In newly surfaced July interview, Fauci warns that widely used COVID tests may pick up 'dead' virus
Over-sensitive tests can just pick up "dead nucleotides" rather than live virus, he said.
By Daniel Payne
Updated: November 8, 2020 - 10:48pm

n newly resurfaced video from July, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to acknowledge that large numbers of positive COVID-19 cases may arise from oversensitive tests that pick up mere fragments of the virus rather than active, viable infections.

If true, many patients may have been receiving false-positive test results — causing much needless anxiety and disruption to everyday life — while the numbers of COVID-19 cases reported by public health authorities and major COVID tracking websites could be vastly overstated.

The admission came on a July 16 episode of This Week in Virology, a longtime science podcast hosted by Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had joined the program to discuss various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including testing.

Concerns have been raised over the last several months that laboratory tests widely deployed to detect SARS-Cov-2 — what are known as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests — may in fact be picking up remnants of the virus instead of meaningful levels of infection. Some critics have argued that significant numbers of purportedly positive COVID-19 tests are actually not infectious at all.

At the center of the debate is the "cycle threshold" at which a PCR test operates. PCR tests work by multiplying a virus fragment over a series of cycles until it can reliably detect and confirm the virus within a sample. The more cycles a test must go through before it detects the virus, the smaller and weaker the original sample was.

High cycles, in other words, are expected to correlate to weaker viral samples, indicating that a patient's "positive" case in that context may be more or less meaningless from an epidemiological or virological perspective.

At high levels, 'the chances of it being [accurate] are minuscule,' Fauci says.

Joining the hosts of This Week in Virology in July, Fauci directly responded to a question about COVID-19 testing, specifically how patients with positive tests might determine whether or not they are actually infectious and need to quarantine.

"What is now sort of evolving into a bit of a standard," Fauci said, is that "if you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more ... the chances of it being replication-confident are minuscule."

"It's very frustrating for the patients as well as for the physicians," he continued, when "somebody comes in, and they repeat their PCR, and it's like [a] 37 cycle threshold, but you almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle."

"So, I think if somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it's just dead nucleotides, period."

Fauci noted that patients who receive a positive COVID-19 diagnosis are not immediately given the cycle threshold of their test. "When someone comes in and it's positive, they don't give them the threshold until you go back and ask for it," he said.

In newly resurfaced video from July, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to acknowledge that large numbers of positive COVID-19 cases may arise from oversensitive tests that pick up mere fragments of the virus rather than active, viable infections.

If true, many patients may have been receiving false-positive test results — causing much needless anxiety and disruption to everyday life — while the numbers of COVID-19 cases reported by public health authorities and major COVID tracking websites could be vastly overstated.

The admission came on a July 16 episode of This Week in Virology, a longtime science podcast hosted by Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had joined the program to discuss various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including testing.

Concerns have been raised over the last several months that laboratory tests widely deployed to detect SARS-Cov-2 — what are known as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests — may in fact be picking up remnants of the virus instead of meaningful levels of infection. Some critics have argued that significant numbers of purportedly positive COVID-19 tests are actually not infectious at all.

At the center of the debate is the "cycle threshold" at which a PCR test operates. PCR tests work by multiplying a virus fragment over a series of cycles until it can reliably detect and confirm the virus within a sample. The more cycles a test must go through before it detects the virus, the smaller and weaker the original sample was.

High cycles, in other words, are expected to correlate to weaker viral samples, indicating that a patient's "positive" case in that context may be more or less meaningless from an epidemiological or virological perspective.

At high levels, 'the chances of it being [accurate] are minuscule,' Fauci says.

Joining the hosts of This Week in Virology in July, Fauci directly responded to a question about COVID-19 testing, specifically how patients with positive tests might determine whether or not they are actually infectious and need to quarantine.

"What is now sort of evolving into a bit of a standard," Fauci said, is that "if you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more ... the chances of it being replication-confident are minuscule."

"It's very frustrating for the patients as well as for the physicians," he continued, when "somebody comes in, and they repeat their PCR, and it's like [a] 37 cycle threshold, but you almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle."

"So, I think if somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it's just dead nucleotides, period."

Fauci noted that patients who receive a positive COVID-19 diagnosis are not immediately given the cycle threshold of their test. "When someone comes in and it's positive, they don't give them the threshold until you go back and ask for it," he said.


[NOTE Video set to 3:51 the beginning of Fauci's statement]

Zitat

---

Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.

---

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/healt...us-testing.html

So the test that determines 'cases' is about as accurate as the model that predicted over 2 million deaths. And ... both have been used to infringe upon our freedom, justify manditory mail in voting, keep children out of school, shut down businesses, ... ....

Additionally the PC test only looks for a piece of the virus, not the entire thing. So even a postitive value for a PCR test set below 30 CT value does not necessarily indicate the KungFLu. It indicates any corona virus that share a portion of its DNA with the Kungflu.