doing a great job on testing, we don’t want to talk to you.” Even the simplest things, which would greatly improve this system, they feel would be admitting there is some imperfection and so they are not interested."
Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson are leading candidates for the completion of a Covid-19 vaccine likely to be released in the coming months. These companies have published their vaccine trial protocols. This unusually transparent action during a major drug trial deserves praise, close inspection of the protocols raises surprising concerns. These trials seem designed to prove their vaccines work, even if the measured effects are minimal.
What would a normal vaccine trial look like?
Prevention of infection must be a critical endpoint. Any vaccine trial should include regular antigen testing every three days to test contagiousness to pick up early signs of infection and PCR testing once a week to confirm infection by SARS-CoV-2 test the ability of the vaccines to stave off infection. Prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines. In fact, their endpoints all require confirmed infections and all those they will include in the analysis for success, the only difference being the severity of symptoms between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Measuring differences amongst only those infected by SARS-CoV-2 underscores the implicit conclusion that the vaccines are not expected to prevent infection, only modify symptoms of those infected.
We all expect an effective vaccine to prevent serious illness if infected. Three of the vaccine protocols—Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca—do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache.
Nov 22, 2020 - American Inst for Econ Research
The initial round of lockdowns was not about suppressing the virus but slowing it for one reason: to preserve hospital capacity. Whether and to what extent the “curve” was actually flattened will probably be debated for years but back then there was no question of extinguishing the virus. The volume of the curves, tall and quick or short and long, was the same either way. People were going to get the bug until the bug burns out (herd immunity).
Gradually, and sometimes almost imperceptibly, the rationale for the lockdowns changed. Curve flattening became an end in itself, apart from hospital capacity. Perhaps this was because the hospital crowding issue was extremely localized in two New York boroughs while hospitals around the country emptied out for patients who didn’t show up: 350 hospitals furloughed workers.
That failure was embarrassing enough, given the overwhelming costs. Schools closed, commercial rights were vanquished, shelter-in-place orders from wartime were imposed, travel nearly stopped, all large events were cancelled, and so on. Clearly there needed to be a good, solid, science-based reason for why the politicians and their advisers had, on their own, decided to take away much of what we once regarded as human rights. More
Portnoy's Complaint. [Strong Language]