Friday, February 12, 2021

Shameless manipulation: Positive PCR tests drop after WHO instructs vendors to lower cycle thresholds. We have been played like a fiddle

Hospitalization rates associated with Covid have dropped from a high of 132,500 Americans on January 6 to 71,500 on February 12.  The US had 920,000 staffed hospital beds in 2019, of which 14.4% harbored a Covid case last month, and 7.8% do now.

This tremendous drop was predicted. Every hospitalized patient is tested for Covid, often repeatedly, using PCR tests with high false positive rates. False positives are due in considerable part to exhorbitant cycle thresholds. This refers to the maximum number of doublings that are allowed during the test. The problem caused by excessive cycle thresholds was well described in a NY Times article last August, but has otherwise been ignored by the mass media. Dr. Sin Hang Lee challenged the FDA's reliance on exhorbitant cycle thresholds in its acceptance of efficacy claims for Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine in early December. He and FDA remain engaged in this debate.

The WHO instructed PCR test users and manufacturers on December 14 and again on January 20 that PCR cycle thresholds needed to come down. The December 14 guidance stated WHO's concern regarding "an elevated risk for false SARS-CoV-2 results" and pointed to "background noise which may lead to a specimen with a high cycle threshold value result being [incorrectly] interpreted as a positive result.

The first instruction has been superceded by the second, which additionally advises on clinical use of the test:  If the "test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested..." While this implies that the test should only be performed in those with symptoms, and its results should be interpreted with the clinical context in mind, most PCR tests in the US are used very differently: to screen asymptomatics at work, at colleges and universities, to permit border crossings, etc.  No caution is applied to the results. One single positive test defines someone as a Covid case. Yet it is well known, and was acknowledged in WHO's January guidance, that screening in low Covid prevalence situations, such as in the screening of asymptomatics, increases the risk of false positives. And the risk increases as the prevalence of disease drops, such that in situations of low disease prevalence, it is common to find that most positives are actually false positives.  For example, see this BMJ chart and then the real-life example in the comment below it.

Everyone in the field knew that the PCR test results were bogus.  Even Tony Fauci admitted last July that cycle thresholds above 35 were not measuring virus, and furthermore that virus could not be cultured from samples that required a high number of cycles to show positivity. 

But the drumbeat from the Coronavirus Task Force and some academics and others was "Test all, test often"--despite the inordinate numbers of false positives and negatives. Congress repeatedly allocated many billions of dollars for testing (often free for the person being tested) and so testing quickly mushroomed. Nearly two million Covid tests a day were recorded in the US over the last 3 months. Most of these have been PCR tests which, despite their problems, are still considered the most accurate. Most of the remaining tests performed were rapid antigen tests. These tests too suffer from high false positive rates, as the FDA warned last November.

While daily deaths have only dropped about 15% since January 12, there have been dramatic drops during the month in new cases (down 60% from 250,000 new cases/day to 100,000) and, as noted, in hospitalizations (down 46%). Reports claim a total of 475,000 Americans have died from Covid.

However, none of these numbers are reliable.  In addition to inaccurate PCR results, a variety of other measures have skewed the reported number of deaths from Covid.

While CDC electronically codes other causes of death, it has chosen to hand code every Covid death, and explains: 

    • "It takes extra time to code COVID-19 deaths. While 80% of deaths are electronically processed and coded by NCHS within minutes, most deaths from COVID-19 must be coded by a person, which takes an average of 7 days."

I am waiting for CDC to answer my Freedom of Information Act query, which requested the protocol CDC's coders use for coding Covid-19 as a cause of death. Why is CDC treating Covid deaths differently from deaths due to other conditions?

CDC changed the way it coded death certificates for a Covid-caused death last March, to include everyone for whom Covid is in any way contributory to the death. By placing different parts of the instructions about coding on different web pages, CDC successfully hid what it was doing. On one page, the guidance states, "If COVID-19 is determined to be a cause of death, it should be reported on the death certificate." On a different webpage, CDC states: "When COVID-19 is reported as cause of death on the death certificate, it is coded and counted as a death due to COVID-19." 

CDC has encouraged providers to be generous with Covid designations. And the Covid death definition appears to be a moving target, variable across states. CDC attempts to explain why its mortality numbers do not add up, and includes this excuse: "Other reporting systems use different definitions or methods for counting deaths." But it is CDC that chose not to issue uniform guidelines.

"We consider COVID-19 deaths to be: 
Deaths in which a patient hospitalized for any reason within 14 days of a positive COVID-19 test result dies in the hospital or within the 60 days following discharge.
Deaths in which COVID-19 is listed as a primary or contributing cause of death on a death certificate." 

