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Originally posted by frogmiller
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I’ll deal firstly with the comments about the inventor of the PCR Test, Kary Mullis, and the quote that is attributed to him as it often features in covid denial. Firstly, he didn’t say it and secondly, what he actually said is taken wholly out of context.
Misrepresented and taken out of context – that seems to be how conspiracy theorists roll on social media.
What Mullis said about the PCR test as a diagnostic tool was in the context of his belief – at the time – that the HIV virus was not the causative agent of AIDS. He was concerned that HIV might be a virus that was a largely benign but present in many people. It followed that he believed that the results of PCR testing for HIV in the human population would be wrongly interpreted as evidence of AIDS (or, more accurately, the presence of an infection that would lead to AIDS).
I’m sure that if you look hard enough on Twitter you will find people who says that AIDS doesn’t exist or is as a result of secret military technology that ‘they’ are using against ‘we the people’, but I think you’ll struggle to find any serious scientific opinion that still doubts that HIV is the causative agent of AIDS.
As for the remainder of the post, PCR testing in the context of covid detects the presence of RNA or RNA fragments from the SARS-COV2 virus, which may indicate a current or recent infection. The PCR elements of the test literally duplicates that material to the level where it becomes detectable. It is fair to say that, broadly speaking, it doesn’t indicate the likelihood of a person becoming ill (although detection after a low number of cycles - i.e. rounds of amplifications - would be indicative of a high viral load).
But in the UK at least, PCR was not the only diagnostic tool used. Even after mass testing was brought online, it was only available to symptomatic people (or those working in high risk settings). If a person showed symptoms and gave a positive PCT test, that has to be a pretty good indicator of an active infection.
Viral culture would not have been a practical diagnostic tool for covid at the height of the pandemic– it is time consuming and difficult, and the testing capacity could not have been built in time.
On the issue of covid denial generally, I agree with Crash – the death figures tend to suggest otherwise, unless you subscribe to the view that excess deaths can only ever be attributed to vaccines.
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