Commentary
While many things elevated the COVID-19 pandemic from mere disease into a world-altering narrative—statistics, media hype, the visuals of masking, lock-downs, etc.—the saga essentially rested on two basic metrics: Determining the scale of the outbreak measured predominantly by PCR tests and “COVID deaths” driving understanding of the disease’s severity as captured through death certificates.
PCR testing and the approach to certifying deaths are thus the “Meat and Potatos” for any pandemic recipe that could turn a future viral outbreak into a global emergency.
The PCR test has been
touted as the “gold standard” for COVID-19 diagnosis. But even its inventor and
Nobel Prize laureate, Kary Mullis, was
skeptical of the PCR’s application for clinical diagnosis, noting that it “does not tell you that you are sick.”
Indeed, the PCR process does not differentiate a viable viral culture (which is what evokes symptoms and transmissibility) from harmless molecular debris. The test deals with DNA/RNA molecules, not viruses as such, and a finding of “positive” is just a probabilistic assumption driven by the estimated number of molecules of interest.
A PCR machine goes through cycles of multiplying molecules representative of the SARS-CoV-2 gene until their amount reaches a certain detectable level. This is called the cycle threshold (Ct). A low number of cycles means that the target molecule was present in high amounts (the test is positive), while a high Ct number means the molecule was present in low amounts (the test is negative).
Numerous studies and official documents—such as
this one by Public Health Ontario (PHO) or
this French study, to name just two—have made it clear that starting at a Ct of 25, the probability of a positive specimen being infectious drops significantly and, for any practical purposes, becomes negligible at a Ct of 35. Yet according to
PHO, Ontario labs run PCR tests
at least up to a Ct equaling 38.
This is blockbuster information. At such a high threshold, the lion’s share of Canada’s
reported total of 4.7 million COVID-19 “cases” might not represent illness in any meaningful way at all.
Estimating the number of these misdiagnoses directly in Canada is difficult because PHO
does not collect the Ct information. There is indirect evidence, however, and it is worrisome indeed.
A German study that re-analyzed PCR tests of more than 160,000 people concluded that the current PCR Ct practice produces 50 percent to 75 percent false positives. In “high-risk” settings like hospitals and long-term care homes, where people were tested and re-tested and re-re-tested, the chances of being misdiagnosed with COVID-19 would climb even higher.
Further indirect evidence of the possible extent of misdiagnosis in Canada is in the apparent near-elimination of the flu in the 2020-21 season, when there were just
69 diagnosed flu cases versus a regular seasonal average of about 50,000.
But if COVID-19 was frequently misdiagnosed due to constantly cycling the PCR test far too many times, then it’s entirely possible—likely, even—that influenza didn’t go away in 2020-21, but was falsely labelled COVID-19. It would also mean that all those asymptomatic COVID-19 “cases” were mostly PCR false positives and that the overall number of true infectious COVID-19 cases was nowhere near the officially reported levels.
The pandemic also brought in revolutionary changes to certifying death. The World Health Organization (WHO)
requested the world’s nations to attribute death to COVID-19 whenever the disease could be thought of as a
contributor to death, even for
probable infections.
Such an unprecedented promotion of COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death absolves serious comorbidities to the whims of PCR testing or to mere
suspicion of the infection. The amended certification resulted in ridiculous situations where people injured in accidents were
pronounced dead of COVID-19—and this was not even contrary to the WHO’s guidelines.
Still, even with such bias—which was allegedly brought in for “surveillance purposes”—COVID-19’s contribution to overall Canadian mortality in 2020 was only
5 percent, which is on par with accidents and markedly lower than cancer and heart disease.
To add to that questionable death attribution, the average age of the
15,600 Canadians who “died of COVID-19” in 2020 was
83.8, with two-thirds of them over the Canadian life expectancy of
82. And while there is no such cause of death as “old age,” the question of how meaningful it is to count those 10,000 deaths toward COVID-19 statistics remains open.
Millions of false-positive “cases” plus biased death attribution—stoked by overheated media and panicked politicians—transform a manageable infectious disease into a terrifying “global emergency.”
Examining objectively and deciding whether the approach to assessing the COVID-19 pandemic’s scale and severity should be reused, adjusted, or abandoned is crucial, because the declaration of a pandemic causes staggering economic damage, is disruptive to every aspect of modern life, and becomes its own cause of death through unintended consequences.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