Weekly mortality surveillance data include a combination of machine coded and manually coded causes of death collected from death certificates. Prior to week 4 (the week ending January 30, 2021), the percentages of deaths due to PIC were higher among manually coded records than more rapidly available machine coded records. Improvements have been made to the machine coding process that allow for more COVID-19 related deaths to be machine coded, and going forward, the percentage of PIC deaths among machine coded and manually coded data are expected to be more similar. The data presented are preliminary and expected to change as more data are received and processed, but the amount of change in the percentage of deaths due to PIC should be lower going forward. Weeks for which the largest changes in the percentage of deaths due to PIC may occur are highlighted in gray in the figure below and should be interpreted with caution.

INFLUENZA Virus Isolated
  • CDC applies several statistical techniques to deal with anomalous data before publishing its cause of death results. The raw death data are not made available to the public.
  • If Covid is listed as one contributor to a death on the death certificate, even if the death is caused by a cancer or heart attack, CDC relabels it a death caused by Covid. 
  • Because hospitals are paid several times more by Medicare for patients who have been given a Covid diagnosis, and a positive Covid test is not required, it is assumed that the diagnosis of Covid is applied liberally in hospitalized patients.
  • By changing the methods by which it performs its calculations, CDC has made it impossible to compare prior year statistics with the period since the onset of Covid.
  • Physician and former Minnesota state legislator Scott Jensen described an audit of death certificates attributed to Covid in Minnesota.  The death certificates listing Covid as the underlying cause of death totalled 2715, but the deaths attributed to Covid included an extra 878 deaths, a 32% increase.
By accepting excessive cycle thresholds for Covid PCR tests, CDC considerably expanded the numbers of Covid-positive cases, hospitalizations and deaths. By using a variety of idiosyncratic and changing statistical measures, CDC was able to control and further increase the number of deaths attributed to Covid-19. 

I do not mean to imply that the PCR tests, whose manufacturers may have recently reduced their cycle thresholds, are now accurate. Over 200 different PCR tests have been "authorized" under emergency rules by the FDA, which so far has not standardized or formally approved them. The public is in the dark as to whether and how each individual test may have changed in response to WHO's instruction, and we remain uninformed about the accuracy of each test. In fact, it has been established by the American College of Pathology that Covid-19 PCR test results are not reproducible.

By hand-coding each death due to Covid, CDC gave itself the power to determine how many Covid deaths would be counted at any particular time.
  
And by creating excessively loose case definitions for Covid, several of which did not require a single sign of illness, just a positive test, CDC was able to calibrate the number of Covid-positive cases by the rate at which it rolled out tests to the nation.

Today, the media are telling us to rejoice.  Maryland has just gotten its percentage of positive Covid tests below 5%, when a month ago the rate was 8.76%.  In my state of Maine, a reduction in the percentage of test results that are positive has turned all counties 'green,' allowing schools to be open.  How much of this is due to dialing down the cycle thresholds?

--------------

Things are worse, things are better.  Wear no mask--no, wear a mask--hey, wear two masks. New variants with even more infectivity are coming! But they are no more lethal, and SARS-CoV-2 is quite infectious already, so will the new strains make an appreciable difference? 

It seems that despite having recovered from Covid, we can be reinfected with the new viral strains. But how common is that? Does it simply mean you can have a positive PCR test, but be otherwise asymptomatic? 

I found only a single case report of a person becoming severely ill from a new strain after having recovered from original Covid.

  • The point is to keep us begging for the latest vaccine as soon as we have received the last but no-longer-effective vaccine. 
  • The point is to keep coming up with narratives to justify locking us up and reducing productivity.
  • The point is to keep us frightened and confused and unable to use our wits. 
  • The point is to stop us looking deeply and clearly into what is happening, while the media blares Covid hysteria nonstop.

Our families are being torn apart. Our small businesses are going bankrupt.  Our countries, and probably we ourselves, are being scooped up by the banks, as borrowing on an unheard-of scale persists at a dizzying pace.  

Who will pay these debts?  What will be the price? Can you see that the looting and crashing of our economies is intentional, buttressed by lie after lie?

We are being lied into the abyss. Our so-called leaders are tossing us and especially our children and grandchildren over a cliff.  They threw away our Constitution long ago. Now, they have stolen and sold our future.

Please calm down.  Turn off all the "news" and ponder what has been happening. We can fix this mess, once enough of us understand it. Give it the time and focus it deserves.  Our leaders won't save us.  Only WE can.


