Why COVID-19 Testing Is A Tragic Waste

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Why COVID-19 Testing Is A Tragic Waste Tyler Durden Mon, 11/16/2020 - 22:00

Authored by Joseph Mercola via LewRockwell.com,

From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the clarion call has been to test, test and test some more. However, right from the start, serious questions arose about the tests being used to diagnose this infection, and questions have only multiplied since then.

Positive reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests have been used as the justification for keeping large portions of the world locked down for the better part of 2020.

This, despite the fact that PCR tests have proven remarkably unreliable with high false result rates, and aren’t designed to be used as a diagnostic tool in the first place as they cannot distinguish between inactive viruses and “live” or reproductive ones.

Dr. Mike Yeadon, former vice president and scientific director of Pfizer, has even gone on record stating that false positive results from unreliable PCR tests are being used to “manufacture a ‘second wave’ based on ‘new cases,'” when in fact a second wave is highly unlikely.

Understanding PCR Tests

Before his death, the inventor of the PCR test, Kary Mullis, repeatedly yet unsuccessfully stressed that this test should not be used as a diagnostic tool for the simple reason that it’s incapable of diagnosing disease.

A positive test does not actually mean that an active infection is present. As noted in a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and prevention publication on coronavirus and PCR testing dated July 13 2020:

• Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms.

• The performance of this test has not been established for monitoring treatment of 2019-nCoV infection.

• This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.

So, what does the PCR test actually tell us? The PCR swab collects RNA from your nasal cavity. This RNA is then reverse transcribed into DNA. However, the genetic snippets are so small they must be amplified in order to become discernible. Each round of amplification is called a cycle.

Amplification over 35 cycles is considered unreliable and scientifically unjustified, yet Drosten tests and tests recommended by the World Health Organization are set to 45 cycles.

What this does is amplify any, even insignificant sequences of viral DNA that might be present to the point that the test reads “positive,” even if the viral load is extremely low or the virus is inactive. As a result of these excessive cycle thresholds, you end up with a far higher number of positive tests than you would otherwise.

We’ve also had problems with faulty and contaminated tests. As soon as the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 became available in January 2020, German researchers quickly developed a PCR test for the virus.

In March 2020, The New York Times reported the initial test kits developed by the CDC had been found to be flawed. The Verge also reported that this flawed CDC test in turn became the basis for the WHO’s test, which the CDC ended up refusing to use.

PCR Tests Cannot Detect Infection

Perhaps most importantly of all, the PCR tests cannot distinguish between inactive viruses and “live” or reproductive ones.

What that means is that PCR tests cannot detect infection. Period. It cannot tell you whether you’re currently ill, whether you’ll develop symptoms in the near future, or whether you’re contagious.

The tests may pick up dead debris or inactive viral particles that pose no risk whatsoever to the patient and others. What’s more, the test can pick up the presence of other coronaviruses, so a positive result may simply indicate that you’ve recuperated from a common cold in the past.

An “infection” is when a virus penetrates into a cell and replicates. As the virus multiplies, symptoms set in. A person is only infectious if the virus is actually replicating. As long as the virus is inactive and not replicating, it’s completely harmless both to the host and others.

Chances are, if you have no symptoms, a positive test simply means it has detected inactive viral DNA in your body. This would also mean that you are not contagious and pose no risk to anyone.

For all of these reasons, a number of highly respected scientists around the world are now saying that what we have is not a COVID-19 pandemic but a PCR test pandemic. In his September 20, 2020, article5 “Lies, Damned Lies and Health Statistics — The Deadly Danger of False Positives,” Yeadon explains why basing our pandemic response on positive PCR tests is so problematic.

In short, it appears millions of people are simply being found to carry inactive viral DNA that pose no risk to anyone, yet these test results are being used by the global technocracy to implement a brand new economic and social system based on draconian surveillance and totalitarian controls.

Artificially Created Justifications for Totalitarian Controls

As reported by The Vaccine Reaction, September 29, 2020:

“The test’s threshold is so high that it detects people with the live virus as well as those with a few genetic fragments left over from a past infection that no longer poses a risk. It’s like finding a hair in a room after a person left it, says Michael Mina, MD, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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

'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’ or ‘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.”

Again, medical experts agree any cycle threshold over 35 cycles makes the test too sensitive, as at that point it starts picking up harmless inactive DNA fragments. Mina believes a more reasonable cutoff would be 30 or less.

According to The New York Times, the CDC’s own calculations show it’s extremely unlikely to detect live viruses in samples that have gone through more than 33 cycles, and research published in April 2020 concluded patients with positive PCR tests that had a cycle threshold above 33 were not contagious and could safely be discharged from the hospital or home isolation.

Importantly, when officials at the New York state laboratory, the Wadsworth Center, reanalyzed testing data at The Times’ request, they found that changing the threshold from 40 cycles to 35 cycles eliminated about 43% of the positive results. Limiting it to 30 cycles eliminated a whopping 63%. The Vaccine Reaction adds:

“In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90% 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.

‘I’m really shocked that it could be that high — the proportion of people with high CT value results,’ said Ashish Jha, MD, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. ‘Boy, does it really change the way we need to be thinking about testing’...

In late August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first rapid coronavirus test that doesn’t need any special computer equipment. Made by Abbot Laboratories, the 15-minute test [BinaxNOW] will sell for U.S. $5 but still requires a nasal swab to be taken by a health worker.

The Abbot test is the fourth rapid point-of-care test that looks for the presence of antigens rather than the virus’s genetic code as the PCR molecular tests do.“

Massive Waste of Resources

As noted by Dr. Tom Jefferson and professor Carl Henegan in an October 31, 2020, article in the Daily Mail,16 mass PCR testing has been a massive waste or resources, as it doesn’t provide us with the information we actually need to know — who’s infectious, how far is the virus spreading and how fast does it spread?

Instead, it has led to economic devastation from business shutdowns and isolating noninfectious people in their homes for weeks and months on end. Jefferson and Henegan claim they shared their pandemic response plan with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson over a month ago, and just presented it to him again. “We urge him to pay attention and embrace it,” they write, adding:

“There are only two things about which we can be certain: first, that lockdowns do not work in the long term... The idea that a month of economic hardship will permit some sort of ‘reset’, allowing us a brighter future, is a myth. What, when it ends, do we think will happen? Meanwhile, ever-increasing restrictions will destroy lives and livelihoods.

The second certainty is this: that we need to find a way out of the mess that does no more damage than the virus itself... Our strategy would be to tackle the four key failings.”

These four areas are:

1. Addressing the problems in the government’s mass testing program

2. Addressing “the blight of confused and contradictory statistics”

3. Protect and isolate the vulnerable — primarily the elderly, but also hospitalized patients in general and staff — while allowing the rest to maintain “some semblance of normal life”

4. Inform the public about the true and quantifiable costs of lockdown that “kill people just as surely as COVID-19”

“If we do these things, there is real hope that we can learn to live with the virus. That, after all, was supposed to be the plan,” Jefferson and Henegan note. With regard to testing, the pair call “for a national program of testing quality control to ensure that results are accurate, precise and consistent.”

Importantly, we must not rely on positive/negative readings alone. The results must be assessed in relation to other factors, such as the age of the subject and whether they are symptomatic, to determine who actually poses an infectious risk. You can review the full details of their proposed plan at the end of their Daily Mail article.

