Jeff Brown is a brilliant analyst primarily for high tech and innovative companies' stocks. He has a unique ability to frontrun new tech trends as he is closely following all the major innovations in real time. He has been consistently and openly questioning the current status of the COVID pandemic about the scale and magnitude in the US and he thinks it has been greatly exaggerated due to the high rate of false-positive PCR testing and misleading counting method for COVID-related deaths. Here is his latest posting about the issue.
by Jeff Brown
Yesterday, we looked at the dramatic drop in new COVID-19 cases – 82% to be exact – since January 8. And we also looked at the surprising collapse in daily COVID-19 tests, which dropped by about 1 million tests a day. That's roughly a 42% drop.
This tells us that the rapid fall in COVID-19 tests is not 100% responsible for the incredible decline in new COVID-19 cases. As I analyzed these numbers, I knew that there was something else happening in the background. There had to be something going on with the testing for COVID-19.
As a reminder, the use of PCR tests to determine if someone is "positive" or "negative" and determined to be infectious – and thus required to be quarantined – has been the standard diagnostic practice throughout the pandemic. But there's a major problem… PCR tests were never designed for this purpose.
Here is what Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, had to say about it:
"If you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody… If you can amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there's just very few molecules that you don't have at least one single one of them in your body."
His comments perfectly capture the absurdity of how PCR tests are being used today to determine if there is a "positive" diagnosis or a new case of COVID-19. The tests are set at a very high cycle threshold (sensitivity) that is so sensitive that it will give "positive" test results even when it finds dead viral fragments in our system from months ago.
What's equally incredible is that scientific research has already determined the correct settings that are appropriate to determine the likelihood of a live viral load, as opposed to remnants of a dead virus. Yet the medical community is using a sensitivity setting that amplifies the genetic material over a million times more than what was proven to be appropriate.
I had heard rumors that the cycle threshold setting was being decreased in the last couple of months, which would dramatically lower the amplification and sensitivity of the test.
If this were true, the result would be that the PCR tests with a lower cycle threshold setting would only pick up new cases that actually have large viral loads. That would be more indicative of someone having the live virus. This would cause new cases to plummet, just as we have seen in the numbers.
But those were just rumors. I couldn't confirm them at all. And it led me down the path of thinking that there must be something else happening.
And I found it. It wasn't easy, and it took me weeks of digging around and phone calls to figure out what has actually been happening.
It wasn't that the cycle threshold was being reduced in PCR tests. That likely hasn't changed. The answer was in the tests themselves. There has been a rapid and very material shift away from PCR testing to antigen testing over the last few months.
Antigen testing doesn't have the problem of PCR testing. If COVID-19 antigens are discovered in our bodies, by definition this means that we have the live virus and should self-quarantine. Having no antigens means no virus.
In other words, antigen testing doesn't generally produce any false positives. And as a reminder, between 60–90% of all "positive" PCR tests run at a high cycle threshold of 40 (which has been standard in the U.S.) are false positives. These don't really represent new cases of COVID-19.
So when I finally found these numbers below, it all made sense.
| Sept. 2020 | Dec. 2020 | Jan 2021 | Feb 2021 | |
| Antigen Testing | 28M | 95M | 111M | 131M |
| PCR Testing | 75M | 100M | 125M | 143M |
The data above represents the monthly testing capacity for COVID-19. This is an excellent proxy for how much of each test is being used for determining a new COVID-19 case. And we can see that something dramatic happened in December of this year.
Antigen testing, which used to make up only about 26% of all COVID-19 testing last September, suddenly spiked in December to nearly half of all COVID-19 diagnostic testing.
Why is that so significant? Because antigen tests don't generally produce false positives like PCR tests often do. And this rapid shift away from PCR testing to the accurate antigen testing, combined with the 42% decline in daily COVID-19 tests, perfectly explains the 82% decline in new COVID-19 cases presented to us every day.
We can imagine how much less fear and panic there would have been if we would have used antigen testing all along. The majority of what we were told were new COVID-19 cases simply wouldn't have existed.
And we should remember that these same PCR tests were also used to determine so-called COVID-19 mortalities. If dead viral fragments are found in any person who has died in the last year, it is considered a COVID-19 death.
There have absolutely been excess deaths related to COVID-19. And knowing that the new COVID-19 case numbers and mortalities are materially overstated, excess deaths will ultimately be the best way for us to understand the actual impact that the pandemic has had on society.
But we're going to have to wait another year or so before that analysis can be done properly. We'll have to look at the 2020–2021 winter season in the context of the prior winter season, which was a very light year for influenza and pneumonia.
And we'll have to look at the final numbers for the forthcoming 2021–2022 winter season. With that information, we can have an informed understanding of the impact of COVID-19.
And I hope that we'll learn a few lessons along the way.
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