How Could It Be Possible? Spending $25 Billion on Covid tests/tracing bought lots of tests, but are any accurate? Spending $Billions on drugs bought us worthless remdesivir, suppressing cheap alternatives... and the article I wished I could have written

How could it be possible that so much of the Covid pandemic narrative:  its bat origin (untouched by any lab); the story that human incursions into nature cause our pandemics and must be stopped; the saga in which effective medications are suppressed and useless ones are promoted; the way that cases are diagnosed; and the value of non-pharmaceutical interventions like masks--might be false, based on fake science, fake statistics, and lying public health officials?

How could it be possible?  Chris Martenson wrote the article I wanted to write, and explains how he (and I) came to fall down the rabbit hole, and gradually came to accept a totally different narrative than the mainstream media and government officials have proclaimed.  What happened to us is simple:  

He writes, 

Please read Martenson's complete article.  I understand that this is too much of a leap for many people to make, but if you have read this far, keep watching what is happening and note the inconsistencies and contradictions.  

Here is a lighter version of what Martenson is saying, in an opinion piece in the October 30 Wall Street Journal written by Holman Jenkins, Jr.  It is titled, "The Other Media Blackout:  How can Americans use good sense about an epidemic about which they are fed false information?"  His final sentence is, "We battle the virus, while being fed a colossally distorted picture of the epidemic and its progress by an incompetent and sociopathic press."

See how so much of what is written about Covid does not make any sense, and reassess what you hear, as often as you can.  Try to put the pieces together.

Today I received three news items that were so jarring to the Covid story we are meant to believe, so incongruous, that I had to mention them.

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First, we have been told that only 25-50% of cases may be asymptomatic.  Fauci said this recently, and it has been a standard belief since the start of the pandemic.  (I happen to think it is way too low.  But anyway...)

Second, we have been told there are 2 tests that can be used to diagnose a current Covid case:  the PCR test and the rapid antigen test.  Using these tests, massive numbers of Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19, up to 150,000 per day.  Cases have been rising rapidly, and as a result harsher lockdown measures are being enforced in some states and some countries.

Third, we assume that government officials want to reduce cases, that they impose quarantines and restrictions to protect us, and that they respond sensibly to the results of Covid tests.

Here are the news articles:

1.  75 prisoners at 2 Maine prisons, and 9 staff, have been diagnosed with Covid using rapid antigen tests.  The vast majority of prisoners were asymptomatic, and a few had mild symptoms. 

2.  "FDA warns about false positive results from COVID-19 (rapid) antigen tests."  Reuters reported that after false positive tests in nursing homes, FDA wanted to remind us that we can't trust these tests.

3.  New Jersey state Senator Michael Testa released a leaked document from the NJ Department of Corrections, which directs correctional staff to release and transport Covid positive prisoners to train and bus stations on November 4.  Staff are directed to wear full PPE while transporting prisoners.  

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So, are the prisoners positive or negative?  If negative, or noncontagious, why are staff donning PPE?  If positive, why are officials releasing them to public transportation? Is the goal to cause more cases?

Are the tests false positives?  Or are most "cases" asymptomatic?

Why are we using tests that FDA warns us may be inaccurate?  Does any of this make sense?

There are only 3 types of tests commercially available in the US:  the rapid antigen, the PCR (a.k.a. molecular test) and the antibody test. There are dozens of different PCR and antibody tests in use. (Remember, when there were no tests available by March, the FDA decided to "Let 1,000 flowers bloom" and allowed anyone with a test to make it publicly available, without any FDA review beyond company-supplied data.  This is slowly changing, but complete FDA approvals have been derailed by the goal to make over a million tests available, daily.)

The antibody test is intended to tell you if you have previously had Covid.  None are very accurate.  FDA does not know how accurate they are, nor how they compare with each other. See my previous posts on the huge problems with PCR and antibody tests.  All were approved by FDA under emergency use authorizations, and have not undergone standard screening and approval.  

Congress approved $25 BILLION DOLLARS for Covid testing and tracing, so we are doing lots of tests and plenty of tracing.  We have shortages of reagents, shortages of other test materials, the tests are non-reproducible... but a lot of money was made available for testing, so, we are testing.

Has it helped reduce cases?  Has it prevented spread?  Who knows.  There is no way to tell.  We cannot compare it to the past, because we were testing very few people then.  We can't compare regions, because so many different companies' tests are being performed, even within one lab. 

The purpose of testing was to identify and isolate cases, and track and trace contacts, preventing spread.  But if cases are asymptomatic, but can still spread the virus, the theory falls apart.  Aggressive testing and tracing has not worked out well in Germany, which has a much more developed tracing system than the US. 

Dr. Fauci has admitted that many PCR tests may be using cycle thresholds (35 and above) that are only testing for "dead nucleotides"--his words, not mine--indicating the tests neither identify infection nor contagiousness.

Addendum:  the Nov. 5 NY Times tells us how terrible the correspondence is between the results of PCR tests and rapid antigen tests.

Addendum:  on Nov. 6 NPR provides bits of the story regarding how CDC distributed defective PCR tests to public health labs across the US throughout February. NPR's piece is titled, CDC Report: Officials Knew Coronavirus Test Was Flawed But Released It Anyway. NPR omits any discussion of why CDC and FDA enforced regulatory roadblocks that prevented non-governmental labs from making any other, accurate Covid tests available in the US during January and February.

According to Keith Jerome, head of virology at the University of Washington, “The great strength the US has always had, not just in virology, is that we’ve always had a wide variety of people and groups working on any given problem. When we decided all coronavirus testing had to be done by a single entity, even one as outstanding as CDC, we basically gave away our greatest strength.”

It remains unclear why federal agencies restricted all US Covid testing to kits created by CDC, and refused to budge, knowing the tests didn't work, while the Coronavirus percolated through the US.

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You are being asked to trust the science.  And who am I to tell you, there isn't any?