Lockdown Dangers Have Been Kept Out of Public Discussion

Jefferson and Henegan aren’t the only ones highlighting the fact that the global lockdown strategy is causing more harm and destruction than the virus itself. In a June 16, 2020 article in The Federalist, James Lucas, a New York City attorney, wrote:18

“If we’re going to allow models and modelers to dictate the entire nature of our society, one would hope that the models are as complete as possible. Yet the epidemiological models that have so transformed our world are seriously incomplete, and therefore fundamentally inadequate.

Any medical therapy is supposed to be tested for both efficacy and safety. There have been several studies examining the effectiveness of the lockdowns in combating the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with mixed conclusions.

So far, however, none of these studies or models have analyzed the safety side of the lockdown therapy. In response to questions from physician Sens. Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy, Dr. Anthony Fauci admits this side of the equation has not been accounted for in the models now driving our world.

As noted in an open letter recently signed by more than 600 health-care professionals, the public health costs from the lockdowns — described as a ‘mass casualty incident’ are real and growing.

These models are estimations based on existing research. The constantly changing projections of coronavirus deaths are extrapolations from research on previous epidemics. Yet modelers have no excuse for leaving evaluations of the lockdowns’ massive costs to public health out of their models.”

The Hidden Costs of Lockdowns

How does the “lockdown therapy” affect public safety? In his article, Lucas highlights the following:

Increased chronic disease rates due to unemployment, poverty and putting non-COVID medical care on hold — Research23 by the Veterans Administration has shown delaying cancer treatment for just one month led to a 20% increase in mortality. Another study found each one-month delay in breast cancer diagnosis increased mortality by 10%

Increased rates of mental health problems due to unemployment and isolation

Increased mortality rates from suicide — In one study, being unemployed was associated with a twofold to threefold higher relative risk of suicide. A more recent study estimates “deaths of despair” linked to lockdowns may be around 75,000 in the U.S.

Reduced collective life span — Extended unemployment is also associated with shorter, unhealthier lives. Hannes Schwandt, a health economics researcher at Northwestern University, estimates an extended economic shutdown could shorten the lifespan of 6.4 million Americans entering the job market by an average of about two years. Lucas notes:

“If epidemiologists don’t care to take account of this toll, another profession must. A study28 just released by a group of South African actuaries estimates that the net reduction in lifespan from increased unemployment and poverty due to a national lockdown will exceed the increased lifespan due to lives saved from COVID-19 by the lockdown by a factor of 30 to 1.

In other words, each year of additional life attributable to isolating potential coronavirus victims in the lockdown comes at a cost of 30 years lost due to the negative public health effects of a lockdown...”

Lack of education is also associated with significantly shorter life spans and poorer health. High school drop-outs die on average nine years sooner than college graduates, and school closings disproportionally affect poorer students.

Who Pays the Most?

As noted by Lucas, in addition to calculating the overall costs on society, modelers must also determine “on whom those costs fall,” because the costs are not borne equally by all. The consequences of the lockdowns disproportionally affect those who are already the most vulnerable — financially and health wise — such as those living near the poverty line, the chronically ill, people with mental illness and minorities in general.

“Contrary to the PR slogan, we are NOT all in this together,” Lucas writes. “We need less insipid pro-lockdown propaganda extolling the virtues of the ‘essential’ workers, and more serious analysis of the enormous public health toll the lockdowns are imposing on them. Otherwise, we may come to see the era of coronavirus as simply the time where pro-lockdown elites sacrificed the working class31 to protect themselves.”

A Pandemic of Fearmongering

An October 28, 2020, article featured by the Ron Paul Institute points out that:

“Ever since the alleged pandemic erupted this past March the mainstream media has spewed a non-stop stream of misinformation that appears to be laser focused on generating maximum fear among the citizenry.

But the facts and the science simply don’t support the grave picture painted of a deadly virus sweeping the land. Yes, we do have a pandemic, but it’ a pandemic of ginned up pseudo-science masquerading as unbiased fact.”

Nine facts that can be backed up with data “paints a very different picture from the fear and dread being relentlessly drummed into the brains of unsuspecting citizens,” the article states. In addition to the fact that PCR testing is practically useless, for all the reasons already mentioned, these data-backed facts include:

1. A positive test is NOT a “case” — As explained by Dr. Lee Merritt in her August 2020 Doctors for Disaster Preparedness33 lecture, featured in “How Medical Technocracy Made the Plandemic Possible,” media and public health officials appear to have purposefully conflated “cases” or positive tests with the actual illness.

Medically speaking, a “case” refers to a sick person. It never ever referred to someone who had no symptoms of illness. Now all of a sudden, this well-established medical term, “case,” has been completely and arbitrarily redefined to mean someone who tested positive for the presence of viral RNA. As noted by Merritt, “That is not epidemiology. That’s fraud.”

2. According to the CDC34 and other research data,35 the COVID-19 survival rate is over 99%, and the vast majority of deaths occur in those over 70, which is close to normal life expectancy.

3. CDC analysis reveals 85% of patients testing positive for COVID-19 wore face masks “often” or “always” in the two weeks preceding their positive test. As noted in the Ron Paul article,36 “The only rational conclusion from this study is that cloth face masks offer little if any protection from Covid-19 infection.”

4. There are inexpensive, proven successful therapies for COVID-19 — Examples include various regimens involving hydroxychloroquine with zinc and antibiotics, quercetin-based protocols, the MATH+ protocol and nebulized hydrogen peroxide.

5. The death rate has not risen despite pandemic deaths — Data37,38 show the overall all-cause mortality has remained steady during 2020 and doesn’t veer from the norm. In other words, COVID-19 has not killed off more of the population than would have died in any given year anyway.

As noted in the Ron Paul article, “According to the CDC as of early May 2020 the total number of deaths in the US was 944,251 from January 1 — April 30th. This is actually slightly lower than the number of deaths during the same period in 2017 when 946,067 total deaths were reported.”

15,000 Doctors and Scientists Call for End to Lockdowns

All in all, there are many reasons to suspect that continued lockdowns, social distancing and mask mandates are completely unnecessary and will not significantly alter the course of this pandemic illness, or the final death count.

And, with regard to universal PCR testing where individuals are tested every two weeks or even more frequently, whether they have symptoms or not, this is clearly a pointless effort that yields useless data. It’s just a tool to spread fear, which in turn allows for the rapid implementation of the totalitarian control mechanisms required to pull off The Great Reset. Fortunately, more and more people are now starting to see through this plot.

About 45,000 scientists and doctors worldwide have already signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for the end to all lockdowns and implementation of a herd immunity approach to the pandemic, meaning governments should allow people who are not at significant risk of serious COVID-19 illness to go back to normal life, as the lockdown approach is having a devastating effect on public health — far worse than the virus itself. The declaration states:

“Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health...

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to coronavirus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this focused protection.”

The declaration points out that current lockdown policies will result in excess mortality in the future, primarily among younger people and the working class. As of November 5, 2020, The Great Barrington Declaration had been signed by 11,791 medical and public health scientists, 33,903 medical practitioners and 617,685 “concerned citizens.”

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Remember: The NY Times Lie Factory Declared Absolutely NO Vote Fraud

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The Vote Fraud is all over America, it leaps out in huge quantities and the NY Times denies the obvious.  The Fraud is Overwhelming. It is so massive it is suffocating.

Here is the reported arrest of Biden campaign official Dallas Jones and two Texas Democrat officials for “orchestrating a ballot harvesting scheme.”

See here, here, and here.

I can’t confirm whether the Texas Democrat officials are arrested or accused.

