They’re starting to come now – the ‘debunkings’ of the Pfizer undercover video sting, in which executive Jordon Trishton Walker, “Director of Research and Development – Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning”, tells his ‘date’ that Pfizer is looking to mutate the virus “so we could create preemptively developed new vaccines, right”.
Pfizer released a statement on Friday, which notably did not deny that Dr. Walker works for the company (a fact which has anyway been confirmed via internet searches). Now the latest ‘debunking’ effort comes from Medpage Today.
After making the odd claim that “it is currently unclear if the man in the video is actually an employee of Pfizer, and if that is his real name” (journalism isn’t what it used to be), writer Michael DePeau-Wilson notes that Pfizer’s statement “summarily debunk[ed] the claims made in the video”, as the company stated that it “has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research” related to its “ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine”.
While it is true that the statement does say this, it also says that “we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern”. Furthermore, it admits that:
When a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells. In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus.
Despite the initial denial, then, what is being described here plainly is gain-of-function research – after all, the company is engineering the original virus to express the spike protein from new variants of concern, variants which are ‘of concern’ precisely because their spike protein has immune-evasive properties.
In case there is any doubt about this, FDA vaccine adviser Dr. Paul Offit inadvertently confirms it in the Medpage piece.
“Usually, when people talk about gaining function, they’re talking about making it so that the virus is either more deadly or more easily transmitted or that it now can jump species,” Dr. Offit says.
“[T]rying to make the virus more immune-evasive or more contagious… would be considered gain-of-function research,” he adds.
Right, so exactly what Pfizer has said it is doing – engineering “the original SARS-CoV-2 virus… to express the spike protein from new variants of concern”.
Offit tries to obfuscate, stressing that “Pfizer has been working with an mRNA platform that is coded for coronavirus spike proteins, not a whole virus”.
Yes, the vaccine does not use whole virus. But no one said it does. The matter at hand is what Pfizer is doing to the virus as part of its vaccine development research. And Pfizer is clear that it is engineering “the original SARS-CoV-2 virus… to express the spike protein from new variants of concern”. The whole virus, note.
Offit then implies that it isn’t gain-of-function research because the variant has already been created by “mother nature” and Pfizer is just reproducing what nature has already done.
If there was some evil hand back there that was trying to make the virus more immune-evasive or more contagious, that would be considered gain-of-function research, but it’s not happening. The evil hand is mother nature.
But even if the variant already exists in nature, that doesn’t mean it’s not gain-of-function research to engineer a virus to gain the immune-evasive mutation in the lab. Besides, how can you be sure you’re producing the exact same variant and not some subtly (or not-so-subtly) new and more immune-evasive variant?
Offit then appears to betray an ignorance of the process of making the vaccine, as he says the “remarkably effective” development involved sequencing SARS-CoV-2 in “a matter of months”. In fact, the virus was sequenced several times even in the last week of December 2019, and took a couple of days each time, not months.
Perhaps needing to restore his reputation with the politico-medical establishment after his criticism of the boosters last month (is this why he was given the job of defending Pfizer?), he is now effusive with praise for the mRNA vaccines. “This is the best medical achievement in my lifetime,” he says. “And my lifetime includes the development of the polio vaccine.”
Thus, despite the denials that what Pfizer is doing is gain-of-function research – denials which presumably take advantage of the fact that ‘gain-of-function’ is not rigorously defined – it’s clear that what Pfizer admits to doing falls squarely within the definition cited by Dr. Offit, namely the commonly accepted one, which includes making the virus more “immune-evasive”.
And they appear to tacitly acknowledge that, which is why they make their excuses. In Pfizer’s case, that it is “required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products” and “carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world”. In Offit’s case that Pfizer was just copying “mother nature”.
