103 Comments
Oct 10, 2023Liked by Jonathan Engler, Martin Neil, Norman Fenton

Summer 2020 Lockdown Sceptics linked to an article about mass testing for TB in blog by a Cumbrian dairy farmer. He explained how the British dairy industry learned the hard way about mass use of single tests and false positives. After culling thousands of herds and paying millions in compensation, DEFRA ‘Experts’ changed policy (Government ‘Experts’ are never wrong) to use 2 tests with differing specificity and sensitivity. The very specific one is for DEFRA inspections or to screen herds with suspected TB. If there is a positive, a very sensitive one is used, combined with the very specific one, for all the cows, to find the infected animals. The farmer, Jim Webster, in July 2020, projected that, if the government continued with Moonshot, they would frighten themselves into lockdown by the Autumn, with the inevitable deluge of false positives from mass use of a single test. I wrote to my MP, pointing out DHSC urgently needed to speak to DEFRA and learn from their experience with mass testing, before the government made a catastrophic error. I did not get a response.

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Oct 10, 2023·edited Oct 11, 2023Liked by Jonathan Engler, Martin Neil

It amuses me to review my early layman’s efforts to try to make sense of what at the time was an unfathomable overreaction by the establishment to SARS-CoV-2, for example my March 2021 article “Scotland’s unscientific mishandling of Coronavirus”, https://thinkscotland.org/2021/03/scotlands-unscientific-mishandling-of-coronavirus/.

At that time I had not yet joined the dots sufficiently to realise that the whole thing was an evil “plandemic”. Referring to the article’s FT graph of Covid-attributed deaths, I naively assumed that the Apr-May 2020 “first wave” faded out because national herd immunity had been attained, when the reality was that they ran out of old, infirm and helpless victims to subject to iatrogenic maltreatment leading to death like this unfortunate 84-year-old, perfectly well when she went into hospital but dead 29 hours later, see the Midazolam article in this monthly: https://thelightpaper.co.uk/assets/pdf/Light-37-Sept-23-Web-Final_2023-09-22-090854.pdf.

Incidentally, the build-up of deaths over the Oct-Dec 2020 period follows the typical profile of respiratory deaths in previous years, see the graph in https://dailysceptic.org/2021/01/07/what-does-endemic-covid-look-like/.

At the time I also didn’t realise that the Jan-Mar 2021 “second wave” was a fake of falsely-attributed Covid deaths, caused largely by fatally adverse reaction to the Covid jabs rolled out initially to the elderly, many with already-impaired immune systems.

By July 2022 I had joined all the dots on the “plandemic” and, for the intended benefit of friends and family, I exposed the establishment’s Covid calumny via an email to my MP, to put him on the spot. Needless to say, he didn’t reply. This also touches on the mal-engineered PCR test which is the subject of your post, see https://metatron.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-my-mp-culpable?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.

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Oct 10, 2023·edited Oct 10, 2023Liked by Martin Neil

Testing what an absolute racket... Wasted billions, and used as a tool of control...

What treachery!

For information, here's my BMJ rapid response published on 27 November 2020:

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4460/rr-2

Coronavirus mass testing - a gross waste of money and resources

Dear Editor

England's health secretary, Matt Hancock, says "Mass testing is a vital tool to help us control this virus and get life more normal".[1]

I disagree. Extraordinary amounts of money and resources are being expended on testing around the world - is this justifiable?

In Australia 9,872,011 tests have been conducted with 0.3% being positive.[2]

According to Gareth Iacobucci's report, "as at 16 November the Liverpool pilot had tested 100,000 asymptomatic people, of whom 700 (0.7%) tested positive for covid-19".[1] [3]

In the Australian and Liverpool examples, there appears to be a huge waste of resources with this mass testing, with more than 99% of the tests being negative.

How much is all this testing costing, not just money and direct resources, but also in causing disruption in people's lives, worry about results, loss of productivity etc?

