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New York Times Finally Admits COVID-19 PCR Positive Tests are Grossly Over-Exaggerated
As many as 90% of COVID-19 Positive Cases Should Have Been Listed as Negative
By: David Deschesne
September 9, 2020
While the extreme left wing New York Times has been cheerleading the excessively high COVID-19 positive case numbers since the coronavirus pandemic began in the U.S., they have curiously done an about-face and started reporting on the over-inflation of the positive test results.
In an August 29, 2020 article posted on the Times’ website, author, Apoorva Mandavilli points out how “the standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.” Mandavilli also wrote, “Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.”
The Times found that most of the PCR tests in use today are tweaked to be too sensitive. The way a PCR test works, is it attempts to isolate a section of viral RNA and amplify it to levels that can be detected. While the cutoff for most tests for other viruses is around 30 cycles, the COVID-19 tests cycle out to 37 to 40 times - each cycle effectively doubling the amount of viral RNA being manufactured in the amplification process.
Mandavalli quotes Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, “Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk - akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.”
While the Times is treating this as groundbreaking new research, the Fort Fairfield Journal, and many other independent media organizations, have been reporting that exact problem for months. PCR tests have been around for several decades and the problems associated with using them as a diagnostic tool have been known by the medical community for just as long. In fact, the creator of the PCR process, Kerry Mullis, said the PCR process should “never be used” as a diagnostic tool to diagnose a disease.
The Times researched COVID-19 positive cases in New York, Massachusetts and Nevada and found that 90 percent of those who tested positive carried barely any of the virus at all and if the cycle threshold of the PCR test was calibrated to stop at the industry-standard recommended 30 cycles, they would have ended up with a negative test.
The U.S. FDA, which normally governs the standards for all new medical tests, and requires verification that they actually work as intended, suspended all their rules in March in order to get as many test kits into circulation as possible. The FDA then allowed PCR test manufacturers to set their own standards and conduct their own “verification tests” of their test kits’ accuracy.
Perhaps erring on the side of caution, most PCR test manufacturers tweaked their test sensitivity too high - in the 37 to 40 cycle range for fear of being the test that missed catching the virus. This resulted in tests being, according to Dr. Mina, 100-fold to 1,000 fold more sensitive.
The Times reported that “The Food and Drug Administration said in an emailed statement that it does not specify the cycle threshold ranges used to determine who is positive, and that ‘commercial manufacturers and laboratories set their own.”
Regardless of who set the sensitivity of these tests artificially higher than they should have been, the result was the same - massive “Positive Case” numbers that were exhaustively and zealously reported by the establishment media, which then set up an artificially inflated level of fear in society which has caused increases in suicide, drug overdose deaths, alcoholism, child and spousal abuse, poverty, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and numerous heart attacks and cancers that went untreated during the lockdown.
The Times now appears to be backpedaling on that narrative now in order to place itself in a better position in the event a class action lawsuit against the establishment mainstream, media organizations is brought by the affected citizens in order to hold them accountable for their sloppy, irresponsible reporting and over-exaggeration of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But, predictably, the Times is still keeping one foot comfortably inside the pro-PCR narrative by stating in the story that the solution to faulty or overtly sensitive PCR tests is to test more people, more often...with less sensitive PCR tests.