In fact, though, as Dr. Robert Malone has pointed out, Pfizer has previously been upfront that it is doing this research, including in an August 2021 article in STAT News, and almost nothing in the undercover video is new. Why such a fuss was made about scrubbing it from the internet is therefore an interesting question – though this may be more linked to the sensation around it than the facts, which Pfizer’s response anyway did not deny. How could it, when those facts were already on public record?
Perhaps the main lesson, then, is that we all need to be paying more attention.
We also need to think hard about what kind of research should be allowed and what should be banned. The reaction to the Project Veritas video suggests a strong feeling that this kind of work should not be done – including when it is (supposedly) imitating what nature has already created. The fear in the public is real and justified, and relates to the folly of engineering viruses to make them worse. Can this ever be a good idea? My feeling is there’s no need to go beyond the viruses and variants nature already provides us with, and to stick to using real specimens, not engineered ones. But the current regulatory regime and scientific establishment clearly disagrees.
Whatever the right answer, we need to be able to talk about this properly. Not be subject to global, military grade censorship when someone tries to raise the topic as a matter of public concern, albeit in a sensational (and entertaining) way.
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How many lockdown deaths today???
how many more lockdown caused deaths than COVID?
In breaking news 67 million + people did not die WITH covid today.
Tomorrow’s another day
Madness……
BBC. Really reassuring today;
“Reports of daily deaths are often lower at weekends and at the start of the week.
This is because less counting takes place while statisticians are off – and adding in the bank holiday weekend will make this figure less certain still”
Lockdown forever. Always lockdown forever.
Effing BBC are arzeholes.
Aren’t they just – although as David Mitchell said quite eloquently on HIGNFY at the weekend, it’s mainly the BBC news that annoys – their program output is of a much higher calibre
Put the statisticians on furlough I say .
I’ve always loved the idea that we’ve seen throughout this ‘deadly pandemic’, when we are told that “data is everything”, that the all important record keepers/statisticians are allowed to distort the figures (for what they’re worth) because they must have their weekends and bank holidays off. The same can be said for politicians being allowed weekends off and holidays throughout ‘the pandemic’. Surely this has got to have been an indication from the outset that the PTB were taking the p*ss.
Do they really need statisticians to “count deaths”?
The Spectator Data Tracker is showing an increase in positive tests in Bolton in the younger age groups, most notable in the 20-39 group, after a period of declining positive tests. Could this be related to the vaccine push there???
Absolute number or % positive?
I think that it’s a case of test, test, and test again and again and again, ad infinitum, etc, etc, etc.
After the recent Panorama programme you’d think people would be onto the scam of positive tests.
A positive test should be retested as happened with the Cambridge Universities in which all their positives upon retest were negative, strange that eh?
The Epidemic that never was
(13) How To Create An “Epidemic” – YouTube
PCR testing and al that.
This is the group least likely to be hospitalised or die, so an increase in cases should be irrelevant except that there is such a level of hysteria that it might be used to delay the end of restrictions.
The number of positive tests is falling day on day depite the number of tests still increasing. Cases peaked on May 26.
Ah, so the increase in “deaths with Covid”, such as it is, would peak on 16th June, just nicely timed to postpone an easing of restrictions on the 21st.
Just cases for which 99.8% will survive, scaremongering is all it is. not deaths.
More evidence, as if we need more, that locking down the healthy, is not only completely pointless, but massively self destructive.
https://shahar-26393.medium.com/not-a-shred-of-doubt-sweden-was-right-32e6dab1f47a
Unfortunately the suffering caused by lockdowns will continue for years.
So in summary, the “epidemic” in Sweden has been equivalent to a moderately severe flu season, and “groupthink” politicians in other countries have messed up royally. There really should be a Nuremberg mark II, you know.
I believe it is already underway,
I won’t believe it until I’ve jabbed their hanging feet.
Yes, and Yes…spot on!
Fascist Con mag in Oz wants COVID lockdown to be a reset for society away from choice
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-covid-shown-road-world-precipice.html
If you don’t believe this is just a normal seasonal corona virus then this summertime disappearance must be quite a shock.
