PCR Test is Flimsy, Say Inventor and Courts | Frontier Centre For Public... https://fcpp.

org/2021/02/27/pcr-test-is-flimsy-say-inventor-and-courts/

PCR Test is Flimsy, Say

Inventor and Courts
Commentary, COVID-19, Government, Lee Harding / February 27,

2021

Every day, the television news tells people about new COVID-19-positive test results, but are they 
reliable? Kary Mullis, the late inventor of the diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind
COVID-19, explained how his test could be misused. So did a Portuguese court which ruled a
positive test is an insuf�cient basis to isolate or quarantine anybody. Fortunately, this is not the TV
news. 

Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction
(PCR) test. He died August 7, 2019, months before it would be used to diagnose SARS-CoV-2.
Regardless, his weighty words remain.

“The PCR, if you do it well, you can �nd almost anything in anybody,” Mullis once said in a public
address. “If you can amplify one single molecule up to something you can really measure, which is
something you can do.…So that could be thought of as a misuse of it.”

In an interview, Mullis claimed the president of the University of South Carolina invited Dr.
Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to debate
Mullis, but Fauci declined.

“These guys like Fauci get up and start talking and he doesn’t know anything really about anything
and I would say that to his face. Nothing,” Mullis said. “The man thinks you can take a blood sample
and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there, you’ll know it. He doesn’t
understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine and he should not be in a
position like he’s in. Most of those guys up there on the top are just total administrative people and
they don’t know anything about the body. 

“Those guys have got an agenda which is not what we would like them to have, being that we pay
for them to take care of our health in some way. They have a personal kind of agenda. They make up
their own rules as they go; they change them when they want to. And they (are smug)—like Tony
Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly

1 of 4 10/11/2021, 12:25
PCR Test is Flimsy, Say Inventor and Courts | Frontier Centre For Public... https://fcpp.org/2021/02/27/pcr-test-is-flimsy-say-inventor-and-courts/
into the camera.

“You can’t expect the sheep to really respect the best and the brightest. They don’t know the
difference, really. I like humans, don’t get me wrong, but the vast majority don’t have the ability to
judge who is and who isn’t a really good scientist.”

But if any non-scientist could judge, might it be an actual judge?

Last summer, four German tourists were detained in Portugal inde�nitely after one of the four
tested positive for the coronavirus. A subsequent test two weeks later drew the same conclusion,
leaving the four stranded in their hotel. Finally, they made a legal appeal under habeas corpus and
were released. On November 11, the Lisbon Court of Appeal in Portugal upheld that decision in a 
34-page ruling. The judges noted that none of the applicants was ever seen by a doctor, “which is
frankly inexplicable, given the alleged seriousness of the infection.” 

Everything relied on the PCR test, which 

the judges found �imsy: “However, in view
of the current scienti�c evidence, this test 
is, in itself, unable to determine, beyond
reasonable doubt, that such positivity
corresponds, in fact, to a person’s infection
with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

Such reliability was “more than debatable,”

in the judges’ words, as it depended on the
viral load and how many repetitive cycles in the PCR test were used to amplify the samples. Each
cycle exponentially increased the load, but the court was not told how many cycles were used for
the tourists’ tests.

The verdict referenced a study published by Oxford Academic in September on the correlation
between 3,790 positive PCR tests and 1,941 SARS-CoV-2 isolates. The researchers found that at a
cycle threshold (ct) of 25, the test was 70 percent reliable, a �gure that dropped to 20 percent at
30 cycles, and just three percent at 35 cycles. That meant 97 percent were false positives, yet that
was used “in most laboratories in the USA and Europe.”

The judges also concluded that, “however, and more relevantly, there is no scienti�c data to suggest
that low levels of viral RNA by RT-PCR equate to infection, unless the presence of infectious viral
particles has been con�rmed by laboratory culture methods.”

Why all of this matters is best summed up by the words of Gian Luigi Gatta, a professor of criminal
law at Italy’s Università degli Studi di Milano. The judges quoted Gatta’s warning of a slippery slope
for freedom: “Today the emergency is called a coronavirus. We don’t know tomorrow. And what we
do or don’t do today, to maintain compliance with the fundamental principles of the system, can
condition our future….The legislative turmoil generated around the containment of the spread of
COVID-19…can never harm the right to freedom and security and, ultimately, the absolute right to
human dignity.”
2 of 4 10/11/2021, 12:25
PCR Test is Flimsy, Say Inventor and Courts | Frontier Centre For Public... https://fcpp.org/2021/02/27/pcr-test-is-flimsy-say-inventor-and-courts/
Lee Harding is a research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash.

Share this:

   

Like this:

Loading...

Related 

Government’s Wasteful, Computer Modellers are Still A National Random Testing is

Misguided Sexual Intrusion Driving the COVID-19 Fear Essential to Determine the True
October 12, 2020 Wagon Infection and Mortality Rate of
In "Featured" April 21, 2021 Coronavirus
In "Featured" April 25, 2020
In "Featured"

Detailed Site Search

 PODCASTS

Audio Podcasts

Video Podcasts

 RECENT POSTS

Sustaining a Pariah State: Pakistan’s Ignominious Alliance in Afghanistan

3 of 4 10/11/2021, 12:25
PCR Test is Flimsy, Say Inventor and Courts | Frontier Centre For Public... https://fcpp.org/2021/02/27/pcr-test-is-flimsy-say-inventor-and-courts/

UK-Canada Nuclear Fusion Project Could Generate Jobs, Unite Climate Alarmists and Skeptics

The Endemic Path is the Way Out

The United States and Provinces of Red North America

The Renewable Part of Hydrogen Is the Hype

4 of 4 10/11/2021, 12:25