CDC's scandal secrete

By Jeff Brown

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided guidance on investigating and reporting COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough cases.

A breakthrough case is when someone is fully vaccinated but still contracts COVID-19. It isn't expected to happen a lot. But as the vaccines are not 100% effective, there will be rare cases of this happening.

And the definition of a breakthrough case is if someone is confirmed to have COVID-19 two weeks (14 days) or more after having completed their vaccination.

This is where things get really interesting.

The way that the CDC determines if someone is a breakthrough case is by using a PCR test. These are the very same tests that have been used throughout the pandemic.

But hidden within the CDC guidance is something truly extraordinary. It contradicts the guidance that was used throughout the pandemic from March of last year until early this year.

For breakthrough cases, the CDC specifies a cycle threshold setting of 28 or less.

As a reminder, the cycle threshold is a setting related to how much the RNA from a specimen is amplified as a way to determine if the virus is live and infectious, or simply dead fragments from a previous infection.

Pre-COVID-19, scientific research had shown that cycle thresholds of 26–27 provided a useful indication of a virus being live and potentially infectious. Therefore, the latest guidance for breakthrough cases makes a lot of sense. 28 or less is based on past scientific research.

What's incredible is that throughout the pandemic, PCR tests were used at a cycle threshold of 40. That's more than a million times amplified from what the CDC is guiding for breakthrough cases.

At a cycle threshold of 40, the number of false positives can be in the 60–90% range. That's because it will detect dead fragments of RNA from infections that occurred weeks or even months ago.

Yet this data was used to feed the fear and panic around the explosion in new cases. And it was also used to determine data on COVID-19-related deaths.

This dramatic swing in guidance is not a nuance. It couldn't be more material. The science behind PCR tests and cycle threshold settings was well-documented prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.

Why did the CDC ignore best practices during the pandemic? Why would the CDC determine if someone was "positive" for COVID-19 using settings that simply wouldn't give accurate results?

And why is the CDC now reverting to accurate and appropriate PCR settings for breakthrough cases?

Imagine how different our lives would have been had the CDC stuck with the scientific research and used the same guidance that it is using now for breakthrough cases?

The charts for COVID-19 new cases, hospitalizations, and mortalities would have looked completely different that what we see today. They would have been a fraction of what we witnessed over the last 15 months.

As I wrote earlier during the pandemic, this is a scandal of epic proportions.