Posted on 06/30/2020 2:33:56 PM PDT by Auntie Mame
And measles, mumps, scarlet fever, yellow fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, tetanus, influenza, and the wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round.
I know a gal who wanted to name her daughter Monique, the poor kid ended up actually being named Monquie.
Yep. She named her daughter monkey...
What an idiot, huh?
They're everywhere, and they vote...
I prefer the term “hammer-banned”. Or just “hammered”.
Excellent and thought-provoking article. Thank you.
One sentence jumped out at me:
...”We’re lost in a simulation, seeking to grab hold of “truth” and reality.”
That is how I’m experiencing life right now. My son said to me the other day “Ma, I think they screwed up the algorithm in this reality sequence, no one believes this one”.. We laughed..but not heartily or long.
“.....What do we mean when we say somebody has ‘tested positive’...
“perhaps some kind FReeper would write down what the answer is.”
There’s a lot of excess verbiage in that article, so if one doesn’t read it all (or doesn’t really much understand it all) it’s easy to miss - but near the end one finds that’s the point of the article: we don’t really know what a positive test is.
I don’t know how much of the article you were able to follow, but here are some of the key things. We don’t really test for the virus per se; we test for segments of genetic material that indicate the presence of segments of proteins (supposedly) unique to the virus.
In order to detect that genetic material, we have to increase the amount present - we do that by a form of (for want of a better word) “molecular Xeroxing” called PCR. Every time you run a cycle in PCR, you double the amount of material present - for another crude analogy, recall the movie “Blow Up” where a guy kept increasing the size of a portion of a photograph until he could detect a particular detail.
For the COVID test, they have to do somewhere between 30 and 40 “doublings” in order to say they’ve detected evidence for the suspect proteins (and hence, presumably, the virus).
Problem #1: it doesn’t seem to be clear how many doublings are a reliable indicator for a positive test, and moreover, whether everybody is using the same standard - what might be a negative result in country A could be a positive result in country B.
Problem #2: it’s not clear why any particular number of doublings should be the threshold for a positive test. Why should no detectable material after 34 doublings be negative, and some detectable material after 35 doublings be positive?
Problem #3: You have to accept that the nucleic acid segments targeted as indicators of COVID-19 proteins really are unique to that virus and that virus only. (I have no idea how reasonable an assumption that is - but they are targeting only a piece of the protein structure, not the entire thing, and lots of these viruses have somewhat related proteins).
Problem #4: unstated in the article, but well-known in the business - PCR is really sensitive to accidental contamination - a little speck on you “original photograph” can become a giant blob if you enlarge it enough times.
refract
verb: make something change direction when it enters at an angle.
“the rays of light are refracted by the material of the lens”
You mean, “Don’t look there, look here”?
I believe it.
I looked up Kary Mullis up and was terribly disappointed to see he died just recently (2019) at the age of 74, per Wikipedia.
Great response. Thank you.
You get it, Grampa, you really get it.
Wow. Excellent breakdown. You must be a teacher, you made it all so clear. Thank you.
I have seen the second item you cite several places, but am not familiar with the first. True? The second item had documentation to support it...nothing would surprise me.
Indeed.
Yes, the presence of Covid sequences doesn't necessarily translate into the presence of viable viral particles, but it does document the presence of Covid sequences. It was the best we could do early on.
40+ years making my living with a piece of chalk - you’re welcome. And thanks for the original post - it was an intriguing article.
This is the kind of stuff people with schizotypal personality disorder ramble on about. Not the same as schizoid, not the same as schizophrenic. One day spouting off about viruses, the next about Bigfoot.
Sounds its kind of like, but different from growing bacteria to determine what kind of urinary infection it is since you are working with invisible parts of virons instead of much larger visible (under a microscope) bacteria?
exactly
In the post I said I don’t know if it’s true. Could be an internet urban legend. It seems logical that skeptical nurses might try to test the system; I think that’s something I would do.
Bottom line: There’s a lot of bullsh!t going on to inflate number and to put fear in the hearts of Americans. We KNOW FOR SURE we can’t trust the NIH and CDC data — and anything Fauci has his grimy hands in.
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