Post by Johnkenn on Sept 2, 2020 16:38:36 GMT -6
This is form a Doctor that I follow...thought it was a good post...this was just the last part with his comments.
1. Who is ok with this? Anyone? www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...-revoked-just-got-a-new-grant?t=1598772343552
What a scam. How about we stop making viruses that can kill people when they leak from BSL labs? That'd be my vote.
2. On to PCR. Let's start with what is PCR. Polymerase chain reaction. Basically, this is a technique or process that turns a single gene into billions of copies in a matter of a few hours. This technique was discovered and described by Kary Mullis in 1983 for which he won a Nobel prize. PCR targets the gene with primers. The primers are segments of the ends of the gene you are interested in. DNA polymerase, an enzyme which replicates DNA, then fills in the rest. This process is repeated over and over until you have 30-40 billion copies after several hours. In the case of disease, you take a sample from a patient (blood, sputum, feces, nasopharyngeal swab, saliva, etc.) and submit it to DNA amplification. In the case of an RNA virus, the RNA is converted to DNA first with an enzyme. That DNA sample is then combined with the gene target primers which bind the ends of "loose strands" of DNA (separated by heat) followed by rapid replication with DNA polymerase. Multiple cycles are performed and each one doubles the prior amount of DNA present. Fluorescent markers then bind the DNA so it can be visualized. The number of cycles required is very important. This is the Ct or Cq value. They are interchangeable. Often equated with a "viral load" in the case of viral disease detection. I saw Michael Mina put it this way in a tweet which I thought was clever: "Ct is like zooming in on your computer screen. If you have to zoom a lot, then the thing was small to start with. If you have to zoom a little, then the thing was big to start. In PCR, the ‘thing’ is the starting amount of virus."
Just as an aside, my virologist, infectious disease colleague in Dallas studied under Kary. She is wicked smart and my go to for questions.
Here is a comment I made on 6/28 regarding the use of PCR:
"An absolutely fantastic article on PCR and its misuse as a diagnostic tool. I've been hinting at this in a couple of these posts but for fear of pushback I've mostly held my tongue. But as a biochemist at heart I can't any longer. PCR is NOT a diagnostic tool. It is a manufacturing tool. It can help make a diagnosis but it should not be the sole arbiter. This article takes you through the why: off-guardian.org/2020/06/27/covid19-pcr-tests-are-scientifically-meaningless/
From the article: And that’s why we asked Dr Calisher whether he knows one single paper in which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated and finally really purified. His answer: I know of no such a publication. I have kept an eye out for one.”
Continued:
Another essential problem is that many PCR tests have a “cycle quantification” (Cq) value of over 35, and some, including the “Drosten PCR test”, even have a Cq of 45. The Cq value specifies how many cycles of DNA replication are required to detect a real signal from biological samples. “Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported,” as it says in the MIQE guidelines. MIQE stands for “Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments”, a set of guidelines that describe the minimum information necessary for evaluating publications on Real-Time PCR, also called quantitative PCR, or qPCR. The inventor himself, Kary Mullis, agreed, when he stated:
"If you have to go more than 40 cycles to amplify a single-copy gene, there is something seriously wrong with your PCR.”
The MIQE guidelines have been developed under the aegis of Stephen A. Bustin, Professor of Molecular Medicine, a world-renowned expert on quantitative PCR and author of the book A-Z of Quantitative PCR which has been called “the bible of qPCR.” In a recent podcast interview Bustin points out that “the use of such arbitrary Cq cut-offs is not ideal, because they may be either too low (eliminating valid results) or too high (increasing false “positive” results).” And, according to him, a Cq of 20 to 30 should be aimed at, and there is concern regarding the reliability of the results for any Cq over 35.
If the Cq value gets too high, it becomes difficult to distinguish real signal from background, for example due to reactions of primers and fluorescent probes, and hence there is a higher probability of false positives.
Emphasis above added by me. Guess what the Roche test Cq (they call it Ct) cutoff value is? 40! I looked it up on the FDA website. Who still thinks 120k people have died from CV19? What if we had more appropriately used 20-30 as the cutoff like Bustin says? It makes you think doesn't it?"
Present day again. Let's look at this weekend's NY Times article. www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
"This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are. 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, a review by The Times found. 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."
"Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said." A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.
