The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test “is so powerful that it can even isolate information that cells carry from the past, such as a fragment of genetic information that may have been circulating in your mother’s womb, a bacteria you breathed in a week ago, or if you were exposed to a virus at the grocery store. In other words, your body may have been exposed to and even reacted on a cellular level to a microbe, but that doesn’t mean you actively have or have had the disease. […] If the PCR test was used every flu season as a diagnostic tool, our flu diagnoses would likely jump, as we apply the label to those who were exposed but never actually became ill. Therefore, we have high rates of false-positive results from COVID testing because the genetic information picked up in the test is being amplified far beyond clinical relevance, and state governors and other public officials have been pushed into making drastic public health emergency decisions based upon this faulty data.

Dr Zach Bush, Vaccines Revealed Episode 1

Reverse transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (Rt-PCR) tests for SARS-CoV-2 have only been authorised for emergency use and strongly criticised due to the anticipated high false positive rate, which means that it can be anticipated that the more people are tested, the more “positive” results you can expect, leading some to call the alleged pandemic, a “case-demic.”

In Vaccines Revealed, Episode 6, Dr Thomas Cowan reminds us that through epidemiology we identify that people are dying from similar diseases in different regions but this does not automatically mean that a virus caused the deaths in one region and then spread to another region to kill people there too. Beriberi and pellagra are but two examples of diseases that were thought to be caused by a transmittable microbe but were later found to be caused by other factors, in these cases, nutritional deficiencies. Thus, epidemiology alone cannot be used to prove viral causation but rather it forms the basis of investigating theories as to what could be causing deaths, which could include “electromagnetic field toxicity and air pollution and a bunch of other things. […]The purpose of epidemiological observations is to create a theory,” and if the theory involves a virus, there are established steps that must be followed to first isolate the virus and then prove causation of illness.

Cowan then goes through the steps of isolation of a virus, which form the gold standard for the basis of developing tests and vaccines. Startlingly, he remarks, no-one has followed the steps to isolate a coronavirus from any person with COVID-19. And, equally startling, he further points out that scientists have been creating mRNA vaccines without having any “real virus”.

Where did the RNA in the gene bank come from?

You pull out these little fragments of chopped-up RNA, how do you know where they came from? Especially when […] we never knew this virus existed; it’s brand new. So, you have nothing to identify what it is.

Dr Andy Kaufman

In Vaccines Revealed Episode 2, Dr Andy Kaufman explains that the evidence for the virus originally put forward, comes from RNA strands taken from the lung fluid of just a couple of people. He explains that the researchers did not properly separate out the sources of all the RNA they found (a necessary step in the isolation process), in order to make a definitive case for their findings. “They say that the full length of a virus genome is about 30,000 bases long, and they’re looking at fragments that are just 100 to 200 long,” which is “a tiny, tiny fraction” of the genome.

Lack of controls to substantiate claims that the RNA belongs to an infectious virus

Kaufman also points out that no control group was used in the initial research; “lung fluid from healthy patients was not used as a basis of comparison to determine whether this same RNA can be found naturally in the lungs. Thus, the methodology of the initial research was seriously flawed. Instead of studying RNA pulled out of an isolated virus, they used lung fluid. The lung fluid of the average person would be expected to have RNA from multiple sources in addition to bacteria and a variety of human cells.”

In the interview cited above, Cowan explains that the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) instructions for use: “2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel,” acknowledges this. On page 42 of the guidelines, it is stated: “Since no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV were available for CDC use at the time the test was developed and this study conducted, assays designed for detection of the 2019-nCoV RNA were tested with characterized stocks of in vitro transcribed full length RNA (N gene; GenBank accession: MN908947.2) of known titer (RNA copies/µL) spiked into a diluent consisting of a suspension of human A549 cells and viral transport medium (VTM) to mimic clinical specimen.”

In Europe, a team of virologists were tasked with the development of the PCR tests, which led them to publish a seminal paper In January 2020, in EuroSurveillance): “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR”, by Victor M Corman et al.

Extraordinarily, as Cowan quotes from the paper, they note the dearth of viral isolates to work with: “The ongoing outbreak of a recently emerged novel coronavirus poses a challenge for public health laboratories as virus isolates are unavailable”.

Cowan explains this as follows: “In other words they were tasked with making a test for a virus and they have no examples of the virus to start with. Since no quantifiable viral isolates are available, then it has not been isolated from a patient” and therefore Cowan concludes that the PCR test being used is a “complete fraud”.

A key author of this important paper is Christian Drosten, director of the Institute of Virology at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, described in UK’s The Guardian in April 2020 by Laura Spinney as, “the head of the German public health institute’s reference lab on coronaviruses, he has become the government’s go-to expert on the related virus causing the current pandemic”.

In addition to Cowan, a group of life scientists have also found the paper to be highly problematic, to the extent that they formed a consortium to collaborate on a review. First, they requested information of the fast-tracked peer review process of this paper, which took all of one day (the paper was submitted on 22 January 2020 and accepted on 23 January 2020) by EuroSurveillance. When they did not receive any information, their next step was to submit a critique, with a letter calling for a retraction of the paper by Drosten and his co-authors, in November 2020.

EuroSurveillance responded some weeks later, after another round of peer review, concluding that the paper would not be retracted. Meanwhile, the critique was made public and other scientists engaged, leading to an extensive addendum being drawn up. In the results of the addendum, the authors write: “We present 20 scientific publications providing ‘wet lab’ evidence of the performance of the Corman et al. PCR protocol. Of those, 17 found problems with incorrect primer design (mismatches, dimer formation, melting temperature) in the SARS-CoV-2 specific ‘confirmatory’ test named RdRp-PCR for ‘RNA-dependent RNA-polymerase” or the E-gene assay’.

To find out about related actions in Germany, please see this post.

In the next blog post, we look more closely at the issue of isolation.