Tag Archives: Covid-19 tests

If different labs come up with different results for the same test, what does that say about the test? From Jon Rappoport at nomorefakenews.com:

In previous articles, I’ve detailed several key reasons why the PCR test is worthless and deceptive. (PCR article archive here).

Here I discuss yet another reason: the uniformity of the test has never been properly validated. Different labs come up with different results.

Let’s start here—the reference is the NY Times, January 22, 2007, “Faith in Quick Tests Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t.”

“Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing…By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing…”

“For months, nearly everyone involved thought the medical center had had a huge whooping cough outbreak, with extensive ramifications. Nearly 1,000 health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N.H., were given a preliminary test and furloughed from work until their results were in; 142 people, including Dr. Herndon, were told they appeared to have the disease; and thousands were given antibiotics and a vaccine for protection. Hospital beds were taken out of commission, including some in intensive care.”

“Then, about eight months later, health care workers were dumbfounded to receive an e-mail message from the hospital administration informing them that the whole thing was a false alarm.”

“Now, as they look back on the episode, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists say the problem was that they placed too much faith in a quick and highly sensitive molecular test [PCR] that led them astray.”

“There are no national data on pseudo-epidemics caused by an overreliance on such molecular tests, said Dr. Trish M. Perl, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and past president of the Society of Health Care Epidemiologists of America. But, she said, pseudo-epidemics happen all the time. The Dartmouth case may have been one the largest, but it was by no means an exception, she said.”

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The Covid-19 test has so many false positives and negatives that it’s essentially useless. From Neil A. Kurtzman, M.D. at mises.org:

Imagine an articulate chief lemming bragging that not only had his followers jumped off a cliff, but that they had done so in far greater numbers than any other slice of the rodents. This is the position occupied by the US regarding testing for COVID-19.We’ve done more testing than any other country and bragged a lot about doing so; but no one seems to have survived to give a proper interpretation of the results.

To begin with, the tests currently in use do not test for the entire virus, rather they just test for various fragments of it. Many of the results are thus false, sometimes false positives and sometimes false negatives. This means one has to interpret their results with caution. Our medical authorities, to say nothing of our political ones, don’t seem to be able to do this.

All medical students are taught the basics of screening in their introductory statistics course. The problem is that most of them either didn’t go or slept through the course. The rest immediately forgot what they had learned.

When testing for anything, a medical professional needs to know the positive predicative value (PPV) of the test as well as the negative predictive value. I’ll focus on the former.

In order to know the PPV—i.e., the percent likelihood that a positive test is a true positive—the sensitivity of the test must be known as well as prevalence of the disease, at least to an approximate degree. According to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, the sensitivity of the tests for COVID-19 is about 70 percent. The prevalence in any of the tested populations is not yet known, so we cannot calculate the PPV, although we can calculate what it would be at any prevalence level we want to assume. I’ll get back to this below.

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