False positive PCR-driven pseudo-epidemics are nothing new - they happen all the time.

There are questions to be asked about the 2003 SARS "pandemic" as well.

I naively keep making the assumption that people know the stuff I have known for ages, so apologies if this is all “old news” to you.

As regular readers of this blog will know, my thesis as to what transpired in 2020 is as I set out in this summary I wrote for

PANDA

:

Every single aspect of the “Covid” narrative is fake. There was no pandemic.

A lot of pushback I receive is centred around incredulity that doctors, public health institutions, hospitals and so could be so completely wrong about things:

“Do you really think that people could be mistaken in believing that there was a major outbreak of a new infectious disease? There was all that testing - that must have been measuring something real, surely?”

Well, what if I was to show you that all this has happened before, albeit on a smaller scale? Because it has. Several times. In fact, one epidemiologist reckoned they happened “all the time”.

In 2006 there was an outbreak of whooping cough at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in New Hampshire, USA.

The episode was actually well-described in a NYT article - access a PDF by clicking the picture below.

I would urge all to read the entire article - it isn’t long.

To quote from the article, setting the scene:

For months, nearly everyone involved thought the medical center had had a huge whooping cough outbreak, with extensive ramifications. Nearly 1,000 health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N.H., were given a preliminary test and furloughed from work until their results were in; 142 people, including Dr. Herndon, were told they appeared to have the disease; and thousands were given antibiotics and a vaccine for protection. Hospital beds were taken out of commission, including some in intensive care.

Here’s the punchline:

Then, about eight months later, health care workers were dumbfounded to receive an email message from the hospital administration informing them that the whole thing was a false alarm.

Not a single case of whooping cough was confirmed with the definitive test, growing the bacterium, Bordetella pertussis, in the laboratory.

Instead, it appears the health care workers probably were afflicted with ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold.

Now, as they look back on the episode, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists say the problem was that they placed too much faith in a quick and highly sensitive molecular test that led them astray.

So just to be clear:

• The initial pseudo epidemic was caused by false-positive results from a PCR test.

• People (wrongly, as it turned out) ascribed real symptoms to the disease as a result of the test. Due to the power of the nocebo effect (which I touch on here, and here¹) it is also possible that individuals developed symptoms because of the positive test, or that cold symptoms which would otherwise have been mundane were made more severe.

• A variety of disruptive and potentially harmful measures were instituted as a result.

• The “definitive” test - culturing the bacterium responsible for whooping cough (pertussis) found zero cases. There was no pertussis in any of the samples.

Some further nuggets from the article:

• Dr. Trish M. Perl, then an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins said “pseudo-epidemics happen all the time. The Dartmouth case may have been one the largest, but it was by no means an exception”.

• New molecular tests are quick but technically demanding- there are no good estimates of their error rates. But their very sensitivity makes false positives likely, and when hundreds or thousands of people are tested, as occurred at Dartmouth, false positives can make it seem like there is an epidemic.

• Dr. Kathryn Edwards, an infectious disease specialist and professor of pediatrics: “That’s the reality out there. We are trying to figure out how to use methods that have been the purview of bench scientists.”

• Neither coughing long and hard nor even whooping is unique to pertussis infections, and many people with whooping cough have symptoms that like those of common cold: a runny nose or an ordinary cough. “Almost everything about the clinical presentation of pertussis, especially early pertussis, is not very specific.

• “We were all somewhat surprised,” Dr. Kirkland said, “and we were left in a very frustrating situation about what to do when the next outbreak comes.”

Conclusion from the article:

Dr. Cathy A. Petti, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah, said the story had one clear lesson.

“The big message is that every lab is vulnerable to having false positives,” Dr. Petti said.

“No single test result is absolute and that is even more important with a test result based on P.C.R.”

Roll forward only 13 years, and it looks like every single lesson learned from the above episode was basically forgotten (or just ignored) - something which in itself tells us something about the power of groupthink to override reason.

