On 29 August, The New York Times published an article with the headline: “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.”
The Times analyzed testing data from Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada and concluded that “up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.” The article goes on to state the growing concern among leading U.S. health officials that so many of those testing “positive” are misdiagnosed since they have such a small amount of the virus they are not contagious.
Suspicion over the “false positive” readings of the standard COVID-19 PCR Testing, referred to as the “gold standard” by the CDC, has been growing for many months.
On 16 July, Statnews.com reported, “The U.S. should invest $75 billion in order to fix its badly flawed system of diagnostic testing for Covid-19, according to a bipartisan committee of industry experts, investors, scientists, and former federal health officials assembled by the Rockefeller Foundation.”
In a recent report on the controversy surrounding the accuracy of the PCR Test program, including the analysis in The New York Times, veteran investigative journalist Jon Rappaport wrote, “COVID-19’s PCR Test Shows an Overwhelming Number of False Positives and is Essentially Worthless.” The article went on to say, “Truth is, the PCR test is not able to produce ANY reliable number that reflects how much virus a person is carrying. A lot, a little, it doesn’t matter.”
Mr. Rappaport wrote, “The issue appears to be the ballooning sensitivity of the PCR test. It’s so sensitive that it picks up inconsequential tiny, tiny amounts of virus that couldn’t harm a flea – and it calls these amounts ‘positive.’ Therefore, millions of people are labeled ‘positive/infected’ who carry so little virus that no harm would come to them or anyone they come in contact with.”
Hypocrisy 2.0
The growing evidence of misleading test results didn’t stop some politicians from advocating for more. On 21 June, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, criticizing President Trump for not advocating more testing, stated on her official website, “The President’s efforts to slow down desperately needed testing to hide the true extent of the virus means more Americans will lose their lives.”
Yet, just weeks before publishing her “more testing required” remarks, Politico.com reported Ms. Pelosi had not been tested herself based on the advice of the official Capitol physician. Even after reporting to the doctor that she had been in the same room as someone diagnosed with COVID, she stated, “I said to the doctor, should I be having a test? He said no, you don’t have any symptoms.”
In addition to The Times analysis, the gross inaccuracies of the standard PCR test were also noted in an article published on 18 August by MedRxiv, a medical health website founded by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Yale University; and BMJ, a global healthcare knowledge provider.
The article states, “Data on PCR-based tests for similar viruses show that PCR-based testing produces enough false positive results to make positive results highly unreliable over a broad range of real-world scenarios. This has clinical and case management implications, and affects an array of epidemiological statistics, including the asymptomatic ratio, prevalence, and hospitalization and death rates.”
More Confusion
On 27 August, the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the Trump administration ordered 150 million new “Rapid Tests” from Abbott Laboratories, a test based on analyzing antigens in the body that can give results in 15 minutes.
In the official release, HHS Secretary Alex Azar wrote, “The introduction of Abbott’s antigen test is another incredibly valuable result of President Trump’s all-of-America approach to constructing our world-leading COVID-19 testing capacity. By strategically distributing 150 million of these tests to where they’re needed most, we can track the virus like never before and protect millions of Americans at risk in especially vulnerable situations.”
While the new rapid test is less expensive and easier to administer, on 25 August, just a few days before the HHS release, USA Today ran the headline: “Inaccurate results from rapid COVID-19 tests raise concerns about widespread screening.” The report cited a test case in Vermont were dozens of people getting positive findings from the rapid test turned out not to have the virus after submitting to a more thorough lab test. While this rapid test was produced by a different company than Abbott Laboratories, it used the same protocols.
The lack of accuracy of all the current available tests was summed up by Dr. Robert H. Schmerling, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, who wrote on 10 August, “Unfortunately, it’s not clear exactly how accurate any of these tests are.”
TRENDPOST: Despite the inaccuracy of the virus tests, each day throughout the western world, the mainstream media leads off the daily news with the soaring amount of new virus cases, easily spreading more fear and anxiety to a locked-down society.