Here is a partial description of the vote fraud in Texas, which, although extensive, was not enough to steal the state for Biden:

Even conservative states run by Republicans have not been immune to Democrat fraud. In Texas, for example, Harris County, home to left-leaning Houston, appears to be the epicenter of most of the fraud. Raymond Stewart, a poll watcher and retired police officer, submitted a sworn affidavit to the district attorney about a Houston precinct judge — identified in news reports as a Democrat — and election staff who unlawfully used a “large stack of Texas driver’s licenses” to allow people to vote illegally at a “drive-through voting window.”

“Staff would come inside from the drive-through voting booth and scan a driver’s license from someone outside and get a ticket and return outside,” Stewart said. “But sometimes a staff member would search through the stack of driver’s license on the table, then scan it, receive a ticket and also go outside to the drive-through booth. As a Police Officer, I quickly became suspicious that they were committing a crime by having the unattended D.L.’s just sitting on the table and that possible voting crimes were being committed using these forms of ID.”

The problems in Texas appear to go very deep. The state political director for Joe Biden’s campaign, Dallas Jones, has been accused in affidavits filed at the Texas Supreme Court of operating a massive, illegal ballot-harvesting scheme involving as many as 700,000 ballots. The affidavits making the accusations, filed by a former FBI agent and retired police officer, allege that Jones was also ordering those ballots to be filled out in the names of homeless, dead, and elderly people. National File broke the story.

“This scheme involves voter fraud on a massive scale,” explained retired Houston Police Department Captain Mark Aguirre in his sworn statement. Using interviews, documents, and other information, Aguirre publicly identified Jones, Texas State Senator Borris Miles, political consultant Gerald Womack, and Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis. “This entire operation is being run by the elite politicians of the Democrat Party in Houston/Harris County,” the retired lawman explained, addiang that he had video evidence as well.

Project Veritas also released video footage from San Antonio suggesting electoral fraud there, with somebody “helping” an elderly citizen to change her votes from Republican to Democrat. “What’s shown in the video is shocking and should alarm all Texans who care about election integrity,” Texas Attorney General Paxton said in a statement. “We are aggressively investigating the serious allegations and potential crimes that Project Veritas’s documentary audio and video recordings shed light on today.” See here.

Sidney Powell in a Fox News interview says the evidence of fraud is overwhelming and is so extensive that it overturns the entire election.  She says she has signed affidavits  from a software designer who attests that the software was designed for stealing elections.  She says it was used to switch millions of votes.

The post Remember: The NY Times Lie Factory Declared Absolutely NO Vote Fraud appeared first on LewRockwell.

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The Election Vote: The Deeper You Look, the Worse it Gets

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In this article, I’m going to discuss two companies, Dominion, and ES&S. I would advise investigators not to go to sleep on ES&S.

I’m not going to repeat all charges that have been leveled at Dominion Voting Systems. But look at what happened in Texas, when the Secretary of State had an analysis done in the fall of 2019.

The report was titled, “Voting System Examination Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite 5.5-A.” [1] It was prepared by James Sneeringer, Ph.D. Designee of the Attorney General of Texas.

The devil is in the details, so here they are:

“Adjudication results can be lost. In the [prior] January exam, during adjudication of the ballots in the test election, one of the Dominion representatives made a series of mistakes that caused the entire batch of adjudication results to be lost. We did not see this problem again during this exam, but the adjudication system is unchanged, so this vulnerability is still present. Recommendation: Certification [approval of the Dominion system] should be denied.”

“Installation is complex, error prone, and tedious. I counted 184 steps in their installation manual before deciding to estimate the remaining steps. I estimate a total of about 500 steps are required to install the software. I did not count steps that merely said something like ‘Click OK’ or ‘Click Next.’ This installation manual is 412 pages long with an additional 23 pages of front matter — contents, lists of figures, and the like…Recommendation: Certification should be denied.”

“Test Voting. During our voting test, we discovered that some party names and proposition text were not displayed, and one scanner was not accepting some ballots. These all turned out to be errors Dominion made in setting up the standard test election used by the Secretary of State. In the case of the scanner, it had accidently been configured not to accept machine-marked ballots. The other problems were caused by leaving some fields empty during election setup, something that the EMS software should not allow, or at least highlight. Recommendation: Certification should be denied.”

“Misleading Message. The ballot-marking devices incorrectly informed voters that they were casting their ballots, when in fact they were only printing them. The ballots are not be counted until they were scanned on a different device. Recommendation: Certification should be denied.”

“USB Port Vulnerability. The ICX ballot-marking device has an indicator light on top to show poll workers when the station is in use. That light is connected by a USB port. When Brian Mechler’s phone was attached to the USB port, the ICX scanned the files on his phone and did not complain, although Dominion later showed that the event was logged. When a USB drive with files was inserted, the ICX sometimes complained and sometimes did not, apparently according to the content of the USB drive and whether it was present when the ICX was first powered up or inserted later.”

The examiner’s final conclusion: “I cannot recommend certification. Computer systems should be designed to prevent or detect human error whenever possible and minimize the consequences of both human mistakes and equipment failure. Instead the Democracy Suite 5.5-A is fragile and error prone. In my opinion it should not be certified for use in Texas.”

If that doesn’t give pause for thought, nothing will.

Now we turn to ES&S, another voting machine company in use in the US. It has a long track record. The source here is a PROPUBLICA article, “The Market for Voting Machines Is Broken. This Company Has Thrived in It,” [2] dated October 28, 2019, by Jessica Huseman. Key excerpts:

“In Georgia, where the race for governor had drawn national interest amid concerns about election integrity, ES&S-owned technology was in use when more than 150,000 voters inexplicably did not cast a vote for lieutenant governor. In part because the aged ES&S-managed machines did not produce paper backups, it wasn’t clear whether mechanical or human errors were to blame. Litigation surrounding the vote endures to this day.”

“In Indiana, ES&S’ systems were plagued by mishaps at the local level. In Johnson County, for instance, the company’s brand-new machines faltered in ways that made it difficult to know whether some people had voted more than once.”

“The vote in 2006 in Sarasota, Florida…There, ES&S machines lost around 18,000 votes; it is still unclear why. The loss was far more than the margin of victory, and a lawsuit followed that ultimately resolved little. The company said in a statement that a variety of testing done on its machines supports its claim that the devices were not at fault, but the county wound up canceling its dealings with the firm shortly afterward.”

“Despite such stumbles, ES&S — based in Omaha, Nebraska, and employing roughly 500 people — controls around 50% of the country’s election system market, the company says, meaning that some 70 million Americans vote using the company’s equipment.”

“A ProPublica examination of ES&S shows it has fought hard to keep its dominance in the face of repeated controversies. The company has a reputation among both its competitors and election officials for routinely going to court when it fails to win contracts or has them taken away, suing voting jurisdictions, rivals, advocates for greater election security and others.”

“ES&S files many such suits. In May 2016, for instance, ES&S unsuccessfully sued Colorado over its decision to buy statewide uniform voting equipment after the state moved to a vote-by-mail system. The company also sued Colorado county over the issue, and it lost these cases as well.”

“In Wisconsin, after the 2016 national elections, ES&S sued to prevent Jill Stein, a Green Party candidate for president, from obtaining information about its machines that might have assisted her in her bid for a recount. A judge rejected ES&S’ argument that submitting to Stein’s request would compromise its proprietary technology.”

“ES&S has also threatened lawsuits against voting rights activists. In 2018, it warned it would sue Audit USA — a small nonprofit that advocates for election security — for posting the company’s manuals for scanners online (it hasn’t done so). The same year, the company repeatedly said it would initiate litigation against security researchers who bought old ES&S machines and attempted to hack them at a conference on cybersecurity. The company also sent letters to its own customers, saying it would sue them if they participated in such conferences or provided ES&S equipment to the events.”

