The Cases That Made a Pandemic: COVID-19 and Its Unanswered Questions

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — When Americans were introduced to COVID-19 in early 2020, the vast majority of people had no idea of what was happening – except for what they were being told by healthcare experts, politicians and officials through TV and other media.

On the news channels, we saw images from China with people falling down dead in the street and police locking people into their apartment buildings by welding the doors. Then Italy. Dark, apocalyptic images of chaotic hospital rooms and hallways, with sick people lined up in the corridors. Then New York, where we were told that Bellevue Hospital had to bring in refrigerated trucks to store the victims of the virus.

We were told that COVID-19 was a deadly threat to humanity. But at this point, only a few people had allegedly fallen victim to the bug, which was still declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization on January 20, 2020, which characterized the outbreak as a pandemic on March 11.

President Donald Trump then declared a national COVID-19 emergency on March 13, 2020.

Many thought that we were dealing with a new Black Plague that would decimate the population. But the death rate from COVID-19 was remarkably low – between 0.063 and 0.082 percent in those up to 69 years old, and even lower among younger people.

CASES, CASES, CASES

At this time, few Americans, if any, had personal experience with COVID-19. When the so-called pandemic took off in early 2020, it did not do so with events we could observe in the street or in our families – it did so with the telling of a story that was promoted around the clock in mainstream media.

Cable news channels had special graphics, banners and tickers – but these were not tracking deaths from the allegedly life-threatening virus – they were tracking cases.

The cases, in turn, were derived from the number of positive COVID-19 tests. It is probably fair to say that never has a global population ever before been so encouraged, prodded and pressured to test for any condition – as for the COVID-19 virus.

In every small town across the nation, drive-in test stations were quickly set up, and temporary road signs informed people on where to turn in order to – in the quickest, most convenient way ever – get a scary long swab stuck up their nostrils, all the way back to the most fragile cartilage, then twisted and pulled out to be sent off to a laboratory for PCR testing.

THE PCR TEST AND ITS DISCONTENTS

How was the test created, and who was behind it? Well, first of all, it was designed in record time. On December 31, 2019, the Chinese CDC reported 27 cases of pneumonia of unknown cause to the WHO. A week later, the Chinese authorities stated that a novel coronavirus was the cause of the disease.

Two weeks after that, a German physician, Dr. Christian Drosten, submitted a paper to the medical journal Eurosurveillance. The paper contained instructions for how laboratories could create a rapid RT-PCR test for the virus, which was called “2019-nCoV.” The paper was accepted the day after it was received, and then published the next day.

Curiously, the WHO had posted Dr. Drosten’s RT-PCR test on its website a week earlier and had recommended it as the global diagnostic gold standard, according to Swiss physician Dr. Thomas Binder.

The PCR test was rolled out remarkably fast, and people were encouraged to test themselves – whether they suffered from any of the unspecific symptoms of COVID-19 or not. The media told us that we could be “asymptomatic” yet still spread the dangerous disease.

As the testing frenzy began, the media started reporting on how the “cases” went up, creating panic and fear in the population.

But many scientists and physicians were skeptical of the PCR test being able to diagnose what became known as SARS-CoV2 or COVID-19.

NOT A TOOL FOR DIAGNOSING DISEASE

PCR is an acronym for polymerase chain reaction and is a test that has long been used in medical science for amplifying DNA/RNA fragments by matching them to an input genetic sequence and allowing for a quantifiable measurement. The method was created by Dr. Kary Mullis, who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his invention.

Dr. Mullis, before he passed away in 2019, was careful to point out that PCR was not a tool for diagnosing a disease. “With PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody,” Mullis said. “PCR is just a method that’s used to make a whole lot of something out of something.”

Scientists critical of the PCR test for COVID-19, however, found themselves unable to publish their objections in medical journals. In an article called External Peer Review of the Corman Drosten Paper, 22 international life scientists pointed out severe flaws with the test.

“The published RT-qPCR protocol for detection and diagnostics of 2019-nCoV and the manuscript suffer from numerous technical and scientific errors, including insufficient primer design, a problematic and insufficient RT-qPCR protocol, and the absence of an accurate test validation. Neither the presented test nor the manuscript itself fulfils the requirements for an acceptable scientific publication. Further, serious conflicts of interest of the authors are not mentioned,” the authors wrote.

Some scientists who did see the PCR test as an appropriate way to diagnose complained that the cycle thresholds that were recommended by the CDC created huge amounts of false positive tests – something that even Dr. Anthony Fauci was forced to acknowledge.

DANCING NURSES AND EMPTY HOSPITALS

While the media were counting cases – cases in the hundreds of thousands – and stirring up panic among Americans, the public was fed videos of dancing nurses on TikTok and Twitter.

But how did the nurses have time to dance when the hospitals were supposedly filled to the brim? “The hospitals are overwhelmed,” we were told. “Hospitals are under siege.”

But were they? Some people ventured to see for themselves and posted on social media with the hashtag #filmyourhospital. What they found was the opposite of what we were being told on the news.