“We need to talk about PCR”. What, again?? Yes, again. There’s no question whatsoever that, as configured & used, PCR mass testing “over-reads” by a considerable margin. This is because of its remarkable ability to amplify up really tiny amounts of viral RNA. The consequence...

...consequence of this is that PCR tests can read ‘positive’ even though the amount of RNA is too small to cause an infection or symptoms. Further, after the body has battled with & beaten the virus, it leaves behind in the airways bits of broken viral RNA. Even these irrelevant

...fragments, which also cannot cause illness nor infect anyone, are also positive in a PCR test. The owners of these tests & their customers, SAGE, have known this full well since before the pandemic started. It’s been shown categorically that PCR tests declared positive...

...after very high amplifications are, unsurprisingly, not able to infect Vero cells in culture. There’s enough bits of virus to come up positive in the PCR test, but only if you set the amp to 11. You can get a positive PCR test, but not be infected. And not be able to infect..

...cell cultures (which you definitely can, if the PCR test is positive when the amp is at 3 or 4). You’re not ill, you can’t infect anyone, but this PCR test is ‘over-reading’ & insisting you’re “positive”. This is all fact. If there’s controversy, it’s that we really should...

...have agreed an upper limit on amplification. Proposals exist & there are neat calibration curves of amplification vs ability to infect these Vero cells in culture. Above a certain number of cycles of amplification, the probability of successful virus culture fell away. We...

...could have set an upper limit like 32 or 30 cycles in PCR & stopped there. But they didn’t. Maybe it suited some people to have the amp set to 11 & declare “positive” a huge percentage of people even though there wasn’t enough virus present, perhaps only broken fragments, to..

...make the owner ill or infectious. I have gone over this at great length because this is the backdrop which any new, more clinically accurate, test faces, when going through ‘validation’. This process invites a new test to see how it does when faced with unknown samples. What..

...we want to see is a test which finds obviously infected samples positive. We want to see the test find negative, samples where there’s insufficient virus to make the person ill or to infect others. That’s precisely the position that a new test, the so-called-called lateral...

..flow test (LFT). This test works with similar technology to a pregnancy test kit. The test liquid is put in the well at one end. After a short time, under an hour, the liquid has spread sideways, or laterally, hence lateral flow test, and the read-out appears in the window...

...at the other end. This test was designed very specifically indeed. It uses well-understood methods to ‘tune it’ in the design stages. It works very well: if there’s no virus, it reads negative 99.7% of the time, which is considered a good number. It implies a false positive...

...rate of 0.3% or so. Equally, when samples were taken from patients who’s swabs were generally capable of infecting those Vero cells, it did as well as PCR in declaring them positive, around 80% of the time (neither test is perfect). The LFT is a fast test, with results in...

...under an hour. PCR takes a couple of days. LFT is cheap. PCR is much more expensive (not sure, but think the difference is more than ten fold). LFT can be performed after basic training. The army ran 90,000 or more of them in Liverpool. PCR by contrast, needs expensive bits...

...of kit and tricky molecular biology. Apart from ‘over-reading’, it is seriously vulnerable to cross contamination between samples & contamination of ingredients in the test. In truth, if you take the politics & financial vested interests out of this & just look at what’s...

...best to provide us with reliable information about infection, I don’t think there’s real competition. I’d pick LFT all day. It’s not prone to over-reading, it’s faster, it’s cheaper, it can be deployed pretty much everywhere, and there’s plenty of capacity for rational...

...amounts of testing. So that ought to be that, surely?
Not really. Because there are vested interests including financial interests. A great deal has been invested in PCR mass testing. You’ll have heard of Lighthouse Labs? I don’t blame them for not wanting to be displaced...

...by the upstart LFT!
What this toxic situation has resulted in is, yet again, proper science going under the bus. I think of it as propaganda, when I see headlines like “LFT fails to find half the cases”. I’ll add the link to an FT piece. But the reality, as I’ve sought...

...carefully to lay out, is that ‘Expensive, slow, technically-demanding & finnicky PCR test over-reads, whereas low cost, rapid & simple LFT performs well’.
All I ask when you see claims & counter claims is that you recognise that comparisons between scientific techniques...

...are sometimes rather grubby & on occasion, downright unreasonable.
I’ve a final point to make & its much more important than is generally realised. While the LFT test has been thoroughly tested by 3rd party scientists & the validation report published, so that it has the...

...testing equivalent of an MOT. It can be used safely because it’s performance has been well characterised. By contrast, and many followers will know this, the PCR mass testing system has never been subjected to proper evaluation. We do not know what it’s operational false...

...positive rate is. This means it’s impossible to interpret positive results. By rights, it should be immediately withdrawn. It’s the results of this out of control PCR test that’s being used to propel us inappropriately into Tier 2 & 3.
So please remember when vested...

...interests attack the LFT & favour the PCR test, there’s a lot more to it than the headlines.

Here’s a test comparing PCR with LFT. You’ll see a claim that LFT “only finds half the cases”. A fairer interpretation is that “PCR declares positive many samples containing too little virus, and perhaps virus fragments, which are from non-infected & non-infectious people”.

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