HOW DO YOU LIKE ALL THAT?

I’ll close for now with excerpts from an American Thinker article by Jay Valentine, “Big Data to the Rescue: The Electoral College Meets Data Pattern,” [3] November 13, 2020:

“Here’s the summary: For the election returns in many precincts to happen the way they did, Biden would have to flip a coin 1,000 times and get heads every time. We aren’t done here.”

“He would also have to do it over and over again, in scores, perhaps hundreds of precincts.”

“Welcome to big data analysis.”

“Industrial fraud is always discovered with statistical analysis… Industrial fraud is pretty cool because from the outside, it is invisible…”

“When subject to statistical analysis against known patterns, industrial fraud stands out like a dinosaur walking through a field of peanut butter. It is unmistakable.”

“Is such analysis proof?”

“Yes, it is proof that there is an anomaly of such proportions that it must be investigated. And this isn’t hard. Remember, all the data you need to do the analysis is after-the-fact voting data. You do not need to see a single ballot.”

“…you just need to know that in precinct after precinct, there is an unmistakable pattern that the more people vote for Trump over Biden the greater the number of Trump votes the counting machines scoop from Trump to Biden.”

“The pattern [of vote-flipping] is one that can only be done by machines, like a computer. There are too many transactions, with too straight a line, across too many precincts, to be the guys with the ballot boxes arriving in the middle of the night. They are extra fraud.”

BUT OF COURSE, NOTHING STRANGE HAPPENED IN THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. NO REASON TO INVESTIGATE. JUST WATCH THE NEWS NETWORKS. THEY’LL TELL YOU BIDEN IS THE PRESIDENT. EVERYTHING IS FINE. GO BACK TO SLEEP. YOUR MASTERS ARE IN CHARGE.

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SOURCES:

[1] https://www.sos.texas.gov/elections/forms/sysexam/oct2019-sneeringer.pdf

[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-market-for-voting-machines-is-broken-this-company-has-thrived-in-it

[3] https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/big_data_to_the_rescue_the_electoral_college_meets_data_pattern_science.html

Reprinted with permission from Jon Rappoport’s blog.

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Illegitimate President

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“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” – H.L. Mencken

It’s now almost two weeks since the most crooked, rigged, fraudulent election in U.S. history. The engineered elevation of a handsy, sniffy, senile, empty portal, trojan horse by billionaire oligarchs, their Silicon Valley techno-geek social media censorship police, and the corporate media propaganda mouthpieces looks like it might succeed. Republican cucks like Romney and even the pliable Fox News talking heads have acquiesced to this third attempt during this ongoing coup like obedient lapdogs positioning themselves to profit from doing the bidding of their global oligarch masters.

Make no mistake. There was a master plan implemented by dark forces to steal this election, overriding the will of the American people. The anger of 70 million Americans is perfectly captured in the above quote from Mencken. If Trump and his allies are unable to prove fraud and overturn this sham of an election, myself and millions more will treat the Kamala Harris administration as illegitimate and do everything in our power to resist and insure its failure.

The level of fake news media propaganda about the “most secure fairest election in history”, and the vociferous blatant systematic censorship by Twitter, Facebook, and Google of anyone who dares to question the approved narrative of “a mostly fraud free election” on their social media platforms is all the proof a critical thinking person needs to realize this election was stolen by left wing oligarchs. Trump was too erratic, uncontrollable and resistant to their new world order agenda of climate extremism, population control through fear, communist economics, cash elimination, and ruling through a technocratic Big Brother surveillance state.

Trump, through naivety, foolishness or carelessness, allowed enemies of his administration to wield power and influence for the last four years. He chose swamp creature after swamp creature for key cabinet positions and seemed surprised when they stabbed him in the back. He failed to purge Obama loyalists holding middle level positions in the FBI, CIA, Dept of Defense, and numerous other agencies. They actively worked to subvert everything he tried to accomplish.

The military industrial complex apparatchiks are cackling like hyenas about how they misled him about troop levels in Syria and continue to ignore his orders to bring the troops home from Afghanistan. Obama and his gang of traitorous thieves conspired to bring Trump down before he assumed office and continued for the entire four years, assisted by a feckless mainstream media of faux journalists peddling fake news and disinformation fed to them by the Deep State coup collaborators.

It was creepy Joe Biden who suggested using the Logan Act to entrap General Flynn and derail the Trump presidency before it began. He was part of the plot, along with Obama, Clinton, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, and a myriad of other slimy toadies doing the bidding of their treacherous back-stabbing superiors. Joe Biden, in addition to being a senile old pervert and the father of coke addict son who slept with his dead brother’s wife, is a racist and a traitor to this country.

Along with his dishonorably discharged deviant son and his gold-digging brother, he shook down foreign leaders and sold his influence for millions of dollars. This was all revealed on Hunter’s laptop, and completely memory-holed by Jake Tapper and the contingent of Deep State media hacks pretending to be journalists. Biden was selected by the shadowy billionaires constituting the invisible government, who really run the show, as a pretend viable candidate for president – whose job was to shut up, stay in the basement, and let them do the vote rigging to hand him the presidency. So now Mencken has been proven right once again.

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” – H.L. Mencken

The “resistance”, also known as left-wing Deep State corporate fascists, have been conducting an ongoing coup since before Trump took the oath of office and it has continued through this rigged election. It has been a planned, coordinated and well-funded coup d’état against a duly elected president and the wishes of the American people. The Steele Dossier was a ploy by Hillary Clinton and her minions to undermine Trump. The accusations of Russian collusion were false and promulgated by CNN, MSNBC, NYT and Washington Post because they were active participants in attempting to undermine the Trump presidency, in collusion with Obama, the FBI, CIA and State Dept.

The Mueller investigation was a complete fraud and nothing more than a diversionary tactic from the true criminality of Obama, Clinton, Comey, Clapper and Brennan. The impeachment scheme engineered by pandemic Pelosi and bug-eyed Schiff head was based upon the fact that Joe Biden illegally interfered in the investigation of a foreign country to protect his crackhead son’s multi-million-dollar Burisma scam. It failed so miserably, not a word was spoken about the sham during the election.

Then, like manna from heaven for down in the dumps left wing billionaires, the Wu-flu was released upon the world by Biden’s communist pals in China. With the unemployment rate at 3.5%, the economy growing strongly, the stock market at all-time highs, the failed impeachment farce over, and a Democrat slate of losers, nutjobs, and communists competing for their nomination, Trump was a shoe-in to win re-election.

Hanoi Jane Fonda told the truth shortly before the election, “I just think Covid is God’s gift to the left.” As Obama’s best buddy Rahm Emmanuel once said, the left never lets a good crisis go to waste. The billionaire oligarchs Soros, Bloomberg, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Dorsey, along with the Deep State democrats and Never-Trumpers, and their propaganda media mouthpieces hatched a plan to weaponize a flu that has a 99.7% survival rate.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken

The anti-Trump coalition was reinvigorated by the opportunity to use the pandemic to wrestle power away from Trump by any means necessary. Under the cover of Covid, the Constitution was shredded and Democrat governors, mayors and bureaucrat drones in swing states changed the rules of the game to encourage and sanction voter fraud. The fix was in. Even though Americans could “safely” stand in long lines at Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot, our left-wing Governors across the land declared it unsafe to vote in person.