This is stating the exact same point I was making back in June and even before. PCR isn't meant for this. It is too sensitive. In fact, you can make anyone positive, just set the Ct value high enough and everyone will be positive. 40 is way too high and that is what every lab in the US is using (I was unaware of this when I posted that information about the Roche test). The European CDC uses 35. Most labs use 20-30 for other PCR tests. With proper controls and pure reagents, 35 is likely ok but across an entire country with thousands of labs? No thanks, give me 30 or less. This is why the CDC has gone away from mass testing of asymptomatic persons. They don't readily spread and their false positive rate is very high. Did you know for prior epidemics like MERS and SARS you had to have symptoms AND two positive PCR tests to get diagnosed? Also, if you are asymptomatic and have a +PCR, it is recommended to have another PCR using a different gene sequence target? This coincides well with Muge Cevik's article I posted here that showed no relation of +PCR to infectiousness: "Thus, detection of viral RNA cannot be used to infer infectiousness." www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.25.20162107v2
The PCR needs to fade into the background. We need to move on to antigen testing for symptomatic and high risk asymptomatic individuals who have been exposed... that's it. The question is what changed compared with prior viral outbreaks? Check this out:
So why this until recently?:
Questions need answering.
3. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...cted-treated-fell-40-per-cent-covid-pandemic/
Lockdowns kill. In the end it will not even be close. Virus deaths will be dwarfed by lockdown deaths. Probably an order of magnitude difference at the rate we are going.
4. That number of children is more than the number who have died in the entire world from CV19. These lockdowns will be judged harshly by history, and rightfully so. Inhumane, narcissistic, selfish, cruel, theoretical nonsense.... that's what they will say about us... or just call us fools. I think that would sum it up pretty well.
5. Can't wait to see this study on Ivermectin. www.trialsitenews.com/zagaz...i-hypothesis-drug-effective-against-covid-19/
6. Herd immunity, determined by heterogeneity. Double yes. arxiv.org/pdf/2008.08142.pdf
7. Get kids back in school. It's safe and they are largely unaffected by this virus. Estimated 137,047,945 children. Five months March-July. 78 deaths from COVID-19. Compared with 21,966 deaths from all-causes. CV19 is an adult disease.
Another thing here. Who wants to wager the US's slightly higher child death numbers are due to our higher Ct PCR cutoff values I discussed above? I'd bet a lot that's the case...
Whole paper here:
8. Yep. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...-shows-have-succumbed-medieval-mass-neurosis/
1. Who is ok with this? Anyone? www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...-revoked-just-got-a-new-grant?t=1598772343552
What a scam. How about we stop making viruses that can kill people when they leak from BSL labs? That'd be my vote.
2. On to PCR. Let's start with what is PCR. Polymerase chain reaction. Basically, this is a technique or process that turns a single gene into billions of copies in a matter of a few hours. This technique was discovered and described by Kary Mullis in 1983 for which he won a Nobel prize. PCR targets the gene with primers. The primers are segments of the ends of the gene you are interested in. DNA polymerase, an enzyme which replicates DNA, then fills in the rest. This process is repeated over and over until you have 30-40 billion copies after several hours. In the case of disease, you take a sample from a patient (blood, sputum, feces, nasopharyngeal swab, saliva, etc.) and submit it to DNA amplification. In the case of an RNA virus, the RNA is converted to DNA first with an enzyme. That DNA sample is then combined with the gene target primers which bind the ends of "loose strands" of DNA (separated by heat) followed by rapid replication with DNA polymerase. Multiple cycles are performed and each one doubles the prior amount of DNA present. Fluorescent markers then bind the DNA so it can be visualized. The number of cycles required is very important. This is the Ct or Cq value. They are interchangeable. Often equated with a "viral load" in the case of viral disease detection. I saw Michael Mina put it this way in a tweet which I thought was clever: "Ct is like zooming in on your computer screen. If you have to zoom a lot, then the thing was small to start with. If you have to zoom a little, then the thing was big to start. In PCR, the ‘thing’ is the starting amount of virus."
Just as an aside, my virologist, infectious disease colleague in Dallas studied under Kary. She is wicked smart and my go to for questions.
Here is a comment I made on 6/28 regarding the use of PCR:
"An absolutely fantastic article on PCR and its misuse as a diagnostic tool. I've been hinting at this in a couple of these posts but for fear of pushback I've mostly held my tongue. But as a biochemist at heart I can't any longer. PCR is NOT a diagnostic tool. It is a manufacturing tool. It can help make a diagnosis but it should not be the sole arbiter. This article takes you through the why: off-guardian.org/2020/06/27/covid19-pcr-tests-are-scientifically-meaningless/
From the article: And that’s why we asked Dr Calisher whether he knows one single paper in which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated and finally really purified. His answer: I know of no such a publication. I have kept an eye out for one.”