Why, exactly, the PCR test churned out so many false positives in unclear. Let me know if you have any more information on that.

I would have thought that designing a test to reliably detect the presence of an easily-identified bacterium which (in theory) is readily culturable from patients with the illness would be far easier than doing the same for a virus causing symptoms indistinguishable from those caused by many known and unknown other pathogens.

If interested in reading further about this and other problems with PCR testing, I recommend this article by Mike Hearn, or an updated bullet-pointed version with additional sources here.

Another pseudo-epidemic - this time involving a coronavirus.

To me, the most interesting additional source Hearn cites is this one. This describes:

• A 2003 outbreak of respiratory illness at a long-term care facility in British Columbia, Canada.

• Between July 1 to August 22, 2003, 95 of 142 residents (67%) and 53 of 160 staff members (33%) experienced respiratory tract infections.

• Twelve residents were admitted to hospital, eight for pneumonia. There were eight deaths among patients with respiratory symptoms².

• PCR testing suggested an outbreak of SARS-CoV, but subsequent investigations concluded that these had been false positives “confounded by concurrent identification of antibody to N protein on serology” and “confirmed HCoV-OC43³ infection”.

• Notably, sera demonstrated cross-reactivity against nucleocapsid peptide sequences common to HCoV-OC43 and SARS-CoV.

The authors seem to miss what is obviously an important broader point.

The outbreak happened right in the middle of the “SARS pandemic” which spanned late 2002 to 2004.

The hysteria around this was particularly prevalent in Canada - see here for an article about the Candian experience generally⁴, and here for a description of the “Coordinated Response to SARS in Vancouver”, a city which is, like the facilty discussed above, also in British Columbia.

As the article describes, British Columbia was on a state of high alert and readiness for new emergent pathogens from Asia.

Quoting from the above article:

Approximately 2,000 passengers land in Vancouver on direct flights from Hong Kong and mainland China every day compared with 500 on average to Toronto.

As such, Vancouver is a potential gateway to North America for emerging pathogens from Asia. Because of this perceived risk, the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) had been increasing preparedness for pandemic threats for several years.

An electronic distribution system was established to regularly disseminate communicable disease bulletins to healthcare facilities across the province.

When a cluster of unexplained atypical pneumonia in China was reported almost simultaneously with reemergence of influenza A H5N1 in Hong Kong, BCCDC used this well-established communication network to issue an alert on February 20, 2003.

So, as a result of a global alert reverberating around the world, an outbreak of the common cold in a long-term care facility was incorrectly attributed to the purported novel pathogen.

Was the way in which the residents were treated any different as a result? We saw terrible examples of egregious neglect, abuse, maltreatment, mistreatment and active euthansia in spring 2020; it is difficult to imagine that in this 2003 incident there were not some harmful effects on the residents as a result of staff assuming that the “scary new virus” was running amok.

So, in fact, were any excess fatalities, such as they were ultimately attributed to the common cold pathogen OC43, in fact due to “the virus” at all, or rather caused by the nature of the “response” to the perception of the virus?

Did the prevailing fear narrative upgrade the mundane to the deadly? Does this sound rather familiar?

Ultimately, the “SARS pandemic” was said to have killed 44 people in Canada, even with what we might presume was some over-attribution. That must be seen within the context that over 300k people die every year in Canada.

However, in response to this “crisis”:

1. In that post I describe a case of a man who developed a cold when he was (erroneously) told he had been inoculated with the causative pathogen; the cold then immediately resolved when the error was revealed to him.

2. According to the article, this is to be compared to 3 deaths per month for the prior 6 months in total, though no breakdown into respiratory / non-respiratory is given.

3. Another coronavirus, and one of the pathogens considered to be associated with the common cold - see here.

4. It’s interesting to note from this article that during the “SARS pandemic”, Public health officials became the dominant voice in daily press conferences and news coverage.