Huge breaking news!  Jefferson Healthcare’s response to a Public Records Request just revealed jaw-dropping information: It is using a PCR assay with an absurdly high cycle threshold of 45, calling into question ALL of Jefferson County’s reported COVID-19 cases!  

To understand what this means and why it’s so important requires a deep dive into the world of PCR testing.  Establishment media outlets don’t go there. Instead they rush to trumpet the following sort of claims without investigating details:

“Port Townsend woman tests positive for COVID-19.” That’s  the headline of a January 21, 2021 article in The Port Townsend Leader. “The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Jefferson County,” the Leader reports, “rose to 274 Wednesday as Jefferson County public health officials reported a Port Townsend woman in her 40’s had tested positive for the disease.”

What exactly does it mean if someone tests positive? What do these numbers really tell us?

As early as last spring, several concerned Jefferson County citizens began warning the county commissioners and Board of Health that authoritative research was proving PCR test results to be plagued with a high percentage of false positives.  That warning was echoed by Canadian pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson [linked here] whose company sells a COVID-19 PCR test.  Oxford University scientist Dr. Tom Jefferson sounded the alarm again in a Daily Mail article, as did a review by the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.  Just last week, these concerns were affirmed in new guidance from the World Health Organization.

As Dr. Tom Jefferson explains, these PCR tests “are telling people they have Covid-19 when they do not. In some cases, for example, viral RNA might be present in such very low quantities that an individual is not at all infectious and poses zero danger. In other cases, the swabs might pick up RNA which is so old it is completely dead, as people continue shedding material from the virus up to 80 days after the initial infection.”

Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is a laboratory technique used to detect the presence of ribonucleic acid (RNA) purportedly unique to SARS-CoV-2.  It does this through amplification of molecular material in what are called cycles, with the top numerical end of those cycles known as the threshold (Ct).

In an August 29, 2020 article in the New York Times titled “Your Coronavirus Test is Positive.  Maybe it shouldn’t be,”  the author writes  “Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.” According to Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk— akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left. “Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive,” agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside.  “I’m shocked that people would think 40 could represent a positive,” she said. A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added.  Dr. Mina says he would “set the figure at 30, or even less.”

The article continues: “The C.D.C.’s own calculations suggest that it is extremely difficult to detect any live virus in a sample above a threshold of 33 cycles.”

Dr. Mina posted this chart on October 26, 2020, demonstrating evidence for low probability of transmissible virus with high Ct values, in other words, how running more than 32 cycles can produce a practically meaningless positive test result.  He wrote, “The readout of future positivity (able to detect viable virus by growing on cells) approaches zero once at Ct (nucleocapsid RNA) >32.  Consistent with numerous studies.”

In a July 16, 2020 interview on This Week in Virology, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “If you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more…the chances of it being replication competent are minuscule.  You almost never can culture a virus from a 37 threshold cycle.  So I think if someone does come in with a 37, 38, even 36, ya gotta say, ya know, just dead nucleotides.  Period.”

Last November a Portuguese court ruled that the PCR test was too unreliable to use it in justifying quarantines.  The ruling relied upon a number of scientific studies, including one by Jaafar et. al, which found that, “when running PCR tests with 35 cycles or more, the accuracy dropped to 3%, meaning up to 97% of positive results could be false positives.” The ruling concluded that, based on the current state of science examined by the court, any PCR test using over 25 cycles is totally unreliable.

Yet another reputable study, by La Scola, et. al, published in the European Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, similarly found that the reliability of these tests drops significantly at 24-25 cycles, and, like the Mina graph, flat-lines at 34 cycles. “[P]atients,” according to the study, “with Ct values above 34 do not excrete infectious viral particles.”

Jefferson County’s Health Officer, Dr. Thomas Locke, has been tight-lipped about the cycle thresholds behind the positive COVID cases his department has been reporting. That is why I submitted my public records request to Jefferson Healthcare to uncover their protocols. They disclosed to me that they are using a PCR assay with a 45-cycle threshold, well beyond the outer limits of reliability.

Someone testing positive in Jefferson County using a 45-cycle threshold that has near-zero accuracy may be labeled a “case” by our health department. A healthy person with no respiratory illness whatsoever can be called a COVID “case”. If a person seeks medical care at Jefferson Healthcare for a stroke or heart attack and then tests positive with this unreliable test, they may be erroneously put in the hospital’s COVID ward and added to county “case” numbers.

The assay being used in this county has been designed to terminate the cycling automatically if the viral load is high.  If it truly functions as intended, one can reasonably assume that not all 274 “cases” cycled up to the 45 Ct.  But we have no idea how many cycles have been repeated on each “case” for the positive test results. 

What’s needed by our Public Health Officer is to report the cycle count for every positive case so it can be individually evaluated, as the Florida Health Department has mandated. Then an overall false positive rate for the county could be more reliably estimated.

“Case” numbers are being used to justify authoritarian policies here and around the globe.  This is institutional fraud on a scale without precedent.  These numbers are being used to terrorize the public into viewing one another as an imminent, potentially deadly, threat.  Our local businesses are being crushed, children’s education throttled, our social engagement eviscerated and futures of young families jeopardized for this colossal mirage of “cases.”  There is a very real possibility that the young generation will never again feel safe in the presence of strangers.

Public health bureaucrats have effectively been given police powers. Censorship has been weaponized by a technocratic elite to the degree that anyone who challenges the official narrative can expect a backlash of demonization, deplatforming and purging from social media and other public forums.  Our own local print media is censoring letters to the editor, even paid advertisements that contain factual data from incontestable sources, if the information differs from that promoted by local authorities. The local radio station is regurgitating those same authorities’ pronouncements as though their veracity is holy and above examination.

Claims of escalating numbers of “cases” are central to maintaining the fear locomotion that demands masking, distancing, quarantines, lockdowns and now, a population-wide clinical trial of an experimental vaccine.

It is past time to hit the pause button, to stop and ask the question— what is going on here?