Messages From The Front

PCR. Three letters that prior to 2020 meant little or nothing to most people. Not now. The PCR test for Covid19 was, we were told, the answer to controlling the virus. It told us who had the disease and whether they were clear of it. It could even tell us if someone had the disease when they had no symptoms, a medical first since the presence of symptoms had always been considered a key part of diagnosis. So it is perhaps interesting to dig a bit into the history of the PCR test.

The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test was invented in 1984 by American biochemist Kary Mullis. He received a Nobel Prize for his invention in 1993. You can read up on detail of how the test works on many sites (eg here) but for the purposes of this post a layman’s reading of what the test does is that it exponentially magnifies DNA and RNA in order to allow scientists to work on them, either for research or, in this case, diagnosis.

There are several aspects of the development and use of the Covid19 PCR test that one may or may not have cause to question, but they are worth discussing:

1. Kary Mullis, the inventor, is on record as saying that the test is so sensitive that you can pretty much ‘find anything in anybody’ – you can see him talk about this in this video:

2. The PCR test for Covid19 was developed by a team led by German virologist Christian Drosten. You can read their paper here. The paper was submitted on 23rd January 2020 and listed as a peer-reviewed paper just 24 hours later – thought to be the fastest peer review in history. The test was approved for use as the official diagnostic for Covid19 by the World Health Organisation shortly afterwards.

3. The PCR test is run in ‘cycles’. The higher the number of cycles the more sensitive the test. Scientists say that once you get above 30 cycles the test is so sensitive that it could be picking up a fragment from a cold that you had six months ago. It is also reported that the tests cannot distinguish between live and dead virus. Freedom of Information requests show that, in the UK, tests were being run as high as 45 cycles. Many scientists have sought to alert us to the potential problems of running the tests at such a high level – notably, and very early on, Dr Mike Yeadon, former Chief Scientific Officer at Pfizer. He discusses his thoughts here:

4. The fact that the PCR test cannot distinguish between live and dead virus is of course key, and leads to the possibility of false positive test results. You can see an online discussion amongst medics in October 2020 here where they talk about the usefulness of the test in managing the disease. Reading between the lines it seems that one thing the test might have been very effective at was quarantining perfectly healthy people.

Given that the Covid19 PCR test was responsible for proving cases, which in turn led to governments worldwide locking down entire populations, closing economies, keeping children out of school and shutting hospitals to so many, you would like to think that the results of this test were reliable. It would seem that this was not necessarily the case. Sadly, Kary Mullis the one person who could be relied on to judge this, is not around to inform us. He died aged 74 in October 2019.

Further reading:

Robert F Kennedy Jnr “The Real Anthony Fauci”: https://www.amazon.com/Real-Anthony-Fauci-Democracy-Childrens/dp/1510766804