Continued:
Another essential problem is that many PCR tests have a “cycle quantification” (Cq) value of over 35, and some, including the “Drosten PCR test”, even have a Cq of 45. The Cq value specifies how many cycles of DNA replication are required to detect a real signal from biological samples. “Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported,” as it says in the MIQE guidelines. MIQE stands for “Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments”, a set of guidelines that describe the minimum information necessary for evaluating publications on Real-Time PCR, also called quantitative PCR, or qPCR. The inventor himself, Kary Mullis, agreed, when he stated:
"If you have to go more than 40 cycles to amplify a single-copy gene, there is something seriously wrong with your PCR.”
The MIQE guidelines have been developed under the aegis of Stephen A. Bustin, Professor of Molecular Medicine, a world-renowned expert on quantitative PCR and author of the book A-Z of Quantitative PCR which has been called “the bible of qPCR.” In a recent podcast interview Bustin points out that “the use of such arbitrary Cq cut-offs is not ideal, because they may be either too low (eliminating valid results) or too high (increasing false “positive” results).” And, according to him, a Cq of 20 to 30 should be aimed at, and there is concern regarding the reliability of the results for any Cq over 35.
If the Cq value gets too high, it becomes difficult to distinguish real signal from background, for example due to reactions of primers and fluorescent probes, and hence there is a higher probability of false positives.
Emphasis above added by me. Guess what the Roche test Cq (they call it Ct) cutoff value is? 40! I looked it up on the FDA website. Who still thinks 120k people have died from CV19? What if we had more appropriately used 20-30 as the cutoff like Bustin says? It makes you think doesn't it?"
Present day again. Let's look at this weekend's NY Times article. www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
"This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are. 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, a review by The Times found. 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."
"Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said." A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.
This is stating the exact same point I was making back in June and even before. PCR isn't meant for this. It is too sensitive. In fact, you can make anyone positive, just set the Ct value high enough and everyone will be positive. 40 is way too high and that is what every lab in the US is using (I was unaware of this when I posted that information about the Roche test). The European CDC uses 35. Most labs use 20-30 for other PCR tests. With proper controls and pure reagents, 35 is likely ok but across an entire country with thousands of labs? No thanks, give me 30 or less. This is why the CDC has gone away from mass testing of asymptomatic persons. They don't readily spread and their false positive rate is very high. Did you know for prior epidemics like MERS and SARS you had to have symptoms AND two positive PCR tests to get diagnosed? Also, if you are asymptomatic and have a +PCR, it is recommended to have another PCR using a different gene sequence target? This coincides well with Muge Cevik's article I posted here that showed no relation of +PCR to infectiousness: "Thus, detection of viral RNA cannot be used to infer infectiousness." www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.25.20162107v2
The PCR needs to fade into the background. We need to move on to antigen testing for symptomatic and high risk asymptomatic individuals who have been exposed... that's it. The question is what changed compared with prior viral outbreaks? Check this out:
So why this until recently?:
Questions need answering.
3. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...cted-treated-fell-40-per-cent-covid-pandemic/
Lockdowns kill. In the end it will not even be close. Virus deaths will be dwarfed by lockdown deaths. Probably an order of magnitude difference at the rate we are going.
4. That number of children is more than the number who have died in the entire world from CV19. These lockdowns will be judged harshly by history, and rightfully so. Inhumane, narcissistic, selfish, cruel, theoretical nonsense.... that's what they will say about us... or just call us fools. I think that would sum it up pretty well.
5. Can't wait to see this study on Ivermectin. www.trialsitenews.com/zagaz...i-hypothesis-drug-effective-against-covid-19/
6. Herd immunity, determined by heterogeneity. Double yes. arxiv.org/pdf/2008.08142.pdf
7. Get kids back in school. It's safe and they are largely unaffected by this virus. Estimated 137,047,945 children. Five months March-July. 78 deaths from COVID-19. Compared with 21,966 deaths from all-causes. CV19 is an adult disease.
Another thing here. Who wants to wager the US's slightly higher child death numbers are due to our higher Ct PCR cutoff values I discussed above? I'd bet a lot that's the case...
Whole paper here:
8. Yep. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...-shows-have-succumbed-medieval-mass-neurosis/