They had to save lives by instituting mass mail-in voting with absolutely no safeguards against fraud. Matching signatures was racist. Requiring ID verification was racist. Their voter rolls were filled with dead people and people who had moved years ago. They all received ballots. Biden received 100% of the dead vote. Over the summer, BLM and ANTIFA terrorists were encouraged to “peacefully protest” in large groups while looting and burning left wing run cities in swing states. Looting and rioting was safe, but going to church, school or voting in person was too dangerous.

You could see the plan to dispose of Trump developing as we approached Fall. Soros, Bloomberg, and their ilk poured hundreds of millions into key states to influence the vote, but the real work was being done behind the curtain. Left wing Secretaries of State in the key battleground states were issuing edicts without legislature approval to insure a Biden victory. While Hiden Biden took long naps in his basement bunker, his handlers took care of laying the groundwork for a successful election embezzlement.

When Pelosi wasn’t breaking her own lockdown rules by getting her hair did, she was blocking any bill that would help the economy recover before the election. Fauci, the CDC, and the medical industrial complex Trump haters then pushed the Covid fear into overdrive. They rolled-out mass testing with a faulty PCR test to drive up cases to all-time highs just before the election.

The MSM talking heads then did their part to hyperventilate about the coming mass death event unless sleepy Joe was put in charge. His brilliant plan of more masking and more lockdowns would surely work this time, just like they worked so well in Europe. The billionaire oligarchs propping up their corpse of a candidate understood Mencken’s truths about the ignorance of the masses.

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” – H.L. Mencken

The entire Deep State apparatus was working in coordination to steal this election and override the wishes of the majority of Americans, because they know what is best for our country – government control of every aspect of our lives and a Great Reset to a new world order run by global elite oligarchs.

The hobgoblin of Covid cases has been the cudgel used to beat the masses into submission and invoke fear into those incapable of independent thought, who have been so dumbed down by the government education system they can’t understand the data right in front of their faces. If you conduct a record number of highly faulty tests, you will get a record number of false cases – not sicknesses. Elon Musk took the exact same test four times in one day and tested positive twice and negative twice.

The chart below is so scary if you can’t add, subtract, multiply or divide. The only thing that should matter to people are deaths “FROM” Covid. The fact is only 6% of the 245,000 deaths were from Covid. The other 94% died from something else, while they had Covid. We know the average age of death is 80, higher than the overall average age of death. They should have a death classification of “FROM Cuomo”. We know for a fact 50% of the deaths were in nursing homes where Cuomo, Murphy, Wolf, and Whitmer sentenced senior citizens to death by sending infected patients into the nursing homes.

We know virtually no one under the age of 50 dies from this over-hyped flu, but government school teacher unions refuse to teach children in person. Only 450 deaths between 5 and 24 years old is far less than the annual flu deaths in this age group. Anything to help derail Trump’s re-election chances has been implemented.

Back to the chart. In April the deaths per case was 7%. Two months-ago the deaths per case was 2.1%. Today the deaths per case is 0.8%. For the math challenged, the death rate has plunged by 88% since April. Have you heard that great news from Fredo on CNN or Madcow on MSNBC?  It’s pretty clear approximately 8% of the U.S. population has been infected by this flu. That’s 26 million people. The 245,000 deaths are less than 1%. Shockingly, that is the exact same death rate of the annual flu, as documented by our beloved CDC:

CDC estimates that influenza was associated with more than 35.5 million illnesses, more than 16.5 million medical visits, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths during the 2018–2019 influenza season.

It’s the flu bro!!!! – And you have a 99.7% chance of not dying from this scary virus.

Does anyone really think it was a coincidence Fauci and Pfizer withheld the results of their vaccination trial until a few days after the election? Do you think that news would have swayed some votes? What I have realized is there are no coincidences. This is all part of the plan. Is it a coincidence that Nancy Pelosi’s former chief of staff is a lobbyist for Dominion or that Feinstein’s husband was a major investor? Is it a coincidence Dominion voting machines were rolled out in every swing state, even though Democrat Senators in December 2019 questioned the security of these machines?

Despite the rigged polls purporting to show a Biden landslide and a blue wave, utilized to depress the Trump vote, and the hundreds of millions spent by the billionaire elitists, it was clear Trump was going to win on election night at 2:00 am. Dorsey and Zuckerberg had been working like madmen during the last week before the election suppressing and censoring the truth about Hunter Biden and the Biden crime family adventures around the globe. But it looked like all that money and effort was going to fail.

Then another non-coincidence occurred in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin, as they all simultaneously stopped counting votes for a few hours, when Trump had commanding leads in all four states. Mysteriously, as soon as counting resumed, an avalanche of Biden votes began pouring in. Republican poll watchers were given the boot or not allowed access to witness the vote counting. Machines “accidentally” switched thousands of Trump votes to Biden in Michigan. Bins of votes arrived in the wee hours of the morning under cover of darkness.

Data experts analyzing the vote counts show the chances of such a one-sided distribution in Biden’s favor was mathematically impossible. The results in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta are skewed so far out of line with the rest of their states and the country, the only explanation is massive fraud. The frantic level of pushback from the corporate media and social media censorship police is proof the claims are true. Trump was right when he said “Bad things happen in Philadelphia”. Was the CIA Hammer program used against Trump? We know the CIA brass hates him. Were the Dominion machines programmed to switch votes from Trump to Biden? We may never find out.

Trump’s only hope at this point is for his lawyers and data analysts to prove this level of fraud occurred. As Mencken profoundly stated:

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.” – H.L. Mencken

I’ve come to the conclusion those who run our government from the shadows are dishonest, insane, intolerable and evil. If the American people allow this coup to succeed and continue to believe the lies they are being told about Covid and the communist agenda of the left, they will deserve to get it good and hard, as Mencken predicted when pondering democracy. Honoring thieves and liars, while detesting those who tell them the truth, is where we find ourselves today.

Those on the verge of gaining power want to rule over you. Freedom, liberty, free speech, and the 2^nd Amendment are considered dangerous by these tyrants. These elitists want a global reset where you are nothing but a serf who will be given what they decide and told to shut up and obey. Otherwise they will destroy your ability to earn a living and will publicly shame you. If they can steal the two Georgia senate seats, and they will use any means necessary to do so, they will fundamentally attempt to destroy this country. For those who don’t believe these left-wing communist radicals would ever go as far as they bloviate on social media, heed the words of someone who experienced it first-hand in a gulag.

“All of the Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We have arrived at a key juncture in this Fourth Turning. In my October article Fourth Turning Election Year Crisis I anticipated the current state of affairs.

“I do not believe either side will accept the outcome of the election and will treat the victor as illegitimate. Once that mindset gains control, only violent conflict can result.”

Based on my observations of fraud, I will not consider Biden a legitimate president if he is appointed by the oligarchs in January. If Trump is able to overturn this blatant fraudulent outcome, the left and their BLM and ANTIFA mercenaries will lose their minds – burning, looting, rioting and attacking defenseless white people. The violence kicked off at the Washington DC March for Trump, with the low-life left wing terrorists sucker punching old people, women and families with kids.

When they picked the wrong victim, they got the shit kicked out of them. This was only a prelude to what is coming. As the intensity of hatred between the 70 million Trump supporters and the 70 million AOC, Sanders, Pelosi, Harris, Soros contingent ratchets up to war level, this will become a shooting conflict. Assassination of politicians, bankers, and oligarchs is a likely next step. The intensity of conflict will only ramp up from here.

I’ve been wondering how Trump could be the Grey Champion if he was to lose the election. As he refuses to concede and continues to fight against this election fraud chapter of this four-year long coup, it becomes clear that even if he is forcibly removed from office, he will become the real resistance. This Fourth Turning is resembling our first Civil War. Both sides were led by men from the Prophet generation (Lincoln & Davis), so both could be classified as Grey Champions. Biden is Silent Generation and Harris is Gen X, so Trump remains the Grey Champion.