No, it’s the lockdowns and vaccines that made it go away. Just don’t mention it also went away last summer, without vaccines.
It’s not even the vaccines.only lockdown. Remember, Boris said so!
That PHE second bar chart of ‘Covid cases’ is total nonsense.
It should come with a health warning.
Beyond that – quoting daily (non) data is a waste of space.
Anything that shows raw numbers not % +ve should be laughed out of court. Even the % +ve needs to be taken with a pinch of salt because of the variations in test sensitivity, accuracy etc. And “cases” without some qualification as to who is “ill” are also meaningless. +ve tests in cohorts that are vulnerable to covid and +ve tests among the young are completely different in their possible impact.
Incredible ….
1 in 67 million dies of COVID.
1 in 31,000 dies following a vaccine.
What happens if you cough into the face of a healthy man when you have the Spanish Flu
(13) Secrets of Influenza – YouTube
Nothing, it appears. Interesting video by Dr Sam Bailey.
At long last got a GPs appointment today
The GP said they would need to run further tests but the initial diagnosis is that I am ‘moron intolerant’
Quite so. I have now reached zero tolerance for the unthinking, biddable masses: they deserve everything coming their way, and the world will be a better place once it does so!
I ‘ve tested positive for that!
Asymptotic tipping point alert
This is awful
I am trying to work out how to account for this if reported Covid deaths are actually just people who died with Covid. There are still plenty of people testing positive. Did people just stop dying in general?
Well mortality has been running below recent average for quite a while now. As for people testing positive, without knowing which groups are testing positive we can’t really draw much of a conclusion about any relationship between positive tests and deaths – but then that’s deliberate I think.
The BBC have consistently spread nothing but gloom and misery throughout this whole 18 months. Even now, they can’t stop talking about the Indian variant. On top of that, we still don’t know what the July 21st actually consists of. Will it mean still wearing masks on public transport and in shops? Will it still mean standing two, three, or four feet away from other people? After being open for a fortnight now, the cafe in my local Morrisons have just BROUGHT BACK asking people to fill in a stupid form where you have to give your name, telephone number, time of arrival & estimated time of leaving. I told the lady I’d fill it in at my table. Then I ‘accidentally on purpose’ left without obeying. Hope the government aren’t monitoring this website.
Sorry, I meant JUNE 21st.
Monitoring this site, Oh yes we are. There are trigger words and sayings, use any of these and you will get a knock on the door @ 3 am at night.
huzzah!
“have to“? What if you just put “I do not consent” at the top of the form and “n/a” by the demands for information? We were told ages ago at our no masks prayer group that we legally we were allowed to decline to fill in these forms (speaking of my prayer group, one person there who only missed a Sunday service once throughout this whole shambles. Lucky person!).
Just sat here waiting for the MSM to announce the increase in deaths as a percentage in a couple of days
“Covid deaths increase 300%!”
Let’s see if the journos are stupid enough to report an ∞ % increase (infinity percent).
Yes after zero deaths one is an exponential increase
This is how it’s done!
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/california-restaurant-charges-patrons-extra-money-wear-face-mask-brag-vaccine-status/
We’re fighting a circular battle, aren’t we? Now we’ve finally got barely any deaths, just like last year, all the news is about cases and once again (despite panorama), we’ve got to talk about cycle thresholds and false positive rates etc etc. Just long enough until we’re back into a winter resurgence and we can go back to deaths… #groundhogyear
The bedwetters are saying it’s all due to “vaccines”, obviously nothing to do with summer and not being in flu season, but what do I know as a covidiot.
I see that channel 4 is showing a program about “anti vax conspiracy” and who’s driving it. I’ll be giving that one a miss.
Exactly the same happened last summer
No vaccines
And no masks, at least here in Wales
Deaths have been dropping since mid-January as vaccinations have been increasing.
