Peter the Roman
Rookie
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
- Messages
- 25
Hi friends,
It appears SARS-CoV-2 (the alleged virus causing COVID-19) tests have not been validated against an independent measure (the so-called "gold standard"), that must be the alleged virus existence, i.e. necessarily virus purification (separate alleged virus particles from everything else). For this reason, the precision of the tests (sensitivity, specificity) is not known. Things go worse as there are a lot of asymptomatic patients of COVID-19, so you can not deduce "infection" with clinical symptoms in those cases. The only thing scientists seem to have is RNA sequencing of the alledged virus and matching with PCR technique, but this could be an insufficient condition.
https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/27/covid19-pcr-tests-are-scientifically-meaningless/
It is worth mentioning that the PCR tests used to identify so-called COVID-19 patients presumably infected by what is called SARS-CoV-2 do not have a valid gold standard to compare them with. This is a fundamental point. Tests need to be evaluated to determine their preciseness — strictly speaking their “sensitivity” and “specificity” — by comparison with a “gold standard,” meaning the most accurate method available. As an example, for a pregnancy test the gold standard would be the pregnancy itself.
...
Jessica C. Watson from Bristol University confirms this. In her paper “Interpreting a COVID-19 test result”, published recently in The British Medical Journal, she writes that there is a “lack of such a clear-cut ‘gold-standard’ for COVID-19 testing.” But instead of classifying the tests as unsuitable for SARS-CoV-2 detection and COVID-19 diagnosis, or instead of pointing out that only a virus, proven through isolation and purification, can be a solid gold standard, Watson claims in all seriousness that, “pragmatically” COVID-19 diagnosis itself, remarkably including PCR testing itself, “may be the best available ‘gold standard’ ”. But this is not scientifically sound.
For anybody who knows about the HIV issue, that sounds familiar: alleged HIV virus has not been purified either.
It appears SARS-CoV-2 (the alleged virus causing COVID-19) tests have not been validated against an independent measure (the so-called "gold standard"), that must be the alleged virus existence, i.e. necessarily virus purification (separate alleged virus particles from everything else). For this reason, the precision of the tests (sensitivity, specificity) is not known. Things go worse as there are a lot of asymptomatic patients of COVID-19, so you can not deduce "infection" with clinical symptoms in those cases. The only thing scientists seem to have is RNA sequencing of the alledged virus and matching with PCR technique, but this could be an insufficient condition.
https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/27/covid19-pcr-tests-are-scientifically-meaningless/
It is worth mentioning that the PCR tests used to identify so-called COVID-19 patients presumably infected by what is called SARS-CoV-2 do not have a valid gold standard to compare them with. This is a fundamental point. Tests need to be evaluated to determine their preciseness — strictly speaking their “sensitivity” and “specificity” — by comparison with a “gold standard,” meaning the most accurate method available. As an example, for a pregnancy test the gold standard would be the pregnancy itself.
...
Jessica C. Watson from Bristol University confirms this. In her paper “Interpreting a COVID-19 test result”, published recently in The British Medical Journal, she writes that there is a “lack of such a clear-cut ‘gold-standard’ for COVID-19 testing.” But instead of classifying the tests as unsuitable for SARS-CoV-2 detection and COVID-19 diagnosis, or instead of pointing out that only a virus, proven through isolation and purification, can be a solid gold standard, Watson claims in all seriousness that, “pragmatically” COVID-19 diagnosis itself, remarkably including PCR testing itself, “may be the best available ‘gold standard’ ”. But this is not scientifically sound.
For anybody who knows about the HIV issue, that sounds familiar: alleged HIV virus has not been purified either.