Ever since the coronavirus "pandemic" began in 2020, Kate Brown's weapon of choice in keeping control over Oregon's citizens has been the PCR test, This is a test where a sample is taken from a person's nasal cavity via swab, and the sample is analyzed to detect segments of DNA. However, the test is open to manipulation, and according to the test's designer, should not be used as a diagnostic tool.

Back in August, the New York Times published an article by Apoorva Mandavilli titled Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be. In it, she discussed the PCR test, how it's used, and why it is not a good tool for determining COVID infections.

Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

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. But researchers say the solution is not to test less, or to skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The most widely used diagnostic test for the new coronavirus, called a PCR test, provides a simple yes-no answer to the question of whether a patient is infected.

But similar PCR tests for other viruses do offer some sense of how contagious an infected patient may be: The results may include a rough estimate of the amount of virus in the patient’s body.

“We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,” Dr. Mina said. “We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making.”

But yes-no isn’t good enough, he added. It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient’s next steps. “It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue,” Dr. Mina said.

So in other words, just because a PCR test returns a positive result does not mean that the person is contagious, or even has it. However, positive results are treated as if both are true.

Here's the real sticking point with PCR tests: cycle thresholds.

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.

This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.

One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.

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, Dr. Mina said.

In other words, a positive test using high thresholds would be completely and totally inaccurate.

Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said.

A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.

But, in typical government fashion - and the approach Pat Allen uses, as we will see later - is that they don't care.

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.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is examining the use of cycle threshold measures “for policy decisions.” The agency said it would need to collaborate with the F.D.A. and with device manufacturers to ensure the measures “can be used properly and with assurance that we know what they mean.”

The C.D.C.’s own calculations suggest that it is extremely difficult to detect any live virus in a sample above a threshold of 33 cycles. Officials at some state labs said the C.D.C. had not asked them to note threshold values or to share them with contact-tracing organizations.

For example, North Carolina’s state lab uses the Thermo Fisher coronavirus test, which automatically classifies results based on a cutoff of 37 cycles. A spokeswoman for the lab said testers did not have access to the precise numbers.

In addition to validating the accuracy of the test, knowing cycle thresholds could also provide valuable research information.

This amounts to an enormous missed opportunity to learn more about the disease, some experts said.

“It’s just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests — that they’re just returning a positive or a negative,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York.

“It would be useful information to know if somebody’s positive, whether they have a high viral load or a low viral load,” she added.

And now we start to see how bad it gets.

Officials at the Wadsworth Center, New York’s state lab, have access to C.T. values from tests they have processed, and analyzed their numbers at The Times’s request. In July, the lab identified 872 positive tests, based on a threshold of 40 cycles.

With a cutoff of 35, about 43 percent of those tests would no longer qualify as positive. About 63 percent would no longer be judged positive if the cycles were limited to 30.

In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90 percent of people who tested positive in July with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said. “I would say that none of those people should be contact-traced, not one,” he said.

And yet with the delusional fear that everyone from the NBA and NFL to local government and organizations operate under, every possible contact must be traced and quarantined.

Other experts informed of these numbers were stunned.

“I’m really shocked that it could be that high — the proportion of people with high C.T. value results,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “Boy, does it really change the way we need to be thinking about testing.”

Dr. Jha said he had thought of the PCR test as a problem because it cannot scale to the volume, frequency or speed of tests needed. “But what I am realizing is that a really substantial part of the problem is that we’re not even testing the people who we need to be testing,” he said.

The number of people with positive results who aren’t infectious is particularly concerning, said Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “That worries me a lot, just because it’s so high,” he said, adding that the organization intended to meet with Dr. Mina to discuss the issue.

PCR tests still have a role, he and other experts said. For example, their sensitivity is an asset when identifying newly infected people to enroll in clinical trials of drugs.

But with 20 percent or more of people testing positive for the virus in some parts of the country, Dr. Mina and other researchers are questioning the use of PCR tests as a frontline diagnostic tool.

People infected with the virus are most infectious from a day or two before symptoms appear till about five days after. But at the current testing rates, “you’re not going to be doing it frequently enough to have any chance of really capturing somebody in that window,” Dr. Mina added.

Highly sensitive PCR tests seemed like the best option for tracking the coronavirus at the start of the pandemic. But for the outbreaks raging now, he said, what’s needed are coronavirus tests that are fast, cheap and abundant enough to frequently test everyone who needs it — even if the tests are less sensitive.

“It might not catch every last one of the transmitting people, but it sure will catch the most transmissible people, including the superspreaders,” Dr. Mina said. “That alone would drive epidemics practically to zero.”

More recently, Oregonians For Medical Freedom published a study title PCR Test Unraveled, docuemnting the fatal flaws of using the PCR test as a diagnostic tool.

What is the PCR Test?