I know a lot of you guys have concerns about vaccination safety but do you really challenge vaccine efficacy? There are one or two odd examples such as the Seychelles usually involving the Chinese vaccines – but the positive evidence is overwhelming from randomised double blind trials through to countless observation studies based on over 60 million doses in the UK.
Re CH4. Why do you avoid hearing the opposite viewpoint? I always make a point of listening to it – hence my presence here.
Deaths have been dropping since mid-January as vaccinations have been increasing.
Deaths were also rising sharply as vaccinations were increasing. The death curve consists of 2 overlapping peaks which coincide with vaccination of over 80s (a) in the community and (b) in Care Homes.
A phenomenon observed in many countries around the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSrc_s2Gqfw
I am sorry I don’t understand either your comment or the significance of the You-tube link.
You seem to be saying that some forms of Covid related deaths have been rising sharply in the UK since January. Can you be more explicit and explain how you know this?
The You-tube video which you link to seems to be meaningless. All it really shows is that many countries had a surge in deaths in the Spring – which is when the Kent variant began to hit – and coincidentally when the first vaccines were introduced. It doesn’t show the rate of vaccination which for most of these countries is still very small. Those countries which do have substantial vaccination rates – Israel, UK, USA – show strong decreases in death rates once the programme reached substantial numbers. You might I suppose use the video to argue that the vaccines were unsafe and causing a surge in deaths. I would disagree strongly but I could see how you might interpret the data that way. I can’t see how you can possibly use it to argue that the vaccines are ineffective when such a small proportion of the population has been vaccinated.
More to the point are the many trials and observational studies. I found this article which links to some of them.
“do you really challenge vaccine efficacy”
Of course.
Who would accept figures at face value from a PR advertising operation fronted by liars with financial and political interests in sales?
Censored ARR figures still around 1%.
(And there’s a difference between an alternative viewpoint and sheer propaganda bollocks. You need to go no further than the trail to see what it is.)
There is nothing censored about ARR figures. You can easily work them out for all the studies I have looked at from the available data. However, they are of limited use as they vary according to prevalence so the ARR in the real world will depend on the current situation whereas there is good reason to suppose that the RRR will be the same.
Cases and deaths dropped last summer too
No vaccines
They also dropped this year in countries that hadn’t got far with rollout
For all we know, deaths, hospitalizations and “cases” would have plunged just as much if NOBODY had been vaccinated. It’s a “known knowable” that they were alreadying falling off a cliff before even 5 percent of the population had been fully vaccinated.
I am not claiming that vaccines were the only reason deaths dropped (although I think we can rule out summer as that has only just begun!). However, we do know a bit about the vaccine contribution from the many observational studies of varying formality. This article links to some of them. Others include PHE reports and the Zoe app.
Incidentally, whether it is a cliff or not depends on how you draw the chart. Broaden the x axis relative to the y axis and you get a gentle decline.
Not just Seychelles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSrc_s2Gqfw
Please see my reply to Mayo about the same video.
Its pretty boring.
Someone, please shut down the legacy mainstream media. No deaths today, so what do they fall back on? The Tikka Masala variant. They are a disgrace and have had a massive negative effect upon the mental health of many.
Seen on Twitter:
Vietnam’s ‘very dangerous’ new hybrid variant may be fueling its worst outbreak so farThe WHO is investigating reports of a mutation that spreads extremely quickly – but the country still isn’t on the UK’s red list
https://twitter.com/i/events/1399759406317846529
The Phô soup variant!
Run for your lives!!
The “If it saves one life” slogan to justify stuff needs updated now.
The new slogan du jour will be;
“If it saves one minor asymptomatic illness”.. .
Victory to the Free.
Expect for the free bit.
Hancock’s words are proof of the global plan here, which is to keep some form of lockdown going forever. How else can he be behaving as if there is a crisis when there isn’t (and actually never was)?
How come there were fewer funerals in Birmingham in 2020 than there were in 2019? Why isn’t this stat all over the media?
