Coronavirus: A Reliable Test Is Badly Needed. We Don’t Have One - David Crowe
By Jerome Burne
(Jerome Burne is the editor of HealthInsightUK. He is an award-winning journalist who has been specialising in medicine and health for the last 10 years and now works mainly for the Daily Mail. His most recent book “The Hybrid Diet” was written with nutritionist Patrick Holford, published 2018. Award: 2015: Finalist for 'Blogger of the Year' Medical Journalists' Association.)
David Crowe graduated with degrees in Biology and Mathematics in 1978 and started a career in software and telecommunications. Since the 1990s he has made a critical study of virus disease models. He was the president of Rethinking AIDS, host of “The Infectious Myth” radio show, and author of a peer-reviewed article on the Ebola vaccine. Sadly, David passed away on July 12th, 2020.
· David Crowe was a Canadian software and telecommunications engineer with a degree in mathematics and biology who has become an independent expert in 21st Century global infections such as SARS, Ebola and flu.
· Working from a database of 10,000 scientific papers, government, corporate and mainstream media reports, he has been raising fundamental questions about the way viral epidemics and are identified and treated.
· Crowe described the current response as a ‘rush to judgement, based on the rapid application of an unproven test, made worse by the use of powerful unproven drugs with toxic side-effects on those who test positive.’ The Chinese seems to have tacitly acknowledged the issue by starting to change the way diagnoses are recorded – see below.
· Some of the evidence for his claim emerged in the aftermath of the last global epidemic caused by a coronavirus known as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). It was first reported in Asia in February 2003, spreading to more than two dozen countries around the world but was contained within the year. Out of the 8,098 who caught it, 774 died.
· After the epidemic, which triggered much the same response as the current emergency, doctors and scientists began publishing insider accounts of what had happened in journals that are rarely seen by the general public. Some of them concerned the very toxic drugs used to treat SARS patients.
· These studies suggest that in the early days, patients with pneumonia were diagnosed with SARS because the symptoms – fever, headache, an aching body and a dry cough -were similar to those of pneumonia and flu. But the drugs they were given were much more toxic than those used for pneumonia, which could be why SARS gained the reputation for being such a deadly disease. At least some of the patients died from the treatment, not from the disease.
· For example, a report commissioned by a World Health Organization expert panel concluded that the antiviral drug ribavirin, widely used during the epidemic, caused the destruction of red blood cells (hemolytic anaemia) in one-third to two-thirds of patients and that 75% of them developed liver problems. The drug is also known to cause ‘flu-like symptoms such as fever, difficulty breathing, body aches and pains as well as being able to trigger psychiatric conditions such as depression, psychosis and aggressive behaviour.
· There is also evidence that these drugs, with their extremely unpleasant side effects, contributed to their deaths. Crowe’s research found that in the countries most affected by SARS, the rich ones – Singapore, Hong Kong and Canada – had a higher death rate than the poorer countries – China and Vietnam.
· This, he suggests, could have been due to high doses of the more expensive injectable ribavirin being used in the rich countries, while cheaper, low-dose, oral ribavirin was often used in poorer countries.
· SARS was so feared, not just because it was thought to be more deadly than other respiratory diseases, but also because it was believed to be highly infectious. But Crowe has evidence that this was a mistake too. It certainly doesn’t fit with an accidental experiment carried out at a Chinese hospital that mistakenly placed SARS and AIDS patients on the same floor of a hospital.
No symptoms? You can still test positive for the virus
· The basic rules for proving disease causation are known as Koch’s Postulates (after the great 19th Century bacteriologist Robert Koch) and they demand that a disease-causing entity, such as a virus, is purified as a first step. But this has not been done, as the authors of a recent paper admitted: ‘“we did not perform tests for detecting the infectious virus in blood”.
Study : Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, Chinahttps://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext
· If a virus is the cause of an infection, then it should be able to cause disease by itself. But there are plenty of reports where this doesn’t happen.
https://healthinsightuk.org/2020/02/12/coronavirus-a-reliable-test-is-badly-needed-we-dont-have-one/
For example, in one family the boy, who had no symptoms, tested positive while his mother, who was quite ill, was tested 18 times but found to be negative each time.
