alicespringstomind

In 2009 I had a very strange, quite traumatic work experience. I was part of a public health team who provided a local response to the Swine Flu (H1N1/09) pandemic. Our usual outbreak response of calm, critical thought following planned, evidence-based practice was overridden by media and political histrionics. It took place over a number of months and as quickly as it overwhelmed us, commanding enormous resources and expanding our tiny department into a sizable response team, it just as quickly dissipated away again. At the time I was so relieved for life and work to revert to normal that I didn’t ask a lot of questions and I think I just assumed that the epidemic had run its course. I remember seeing something around that time about Dr Wolfgang Wodarg in Germany and dismissing him as a conspiracist. He claimed Big Pharma had improperly influenced the World Health Organisation’s H1N1/09 pandemic response. That would not have happened, was my solid conclusion and I gave it no further consideration.

Dr Wodarg is today at the centre of the first lawsuit which has just been filed by the German Corona Investigative Committee. Dr Reiner Fuellmich is leading the legal team representing Dr Wodarg as their first plaintiff, against online “fact checkers” who have accused Wodarg of lying about the Covid-19 PCR tests in use, and consequently censoring him. In 2009 Dr Wodarg, whose specialities include lung disease and epidemiology, was a Member of the German Parliament and the Council of Europe. As it turns out, his actions were prominent in stopping the Swine Flu pandemic response which played out very similarly to the current Covid-19 pandemic response, but thankfully ended in a much swifter manner. I have only learned of the part that Wodarg played in this recently, by watching 2020 events with slightly more insight than I had in 2009.

The Corman-Drosten Review Report is an impressive series of documents authored by a group of 22 medical specialists from across mainly Europe but also USA and Japan, questioning the validity of the PCR tests being used to diagnose cases of Covid-19. Submitted on 27 November 2020 to Europe’s infectious diseases journal, Eurosurveillance, the report describes in detail “tremendous concerns” about the testing protocols in use. It is an extremely complicated issue to try and understand, let alone explain, but in brief, these tests were never designed to be used as a screening tool, but rather as an adjunct to clinical diagnostic evaluation. Relying solely on PCR tests, including of asymptomatic people, without concurrent medical evaluation, as is happening across the globe en masse, is not diagnostic and leads to many false positive results, particularly when disease prevalence is low.

Additionally the testing protocols in use follow recommendations made in an article published in Eurosurveillance in January 2020, by a group of authors led by virologists, Victor Corman of Berlin University and Christian Drosten of Berlin’s Charite University. The Corman-Drosten Review Report describes multiple issues relating to the testing recommendations made in their article, including ten major testing flaws which result in high rates of false positive results.

As an example of how a false positive pseudo-epidemic can occur, Cambridge University in UK are offering PCR tests each week to all of their 15,000 students across 31+ colleges, citing asymptomatic transmission as their rationale. On the week of 30 November to 6 December 2020 a total of 9,376 students submitted self-administered swabs to the screening program. Due to laboratory resource limitations, the tests are “pooled” into households, so that of the 9,376 individual swabs, 1,937 pooled tests were performed. Ten of these tests returned positive results. All students in the positive pools submitted another swab for re-testing and every confirmatory test returned a negative result. The false positive rate of initial testing in this instance was therefore 100%. The reasons that this can happen are described in the Corman-Drosten Review Report, but a much simpler explanation is provided by Dr Clare Craig at her blog post A Miscarriage of Diagnosis.

Despite the lack of attention given to any of these issues in mainstream media, they are matters of great importance and impact to public health policies and outcomes. Dr Reiner Fuellmich is a credible and ethical person who has accessed medical specialists and other scientists from around the world to compile evidence for his lawsuits against those using public health as a tool to suppress our democratic processes. He speaks for ten minutes here with Ben Swann.