Oh, wait . . .
Never be too careful though people. No deaths is just too high.
Yeah, we need resurrections and we need them now.
And ‘deaths with Covid present’ means naff all. Deaths FROM Covid are all that should matter.
The authorities have little idea of or interest in that statistic
True – but it doesn’t hurt to push back. I made a formal complaint about a local Councillor a few months ago, when he started spouting off on local news about how testing was crucial for finding out who was ‘definitely infectious’ – with a few pertinent facts indicating that said Councillor was talking out of his rear end. Not expecting much I got a reply indicating something to the effect my complaint was duly noted, but I have not seen or heard from said Councillor at all in months, nor have I seen such ludicrous statements spouted.
Former Tory leader calls out scientists obsessed with extending lockdowns at all costs:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/06/01/top-tory-corona-obsessed-scientists-staging-a-coordinated-effort-to-extend-lockdowns/
Back when the Conservative party still had conservatives as leaders…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJrVuWxjDew
There is something (apart from the obvious) distinctly odd about that table of figures re. testing. Has anyone else noticed?
Not sure it’s what you mean but I’m astonished by how much testing is being done now
The leas COVID there is, the more testing we do
Seems like the opposite of what you would expect
The IFR increased even when there are vaccines that are supposed to reduce it?
Nope. It looks like they had decreased notably around late summer
Did someone below spot it? After 14 hours of no sleep and willing these numbers to tell me something, please don’t leave me hanging.
Look at that chart and see how the percentage of positive tests plunged in February.
What percentage of the UK population had been fully vaccinated by February?
I don’t think the plunge in cases had anything to do with the rollout of the vaccines. Seasonality and probably more people becoming natural immune had much more to do with this steep decline than the vaccination rates.
Also, the elderly were the first to be vaccinated in large numbers. This is the population that comes into contact with far fewer people on a daily basis.
The plunge also aligns with the predictions made here late last year. It was confirmed around January 9th, when it was noticed that PCR cycles could be amended for political gain.
I made the same prediction in December 2020 – published it everywhere I could and even emailed the prediction to reporters: My prediction? Authorities at some point would change the cycles on the PCR test … to protect the narrative that the vaccines “work.”
This actually happened in late April in the U.S. when the CDC issued guidance to reporting agencies to not send them test results (of people who were already “fully vaccinated”) unless said positive results used 28 or fewer cycles.
Oh dear, won’t that muck up all those studies showing vaccines work?
I know it’s slightly off subject but as someone who has decided not to have the vaccine I have been shocked by the amount of pressure I am coming under from everyone from colleagues to family members to take the vaccine. Colleagues told me today they would refuse me access to the office, family members and friends constantly nag and tell me how vulnerable I am not having it and basically act like because I have not taken the virus I am likely to drop down dead at any moment. Well people are, for now at least, not marching me at gun point to the vaccination centre what they are doing is as good as this.
I agree, it’s getting quite fractious at times for me too sometimes, others around me are sharing ‘jabbing notes’ about which one they’ve had, which arm, like WTF?
The “selfish” argument is common, I am finding, but ask someone why they feel you are selfish, for believing in the notion of informed consent over what happens to your own body? If someone wants to judge you according to perceived health status, have they had an HIV test recently? or any STD’s?! hey, you might need to know, to make some judgments of your own!
Make no mistake, they are absolutely not [potentially] risking their own health for the sake of others, they are doing it for themselves. As a parting shot, you might want to point out that – the only criteria for this experimental technology to get emergency authorization, was that it could be capable of reducing mild symptoms, eg. headache, cough, mild fever – also known as common cold symptoms!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/09/23/covid-19-vaccine-protocols-reveal-that-trials-are-designed-to-succeed/
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037
Ask these people if they believe the “science” that the vaccine protects them from “severe” cases?
If they say they do, then ask them why the hell are they upset with you for not getting the virus? They can’t get a severe case if you are vaccinated or not vaccinated.