· Another study reported that four Germans tested positive after meeting a Shanghai-based woman in Germany, who became sick on her way home, showed no subsequent signs of “severe clinical illness.”
Study: Transmission of 2019-nCoV Infection
from an Asymptomatic Contact in Germany - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001468
· False positives are dangerously misleading. For instance, even if an epidemic began to die out, public health officials would still be getting positive results from an unreliable test and insist that the epidemic was still a threat. Testing all of Wuhan’s 10 million inhabitants with a 99% accurate test would give you 100,000 false positives.
· One simple way to establish the false positive rate would be to test at least a thousand healthy people, without symptoms, outside the epidemic zone to find out how many tested positive. However, no serious attempts to establish true or false positive rates have been published.
· But the Chinese government have just changed the way new cases are recorded, according to a tweet from a Hong Kong journalist. The original WHO guidelines for diagnosing 2019 Coronavirus said that a positive test was all that was needed. The person didn’t need to have symptoms or to have had recent contact with someone who was infected.
· Now cases that were diagnosed without symptoms are being removed from the record of new cases if they don’t develop them. A recognition of the failings of the test that should make infection figures more realistic
· Apart from encouraging the use of drugs with toxic effects, the pandemic panic will almost certainly generate permission to test and approve vaccines for the virus, especially if the faulty testing continues, and more and more cases are diagnosed. Given the relatively small number of patients, even in this pandemic, the use of pharmaceutical drugs is not a big money-maker, but it is certainly good publicity, the big money will be in a vaccine that can be given to millions, or even billions of people.
We won’t know which is worse – infection or treatment?
· In the panic created by an epidemic, more people go to A&E with flu-like symptoms where a slight cough or fever can be seen as predicting imminent doom. But with an effective test, those known to be uninfected could be told not to worry. Those who had symptoms and were known to be infected could be quarantined and treated, assuming that safe, specific and effective drugs had been developed.
· With the unreliable test, however, uninfected healthy people may be treated with toxic drugs, and unhealthy people, sick for some other reason, may also be treated with inappropriate drugs. Isolation, and other medical procedures such as invasive ventilation, also have their own side effects. This means that we cannot distinguish the dangers of testing positive from the dangers of the virus.
Coronavirus COVID-19: The Risks, The Testing, & The Treatments [Part 2]
Apr 26 2020
SOME IMPORTANT PARTS TAKEN FROM THIS INTERVIEW ABOUT PCR TEST AND “ASYMPTOMATIC” PEOPLE
Ø DAVID CROWE
Well, okay — so there’s the Chinese paper I’m reading. It said that “Amongst asymptomatic people, we estimate that the false positive rate is 80 percent.”
I think that should be shocking. And that’s not unusual for biological tests. They also said,”the opposite of that is that there’s a 20% probability that if you get a positive, test it’s a real positive.” So, okay it consumes a lot of resources, put people in quarantine — which is damaging psychologically to people. If you’re 20, it’s one thing, but what if you’re 80, and you’re weak? You’re used to having your family around to look after your needs — you’re now in a hospital room surrounded by people you can’t see because they’re all wearing gowns and they’re gonna do the minimum for you, but where’s your daughter to help you out, or your son? Where’s the grandkids? Like, I think that kind of thing to elderly people can be incredibly damaging and it’s the elderly people who are dying.
Ø There is the superior Institute for public health in Italy — the ISS — has published a summary of their analysis of the deaths from coronavirus positive people and they study — they’re currently up to about 2,000 tests, 2,000 files that they’ve analyzed, and they found three people out of 2,000 who did not have pre-existing health conditions. [Video published March 21, 2020] They found an average age of 80, so what we’re seeing is very elderly people who have pre-existing health conditions going into the hospital with, you know, some kind of pneumonia, or flu, or some kind of respiratory illness. They’re isolated, they’re offered extremely toxic drugs, and they’re often unnecessarily intubated — which means sticking a tube into you into your lungs us to, that’s suppose to help you breathing, but that can be also very damaging. So, the aggressive treatment which comes along with the panic that “We have this deadly new virus” is a factor.
