Testing, Testing…1…2…3.
The starting point remains the same: peak infection was on or around 19th March and peak deaths on 8th April. Over two-thirds of the UK population had had SARS-CoV-2 by 19th March. The virus has been and gone, moving to the southern hemisphere as alpha and beta genera coronaviruses do, being seasonal viruses.
Everything that the deathmongering government has come up with since then is unnecessary and pointless.
Telling people to wear non-surgical face coverings in shops, talking up the even more dangerous second wave and now the apparent importance of testing. All irrelevant and nothing more than the government’s continuing and increasingly desperate attempts to keep you all in a state of fear and to stop any scrutiny being given to the government’s response and the NHS being the principal reason the UK has had the second highest mortality rate on the planet since pretty much the start of this insanity. It can only be a matter of time before Yemeni and South Sudanese TV start featuring their own virtue-signalling celebs in charity appeals for ‘the poor people of the United Kingdom, where a tinpot dictator and mass-murdering government have killed tens of thousands of their own people, with millions having been affected. Please send back all those donations they sent us, as they need the money/medicine/donkey/water pump/Stacey Dooley way more than we do’.
In terms of the Death Secretary’s latest lie that testing apparently stops the killer virus of death (how – is it afraid of needles? Or maybe just smart enough to know that NHS hospitals are ground zero for infection super-sites), there are three main types of test that can be undertaken:
1 Nucleic acid.
2 Antigen.
3 Antibody.
Each is different because each test is looking for something different: this may sound bloody obvious but it is crucial – and not surprisingly the fundamental fact over which the government’s strategy fails – because you cannot simply “test for coronavirus”.
Nucleic Acid.
Also known as molecular testing or reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing, looks for fragments of the virus’ genetic make-up, in the case of SARS-CoV-2 its ribonucleic acid. The PCR testing process amplifies a very small number of pieces to produce its result and it is a quick method of testing large numbers of samples. Testing positive for a nucleic acid test indicates the presence of the virus’ RNA in an individual subject’s sample. This shows whether that individual has previously come into contact with SARS-CoV-2. Nothing more, nothing less.
The fragments of the viral RNA may well be from dead virus cells which can remain in an individual’s body for months. Following the lysis of infected cells by the body’s innate or acquired immune system, it is common for cellular debris to remain in the body for a period of time, with 6-12 months being standard for many viruses. If you are looking just for tiny bits of its identify, alive or dead, you will get a positive result every time, whether someone has SARS-CoV-2 now or had it in January, whether the infected cells are alive or dead.
RT-PCR testing doesn’t tell you where someone caught the virus or when. So its utility is limited unless of course you want to be able to label someone as ‘coronavirus positive’ in an attempt to make them sound like social outcasts as ‘HIV positive’ did in the 1980s. This deathmongering regime will stop at nothing to try and make ‘testing positive’ sound as scary and serious as possible.
It is unsurprising that mass RT-PCR testing throws up lots of false positives, as the dead cells will cause that outcome every time as well as each and every time a subsequent test is done. South Korea had some pretty impressive jumps in infection numbers – the so-called second wave – only to realise later that they were all false positives. Do not be at all surprised if the majority of the rise in infections since lockdowns were eased are for exactly this reason: it is like having a stamp in your passport without any entry/exit dates. If someone has a stamp for a country in their passport when you look at it in April 2020, it will still be there if you look again in July 2020 or November 2020. It doesn’t mean they have been there three times, just that you are looking at the same thing on three separate occasions.
Antigen.
This looks for the presence of the part of a pathogen that does the damage. It is pathogen-specific, in the case of SARS-CoV-2 looking for its trimeric spike glycoprotein. This is most likely activated in the respiratory tract (more on the relevance of SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site another day), whereupon the virions are able to effect entry to host cells. The presence of the antigens means that the subject has SARS-CoV-2 at the point of testing. It does not mean they will get any symptoms of COVID-19 although someone with symptoms would test positive with an antigen test. Given the virus’ colonisation and that peak viremia is in the first week following infection, antigen testing can provide an accurate view of infection but as during that first week it is the innate immune system that is fighting the infection (hence the fever or pyrexia caused by leukocytes releasing pyrogens) before the acquired immune system kicks in, it does not identify the body’s response to the infection, just that an active infection is present.
Antibody.
Also known as serology testing, looks for the presence of antibodies, the pathogen-specific response to antigens. As we have written about previously here, antigen presenting cells allow the adaptive immune system to encode B antibody cells to attack the antigen, producing immunoglobulin. Look for immunoglobulin G or M – and maybe A – and you know that the immune system has produced a specific response. You can also look for the presence of T cells that have been encoded by the antigen presenting cells and activated on a pathogen-specific basis to perform the same purpose.
Testing positive for antibodies also gives an indication of the elapsed time since first having caught the virus: immunoglobulin G (IgG) is the most common antibody and immunoglobulin M (IgM) is the ‘first responder’ antibody, so if someone has IgM present they are likely to caught the virus within the previous couple of weeks whereas someone with IgG present caught the virus prior to that. As IgM antibodies are replaced by IgG after a couple of weeks and given the virus’ infection cycle of 14 days, someone with IgG is also likely to be well clear of the virus and have antibody immunity on a long-term basis, as IgG antibodies hang around for a while and are those used in creating permanent immunity.
