Could the Conspiracy Theorists ‘Have Been Right all Along’ asks the Daily Mail?

On the 12th of April 2022, the Daily Mail Online shared an investigation which led to them questioning whether the ‘science’ touted by the government concerning COVID was flawed. In particular, they queried if flawed PCR tests convinced us Covid was worse than it really was and were the ‘conspiracy theorists’ right all along. The Cides believes the Daily Mail should have carried out this investigation two years ago, instead, they, along with other media outlets, published a biased narrative.

The Mail Online reported on the 12th of April 2022, that they were investigating whether the “science that the government often said they were following was flawed at least in some respects.” For this investigation they focused on the subject of the PCR test, and asked, “Did flawed PCR tests convince us Covid was worse than it really was?” and even questioned if the “conspiracy theorists were right all along!”

One of The Most Enduring Conspiracy Theories

The Mail argued that one of the most enduring Covid conspiracy theories was that the 'gold standard' PCR tests used to diagnose the virus picked up people who weren't infected. Some conspiracists they said suggested that the swabs, which have been carried out more than 200 million times in the UK alone, may mistake common colds and flu for corona”.

Two whole years after they really should have the Mail asked whether the test which informed harmful, nonsensical policies was even fit for purpose.

“If either, or both, were true, it would mean many of these cases should never have been counted in the daily tally – that the ominous and all-too-familiar figure, which was used to inform decisions on lockdowns and other pandemic measures, was an over-count. And many of those who were 'pinged' and forced to isolate as a contact of someone who tested positive – causing a huge strain on the economy – did so unnecessarily.”

The Mail acknowledges that these statements have been asked previously and have been “roundly dismissed by top experts” they also admit, that other “top experts” or as they put it “those scientists” have been shouted down on social media, accused of being 'Covid-deniers', and even side-lined by colleagues.

But ask, “could they have been right all along?”(source).

The Corman Drosten Paper

The conspiracy theorists, were aware that there was something very wrong with the use of the PCR test, particularly after a paper, had appeared on the WHO’s website (13th and 17th January 2020) from the scientific journal Eurosurveillance, claiming to have developed the first effective test for detecting the Novel Coronavirus. This was only days before the declared “COVID” a  Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) (source), on January 23, 2020.

The published piece was authored by a Dr Christian Drosten and several of his colleagues from the Berlin Virology Institute, and the head of a biotech company TIB Molbiol Syntheselabor GmbH. Remarkably the authors acknowledged that they had designed the test “without having virus material available”(source). The Corman Drosten paper also omitted the omission of a Ct value at which a sample is considered positive and negative, and high cycle numbers have been typical.

The RT PCR test was still hailed as the “gold standard” and enabled the total number of cases to increase from as little as 44 individuals reported with pneumonia of unknown aetiology, to 9,826.64 by the very next day.

A request to retract the paper

It did not take too long before the paper and therefore the use of the RT-PCR was questioned by other scientists. An international consortium of Life Science scientists came forward after finding that the Corman-Drosten paper was “severely flawed” with respect to its biomolecular and methodological design.

Their paper was named: “External peer review of the RTPCR test to detect SARS-CoV2 reveals 10 major scientific flaws at the molecular and methodological level: consequences for false positive results”. The scientists highlighted that the Corman-Drosten paper itself already signifies that a large number of false positive results are generated by this test, even under controlled laboratory conditions, making it completely unsuitable as a reliable virus screening method for entire populations”

The scientists included a request to retract the Corman/Drosten paper, believing that the publication by “Eurosurveillance”, raised concerns about whether the paper was subjected to peer review at all.

The fraud surrounding the Corrnan Drosten Paper

The scientists were right to have concerns as Drosten failed to declare that he was a member of the Eurosurveillance editorial board when he and his co-authors were published in the journal only two days after submission (23 January) not only that he was holding a fraudulent doctoral title and would likely face court charges as a result (source).

Also, co-author, Chantal Reusken, also failed to declare that she was on the Eurosurveillance editorial board and TIB Molbiol CEO Olfert Landt failed to declare his conflict of interest that his company was the maker of a PCR kit based on the published assay sequences, Landt, only revealed this on July 29th 2020 (source).

TIB Molbiol had been supplying COVID-19 PCR test kits since early January 2020, and over a 12-month period had delivered over 60 million tests.” (source). The paper it seems was more a marketing piece than a scientific one.

The PCR test procedure ‘cases’

The WHO’S definition of a “confirmed case” of SARS-CoV-2 infection, is a person with a positive Nucleic Acid Amplification Test (NAAT), which is essentially a PCR test, regardless of whether the person is unwell or not. A PCR test may be able to detect short nucleotide sequences being they exist but come from somewhere else, not from a virus labelled “SARS-CoV-2”.  (If it is done poorly or at the target sequence may not even exist in the sample and a “positive” result is simply an artefact of the process).

The conspiracy theorists among us knew that the Nobel Prize-Winning inventor of the PCR Kary Mullis had stated that the PCR “doesn’t tell you that you are sick, or that the thing that you ended up with was going to hurt you” The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) also knew that there were consequences for false positives with the PCR test and withdrew the test in July 2021 (source).

Those pesky Conspiracy Theorists

The “conspiracy theorists” that the Mail speaks of, bearing in mind that many of them were educated scientists and doctors, simply pointed out that there were obvious flaws in the tool used to create the pandemic figures.

Those figures were used to inform policy and implement harmful measures around the country and although the Mail cites academics at Oxford University who say that the cost was an “eyewatering £2billion a month, it is obvious the cost was so much more than that.

Through ignoring the “conspiracy theorist” scientists, the Mail has aided the government in measures that have cost people their, livelihoods, relationships, jobs, homes, health, and lives. Consequently, although the truth may be surfacing within the mainstream, there can never be smug “I told you so’s” from those of us who told them so.