Ø Now, I think a lot of those 2,000 people who died probably would have died in 2020 anyway. Fifty percent of them had three or more pre-existing health conditions, which included, you know, chronic renal failure, liver disease, cancer, various heart disorders, hypertension was the least significant of the of these things. But fifty percent had three or more pre-existing conditions so these are very, very weak people — they probably would have died this year, but they might have been helped along by doctors who are not trying to kill them — they’re sincerely trying to help. But in a panic they say, “Well, what about this new antiviral drug from Gilead called Remdesavir? It’s being researched for Ebola, so maybe it’ll work for coronavirus. Let’s give it a shot.” I mean, can an eighty-year-old with three pre-existing health conditions tolerate that?
Ø GREG CARWOOD
Hmm, yes those are important questions. And when we look at just the numbers in this country that we have right now — I mean, last I looked it, was just over eleven thousand cases, and total deaths a little bit more than a hundred and fifty — and so the suggestion here is that this aggressive treatment could be responsible for these hundred-and-fifty deaths, and not a virus? Is that what we’re saying?
Ø DAVID CROWE
Yeah like in the Italian report — which is which I keep going back to because it’s a good source of information — I’d love to have this information from the United States. Like, I tried to find out about the 22 who died in a nursing home in Washington State, and if anybody has this information, I want to get it. Were they treated with antiviral drugs? Were they treated with high-dose corticosteroids? Were they all intubated? Like, what was their treatment? Was this normal for elderly people with pneumonia, or did they rush to some higher level of treatment?
In the Italian report, considering deaths of coronavirus-positive people, 52% had been put on antiviral drugs — quite likely the Remdesivir, which is this ebola drug that people are all excited about — 27% were put on high dose corticosteroids. Now both of these things — antiviral drugs and corticosteroids — after SARS (and I have a book chapter online which details what happened during SARS) both of these were criticized for being ineffective and toxic. For example, the antiviral drug used in SARS — which is not being used this time around — caused hemolitic anemia, which is like the breakdown of your blood cells. It caused liver problems in like 75% of people. Corticosteroids caused ongoing neurological deficit in a large number of people. It caused osteonecrosis — which is basically a rotting of your bones — which caused a need for joint replacements in many people who were treated during SARS.
Ø So these drugs they’re giving are not friendly drugs, and they’re being given to people the average age of 80, who have pre-existing health conditions. I mean, I’m repeating myself but I define this to be absolutely insane.
Ø GREG CARWOOD
Yes and I actually love what you’re saying and I’ve been digesting material from other journalists that are saying similar things the few that are and its really good for de-stressing over this whole entire thing so I I don’t mind reiterating it. I actually had a little thing from Jon Rappoport here where he talks about the very same thing. I think he’s referencing the same report. But he says many people who are diagnosed as coronavirus cases in Italy and then died were almost certainly put on these antiviral drugs as well
Ø DAVID CROWE
Yeah, well now we have the numbers. I think what first came out was a news report of a press conference, which is kind of sketchy on details, but the Italian report is very clear — it’s got nice graphs and it’s it’s got numbers and you know it’s basically saying “of the first 2,000 people, you know, we –“ they don’t even know for sure that the three people who had no pre-existing health conditions died from the virus. They’re investigating to see if there was anything else but I mean, what is this panic for?
And if I can talk about numbers for a second, somebody sent me a paper on flu in Italy. Italy’s — I believe — around 63, 65 million people. In a bad flu season like 2016–2017, I calculated from numbers in this paper that there could be 17,000 deaths of 65+ people in Italy. Seventeen thousand in one week. Did I say in one week? So that’s the background. In a bad flu season in the peak week, like the worst week of the flu season you could have 17,000 deaths, and, you know, in a normal week you might have 10,000. So the deaths from that are ascribed to the coronavirus so far are not really much more than a little bump. And it’s quite probable that these elderly people are the people who normally would be included in the flu season’s moralities.