With his bully pulpit, Twitter account, mass rallies, a potential for TNN (Trump News Network), and 70 million dedicated followers who believe he was robbed, Trump can essentially create an alternative presidency. Every decision or policy from Harris/Biden will be contested by Trump. Imagine the fireworks if he chooses to hold a counter rally in DC on inauguration day. The pussy hat wearing lefties did so in 2017. Paybacks are a bitch.

I see two potential triggers for the coming violent upheaval. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump regarding the coordinated election fraud, the left will go berserk, but this time the Trump supporters will fight back. If Trump is unsuccessful and the wizards of fraud are able to steal the two Georgia Senate seats, the left will try to implement their radical takeover of the country by packing the Supreme Court and adding Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. as states.

If they successfully seize power, they have no intention of ever relinquishing it. They will work with their global elite brotherhood to institute their desired global reset. The right will either surrender and accept their fate as slaves or violently fight back. Trump will be provoking conflict and leading the resistance to the illegitimate Harris/Biden regime. Since Harris/Biden is controlled by warmongering statists, one cannot rule out a foreign conflict added to the mix. This civic chaos and global disorder will be exacerbated by the financial collapse caused by the toppling of the global debt Ponzi scheme.

This four-year coup attempt has radicalized millions of liberty-loving, critical thinking people who love their country, but now hate those hijacking their government. We are tired of seeing our country debauched. Good people who are driven to despair and feel they are backed into a corner are dangerous, and heavily armed.

If you are not armed, it is time to do so. Starve the beast. Do business with locals using cash. Reduce your footprint. Get out of debt. Become anti-fragile. Resist every mandate issued by dictatorial politicians and low IQ government drones. Figure out who you can depend upon and know your enemy. Do not associate with anyone who voted for Harris/Biden. Only tough choices await. Mencken’s time for slitting throats seems to be rapidly approaching. This is how Fourth Turnings roll.

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.” – H.L. Mencken

Reprinted with permission from The Burning Platform.

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Covid Vaccine

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Viruses work by getting their genetic material injected into a cell where the cell’s own DNA transcription system gets hijacked to produce many copies of the virus. The illness is the symptoms this causes and in the case of covid-19 range from none to mild; deaths are in people with co-morbidities, but the worldwide freakout has let governments run wild. Every week since the ‘pandemic’ was declared has seen more influenza deaths. Wrecking the world wide economy was criminal.

The COVID vaccine according to Reuters:

“Moderna’s data provide further validation of the promising but previously unproven mRNA platform, which turns the human body into a vaccine factory by coaxing cells to make virus proteins that the immune system sees as a threat and attacks.”

The clinical trial for Moderna worked on 90 patients. I am not sure I want to have government mRNA injected into my cells. My experience in healthcare is grim. Doctors do whatever they want to patients and the results, often bad, usually come later. Healthcare is the only business where killing the customer is an acceptable outcome.

Some states are circulating potential laws that make covid vaccines mandatory.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a signalling system for metabolism in cells, I prefer the original equipment which works much better.

My 21 years in healthcare taught me that if you are offered a prescription, which is almost a reflex with doctors, demand generics, medicines that have been proven to work on millions patients. The Moderna clinical trial is statistical bullshit. Healthcare even has their own math called ‘biostatistics’ so they can extrapolate 95 cases to the whole human race. No thanks.

“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~Albert Einstein

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THE PAUSE IN DOMINION VOTES IN SWING STATES TO COUNT AND THEN OVERCOME THROUGH FRAUD

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THE PAUSE IN DOMINION VOTES IN SWING STATES TO COUNT AND THEN OVERCOME THROUGH FRAUD

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THE PAUSE IN DOMINION VOTES IN SWING STATES TO COUNT AND THEN OVERCOME THROUGH FRAUD

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THE PAUSE IN DOMINION VOTES IN SWING STATES TO COUNT AND THEN OVERCOME THROUGH FRAUD

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Rapid Testing Is Less Accurate Than the Government Wants to Admit

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by Lisa Song

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The promise of antigen tests emerged like a miracle this summer. With repeated use, the theory went, these rapid and cheap coronavirus tests would identify highly infectious people while giving healthy Americans a green light to return to offices, schools and restaurants. The idea of on-the-spot tests with near-instant results was an appealing alternative to the slow, lab-based testing that couldn’t meet public demand.

By September, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had purchased more than 150 million tests for nursing homes and schools, spending more than $760 million. But it soon became clear that antigen testing — named for the viral proteins, or antigens, that the test detects — posed a new set of problems. Unlike lab-based, molecular PCR tests, which detect snippets of the virus’s genetic material, antigen tests are less sensitive because they can only detect samples with a higher viral load. The tests were prone to more false negatives and false positives. As problems emerged, officials were slow to acknowledge the evidence.

With the benefit of hindsight, experts said the Trump administration should have released antigen tests primarily to communities with outbreaks instead of expecting them to work just as well in large groups of asymptomatic people. Understanding they can produce false results, the government could have ensured that clinics had enough for repeat testing to reduce false negatives and access to more precise PCR tests to weed out false positives. Government agencies, which were aware of the tests’ limitations, could have built up trust by being more transparent about them and how to interpret results, scientists said.

When health care workers in Nevada and Vermont reported false positives, HHS defended the tests and threatened Nevada with unspecified sanctions until state officials agreed to continue using them in nursing homes. It took several more weeks for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to issue an alert on Nov. 3 that confirmed what Nevada had experienced: Antigen tests were prone to giving false positives, the FDA warned.

“Part of the problem is this administration has continuously played catch-up,” said Dr. Abraar Karan, a physician at Harvard Medical School. It was criticized for not ensuring enough PCR tests at the beginning, and when antigen tests became available, it shoved them at the states without a coordinated plan, he said.

If you tested the same group of people once a week without fail, with adequate double-checking, then a positive test could be the canary in the coal mine, said Dr. Mark Levine, commissioner of Vermont’s Health Department. “Unfortunately the government didn’t really advertise it that way or prescribe it” with much clarity, so some people lost faith.

HHS and the FDA did not respond to requests for comment.

Types of COVID-19 Tests

• PCR: a very accurate, lab-based test that can take days to process and report results. The test detects the virus’s genetic material.

• Antigen: a quick, on-the-spot test that’s less sensitive than PCR but good at identifying people who are most likely to infect others.

• Antibody: a test that tells you if you’ve had the virus in the past but doesn’t tell you if you’re infected now.

The scientific community remains divided on the potential of antigen tests.

Epidemic control is the main argument for antigen testing. A string of studies show that antigen tests reliably detect high viral loads. Because people are most infectious when they have high viral loads, the tests will flag those most likely to infect others. Modeling also shows how frequent, repeated antigen testing may be better at preventing outbreaks than highly sensitive PCR tests, if those tests are used infrequently and require long wait times for results. So far, there are no large scale, peer-reviewed studies showing how the antigen approach has curbed outbreaks on the ground.

People need to realize that without rapid testing, we’re living in a world where many people are unknowingly becoming superspreaders, Karan said. About 40% of infections are spread by asymptomatic people with high viral loads, so antigen tests, however imperfect, shouldn’t be dismissed, he said.

Even those who are more skeptical said they can be helpful with a targeted approach directed at lower-risk situations like schools, or outbreaks in rural communities where PCR is impractical, rather than nursing homes where a single mistake could set off a chain of deaths.