10 comments:

  1. Covid vaccines fail to prevent all mild and asymptomatic cases of covid-19.
    Thus spreading covid & mutations continues indefinitely until resolved somehow?

    https://swprs.org/covid-masks-review/

    Facts about Covid-19 – Swiss Policy Research
    https://swprs.org/covid19-facts/

    virus that causes mild to moderate symptoms in roughly 95% of those “infected,” and that over 99% of the “infected” survive.

    https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/960150/COVID-19_mRNA_Pfizer_BioNTech_vaccine_analysis_print.pdf

    https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?EVENTS=on&PAGENO=1&PERPAGE=10&ESORT&REVERSESORT&VAX=%28COVID19%29&VAXTYPES=%28COVID-19%29&DIED=Yes&fbclid=IwAR2rBWzmzUUh-5eWc3N4gp6PV3aEnpIyzAX0Oazu32g8hzrPHqKfVmflV1M

    Retired Dr Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc FRSA
    Will Masks and Social Distancing Be Permanent?
    https://www.vernoncoleman.com/willmasks.htm
    http://www.vernoncoleman.com/main.htm

    The New Norma War
    CJ Hopkins
    I guess I’ll see you in a quarantine camp, or in the psych ward, or an offshore detention facility … or, I don’t know, maybe I’ll see you in the streets.

    New Normal life double, triple masked naturally.

    No challenging official narratives, and its increasingly totalitarian ideology the truth is, things aren’t looking so good.

    https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/09/the-new-normal-war-on-domestic-terror/

    CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

    ReplyDelete
  2. On the Treatment of Covid-19 – Swiss Policy Research
    https://swprs.org/on-the-treatment-of-covid-19/

    ReplyDelete
  3. I myself am still awaiting a good analysis of 'excess deaths'.

    For example, a certain percentage of patients with a certain cancer (or a heart attack) are expected to die, others survive. Covid-19 would add to the stress. Mis-classification of cause of deaths becomes a problem, true enough.

    Still, without claiming to be definitive, a good analysis of 'excess deaths' would help move the discussion in an objective direction.

    ReplyDelete
  4. As we ponder what has been happening and look to our so-called leaders in Washington DC. Who are hiding behind their 3 miles of perimeter fencing topped with razor wire. Guarded by an unknown number of DoD personal and fully armed National Guard Troops.
    _
    With the news coming out of the compound that the Troops and the Fence will be in fact extended until at least fall of this year.
    _
    One certainly doesn't need to ponder long to realize that something very frightening is part of next step.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hello-I recently read an article written about the current US Covid19 mRNA vaccines and of particular concern was the fact that Moderna’s has an undisclosed mRNA adjuvant as detailed in this blog post. https://circleofmamas.com/health-news/modernas-secret-adjuvant/
    I was wondering if you could comment on what to expect with flagellin production in multiple cell types and what repeated yearly exposure to TLR5 can do to people with multiple health issues?
    Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  6. The pharmaceutical companies and their investors have a good thing going for themselves .They will keep this cash cow going for as long as they can keep the majority of people asleep .These days ,I do believe they have thought out their plan and implemented it with fairly good precision given their changing the wording of the meaning of an "EPIDEMIC" .Then on to event 201 in the Autumn of 2019 ,declaration in early 2020 of an epidemic and the use of the false PCR testing using a high amplification test result of positive to ratchet up the fear porn of this ever so dangerous disease,so called "new ,never isolated " .
    But fear no more the savior vaccines are on their way .But unfortunate with many dying because of them. Will we ever be able to go back to a so called normal way of life ?
    We can blame our own governments for jumping on this bandwagon with the lockdowns , masks etc.Kind of makes one wonder if they own shares in the pharma industry .

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  7. Math Absurdity

    Lowering the cycle threshold when vaccinating for variables guilty of deliberate
    manipulation of viewing variables one vaccinating, two lower cycle threshold both variables
    would expect lower cases with data blurred at the point simultaneously both at same time interval pls!

    The equations would then not readily distinguish if lower cases are from vaccinating and/or cycle
    lowering!

    However it would at first look lower cases upon vaccinating that it is because of the
    vaccine though could be mainly if not all do to lower cycle change at the same time.
    Unless accounting for each in data change interval of course suspiciously done together!!

    Since lower cycle threshold is known to lower the number of cases even if vaccine doesn’t work at all
    could make it appear dramatic falling cases from the vaccine when in fact from lower cycle threshold!

    No question done together to confuse this issue purposely to make the vaccine look as the reason when
    in fact only know for certain lower cycle measurement known to decrease cases becomes too hard to see
    if the cycle only is reason or vaccines when both in data same interval of time in rates to then see!!
    They know if wanted to see vaccine change on cases, would definitely not change cycle lower
    when vaccinating, yet decided to change cycle lower so blinding can’t see vaccine changing cases mixed
    with lower cycle known lowers cases!