I mean, I couldn’t believe this number, but I said, “Okay everybody in Italy lives to 80 and there’s 65 million so divide 65 million by 80 by 50 to the number of weeks in a year.” I got something like 12,000 people need to die every week in Italy if the average age is — average lifespan is 80. So 17,000 is not that far out, and yet we’ve got a much smaller number and we were saying the sky is falling.
And I think what we’re doing is reclassifying deaths. We’re hastening deaths through aggressive treatment, and I don’t know if the broader world will ever figure this out, because we idolize doctors so much that we only listen to what comes out of their mouths. So if after this is all over, and the doctors say that all the social isolation, the quarantining, the aggressive treatment — it was all a grand success, the press are going to write down, “You know, Doctor So-and-So said our approach to the coronavirus was a grand success.” They’re never gonna ask tough questions which is deeply disturbing to me.
Ø GREG CARWOOD
Yes and I am curious, I’m sure a lot of the listeners are too: Is there a real virus? I mean it’s not a retrovirus, it’s an RNA virus, they say the test is looking at RNA. There’s a lot of speculation about “Is this a bioweapon?” Whatever — I don’t think people are that concerned about that now. They just don’t want to “get something.” Is there even something “to get?”
Ø DAVID CROWE
Well, I don’t think so. My paper does not rest entirely on that. But, I mean, I start with saying, “Yeah, we got this test for RNA. Nobody’s purified the virus. We do not have the proof that is actually a test for a virus.” But if you say, “Okay, well, I don’t I don’t buy that,” you know, “This RNA is viral,” that doesn’t eliminate the risk of false positives. And nobody’s done the analysis.
Like, for example, why don’t we go through the freezers of hospitals — which are full of, you know, historical samples of snot, which is, you know, basically what they they get [with the test] or throat swabs? Sputum. And those these are frozen and stored for years for various research, so why don’t we analyze a few thousand of those in a blinded setting mixed with samples from current patients and see if we only find the RNA in the new samples? Because if we find 1% of historical samples are testing positive on this test, that means we have a 1% false positive rate, and that is very significant.
Let me explain. In Wuhan, a city of 10 million, a 1% false positive rate would mean there’s 100,000 positive people in Wuhan — with a with a 1% false positive rate. So, because the majority of people don’t have the disease, a small false positive rate can dominate over the actual number of positives.
Ø GREG CARWOOD
Mm-hmm that makes sense. And as far as the test is concerned, I’ve heard you talk about the fact that you would expect many private organizations to be working on a better test, and we’d let the free market decide, but what’s actually happening? Who makes the test?
Ø DAVID CROWE
Well, the test is based on PCR technology and, basically, if you’ve got the primers — the little bits of RNA, not the entire string of RNA, the little bits of RNA that you use to start the whole thing off — then you basically are just customizing a standard PCR machine to become a coronavirus testing machine. So, you know, PCR is a very flexible technology, but people have almost a religious faith in its capabilities.
I should talk a little bit about the inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis. He got the Nobel Prize in 1993 and, sadly and tragically, he died last year, because I think we could really use some advice from him under the current circumstances. But this is one of the interesting things — in 1996 Dr. Peter Duesberg (who I’ve mentioned) wrote a book called Inventing the AIDS Virus which questioned whether HIV caused AIDS. And the forward — it was written by Kary Mullis. So, Kary Mullis was no — you know — “establishment scientist.” The reason he was able to invent this major advance in biotechnology — PCR — was because he was such a creative and thoughtful scientist, and he didn’t go along with the herd. So, he was right up there with Peter Duesberg saying, “Well maybe HIV isn’t the cause of AIDS.” So I think he might be, um very skeptical.
