Among those calling attention to problems with the PCR test is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who the media and politicians have ordained “America’s #1 infectious disease expert.”
Back in July, Dr. Fauci appeared on the podcast, “This Week in Virology,” where he stated the following about the higher levels of PCR results:
“What is now sort of evolving into a bit of a standard is that if you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more… the chances of it being replication-confident are minuscule.”
Note: Most medical authorities accept as “infectious” any threshold cycle up to 40 and sometimes slightly above that.
In the podcast, Fauci also stated,
“It’s very frustrating for the patients as well as for the physicians… 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.”
You can hear Dr. Fauci’s comments here.
Kansas Response and Confusion at MIT
Responding to growing criticism of inaccurately calibrating relevant levels of COVID-19 infection, on 7 January, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KHEL), lowered the cycle threshold (Ct) from 42 cycles to 35.
But no across-the-board adjustments are being made, leading to confusion and amped-up anxiety of reported spikes in infectious transmissions.
A perfect example is the following email and response on 2 November at MIT Medical. On the school’s website, a student, clearly concerned about a PCR test result, sent this email:
“Last week, I tested positive during routine COVID Pass testing on campus and was told to self-isolate for 10 days. My family members have all tested negative, but they are also being asked to quarantine for 14 days. None of us have had any symptoms, and we’re all feeling pretty frustrated at having to put our lives on hold like this. Isn’t it possible that my test was a false positive? Can’t I be retested?”
Note the obfuscation and lack of clarity in the official response:
“The PCR test used by MIT, like other PCR tests, is very unlikely to return a false positive. If the test comes back positive, we can be sure that it has correctly detected genetic material from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes COVID-19… But might PCR tests be too good at finding traces of the virus? That’s a question which scientists are starting to investigate.”
This comment was made over six months after the coronavirus first appeared in the state of Washington. Yet, as evidenced by the official response above, scientists are just “starting to investigate” the effectiveness of the PCR Test.
The additional official response to the anxious student gets even more confusing:
“But as we learn more, this binary way of viewing test results – positive/negative, infected/not infected – may change. After all, the amount of virus in a sample is directly correlated with the number of amplification cycles needed to detect it, a number known as its cycle threshold (Ct). A positive test that comes back positive in 20 cycles contains a greater amount of virus than one requiring 40 cycles. Right now, we just call both results ‘positive.’”
The response then quotes the school’s associate medical director:
“There is some evidence that Ct values may be useful in predicting patients’ infectiousness and prognosis, but we’re not yet at the point where it makes sense for us to include that information in our decision-making process at MIT. For one thing, Ct values are not absolute. Different machines can produce different Ct values for the same sample, and the same machine can give different Ct values for different samples from the same person.”
The response concludes,
“While it may be useful to know if an individual’s Ct value is on the high or low end of the scale, based on our current knowledge, it would not change quarantine or self-isolation recommendations.”
TRENDPOST: As exemplified above, despite the completely inconclusive value of the PCR test, it remains the “gold standard” for confirming the anxiety-producing reports of infection used to justify the destruction of economies around the world.
As Dr. Michael Mina, a leading epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, described the PCR test, “The threshold is so high that it detects people with the live virus as well as those with a few genetic fragments left over from a past infection that no longer poses a risk. It’s like finding a hair in a room after a person left it.”