A WHO report providing guidance for surveillance during an influenza pandemic, published in 2017, recommends "case-based reporting (the counting of individual cases) should cease once there is broad community transmission in a country - at this point, syndromic data from sentinel sites, hospital-based data and systematic laboratory testing should be used instead".[4]

Doesn't this mean that widespread testing of asymptomatic people should be ceased?

Surely scarce money and resources can be better targeted in the coronavirus response? As Professor Allyson Pollock says, mass screening proposals risk causing harm through "significant diversion of healthcare resources".[1]

Ongoing testing and questionable 'case' numbers are being used to implement drastic limitations on people's freedom of movement and association around the world, including lockdowns which interfere with people's right to earn their own living, to freely associate with others, to simply live their lives freely.

There must be an urgent reappraisal of the worth of mass testing.

References:

1. Gareth Iacobucci. Covid-19: Government ramps up "Moonshot" mass testing. BMJ 2020;371:m4460

2. Coronavirus (COVID-19) current situation and case numbers. Australian Government Department of Health: https://www.health.gov.au/health-alerts/covid-19/weekly-reporting As accessed 27 November 2020. (Updated link.)

3. Re "tested positive for covid-19". I argue the reference to 'covid-19' is incorrect terminology, and this should be "tested positive for SARS-CoV-2": See: Re: Covid-19 vaccines...or SARS-CoV-2 vaccines? Clarification needed. BMJ 2020;370:m3258

4. WHO guidance for surveillance during an influenza pandemic. 2017 Update: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/259886/9789241513333-eng.pdf (Updated link.)

Competing interests: No competing interests

27 November 2020

Elizabeth M Hart

Independent person investigating the over-use of vaccine products and conflicts of interest in vaccination policy

Adelaide, Australia

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Oct 10, 2023Liked by Jonathan Engler, Martin Neil

This is probably not important, but the Lancet study where they compared seven tests says "SARS-CoV was cross-detected by all assays", which is not surprising because SARS-1 and SARS-2 are like 79% similar and the N proteins, which I assume are targeted by most (if not all?) of the tests, are like 87% similar. But the package insert of the Innova LFT (I assume this is the one https://innovamedgroup.eu/en/rapid-antigen-test-for-the-qualitative-detection-of-sars-cov-2-antigen-2/ ) claims it does not cross-react with SARS-1. How can that be? What distinguishes the Innova LFT from the other LFTs? Does it target other parts of the virus? Spike maybe? If so, how would this affect the sensitivity for the later "variants" because, as we know, Spike seems much more mutative than N?

Maybe someone can enlighten me.

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In May of 2020 I wrote, “There is a pandemic, but it is a pandemic of testing, not of any disease. ‘Knowing’ which particular upper-respiratory virus one has does not change the treatment.” This is still true. I have family and friends ask me from time to time if I know where they can get test kits (I’m a retired pharmacist). When I tell them not to bother, they get angry. These are the same people who were spraying all their Amazon packages with bleach in April of 2020.

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Oct 10, 2023Liked by Martin Neil

My five cents here... In 2020/21, we have tested several LFTs - not just against PCR as was usually done at the time; in addition, we created a combined endpoint of PCR AND virus viability test - all tests where PCR and LFT results differed were applied to cell culture and we looked for the signs of developing infection in the cell culture. This was to account for the fact that PCR positivity does not by far mean infectiousness.

The results were interesting - although the best nasopharyngeal swab-based LFTs yielded approx. 70-75 % sensitivity when compared to PCR only, this improved to 96 % when compared to the combined viability+PCR endpoint. This indicates at the very least that 25% of people quarantined based on PCR were not infectious.