What they are really admitting is they don’t believe the vaccines really work.
“What they are really admitting is they don’t believe the vaccines really work.” Yes, in a nutshell. Essentially what this also means is that – they think you might be right [by electing not to have it] & that terrifies them.
And that’s why so many of them support compulsory jabbing: if they were going to get jabbed anyway, they haven’t made a really bad decision.
As someone said recently, you can’t educate pork. Most of these people just follow what’s said on the television between doses of East Enders or, for goodness sake, Radio 4 and 3. You can’t blame the poor things as it’s so endless. Today I telephoned my local U3A secretary to enquire about a painting group and practically the first thing she said was ” I trust you have had both of your vaccines?”.”No” said I taken rather off guard, and from that moment on I was fighting to get a word in as she delivered a very self righteous lecture on how wrong I was. I stood up for myself politely I hope but it’s getting very tiresome. Must put some of the best answers on here onto a large sheet of paper and stick on the wall by the phone. And by the way, thank you all on here
for the normality, it really helps.
Thought of telling them to go f*ck themselves, the covid bigots? Threaten to sue them for discrimination, that might shut your colleagues up.
Not at all off subject. I’m 67 and my cradle snatching wife is 68. We’ve not been jabbed and will never be. We run our own business and our first reaction to critism is ‘Fuck you’. We do Threat Assesment and Risk Management. Bring me the Threat and I’ll tell you how real it is. Data. Not fantasy.
“Cradle snatching”?
I’m in the fortunate position of not having had any pressure whatsoever (though someone I know is rather worried about being near people who have been injected with viruses. Of course, I may be an outlier…
Not off subject at all – this precisely the point. Government are setting citizen against citizen, and it’s stressful for we in the minority group.
Get an antibody test. It’s quite likely you’re immune anyway, without the jab.
That number again – o.
Still, I bet there were zero deaths in Melbourne too, and, because of the vagaries of the way they report deaths, I wouldn’t be surprised if over twenty deaths were reported tommorrow. Worth noting also, only one death announced the previous bank holiday Monday on the third of May – and yet back up to twenty seven on the Wednesday two days later.
Ah well, I can only hope that some places in the north get rather more than two weeks of freedom this summer.
Are there really 26.5 million people getting tested every single day?? I find that very hard to believe.
Assuming a theoretical maximum of about 68 million people getting tested twice a week, giving about 19.4 million per day, it’s hard to see how it can be. Unless there are a lot of rather obsessive testers. I worry to think what damage they’d be doing to themselves…
That is surely the total number, in the month, of the tests, ie averaging just under 1 million per day
Ah, that makes more sense!
Matt Hancock tweeted that although the “whole country will be so glad there were no COVID-related deaths recorded yesterday… we know we haven’t beaten this virus yet”.
So the unachievable goal of zero Covid is now admitted as Government policy, as it was all along.
Does this mean we have squashed the sombrero?
Could someone please add some extra columns to the chart above?
Number of PCR tests
Number of Lateral Flow Tests
False Positive Rate for PCR
False Positive Rate for Lateral Flow
Net ‘Positive’ number (which could be a negative number)
Looks like the vaccines killed more than the virus.
Will the continued restrictions, limiting opportunities to challenge our immune systems, make the next winter virus season worse?
The table is interesting, but, as someone has pointed out below, we need to know more.
Such as, what percentage of LFT tests are showing as positive, and what percentage of PCR tests are showing as positive?
Fundamentally, it’s often been said that the tests give a high number of false positives, maybe 1/1.5 or 2%, however, the positive rate for April and May above gives the positive rate as 0.29. So there’s something needs explaining there.
What is/was the cycle threshold here in the UK for determining a positive PCR result? I’ve never seen that question adequately answered – only that it varies from testing centre to testing centre!
Has the threshold been lowered on the quiet?
