Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Mass testing results: Endless panic and false positives

Imagine a virus that is such a serious threat … that you don’t even know you have it in most cases unless you get a test? The tail wagging the dog? The cart driving the horse? If we are now going to hold our nation hostage because of this obsession over PCR (polymerase chain reaction) swab tests, we should at the very least make certain they’re accurate.

What happens when we have expedited and chaotic test results driving an epidemic curve rather than actual symptoms? You get what happened to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine last Thursday. He tested positive for the virus after experiencing absolutely no symptoms. But because he is such a VIP, he got a second, more accurate test that showed he was in fact negative for SARS-CoV-2. The same thing happened to Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, who tested negative after receiving a false positive and was therefore allowed out of coronavirus prison.

How many more people are really negative, and why don’t people who don’t have such connections get the same due process that DeWine was accorded before upending their lives because of symptoms milder than a cold or perhaps completely nonexistent? And why won’t this experience change DeWine’s entire attitude toward treating every single COVID-19 case like it’s contagious pancreatic cancer, regardless of the symptoms or of whether we can even trust the test results?

This is a serious question that threatens the liberty of all Americans. As the FDA’s most recent fact sheet on PCR tests notes, the dangers of false positives include the following: “A recommendation for isolation of the patient, monitoring of household or other close contacts for symptoms, patient isolation that might limit contact with family or friends and may increase contact with other potentially COVID-19 patients, limits in the ability to work, the delayed diagnosis and treatment for the true infection causing the symptoms, unnecessary prescription of a treatment or therapy, or other unintended adverse effects.”

That’s nothing to sneeze at.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci says chance of coronavirus vaccine being highly effective is ‘not great’

White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday that the chances of scientists creating a highly effective vaccine — one that provides 98% or more guaranteed protection — for the virus are slim.

Scientists are hoping for a coronavirus vaccine that is at least 75% effective, but 50% or 60% effective would be acceptable, too, Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a Q&A with the Brown University School of Public Health. “The chances of it being 98% effective is not great, which means you must never abandon the public health approach.”

“You’ve got to think of the vaccine as a tool to be able to get the pandemic to no longer be a pandemic, but to be something that’s well controlled,” he said. 

The Food and Drug Administration has said it would authorize a coronavirus vaccine so long as it is safe and at least 50% effective. Dr. Stephen Hahn, the FDA’s commissioner, said last month that the vaccine or vaccines that end up getting authorized will prove to be more than 50% effective, but it’s possible the U.S. could end up with a vaccine that, on average, reduces a person’s risk of a Covid-19 infection by just 50%.

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