Further, however, we tested several saliva and anterior nose swab tests widely used in the Czech Republic at the time and the results were catastrophic - they revealed 50-80 % of individuals with the lowest CTs (i.e., the most infectious ones that you typically recognized from 20 feet away) but almost none of those who were infectious with higher CTs. If anyone is interested, the papers are here:

The best of the LFT tests: doi: 10.1080/23744235.2021.1914857

Five nasopharyngeal LFT tests: DOI: 10.3390/v13040684

Saliva/anterior nasal tests: doi: 10.3390/diagnostics11091567

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You may find this response to a FOI from the UKHSA to me once I caught them out and they sent me a document dump about LFTs etc interesting:

"Frequency more important than accuracy"

https://awkwardgit.substack.com/p/frequency-more-important-than-accuracy

"Here's a link supplied by the UKHSA in their document dump:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33219112/

Test sensitivity is secondary to frequency and turnaround time for COVID-19 screening

We therefore conclude that screening should prioritize accessibility, frequency, and sample-to-answer time; analytical limits of detection should be secondary.

and this one:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMp2025631

Rethinking Covid-19 Test Sensitivity — A Strategy for Containment

Frequent use of cheap, simple, rapid tests will accomplish that aim, even if their analytic sensitivities are vastly inferior to those of benchmark tests.

So the claim is that do enough tests often enough to get the result you want, it doesn't matter then if their accuracy is a bit hit or miss."

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Oct 10, 2023Liked by Norman Fenton

You make a great point that comparing one "test" (the LFT) against another "test" (the PCR) is of limited use unless one of the "tests" was compared against a gold standard. The only gold standard is an isolated virus. Has anyone ever taken a PCR-positive person's fluids and isolated a virus? I believe the answer is no. They only do cell culture experiments and declare that the dying cells indicates an "isolation" of a virus. Of course that is not isolation. Besides, such experiments never include a control, so the experimental procedure can be what is causing the cells to die.

The PCR "test" was never meant to be a test, as its Nobel-laureate inventor, Kary Mullis, said many times, right up until 2019 when he died.

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Wow. Nice work! This is important, a key.

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The second wave, Kent variant in the UK, was likely engineered to cover up the deaths from the vaccine rollout.

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You mention that the PCR test is "the gold standard".

Pity the UK Government doesn't agree in their own documentation:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/999866/asymptomatic-testing-for-SARS-CoV-2-using-antigen-detecting-lateral-flow-devices-evidence-from-performance-data-Oct-2020-to-May-2021.pdf

Pity that in the document above it contains the following statements:

"There is currently no gold standard test for transmissible virus "

and

"As PCR is an imperfect gold standard"

https://awkwardgit.substack.com/p/no-gold-standard-test-for-transmissible

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Oct 12, 2023Liked by Martin Neil

Scotland's Covid Zealots set up 'asymptomatic testing centres' at who knows what cost?

The media regailed us constantly with reports of cases, which presumably, relied on the LFT usage so avidly adopted by just about everyone I know.

To add to the fun,Boots is now selling a range of testing kits

https://www.boots.com/my-health-checked?queueittoken=e_sale2022uk~q_043cbcbb-30df-4725-875b-ac1852b4ae02~ts_1697090348~ce_true~rt_safetynet~h_5d296a3397a435164c267e68483b2125e8fa235b571d193b29df22721c36d888

A whole range of new tests is on its way, to reduce us all to helpless anxiety and foreboding :

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/other/supercharged-lateral-flow-style-tests-to-spot-10-different-diseases/ar-AA1hNTsz

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Oct 12, 2023·edited Oct 12, 2023Liked by Jonathan Engler, Martin Neil

I've had quite a long FOI exchange with the DHSC, MHRA and UKHSA about the repurposing of Innova LFTs that you may find interesting - all documented on my substack if you root through it towards the beginning - but here's a couple of them - one from the beginning and one from the end:

https://awkwardgit.substack.com/p/let-me-tell-you-a-story-about-lfts

https://awkwardgit.substack.com/p/ukhsa-has-replied-about-the-lft-repurposing

"from the first page of the communication from the DHSC to the MHRA the main reason they wanted it done was "because we say so" then a lot of waffle that attempts to justify it as long as you do not look at it critically."