It is “completely irresponsible” to take a less-accurate test and say it applies to all situations, said Melissa Miller, director of the clinical microbiology lab at the University of North Carolina.

There’s no precedent for the government to bet this much on a product before it’s been thoroughly vetted, said Matthew Pettengill, scientific director of clinical microbiology at Thomas Jefferson University. “They put the cart before the horse, and we still can’t see the horse.”

The Government Quickly Embraced an Unproven Test

During a public health crisis, the FDA can issue emergency use authorizations to make tests available that might otherwise have been subjected to many months of scrutiny before being approved. The three most popular antigen tests in the U.S., from Abbott Laboratories, Quidel and Becton, Dickinson, commonly known as BD, had to submit far less proof of success than is usually required.

FDA gave the first authorization to Quidel on May 8 based on data from 209 positive and negative samples. BD got its permit July 2 with a total of 226 samples and Abbott in late August with 102. Outside of a pandemic, the agency might otherwise have required hundreds more samples; in 2018, BD’s antigen test for the flu provided data on 736 samples.

There’s no excuse for the small pool of data, particularly for Abbott, Pettengill said. At the start of the pandemic, the FDA authorized PCR tests based on as few as 60 samples because it was difficult to find confirmed cases. By the time Abbott got its authorization in August, it was “a completely different ballgame.” Abbott’s validation document states the company collected swabs from patients at seven sites. Given the case counts over the summer, it should have only taken a few days to collect many hundreds of samples, Pettengill said.

Abbott didn’t respond to requests for comment. Quidel pointed ProPublica to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine that explained how regular antigen testing can contain the pandemic by identifying those who are most infectious.

“We have full confidence in the performance” of our test, Kristen Cardillo, BD’s vice president of global communication, said in an email. BD “completed one of the most geographically broad” clinical trials for any antigen test on the market, she added, by “collecting and analyzing 226 samples from 21 different clinical trial sites across 11 states.”

The day after the Abbott test was authorized, HHS placed a huge bet on it, buying 150 million tests.

Then, it gave institutions like nursing homes advice on how to use them off-label, in a way in which they were untested and unproven.

The three tests are authorized for the most straightforward cases: people with COVID-19 symptoms in the first week of symptoms. That’s how they were validated. They produced virtually no false positives that way and were 84% to 97% as sensitive as lab tests, meaning they caught that range of the samples deemed positive by PCR.

Yet HHS allowed their use for large-scale asymptomatic screening without fully exploring the consequences, Pettengill said.

A recent study, not yet peer reviewed, found the Quidel test detected over 80% of cases when used on symptomatic people and those with known exposures to the virus, but only 32% among people without symptoms, The New York Times reported.

The HHS encourages nursing homes that can’t get access to PCR tests to use antigen tests, even on asymptomatic people. The agency suggested repeat testing to reduce false negatives but didn’t mention false positives.

An October survey found that nearly a third of nursing homes had left the federally provided antigen tests untouched, The Wall Street Journal reported. Staff cited time-consuming paperwork for federal reporting requirements and skepticism about their accuracy.

“I think a lot of the trust was lost, unfortunately,” Karan said.

“Be Prepared for Some ‘Pressure’”

As antigen tests began to give false positive results in nursing homes, state public health officials in Vermont and Nevada pushed back. But HHS officials overruled their concerns and pressured them to keep using the tests.

In July, an urgent care clinic in Manchester, Vermont, discovered that, of 64 patients (mostly asymptomatic) who the Quidel test said were positive, only four, all symptomatic, got a positive PCR result. As reported by the Vermont alt-weekly Seven Days, Quidel said the fault lay with the PCR tests. The FDA also pointed a finger at the PCR “without any foundation of evidence,” Levine, the state health commissioner, told ProPublica.

There was a potential problem related to the PCR machine’s software, but Vermont’s state lab retested the samples after upgrading the system and found no change in results, Levine said. State officials also conducted pop-up testing in the Manchester region and found just a handful of positives out of 1,600 tests, he said, proving that there was no outbreak in the community.

Levine said his health agency ended up labeling the 60 samples as “discordant” instead of “false positives” and left them out of the official case count. “We didn’t want hard feelings,” he said. “I do think this administration wanted to show it was doing something ... and this [antigen test] is one way to demonstrate that.”

The federal government defended Quidel again in early October. The Times reported that Nevada’s Health Department ordered nursing homes to stop using all antigen tests after reviewing results from 3,725 tests. Nursing homes had double-checked 39 samples the BD and Quidel tests flagged as positive, but 23 of them tested negative via PCR. Nevada’s letter noted that it only learned about the problem because the state chose to go above and beyond federal guidelines: The FDA had said there was no need to double-check positive results. State officials told nursing homes to continue using PCR to fulfill testing requirements.

Cardillo, the BD spokesperson, said a “very small number” of the 11,250 nursing homes using BD tests reported higher than expected false positives, and “we are conducting thorough investigations into those cases.”

When an official from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services asked why the state adopted a ban, a Nevada health facilities inspector said false positives could put nursing home residents at risk, according to emails obtained by ProPublica via a public records request.

If someone tests positive on an antigen test, the nursing home may sequester the patient with other residents who are truly infected, the Nevada official, Bradley Waples, wrote. If that person later has a negative PCR test, then the faulty diagnosis will have placed them “in danger of contracting the virus by introducing them to a room full of actual positive residents.”

His email didn’t explain whether anyone had been infected that way. A spokesperson from the Nevada Health Department declined to comment.

In one nursing home, the antigen tests found seven positives out of 35 samples, yet all seven tested negative by PCR, Waples wrote. Two other states had reported similar false positive problems, he added.

“Thanks Brad,” the CMS official replied. “It’ll be interesting to see what HHS does with this information. Be prepared for some ‘pressure.’”

That pressure arrived two days later in a letter from HHS, where Assistant Secretary Brett Giroir ordered Nevada to rescind the ban. You “must cease immediately or appropriate action will be taken against those involved,” he wrote. Nevada complied.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Giroir’s letter cited some of the key arguments for antigen tests, including their ability to detect those who are most infectious. Yet the agency’s reasoning glosses over many unknowns. Some people can become acutely ill without ever showing high viral loads, or only doing so briefly, said Miller, the North Carolina scientist. Those with lower viral loads may still be able to infect others, and the data is murkier for asymptomatic people, she added.

“I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but we’re not fully understanding how these tests perform in certain populations, and yet they’re being used,” Miller said.

“It’s a test, yes, but there are people on the other side of that test,” she added. If you have a family member in a nursing home that’s getting false positives, it takes time to confirm results by PCR, Miller said. “These are days in which the residents and their families have an incredibly high level of anxiety and worry about their loved ones.”

America Needs a National Antigen Testing Plan

The initial vision of giving every American at-home tests every day has been slow to materialize. Many of the available antigen tests require machines to read the results or someone who’s trained to administer the test. Some states aren’t even reporting their antigen results, so it’s unclear when they’re used or how they complement PCR.

“We need a federal plan for who gets tested, with what tests ... when, how often, and what data should be reported back, and what those data pieces mean,” said Dr. Rebecca Lee Smith, an epidemiology professor at the University of Illinois.

So much remains unknown about the best way to use antigen tests, Smith added. If you have a million tests, is it better to test a million people once, or test half a million people who are at high risk twice, or test essential workers five or 10 times? “It’s how you use the tests, not just how many tests you have.”

The U.S. has never had a national testing strategy, said Dr. Ranu Dhillon, an expert on rapid testing and global health equity at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The administration’s haphazard approach to antigen tests is an extension of that larger failure, he said.