    Absolutely ridiculous to do these both at the same time interval, and those in charge who chose too most
    certainly knew they where doing this when did this!

    Only thing new is now they know, that you know, they did this!

    The lower case numbers seeing with vaccine rollout could all be nearly or entirely only from lower cycle change.

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  8. More Precise Accurate Efficacy explaining the need to lower threshold cycles to lower cases already knew vaccine efficacy of 95% grossly exaggerated over estimated deliberately

    Calculations in this article are as follows: 19 percent 29 percent I ignored denominators as they are similar between groups.

    https://vaccineimpact.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2020/11/Stay-Pfizer-vaccine-phase-3-trial.pdf

    https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Dr.-Lee-Amended-Reply-Final.pdf

    Peter Doshi Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% effective” vaccines we need more details and the raw data - The BMJ

    https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-modernas-95-effective-vaccines-we-need-more-details-and-the-raw-data/

    https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037

    Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us
    Feature BMJ 2020 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m4037 (Published 21 October 2020)


    Clarification: Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% effective” vaccines we need more details and the raw data
    February 5, 2021
    Post-publication clarification to Peter Doshi’s 4 January 2021
    In response to feedback received following publication, I would like to clarify certain aspects of my article.

    First, regarding the 3410 “suspected covid-19” cases and my calculations of 19% and 29% vaccine efficacy, readers have posited that this relied on the assumption that all 3410 cases were false negatives and therefore actually true covid-19 cases. While it is correct to say that one could arrive at these figures by making that assumption, and also that others have made similar calculations in discussing the potential implications of the 3410 suspected covid-19 cases, the 19% and 29% calculations I made in my article did not rely on assuming anything about false negatives. My calculations were of vaccine efficacy against an endpoint of “covid-19 symptoms, with or without a positive PCR test result” (i.e. irrespective of what is causing those covid-19 symptoms, whether that be SARS-CoV-2 or something else). This was not the primary endpoint used in the trials, which was laboratory confirmed covid-19 .

    According to FDA’s report on Pfizer’s vaccine, there were “3410 total cases of suspected, but unconfirmed covid-19 in the overall study population, 1594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1816 in the placebo group.”

    If many or most of these suspected cases were in people who had a false negative PCR test result, this would dramatically decrease vaccine efficacy.

    ReplyDelete
  9. With 20 times more suspected than confirmed cases, this category of disease cannot be ignored simply because there was no positive PCR test result. Indeed this makes it all the more urgent to understand. A rough estimate of vaccine efficacy against developing covid-19 symptoms, with or without a positive PCR test result, would be a relative risk reduction of 19% (see footnote) far below the 50% effectiveness threshold for authorization set by regulators. Even after removing cases occurring within 7 days of vaccination (409 on Pfizer’s vaccine vs 287 on placebo), which should include the majority of symptoms due to short-term vaccine reactogenicity, vaccine efficacy remains low: 29% see footnote

    https://participatorymedicine.org/epatients/2012/03/former-nejm-editors-on-the-corruption-of-american-medicine-ny-times.html

    Former NEJM editors on the corruption of American medicine (NY Times)
    First, a little background for our newer readers.
    In 2009, as I was just starting to get educated about healthcare, I posted A Quote I Won’t Soon Forget, which began

    Marcia Angell MD is a well-known, respected physician, long-time editor of NEJM. So it was a bit of a shock today when Amy Romano, blogger for Lamaze International, sent me this quote:
    It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

    Article alludes to gain of function. When they decide about tab round drinks on the bats in accidentally bat release for it, rule 1 on “ accidental release” only if antidote available simultaneously?
    https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=neil+needle+and+the+damage+done+&&view=detail&mid=6E79CA1468957FBCB4016E79CA1468957FBCB401&&FORM=VRDGAR

    https://www.commdiginews.com/politics-2/fauci-funded-wuhan-lab-gain-of-function-research-to-create-covid-19-135971/

    Fauci funded Wuhan lab “gain of function” research to create COVID 19
    Rick JohnsonFeb 4, 2021
    WASHINGTON, DC:  Dr. Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins spent $2.5 million dollars to fund “gain of function” research into deadly viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from 2014 through 2017. Roughly $700,000 a year was funneled by Dr. Peter Daszak through his Eco Health Alliance directly to the Wuhan lab. To specifically fund research to enhance the transmissible characteristics of a specific bat virus captured in the Hunan caves in 2011.
    The stunning revelation was that the NIH and NIAID provided the funding that produced the altered COVID 19 virus. The virus has now devastated the lives and economies of the entire

    Bat picks up the tab? 

    ReplyDelete