And don't forget that the UKHSA told me officially they had NO proof that SARS-CoV-2 caused illness in humans:

https://awkwardgit.substack.com/p/ukhsa-states-that-they-have-no-proof

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One of the numerous aspects of the Covid Operation is to invent new markets for the Pharmaceutical Industry. It is impossible to underestimate the value that Pharma and the medical cartel bring to large financial investment firms. Pharmaceuticals and the "health management system" in the US is currently the largest sector of the US economy.

It has been noted for years that the Pharma "blockbuster" business model is broken beyond repair and Pharma was in terminal decline. By 2017 the Internal Rate of Return for the industry was below the cost of capital- that same year it was projected that the IRR would sink to 0% by 2020.

Circa 2020 Big Pharma was facing escalating R&D costs, skyrocketing marketing costs and were up against the patent cliff for numerous of their biggest selling products- a perfect storm.

It is also impossible to overstate how severe the economic crash of 2019 was for the Pharma Industry. Magically a phony Pandemic appeared in 2020.

The vaccine part of the plan is for the mRNA "vaccine" cash cow to be much bigger than Covid. The mRNA platform can use similar mechanisms against any imagined viral pathogen in existence (doesn't matter that it's all fraud) get the tech to market, start going down the list using "downloadable" mRNA paltforms for individualized "diseases" that they invent.

Another aspect of the Covid Operation is to codify regulatory mechanisms which allows Pharma to sidestep lengthy and costly clinical trials with the new "Bio-Pharma business model" as they are deemed no longer necessary with this "new" delivery system. This allows for greater profiteering as Phase III clinical trials account for 90% of all R&D costs for approved drugs.

Manufactured pandemics have become mammoth investment opportunities that increase the wealth of billionaires and further consolidate their power. It's all fraud. There was no viral pandemic or epidemiological emergency in 2020- it was mass medical homicide, data fraud and a series of manufactured events to get the desired results.

The "Covid-19 Crisis" was not an epidemiological event nor a medical emergency, it was and is a criminal conspiracy- an orchestrated program launched by elite Western financial interests in response to the comprehensive collapse of the Western financial systems in 2019 which itself was the result of decades long Ponzi Schemes carried out by these elites.

Covid-19 is the biggest money laundering/racketeering scheme in the history of this country and perhaps the world.

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Can we just cut the bullshit. This is a genocidal agenda enacted by the WEF fourth Reich on humanity. That’s it!🤷🏻‍♂️

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An isolate (of SARSCOV2) was never used to develop the PCR test, according to this FDA document. The PCR test was not fit for purpose as it was not configured to test for SARSCOV2 in the first place.

She tried.

from UK Lawyer Anna De Buisseret

“SHARE SHARE SHARE!!! on all platforms:

A new FDA document admits “Covid” PCR test was developed without isolated samples for test calibration, effectively admitting it’s testing for something else.

NA document just released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) openly admits that the infamous PCR test for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) was developed not with actual samples, but rather with what appears to be genetic material from a common cold virus.

In the FDA document, it is clearly stated that ordinary seasonal flu genetic material was used as the testing marker in the PCR test kits because the authorities knew that many people would test “positive” for it, thus allowing them to use these results to create the “Covid” narrative.

Its a long read but have a look for yourself and see the deception in plain sight. There is no legitimate test out there that accurately identifies the presence of SARS-CoV-2.

From the document:

“Since no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV were available for CDC use at the time the test was developed and this study conducted, assays designed for detection of the 2019-nCoV RNA were tested with characterized stocks of in vitro transcribed full length RNA (N gene; GenBank accession: MN908947.2) of known titer (RNA copies/µL) spiked into a diluent consisting of a suspension of human A549 cells and viral transport medium (VTM) to mimic clinical specimen.”

Another revelation in the document is the admission by the FDA that test results are “pooled” together to produce numbers that are inaccurate. The FDA is quite literally manufacturing data to support a false narrative.

You can DOWNLOAD IT HERE -

https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download?fbclid=IwAR0dv_DlnvLlJ-RTHZVRw07XSyZnK4VBAYxE7vjYJobjOlQi-esvG9UPWkk

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