This is the kind of frustrating garbage that could only be written by ideologues with no molecular biology background at all. Go ahead and down vote ... or consider:
In Feb 2020, we only had a dozen or so cases in NYC and WA state, all travelers from China. CDC had the samples of the virus, but apparently wasn't sharing with FDA. Why? Because CDC was handling the PCR testing entirely in-house, as they typically do for small outbreaks of emergent diseases. The initial series of PCR tests that were being used world wide, 10s of thousands of them, were all produced in-house by the CDC.
No one really cared that there was no FDA-approved diagnostic test that early. We still thought we had this thing contained until 3rd week of February when we had our first community-acquired (ie, no known infected contact) case. Panic didn't really start til it spread down the west coast and the NBA and MLB started cancelling games in the 1st and 2nd weeks of March 2020.
There's been a narrative that no one had isolated the virus and it was all fake. That was never true. We got the gene sequence early in January 2020 and we got it from somewhere, folks. We got it from the samples we were getting out of Thailand and Japan in January 2020. We had scanning electron micrographs of it that early which means we had it and could visualize the dead virus. Live virus is a little trickier because you need a human cell line to grow it in and the right growth conditions. That can take longer to get right in the lab.
So, if you don't have live virus, you go back to your grad school training, pull up the BLAST sequence and design primers using the computer database. They teach this in introductory Biochemistry undergrad courses now. It's not hard. It's not controversial science at all, and it's accurate. As long as the primers are designed well, they can be used with high confidence.
By the 2nd week of March 2020, CDC was overwhelmed. It had a huge batch of tests fail because of faulty negative controls. There was enormous demand for new tests, so academia answered the call. Using the techniques I described in #4, virologists in medical schools and academic medical centers around the country started developing their own in-house tests to treat the patients they had in their EDs. This is when Trump called in Quest and Labcorp and got the major commercial labs involved, and FDA accommodated.
Yes, they should have validated those tests against patient specimens. Under normal circumstances, those are requirements for FDA approval, but with the EUA process, FDA could overlook that and let these highly competent scientists do a relatively simple task in good faith. They'd go back later, require validation and pare down the list. That's what they're doing now. It should've been done during the lull in cases in May 2020, but bureaucracies are slow and inefficient and FDA was worried about remdesivir, convolescent plasma, HCQ, etc at this time.
Fast forward and now FDA's getting rid of the EUA for the CDC's initial PCR test. Ok, fine. There are better ones out of the over 200 of them FDA still has out there under EUA. And the linked documents in that blog show that. That doesn't mean there was fraud in the test design. There are over 200 different tests here, not just one.
If there was fraud, it was in running the PCR test (regardless of which primers were used) for too many cycles. This creates false positive results. Any student knows this because we have all at least once amplified dust in the air and f'ed up a run before by not being careful enough with our aseptic technique. Again, this isn't an issue of the the primers. If the primers were bad, you would get NO amplification. The test would be too stringent. You'd get a negative result. We were seeing the opposite. The problem was the cycle number.
And lastly, you're thinking "but didn't the CDC just say their tests couldn't distinguish between COVID and flu"? No, that's spin. PCR can identify one gene sequence with high specificity. We have PCR tests for SARS-COV2 (COVID). We have other tests for flu, and not just any flu broadly, but for both types A and B. What CDC was saying in that press release is that because the use of these tests clinically is for influenza-like symptoms, it stands to reason that they would want any commercial test to do the logical thing and test for both viruses. That is, they wanted a product developed that tested any specimen received for both, so they could give doctors a meaningful answer, so the doc wouldn't have to order a COVID test and a flu test, but instead just order the ILI (influenza-like illness) panel, which makes sense.
If we're going to accuse the CDC of being corrupt we need to understand how they conducted their fraud. Running the PCR tests too aggressively, with too many cycles generates false positive results. Some king in Ghana got a positive COVID test off of a sample of papaya juice he sent in. This is how they got that. The vast majority of it was in manipulating the data and the data collection.
Think of it like the election fraud. They can't get away with gross fraud, having some guy shredding ballots or whatever. Those people get caught and they can't create enough fake votes to be convincing. So they do it behind the scenes with the computers. We've all seen the Mike Lindell symposiums showing the algorithms they used. CDC was running a similar data manipulation racket with COVID data. It was conflating ILI (flu and COVID regarded as the same thing and called COVID). It was conflating deaths with COVID and deaths from COVID to boost the numbers, etc. They "disappeared" the 2020-2021 flu season, attributing it all to COVID. They disavowed "breakthrough" COVID cases in the vaccinated, so they could claim all new cases were in us dangerous unvaccinated people. That's how they work these scams. The know no one looks at the data collection methodology, so they exploit that. That's where the fraud is.
This is the kind of frustrating garbage that could only be written by ideologues with no molecular biology background at all. Go ahead and down vote ... or consider:
If we're going to accuse the CDC of being corrupt we need to understand how they conducted their fraud. Running the PCR tests too aggressively, with too many cycles generates false positive results. Some king in Ghana got a positive COVID test off of a sample of papaya juice he sent in. This is how they got that. The vast majority of it was in manipulating the data and the data collection.
Think of it like the election fraud. They can't get away with gross fraud, having some guy shredding ballots or whatever. Those people get caught and they can't create enough fake votes to be convincing. So they do it behind the scenes with the computers. We've all seen the Mike Lindell symposiums showing the algorithms they used. CDC was running a similar data manipulation racket with COVID data. It was conflating ILI (flu and COVID regarded as the same thing and called COVID). It was conflating deaths with COVID and deaths from COVID to boost the numbers, etc. They "disappeared" the 2020-2021 flu season, attributing it all to COVID. They disavowed "breakthrough" COVID cases in the vaccinated, so they could claim all new cases were in us dangerous unvaccinated people. That's how they work these scams. The know no one looks at the data collection methodology, so they exploit that. That's where the fraud is.
Pau Pau Fruit