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RNA, you have to use an enzyme called reverse copies of this original RNA.
transcriptase (RT) to turn the RNA into DNA). However, all biological tests have false-positives (a result telling you
Coronaviruses are RNA viruses, so that’s why that you have the condition when you don’t) and false-negatives (a result
an RT-PCR test is used. They turn the RNA telling you that you do not have the condition when you do). When you
into DNA, and they postulate that if you have skip the first step that proves an infection, there’s no way to know how
evidence of a certain type of DNA, you have an many PCR test results are false-positive or false-negative.
infection of that organism. Here’s what happens with the PCR test amplification. You go through
There is one problem, however. If you have thirty-five amplification cycles, and you don’t find the DNA because
never proved—by Koch's postulates—that you thirty-five cycles do not create enough to detect it. So, you amplify it
have an infection with that organism in the first thirty-seven times, and then you start to find it. Then you want to find it
place, you can’t use a PCR test to show it. In more, so you amplify it forty times, and you find it more, but then you
fact, Kary Mullis explicitly said, “You can’t use start getting positives—a lot of them. And then, interestingly, if you
this test to diagnose infectious disease.” Later, amplify it sixty times, everybody is positive. So, you have to find the
Mullis became a so-called AIDS dissenter. He sweet spot between finding some positives and finding all, which makes
was furious and said, over and over, that you the test meaningless.
cannot use the PCR test to prove viral causation. Now let’s say you do the test and you set the number of cycles at
The book The Silent Revolution in Cancer and thirty-nine cycles. Perhaps you have a low number of false-positives at
AIDS Medicine has the whole story. thirty-nine cycles: 1 percent. That means that if you test thirty million
The PCR process is somewhat complex, but people, you’ll get three hundred thousand positives—and you have an
it is important to understand it. Here’s how it epidemic. If you then want to demonstrate that because you gave them
goes: We found a new coronavirus. It’s in some wheatgrass juice or a vaccine or told them to drop a book on their head
of the people who are sick. We don’t know what there are no more positives, all you have to do is put the cycles down to
percentage, and we don’t know if it’s in people thirty-six, and then everybody tests negative.
who are not sick. We’re not going to purify it,
but we know what the RNA is, so we can take CAUSES VERSUS VIRUSES
a piece of that RNA, which is unique, and we Now we can turn to what is a cause and what is a virus—and this is
can turn it into DNA. We can then amplify it the second layer to the story. For this I want to refer health professionals
through cycles. The amplification is needed and medical doctors, in particular, to a lecture given by one of the most
because if you have one piece of DNA (or ten or prominent virologists in the world, “Skip” Virgin (Herbert W. Virgin IV,
one hundred), it’s not enough to see it. But if you MD, PhD). You can find him on YouTube and on the National Institutes
make one piece become two, and two become of Health (NIH) website giving the NIH’s 2015 Annual RE Dyer Lecture
four, and four become eight—and if you do that on the state of infectious diseases.
8
twenty or thirty times—you will have a million First, let me point out that when I was in medical school, we knew

THE PCR TEST: EXPLAINING SURROGATE TESTS
To explain what a surrogate test is, let’s say you want to know how many feet are in a particular town (not feet like
inches, but feet at the end of your legs). Obviously, one way to find that out is to gather everybody in the town square
and count the feet. Next, you want to know how many feet are in the next town over, so you assemble everyone and you
count their feet. You keep doing that, and you get a 100 percent accurate reading of how many feet are in each town.
Then you say to yourself, “This is too tedious, I don’t want to do this. I’m going to use a surrogate test, and that’s
going to tell me how many feet there are.” So, you make some assumptions: (a) everybody who has feet has shoes; (b)
everybody who has shoes has only one pair of shoes; (c) everybody who has shoes has shoelaces; and (d) there’s only
one shoe store in town that sells shoelaces. You decide that you are going to make this easy for yourself by going to
the shoe store and asking how many shoelaces they sold this year—and that will tell you how many people have feet.
It’s nonsense, of course, because some people may not have shoes, some have many pairs of shoes, some have shoes
without shoelaces and some shoelaces may come from other stores. Nevertheless, that’s an example of a surrogate
test—and a PCR test is a surrogate test.
If you first establish that everyone in town has one pair of shoes and they all have shoelaces, then you can count
the shoelaces and make your counting job easier. But if you don’t know the first critical piece of information, you can’t
do the second thing. In the case of this coronavirus, they didn’t do the first thing—for whatever reason—but they are
using the surrogate test anyway. To me, that is a monumental mistake.

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