PCR Testing Saga: Were We Duped? [23/02/21]

Were federal health officials and experts at WHO really unaware that the recommended high cycle count (CT) for PCR tests would produce an exorbitant number of false positives for COVID?

by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Story at-a-glance:

• Curative offers a PCR test using spit rather than swabs from the back of your nasal cavity. Initially only authorized for use on symptomatic patients, the company has requested the U.S. Food and Drug Administration expand its authorization for use on asymptomatic individuals.
• According to company data, the spit test accurately identifies about 90% of positive cases when compared against a nasopharyngeal PCR test set to 35 cycle threshold (CT).
• According to the FDA, that comparative CT is too low, and will produce too many false negatives. This, despite the scientific consensus, which states anything over 35 CTs is scientifically unjustifiable as it produces enormous amounts of false positives.
• According to an April 2020 study, a CT of 17 must be used to obtain 100% confirmed real positives. Above 17 cycles, accuracy drops dramatically. At 33 cycles, the false positive rate is 80%. Beyond 34 cycles, the false positive rate reaches 100%.
• Because the PCR test cannot discern between live virus and dead, noninfectious viral debris, the timing of the test is important. Recent research shows the median time from symptom onset to viral clearance confirmed by viral culture is seven days, whereas the PCR test continues to detect nonviable (noninfectious) SARS-CoV-2 for a median of 34 days.

For several months, experts have highlighted the true cause behind the COVID-19 pandemic, namely the incorrect use of PCR tests set at a ridiculously high cycle count (CT), which falsely labels healthy people as “COVID-19 cases.” In reality, the PCR test is not a proper diagnostic test, although it has been promoted as such.

An important question that demands an answer is whether the experts at our federal health agencies and the World Health Organization were really too ignorant to understand the implications of using this test at excessive CT, or whether it was done on purpose to create the illusion of a dangerous, out-of-control pandemic.

Regardless, those in charge need to be held accountable, which is precisely what the German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee (Außerparlamentarischer Corona Untersuchungsausschuss, or ACU), intends to do.

They’re in the process of launching an international class-action lawsuit against those responsible for using fraudulent testing to engineer the appearance of a dangerous pandemic in order to implement economically devastating lockdowns around the world. I wrote about this in “Coronavirus Fraud Scandal — The Biggest Fight Has Just Begun” and “German Lawyers Initiate Class-Action Coronavirus Litigation.”

FDA demands higher false positives

An interesting case detailed in a Jan. 21 Buzzfeed article that raises those same questions in regard to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is its recent spat with Curative, a California testing company that got its start in Jan. 2020. It has since risen to become one of the largest COVID-19 test providers in the U.S.

Curative’s most popular PCR test differs from other providers in that it uses spit swabbed from the patient’s tongue, cheek and mouth rather than from the back of the nasal cavity.

In April 2020, the FDA issued an accelerated emergency use authorization for the Curative spit test, but only for patients who had been symptomatic within the two weeks prior to taking the test, as the data available at that time showed it failed to catch asymptomatic “cases.”

However, the test was subsequently used off-label on individuals without symptoms anyway, and the company has been urging the FDA to expand its authorization to include asymptomatic individuals based on newer data.

In Dec. 2020, Curative submitted that data, showing its oral spit test accurately identified about 90% of positive cases when compared against a nasopharyngeal PCR test set to 35 CT.

The FDA objected, saying that Curative was comparing its test against a PCR that had a CT that was too low, and would therefore produce too many false negatives. According to the FDA, the bar Curative had chosen was “not appropriate and arbitrary,” Buzzfeed reports.

This is a curious statement coming from the FDA, considering the scientific consensus on PCR tests is that anything over 35 CTs is scientifically unjustifiable.

From the start, the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended running PCR tests at a CT of 40. This was already high enough to produce an inordinate number of false positives, thereby labeling healthy people as “COVID-19 cases,” but when it comes to Curative’s spit test, the FDA is demanding they compare it against PCR processed at a CT of 45, which is even more likely to produce false positives.

The FDA’s concern is that Curative’s test is missing infections and giving infectious people a clean bill of health. However, in reality, it’s far more likely that the test is accurately weeding out people who indeed are not infectious at all and rightly should be given a clean bill of health. It seems the FDA is merely pushing for a process that will ensure a higher “caseload” to keep the illusion of widespread infection going.

When are you actually infectious?

A persistent sticking point with the PCR test is that it picks up dead viral debris, and by excessively magnifying those particles with CTs in the 40s, noninfectious individuals are labeled as infectious and told to self-isolate. In short, media and public health officials have conflated “cases” — positive tests — with the actual illness.

Medically speaking, a “case” refers to a sick person. It never ever referred to someone who had no symptoms of illness. Now all of a sudden, this well-established medical term, “case,” has been arbitrarily redefined to mean someone who tested positive for the presence of noninfectious viral RNA.

The research is unequivocal when it comes to who’s infectious and who’s not. You cannot infect another person unless you carry a live virus, and you typically will not develop symptoms unless your viral load is high enough.

As it pertains to PCR testing, when excessively high CTs are used, even a minute viral load that is too low to cause symptoms can register as positive. And, since the test cannot distinguish between live virus and dead viral debris, you may not even be carrying a live virus at all.

These significant drawbacks are why PCR testing really only should be done on symptomatic patients, and why a positive test should be weighed as just one factor of diagnosis. Symptoms must also be taken into account. If you have no symptoms, your chances of being infectious and spreading the infection to others is basically nil, as data from 9,899,828 individuals have shown.

Of these, not a single person who had been in close contact with an asymptomatic individual ended up testing positive. This study even confirmed that even in cases where asymptomatic individuals had had an active infection, and had been carriers of live virus, the viral load had been too low for transmission. As noted by the authors:

“Compared with symptomatic patients, asymptomatic infected persons generally have low quantity of viral loads and a short duration of viral shedding, which decrease the transmission risk of SARS-CoV-2.

“In the present study, virus culture was carried out on samples from asymptomatic positive cases, and found no viable SARS-CoV-2 virus. All close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases tested negative, indicating that the asymptomatic positive cases detected in this study were unlikely to be infectious.”

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