He also said that quantitative PCR is an oxymoron. And by that, I mean “Using my technology to measure the amount of RNA or DNA will not work.” And that’s — of course — exactly what they’re doing in many cases with this test. And maybe if we can talk about the test a little bit I can explain that the this test, like almost all biological tests is not a binary test. By “binary” I mean “infected — uninfected,” “positive — negative,” “reactive — nonreactive.” There are essentially no tests for infectious diseases that are binary. They are all a continuum of something, and often it is a color change or something like that, that is measured. And if the color is deeper than a certain amount, then you’re positive.
So with PCR, PCR is a cyclic technique. It’s a very simple technique. If you did it once, you’d say “why did we bother?” But it doubles the amount of DNA at every step, so if you do it ten times, you get about a thousand times more DNA. If you do it 20 times, you get a million times more; 30 times a billion times more. So it’s a very powerful technique for manufacturing DNA.
it’s use for testing is a little bit more, um, sketchy. So that, so what they basically do is, they run this test until they get sufficient material to be detected at a certain level. Like, they often use fluorescence. So the glow is bright enough, and they say, “Okay, we got enough material. We’ll stop.” And then they record the number of cycles. So it might be 20, 30, 40. And then they have an arbitrary cutoff, and they say, “If you get to 37 cycles, and you don’t have enough material generated, you’re negative.”
The problem with that is, if we follow that — in one paper that was published by researchers from Singapore — they found that they tested a group of people, 18 people for 1 to 2 weeks, every day. So, every day they had a test, and in the majority of cases the patients went from positive (or infected) one day, to negative (or uninfected) the next day. No big deal, maybe they’ve been cured. But then *back* to positive, or unaffected. So how can this be? If the test is accurate, and it’s showing that you are infected when it’s positive, and uninfected when you’re negative, then what was happening to these people? How did they get re-infected in a sterile hospital situation?
Or maybe the test is just not very good.
Ø GREG CARWOOD
Hmm yes, it’s very insightful. I know there’s a lot of nuance and complexity to these sorts of things…
Ø DAVID CROWE
Yeah, I’m getting a little too deep into into this but you know PCR is so important. It’s — it’s like understanding how the internal combustion engine works, right? Like it’s — it’s so integrated into our society. This is probably more important right now than knowing how a car works.
Isolation versus Purification
David Crowe
May 21, 2020
Version 1
I have been saying since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic panic that the virus has not been purified, and therefore probably does not exist. But people are continually pointing me to papers that claim isolation of the virus.
There is a saying regarding politicians, that you can tell if a politician is lying if their lips are moving. With virologists you can tell when they are lying when they use the word “isolation”.
Virologists must know that the common definition of isolation and purification are virtually identical. For example, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:
Isolation • “The action of isolating; the fact or condition of being isolated or standing alone; separation from other things or persons; solitariness”.
Purification • “Freeing from dirt or defilement; cleansing; separation of dross, dregs, refuse, or other debasing or deteriorating matter, so as to obtain the substance in a pure condition”.
One can argue about subtleties, but if you took some ore and isolated gold, it would be the same as purifying gold. But with viruses, virologists have completely debased the word “isolation” while rarely using the word “purification”.
What is COVID-19 Isolation?
In a paper using transgenic (genetically modified) mice:
Impure materials called a virus isolate were obtained, antibiotics were added, and then the material was cultured in vero cells with various growth stimulating substances.
Experiments only worked on transgenic mice, not regular mice.
7 transgenic mice were injected intranasally (in the nose by a hypodermic) with cell culture material. 3 transgenic control mice were injected with PBS (phosphate buffered saline).
Treated transgenic mice (but not regular mice) lost weight and showed interstitial pneumonia. Maybe some of the cell culture material got into the lungs and caused an immune reaction, infection etc, in mice that could not fight it off like normal, robust, wild-type mice. By comparison, saline wouldn’t cause these problems.
Isolation was defined as “cytopathic effects” (i.e. some cells in the cell culture died).
The authors claimed to fulfil Koch’s postulates but in the absence of virus purification, this is a bald faced lie.