While there have not been well-publicized examples of false negatives that have led to outbreaks, one risk that’s been overlooked until recently is the probability of false positives in low-prevalence communities — places where few people have the virus, Miller said.

Even if a test is very “specific” (providing few false positives), it can flag more false positives than true positives. This happens for both PCR and antigen tests, but if antigen testing scales up to tens or hundreds of millions of tests a month, communities and institutions could get overwhelmed, Miller said.

One paper from August found that if a quarter of American school kids were tested three times a week with an antigen test that’s 98% specific, it would produce 800,000 false positives a week that need to be double checked by PCR tests. (For reference, the U.S. is processing an average of 1.4 million tests per day, nearly all of them PCR).

Miller said she’s received confused phone calls from doctors asking for advice. She helped a state task force create a flowchart that explains how to interpret antigen results and when to do repeat testing. “But why are 50 states doing this,” instead of a single clear message from the administration? Miller asked.

Karan, the Harvard physician, said federal officials need to set expectations. An employer who can’t afford PCR might welcome antigen testing, because catching 80% of infected workers would be better than catching none at all. Meanwhile, anyone who gets a single negative result shouldn’t use it as an excuse to go to a bar, he said, and they should understand they might test positive a couple days later. This is particularly crucial for the many who plan to rely on antigen tests results to clear them for Thanksgiving gatherings.

Smith said any testing plan must be paired with a strong program of contact tracing, isolation and quarantine. The reality in this country is that “just telling someone they’re positive has not been enough. There has to be a cultural shift.”

As Reuters reported, Slovakia drove down its infection rate through a mass antigen testing program that imposed strict quarantine rules. The country tested 65% of its population in one weekend, then repeated the tests in hot spots a week later. Anyone who refused testing had to stay home, while those who tested negative got certificates that let them participate in public life.

That approach wouldn’t be feasible in the U.S., Smith said. “We need to instead think about empowering and supporting people to abide by isolation and quarantine.”

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Germany Wants To Avoid "Yo-Yo Shutdown" Of Economy With 4-5 Months Of 'Severe' Lockdown

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Germany Wants To Avoid "Yo-Yo Shutdown" Of Economy With 4-5 Months Of 'Severe' Lockdown Tyler Durden Mon, 11/16/2020 - 04:15

Germany is among the latest large European countries to reimpose COVID-19 restrictions nationwide, alongside France, Germany and the UK as cases rise across the continent. 

While this has included shutting down pubs, restaurants, cafes and potentially crowded night venues, the latest restrictions stopped short of school closures or retail outlets. German officials are now signaling to the public that they should brace for more months of "severe" measures to curb the surge in cases, according to Reuters on Sunday:

Germans should brace for another 4-5 months of severe measures to halt the rise in coronavirus infections and should not expect the current rules to be eased quickly, Economy Minister Peter Altmaier told weekly Bild am Sonntag.

Germany’s economy minister said the nation should be prepared for a months-long lockdown period to address surging coronavirus caseloads.

Closed restaurant in Nuremberg, Germany via AFP/Getty Images.

Describing that "we're not out of the woods yet" Altmaier further emphasized that Berlin wants to avoid a "yo-yo shutdown" with the economy "constantly opening and closing". 

"If we don’t want days with 50,000 new infections, as was the case in France a few weeks ago, we must see through this and not constantly speculate about which measures can be relaxed again," he told a German newspaper over the weekend.

"All countries that lifted their restrictions too early have so far paid a high price in terms of human lives lost," he added.

Via Worldometers.info

Last week Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that Germans can expect a "more severe" outbreak during the second wave. "As it was the case with the Spanish flu, we now also have to expect that the second wave will be more severe," she said Wednesday.

As of Sunday Germany is on the cusp of surpassing 800,000 confirmed infections, including over 12,500 deaths, making it the 13th most infected country globally.

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"We Need A Full Investigation": WaPo Questions COVID Origins 10 Months After ZeroHedge Twitter Ban For Doing Same

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"We Need A Full Investigation": WaPo Questions COVID Origins 10 Months After ZeroHedge Twitter Ban For Doing Same Tyler Durden Sun, 11/15/2020 - 16:20

About 10 months after Zero Hedge was suspended from Twitter and ridiculed by those peddling the "official" narrative about Covid-19 for an article we published asking critical questions about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, the "mainstream" media finally appears to be asking those very same questions.

In the latest example of one of our "conspiracy theories" potentially turning into "conspiracy fact", the Washington Post published an op-ed by its Editorial Board on Saturday called "The coronavirus’s origins are still a mystery. We need a full investigation."

Just about 300 days late, guys. Good thing time isn't of the essence, we guess.

"After so much death and illness, a mystery from the first days of the novel coronavirus has yet to be solved. We still don’t understand its origins or how it became a global killer. The answers lie in China, and quite possibly beyond. The world needs a credible, impartial investigation to better prepare for future pandemics," the op-ed opens by saying.

The op-ed also notes that "no samples were taken that might prove a virus connection" from the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after the outbreak began. "The data are insufficient to settle whether the market was the contamination source, or whether it served to amplify the virus for human-to-human transmission, or both, or neither."

"The identity of the animal intermediary — if there is one — remains a puzzle," the op-ed says. Wait - if there is one? We thought the signed, sealed and delivered "official" explanation was pangolins already. What happened?

Then, to WaPo's credit, they talk about China silencing the doctors who were alarmed by the virus at first - something we wrote about and talked about extensively, as it was happening:

Last December, when the outbreak began in Wuhan, China silenced eight doctors who were alarmed by the mysterious illness that was spreading fast. Then, during critical weeks in January, provincial and central governments kept the lid on public information as the virus spread. These early coverups were telltale symptoms of China’s authoritarian party-state in action. The secrecy has left legitimate questions about whether China will ever be open about the virus origin.

And then there's the coup de grace; WaPo "goes full Zero Hedge" and asks the very same question we asked almost an entire year ago: was the Wuhan Institute of Virology involved?

Beyond the blame game, there are troubling questions in China that must be examined, including whether the coronavirus was inadvertently spread in an accident or spill from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had previously carried out research on bat coronaviruses.

The hypocrisy is stunning - though we honestly aren't surprised at this point.

As a reminder, in January 2020, shortly after we asked if "This [Is] The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic", referring to Wuhan Institute Of Virology scientist Peng Zhou (who three months later was being investigated by western spy agencies for his role in creating Covid) and some low-grade "reporter" from Buzzfeed decided to report us to Twitter for "doxxing" Zhou using publicly available information, Twitter told us our account had been suspended.

 

Recall, in September 2020, Twitter also nuked the account of "rogue" Chinese virologist, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who "shocked" the world of establishment scientists and other China sycophants, by publishing a "smoking gun" scientific paper demonstrating that the Covid-19 virus was manmade.

It was not immediately clear what justification Twitter had to suspend the scientist who, to the best of our knowledge, had just 4 tweets - none of which violated any stated Twitter policies - and the only relevant tweet being a link to her scientific paper co-written with three other Chinese scientists titled "Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route" which laid out why the Wuhan Institute of Virology had created the covid-19 virus.

For those who missed it, here is our post breaking down Dr. Yan's various allegations which twitter saw fit to immediately censor instead of allowing a healthy debate to emerge.

133 days after Twitter "permanently" banned Zero Hedge on January 31, the network reinstated us after admitting it made an error. 167 days after that, the Washington Post is asking the questions that got us banned in the first place.

We'll let our readers draw their own conclusions after letting that sink in.

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