PART 1 of my investigation into the Corman-Drosten research paper reviewed the evidence of its many failings.
Published on January 23, 2020, the paper presented the workings of a real-time RT-PCR diagnostic test for Covid 19 which was accepted by the World Health Organisation and made available globally from mid-January.
Here in Part 2, I throw further light on the scandal surrounding this paper and its astonishing but misplaced influence on the worldwide draconian and often unnecessary quarantines and social distancing policies that PCR test results have appeared to justify.
The turning point in exposing the test’s unreliability came on November 20, 2020. An appeals court in Portugal made the monumental ruling that ‘the PCR process is not a reliable test for Sars-Cov-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful’.
The OffGuardian article reporting it stated: ‘In their ruling, judges Margarida Ramos de Almeida and Ana Paramés referred to several scientific studies. Most notably this study by Jaafar et al., which found that – when running PCR tests with 35 cycles or more – the accuracy dropped to three per cent, meaning up to 97 per cent of positive results could be false positives.’
This groundbreaking ruling from a European appeals court should have been proof enough that the PCR test was far from being the ‘gold standard’ in testing for SARS-Cov-2 and essentially ‘not fit for purpose.’
Shockingly, the UK mainstream media did not pick up on this story, begging the question: Why was PCR testing not ever properly scrutinised under the UK’s judicial system, given the test’s proven capacity for producing false positives when running 35 cycles or more?
In the months since, the public has had to bear the brunt of the ‘unlawful’ quarantining resulting from wide-scale but unreliable PCR testing and will bear the heavy tax burden the Government’s investment in it has incurred.
This will be felt for many years to come as it pays for the epic waste of ‘Operation Moonshot’ and ‘NHS track and trace’ that, astoundingly, still uses PCR tests alongside lateral flow tests.
On December 14, 2020 (many months after the unreliability of the PCR test was widely known and after thousands of false positive cases were counted as Covid cases) the WHO finally issued a warning statement that using a high CT value would result in false positives.
An extract from its statement warns: ‘When specimens return a high CT value, it means that many cycles were required to detect virus. In some circumstances, the distinction between background noise and actual presence of the target virus is difficult to ascertain’.
The report goes on to state that an ‘adjustment of the PCR positivity threshold is necessary to account for any background noise which may lead to a specimen with a high cycle threshold (CT) value result being interpreted as a positive result’.
Dr Thomas Binder MD, one of the 22 authors of the external peer review (mentioned in Part 1 of my report) of the Corman-Drosten research paper tweeted: ‘It is madness to test with a hypersensitive unspecific RT-PCR test only, without consideration of CT & clinical findings. And it is the coronation of insanity to test even asymptomatic people in this way.’
Richard Tice (leader of Reform UK) was spot on when he said in his piece for TCW: ‘Stop testing the asymptomatic, stop wasting money and give people back the freedoms we need to get this country back working, living, educating, and loving again.’
The WHO’s technical data manager, Maria Van Kerkkhove during the organisation’s media briefing back in June 2020 stated: ‘Based on our data, it seems unlikely that an asymptomatic carrier will transmit the infection to someone else. We have a number of reports from other countries. They monitor asymptomatic carriers, their contacts, and do not detect further transmission.’
This was further confirmed in an article in the British Medical Journal by Professor Allyson Pollock, where she wrote: ‘A city-wide prevalence study of almost ten million people in Wuhan found no evidence of asymptomatic transmission.’
Despite this overwhelming evidence, the Johnson government, following the ‘advice’ from SAGE, continues to ring the bells of doom about the risk of asymptomatic spread of Covid, premised on provenly unreliable data.
This miscalculation has reverberated through the Government’s draconian Covid legislation, in the explicit scaremongering messaging of the public advertising campaign, and embraced by the leading food retailers in their own ‘shop safely’ messaging, in what I like to call a veritable Project Fear.
So who were key authors of the Corman-Drosten research paper, published in January, 2020 in Eurosurveillance that so influenced draconian quarantine and social distancing policies?
The named are: Victor M Corman, Olfert Landt, Marco Kaiser, Richard Molenkamp, Adam Meijer, Daniel K W Chu, Tobias Bleicker, Sebastian Brünink, Julia Schneider, Marie Luisa Schmidt, Daphne GJC Mulders, Bart L Haagmans, Bas van der Veer, Sharon van den Brink, Lisa Wijsman⁵, Gabriel Goderski, Jean-Louis Romette, Joanna Ellis, Maria Zambon, Malik Peiris, Herman Goossens, Chantal Reusken, Marion P G Koopmans, Christian Drosten.
It was Olfert Landt’s bio-tech company, TIB Molbiol, based in Berlin, which was the first to produce and ship RT-PCR testing kits around the world for the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The paper has been revised three times, but the most important update was to the conflict of interest section. It was updated to state that Olfert Landt is CEO of Tib-Molbiol and that Marco Kaiser is senior researcher at GenExpress and serves as scientific adviser for Tib-Molbiol.
But was it a coincidence that Landt and his associate, Christian Drosten, inventor of the protocol for the RT-PCR test, had their research paper published in the very same journal that Drosten happened to be the editor of, cementing the adoption of the RT-PCR test as the worldwide ‘gold standard’ test for SARS-CoV-2?
Was it just a coincidence that the first viable testing kit was made ready for shipping as early as January 10, a critical fact that was picked up by Bloomberg Business in its article entitled: ‘A Berlin bio tech company got a head start on coronavirus test.’ They certainly did get a head start. The company’s profits tripled in February 2020 from the same period in 2019.
The German daily newspaperDer Tagesspiegel also commented on TIB Molbiol’s tripling of profits in February, along with some other interesting facts. See the English translation below.
On June 10, 2020, the editorial team of Eurosurveillance was contacted about a ‘possible undisclosed conflict of interest’ of Olfert Landt, CEO of TIB Molbiol.
In response, the editorial team stated: ‘We also received a detailed statement from the corresponding author, Christian Drosten, and from Olfert Landt, who explained that for the main reasons outlined above, they do not consider that being Tib-Molbiol’s CEO constituted a conflict of interest with respect to the article in question at the time of submission.’
I’d like just to remind the reader that Christian Drosten is also part of the editorial team of Eurosurveillance.
Another point I’d like to highlight, which the article mentions, is the fact that it was Landt’s company, TIB Molbiol, which also happened to be the first to provide testing kits during the SARS, avian influenza (bird flu), swine flu and MERS outbreaks. Now that’s some bio-tech company … always first out of the gate.
Back to the critical date of January 10, 2020. The Eurosurveillance published Corman-Drosten research paper stated: ‘A viral genome sequence was released for immediate public health support via the online community resource virological.org on 10 January.’
This critical date happens to be the very same day that TIB Moblbiol shipped out its first testing kits for the novel virus to Hong Kong. I would like to know how it’s feasible for a diagnostic test to be made ready to accurately detect the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, on the very same day that the genome sequence for that virus was made publicly available?
More scandals will be revealed in Part 3 of my investigative report on the Corman-Drosten paper, its PCR test and what could become the biggest tort case in legal history, thanks to the German lawyer Dr Reiner Fuellmich.