A plague of false positives; current ‘cases’ could all be due to inherent limitations of the test equipment and staff.
Now we’re beginning to see what the mass testing of people for evidence of Covid-19 infections is really about. Thanks to the data provided by your reader and attached to your report of a zero daily death rate for the entire UK in today’s Lockdownsceptics page, I’ve made a rough and ready check to try to interpret the BBC’s daily figures of new ‘cases’ mainly using Lateral Flow test kits.
I’ve suspected that those new ‘cases’ might be rather too convenient for politicians aiming for permanent lockdown, and now I see how it’s being done. The question is, how many of these daily ‘case’ numbers may actually be due to a convenient inherent flaw generated by these kits and those who use them outside the professional laboratory setting? How many, in fact, could just be false positives?
The error rates of most of the kits in widespread use are now known, and the data on numbers of tests over the past year, provided by a reader yesterday, make it possible to make an informed guess on how many are likely to be false positives. I’ve used the data on positivity rates for the best LFT products in widest use reported in the Porton Down and Oxford University study of November last year. Here’s what it tells us about this error rate:
Specificity
Device specificity was determined through an analysis of 6,967tests from evaluation phases 2-4. There was an overall false positive rate of 0.32% (specificity 99.68%). However, there was some indication that there was a difference in the false positive rates between laboratory-based testing (0.06%) compared to field testing (0.39%) Our evaluations noted that where there were challenges in interpreting the results (Table 2).
Am I being naive here – is the practical error rate really more than six times greater than that of the same tests done in a reliable lab? The authors remark that this presents a ‘challenge’ in interpreting the results. When I started work in an analytical lab seventy years ago, with far simpler tools than these modern kits, such astounding inconsistency would not have been tolerated for a moment.
I’ve calculated the numbers using the overall false positive rate of 0.32% for all test results combined, as reported in this Study. Here are the results.
Month LFT tests Positives Likely true +ves
Numbers % Claimed False Numbers (%)
Jan 2021 17,396 7.64 1328.4 55.7 1272.7 7.32
Feb 2021 16,524 2.17 329.4 52.9 276.5 1.60
Mar 2021 34,506 0.49 170.3 110.4 59.9 1.74
Apr 2021 26,820 0.29 78.7 85.8 -7.1 -0.02
May 2021 25,525 0.29 77.7 81.7 3.9 0.015
(All numbers in thousands)
This suggests that for the past two months (at least) those daily numerical and percentage case rates could actually have been almost all close to zero. OK – these numbers are deceptive in that they suggest a level of precision that is far greater than justified by the original data. But also, that’s without even considering that other bothersome fact that kit failures in the field ranged from 0.65% (around half the average false positive rate) to 16.8% (no comment needed.)
The conclusion, however, seems pretty clear to me. Those new ‘cases’ reported to the fearful general public every day could have been, for the past two months at least, of the same scale as the probable numbers of false positives inherent in the number of tests done.
To hang on the its crumbling Project Fear as long as possible, all Boris to do is keep ramping up the number of tests being done, and conveniently forget to make allowances for the false positives. Take them out of the calculation there’s nothing much left! The government only has to manage the test program in whatever way it wishes to generate data that appear to justify it – circular science has become the driver of our modern society, reinforced by the emergence of the Stockholm Syndrome in our grateful appreciation of the enormous benefits of our totalitarian Big Brother regime.
Apologies for the numerical listing getting closed up – I’m not into converting text into tables! But the final couple of data shows my thesis – negative numbers for April is obviously not real, but does indicate just how low the real rates could have been recently.
All of these so-called COVID deaths just prove the old adage that there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
There is conclusive evidence that GPs – rarer to spot than Lord Lucan or Shergar – were entering COVID on death certificates when it was definitive that this was not the cause of death.
Adding to this the number of nosocomial deaths will prove that this virus has been hyped up to scare the population into accepting, without protest, the erosion of liberties that have been enshrined for centuries.