There is a positive correlation between the levels of antibody production and the severity of COVID-19 symptoms – the greater the severity, the higher the number of antibodies – so antibody testing can also indicate the degree of infection, notwithstanding the drawbacks explained later on. As there is no previous data to use as baseline, we don’t yet know for how long the antibodies hang around after infection although one would expect their number to decay over time. Don’t forget that the immune system will hold back a number of antibodies to serve as memory cells, ready to respond immediately if the same antigen is detected in the future.
This relationship between the virus’ lifecycle and IgG production highlights the first of two potentially significant drawbacks of antibody testing: on the basis that by the time IgG antibodies are circulating the infection has passed, a positive IgG antibody test tells you nothing other than the fact the subject has already recovered from an earlier infection at some point in the past. In this respect it is the antibody testing equivalent drawback to nucleic acid testing, i.e. virus cells or antibody cells exist but they may well have been around for a while and the subject is probably over any infection.
No Antibodies Required = No Antibodies Produced.
The second point is that many people who catch SARS-CoV-2 do not create antibodies to the degree that a potentially notable proportion of patients with COVID-19 did not test positive for antibodies, i.e. their adaptive immune system did not feel the need to have to create pathogen-specific antibodies, because the infection was dealt with by the innate immune system. Therefore the second stage of the immune system wasn’t required because the virus was dealt with by the first stage.
In one cohort, over 30% of patients with COVID-19 developed no antibodies and in another an astonishing 62% of patients never developed any. They developed mild to moderate symptoms but the body did not need to bother with activating the adaptive immune system and they all made full recoveries. So while antibody testing has a utility, one should be wary of placing too much reliance on the results. Any decision with a >60% chance of error, which is a huge margin, is likely to be the wrong decision. Having said that, the worship at the altar of social distancing (‘we’re all in this together’…er, no) was predicated upon one study in Hong Hong that showed a 44% reduction in infections. Would you buy a car where the airbag would not work 56% of the time?
Seasonal Coronaviruses And Common Colds.
A likely reason for this lack of antibody production is something about which we have been writing since day one: for the vast majority of the people who catch SARS-CoV-2, it is within the scope of the innate immune system to overcome it. This reflects the fact that alpha and beta genera coronaviruses are principally irritants, for example HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-NL63, which cause the common cold. The similarity in respect of the antibody response is substantiated by this evaluation of SARS-CoV-2 antibody response [Seow et al, 2020] that observes:
“We suggest that this transient nAb response is a feature shared by both a SARS-CoV-2 infection that causes low disease severity and the circulating seasonal coronaviruses that are associated with common colds.”
So SARS-CoV-2 certainly is not the worst virus ever in the history of the world that kills on sight while also being very polite in following one-way systems, knowing the metric system and being able to count when 4 people are inside a shop at any one time (up to 4 people = all must be immune, more than 4 people = all will die). This view is substantiated by an observation that the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 may have been gained through recombination with another virus, such as an influenza A serotype that would make it – yes, you’ve guessed it – even more similar to seasonal or winter flu, than which it is still less dangerous. Another possibility – our research is going down this line – is that SARS-CoV-2 may be the result of recombination with another coronavirus, one of the three HCoVs mentioned above, which is where it gained its pathogenic capability.
Which Test, If Any, Is Best?
Turning back to testing, if you are going to test then, which test do you offer?
Each of the three types of test has a different objective and indicates a different outcome. Each has drawbacks, nucleic acid testing in particular and all are based upon a single point in time. You could test the entire population of the planet today but what about tomorrow and the day after that?
What all of this hopefully shows is that you cannot simply ‘test for coronavirus’ and the propaganda being force-fed to the population that a) you can and b) you should get tested, is a dangerous lie.
If all of this were not enough to convince you of the lack of merit in ‘testing for coronavirus’, given the government’s and NHS’ history of data breaches and data loss, would you ever trust them with the results? It was noteworthy that the government’s testing of its own track and trace program – undertaken on an outsourced basis by the serial outsourcing parasites that have been buggering up government contracts since the beginning of time whilst trousering millions of pounds in directors’ salaries, dividends and collateralised debt issuance – was very recently confirmed to have failed more than 50% of the time in non-complex cases. If they get it wrong more than half of the time, do you really think they will get mass testing any differently?
If you want to avoid false outcomes, lost data, incorrect results and being put on the wrong database (want that job? – sorry, the computer says you are SARS-CoV-2 positive), do NOT offer yourself for testing.
For those in high risks groups or those engaging on a regular basis with them, i.e. in close contact for sustained periods of time, antigen and maybe antibody testing may provide greater visibility and reduce, for example, the risk of increased viral dosage to those who are frail.
But for everyone else, testing in general and nucleic acid testing in particular serve little purpose other than for governments to be able to stigmatise those who may have tested positive (having had the virus months ago, as most of us have, starting from last December) and point them out, presumably by making them wear a yellow star when in public.
No doubt the Death Secretary, Chief Manslaughter Officer and the rest of the deathmongers would think of that as a great idea and perhaps even order everyone to clap in support of it. But then people like them thought gassing the Jews was a good idea.
Do not follow government advice. Do the opposite of what the government says and you will be far safer and live far longer.