In a paper claiming isolation of COVID-19 virus from a patient in Korea:
Impure materials were obtained (nose and throat swabs), antibiotics were added, and then the material was cultured in vero cells with various growth stimulating substances.
Isolation was defined as “cytopathic effects” (i.e. some cells in the cell culture died).
They noted that the same RNA was obtained at the end of the process that they had put in at the beginning, but in greater quantity. However, because RT-qPCR is not reliably quantitative, this is not a supportable statement, and cannot be used as proof that a virus was replicating.
What is Purification?
Perhaps a psychologist could explain why virologists feel free to abuse the word “isolation” so freely, but are scared to death of even writing the word “purification”
Purification clearly means separating the virus from all other organic materials. Logically, this requires the following steps:
1. Culturing materials believed to contain a virus in other cells (e.g. the Vero cells mentioned above) as viruses are not believed to replicate outside target cells.
2. Purifying virus particles by removing the liquid on top of the culture (supernatant) believed to contain the free viral particles, by filtering (to eliminate particles larger than a virus), by centrifugation (to separate particles by density).
3. Putting a portion of the material under an electron microscope to verify that almost all that can be seen is particles of the same size and shape.
4. Breaking down the proteins and genetic material (RNA or DNA, depending on the virus) in the rest of the sample and analyzing them (e.g. sequencing the RNA or DNA).
Note that only now can tests be developed because you have the pure proteins, RNA or DNA required to ensure that the test really is for viral materials. Furthermore, purification is the only way to validate tests once they are developed. People who test positive (whether it is an RNA, DNA and, depending on the virus, antibody tests) should have the virus purifiable, and those who test negative should not.
https://theinfectiousmyth.com/coronavirus/IsolationVersusPurification.php
Published paper of David Crowe titled:
Flaws in Coronavirus Pandemic Theory version
Executive Summary
The world is suffering from a massive delusion based on the belief that a test for RNA[1] is a test for a deadly new virus, a virus that has emerged from wild bats or other animals in China, supported by the western assumption that Chinese people will eat anything that moves.
If the virus exists, then it should be possible to purify viral particles. From these particles RNA can be extracted and should match the RNA used in this test. Until this is done it is possible that the RNA comes from another source, which could be the cells of the patient, bacteria, fungi etc. There might be an association with elevated levels of this RNA and illness, but that is not proof that the RNA is from a virus. Without purification and characterization of virus particles, it cannot be accepted that an RNA test is proof that a virus is present.
Definitions of important diseases are surprisingly loose, perhaps embarrassingly so. A couple of symptoms, maybe contact with a previous patient, and a test of unknown accuracy, is all you often need. While the definition of SARS, an earlier coronavirus panic, was self-limiting, the definition of the new coronavirus disease is open-ended, allowing the imaginary epidemic to grow. Putting aside the existence of the virus, if the coronavirus test has a problem with false positives (as all biological tests do) then testing an uninfected population will produce only false-positive tests, and the definition of the disease will allow the epidemic to go on forever.
This strange new disease, officially named COVID-19, has none of its own symptoms. Fever and cough, previously blamed on uncountable viruses and bacteria, as well as environmental contaminants, are most common, as well as abnormal lung images, despite those being found in healthy people. Yet, despite the fact that only a minority of people tested will test positive (often less than 5%), it is assumed that this disease is easily recognized. If that was truly the case, the majority of people selected for testing by doctors should be positive.
FULL STUDY IN PDF FORMAT AVAILABLE FROM HERE: https://www.academia.edu/42632288/Flaws_in_Coronavirus_Pandemic_Theory_version_7_2
Videos:
Coronavirus,Suppressed Medical Science+Infectious Myth - Truthiverse With David Crowe
PCR TEST SHOULD NEVER BEEN USED - Coronavirus COVID-19: The Risks, The Testing&The Treatments-David Crowe
PCR Test Is Meaningless, Virus Has Not Been Purified&Ventilators Are Killing People – David Crowe
One Of The Most Influential Voices In Uncovering The Truth Behind Pandemic Through His Brilliant Research - David Crowe