The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a process designed by Dr. Kary Mullis in 1984 used to “amplify” or copy small segments of DNA.1,2 It uses a series of chemicals (primers) to detect segments of DNA in a test sample, like those taken with a nasal swab.3 Amplification using PCR can create over a billion copies very quickly, and continues until predetermined cycle thresholds (Ct) are reached.The higher the Ct value, the higher the amplification.4 The copies are then compared to a master copy genetic sequence to determine results.5

DNA Master Copies

The key to developing a successful PCR test is using a master copy of the genetic sequence that is pure and isolated. If the master copy is contaminated in any way, the test is considered unreliable. The SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the illness Covid-19) master copy, used for PCR testing, was derived from a synthetic RNA strand combined with viral fragments manufactured by Chinese scientists.6 In other words, scientists made an educated guess at the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2. At the time of publishing this article, labs continue to use the synthetic virus even though a pure and isolated SARS-CoV-2 virus has been isolated.7

And then it goes on to describe how the blueprint used to design OCR tests was debunked and pulled for gross inaccuraices.

The Corman-Drosten Paper: The Blueprint for PCR Tests

On January 25th, 2020 a paper titled “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR” was published in the Eurosurveillance journal. The purpose of the paper, commonly known as the Corman-Drosten paper, was to “develop and deploy robust diagnostic methodology for use in public health laboratory settings without having virus material available.”8 This paper has been used around the world by laboratories as a blueprint to design their own PCR tests9 and gain Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).10

The Corman-Drosten Paper Debunked

A request to retract the Corman-Drosten paper was submitted on November 28th, 2020.11 The report accompanying the retraction request lists “10 major scientific flaws on the molecular and methodological level.” One of these flaws of the PCR test includes using a master copy RNA sequence, supplied by China, for testing. Using a sequence that is based upon an educated guess, scientists were forced to only test against 2 sections of viral RNA.13 Because of this, the test does not possess the ability to accurately distinguish between SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses,14 of which there are many, including the common cold. Another flaw is that while the Corman-Drosten paper is listed as peer-reviewed, the time between submission and publication is less than 24 hours,15 an impossibly short time for peer review.

That last sentence always cracks me up, because whether on social media or anywhere else, you will always find people who want to debunk anything that goes against the delusional fear narrative of masking up and locking down by claiming something that goes against that narrative isn't "peer reviewed" (which is a whole different issue)

But then it gets to the issue of cycle thresholds.

Cycling Thresholds

When the Food and Drug Administration issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for PCR testing, using the Corman-Drosten paper as a blueprint, a recommended Ct was not listed. Oregon is using the Thermo Fisher PCR test which lists a Ct of just under 40.17. According to University of Oxford scientists, any test with a Ct above 30 is completely unreliable. The higher the Ct value, the more times the sample had to be amplified to find any trace of the virus, and the less likely the person is infected. According to researchers who wrote the retraction request, when a Ct above 35 is used, “the probability that said person is actually infected is less than 3%, the probability that said result is a false positive is 97%.”

So to put it plainly, any test with a cycle threshold above 30 is unreliable, but Oregon uses a value less just under 40!

Another major flaw of PCR tests has to do with viral fragments.

Another serious flaw with PCR testing is that it will show a positive match even if the sample only contained viral fragments. A person cannot infect another person with viral fragments20 and therefore is not contagious even though fragments can remain within the body for up to 31 days.21 This renders the PCR test incapable of determining whether or not a person is contagious. A Portugese appeals court recently deemed the PCR test unreliable and will longer use it to drive policy or lockdowns. They stated, “Based on the currently available scientific evidence this test the RT-PCR test is in and of itself unable to determine beyond reasonable doubt that positivity in fact corresponds to infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

Testing Positive for SARS-Cov-2 Using a PCR Test

If a person were to test positive for SARS-Cov-2, it means that after amplifying the test using just under 40 cycles, viral fragments were found that match the theoretic sequences created by China. The test does not differentiate between the presence of live or dead virus, nor does it state at which cycle threshold (number of times the sample was amplified) the RNA was detected. Essentially, it’s useless as the sole means of determining if a person is contagious. This is why Dr. Mullis and PCR test manufacturers agree it cannot be used to diagnose an active infection.24

For any other virus, a person would need to present with clinical signs of infection, such as cough or shortness of breath, for which a doctor could order confirmatory medical tests.25 Historically, medical professionals only order tests with the presence of signs and symptoms in their patient. For SARS-Cov-2 however, a single PCR test is used to diagnose a person without symptoms to be an active case.

So as you can see, Kate and Pat's weapon of choice is a highly unreliable and easy to manipulate tool.

So what do Kate and Pat have to say about these testing levels?

Since the methods used to detect SARS-CoV-2 were designed and have FDA EUA clearance to be used as qualitative (positive, negative) assays, it is not appropriate to report Ct values for patient management.

Following the manufacturer instructions, the OSPHL reports out whether a test has been determined to be positive, negative, or indeterminate (when a specimen has ambiguous results).

In other words, "we don't have to tell you, so we won't."

And them they make more excuses for using a test with no standards as if they all provide the same, rock-solid results.

The OSPHL does not recommend establishing a state-wide cycle threshold cutoff for SARS-CoV-2 testing. There is no international or national standard for setting the Ct cutoff because many different RT-PCR tests are being used to detect SARS-CoV-2. Each test is different based on how the test was designed and different Ct cutoffs are recommended by test developers.

So to sum it all up; a tool that, according to its designer, should not be used as a diagnostic tool is being used as a diagnostic tool in spite of the facts that the blueprint paper used for its design was debunked and withdrawn for multiple errors, it is inconsistent, and Oregon is using a level that is far above a level that is even useful.

You can see why this tool is Kate's weapon of choice for keeping Oregonians under her control.