Our good friend Dawn Pine sent me this video last week. I originally intended to put it into yesterday’s Great Mondaydact Browser Mulcher – which, trust me, is a HIGHLY apt description, given what those posts do to my Chromium memory usage – but honestly, it’s such a good video that it deserves its own post.

This 15-minute (or thereabouts) clip involves a rather fetching Kiwi doctor with a lovely voice and charming accent, who just happens to be a well-qualified MD, talking about the Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test. You know the one. This is the so-called “gold standard” of Chinese Mumps diagnostics testing.

Except… it’s actually thoroughly unfit for diagnostic purposes:

(Yes, I know she’s got more than a touch of crazy-eyes, but she seems really quite charming, so I’ll let her slide on that. For now.)

The tl;dw summary of that video is that the Corman-Drosten paper in the Eurosurveillance journal contained some serious methodological flaws and ignored the underlying assumptions of the RT-PCR test. As the makers of the diagnostics kits themselves tell you, the RT-PCR test is not fit for purpose for much beyond a research tool.

The RT-PCR test may well be useful for figuring out whether someone has the Chinese Mumps – though, as the video points out, it isn’t necessarily very good at that either. Apparently, we have already sequenced the genome for General Tso’s Chicken Pox. That does not, however, mean that we have a reliable means of detecting it. As Dr. Bailey points out, at about the 5:45 mark, as of the making of that video (Jan 12, 2021), NOBODY has obtained purified Kung Flu virus samples for testing.

In other words… we are likely using a test that is not fit for purpose, based on that one criterion.

And it gets much worse than that. As Dr. Bailey points out throughout the video, we keep making basic errors of logic and classification with these tests. A positive test result with this technique tells you… pretty much nothing. It just means that you have a bit of this bug running around in your system. That is not an indication of how infectious or sick you actually are.

Yet we have submitted ourselves – quite meekly, mind you – to shutting down entire societies, industries, and economies simply on the basis of positive test results. We have claimed that people who die WITH COVID-19, actually die FROM COVID-19. And we have insisted, in the face of considerable quantities of evidence to the contrary, that a test-and-trace regime will work in containing the spread.

It was all based on a lie. All of it.

Now, let’s be clear. The RT-PCR technique does work. It’s a brilliant idea, actually. Nobody claims otherwise, and the people behind the original technique rightly deserve all of the plaudits that they received.

But the RT-PCR when applied to COVID-19 has created some serious problems, in large part because of our uncritical acceptance of the idea as a “gold standard”. From what little I’ve seen – and it is only a little – we simply do not have a particularly effective method of specifying rather than classifying.

What I mean here is that the Corman-Drosten technique allows governments and health authorities to classify people into buckets – infected, not-infected, at-risk, etc. But there are significant distinctions between people in those buckets. We already know that most people who catch the bug will have basically zero symptoms. Some will suffer fairly debilitating illness, for a few days. And a small number will require outright hospitalisation. But we cannot know which sub-group is which, a priori.

In other words, we cannot specify who is genuinely in danger. Having that test does not help us determine who we actually need to quarantine. So we have adopted completely impractical, and incredibly damaging, mass-lockdown policies.

And we can already see that the COVID waves are rapidly receding around the world – which is ENTIRELY expected. The weather is warming up and the days are getting longer. We saw the exact same thing a year ago. And we will almost certainly see the virus return this winter. It’s not a big deal and it’s not something to be frightened about. This is going to be a normal, regular part of life now.

Blame the Chinese if you want – more specifically, blame their government. They deserve it. The CCP could have stopped this entire nastiness in its tracks at the outset, but they refused. That has a lot to do with the very East Asian obsession with saving “face”, which leads to very short-term thinking. That is counter-intuitive, given the popular stereotype of Chinese and Japanese people as “inscrutable” and “long-term thinkers”. But I’ve seen it often enough in the workplace and elsewhere to know that this is an ingrained trait – almost surely a genetic one.

As for the Kung Flu test itself, it is not fit for purpose. Its own manufacturers point out that it cannot really be used for diagnostic or clinical purposes. So why are we using it as such?

Well, Dr. Bailey’s video answers that question as well. And, as always, it comes down to one simple principle:

“Money talks, and merit walks”. Indeed. That’s the reality of things.

There are tremendously powerful monetary interests behind the adoption of the RT-PCR tests for the Kung Flu. You can see this in action if you have to travel. The prices are absolutely exorbitant in some parts of the world. In India, you can get that test for US$35 at a clinic before you fly. The price in Russia is roughly similar. But when you get to the UK, the cost skyrockets to US$80 or more.

That is insane pricing. And the companies that operate these tests have tremendous market power, because governments dramatically limit competition by keeping lists of approved providers. They have what is known in economics as oligopolistic pricing.

This, despite the serious prevalence of false positives with the Kung Flu tests. Four-time World’s Strongest Man Brian Shaw tested positive on one test in Dubai, then negative on the follow-up. Elon Musk said that one nostril tested positive and the other tested negative. In Tanzania, goats and papayas tested positive for a human bug.

That news article does not make clear which type of test was used, but the fact that these tests come back so often with false positives does not fill me with much confidence in them.

The most important takeaway from Dr. Bailey’s video is the point that we must question every narrative thrown at us about the Kung Flu. Just about everything that authorities have told us about this virus has proven to be false. It is NOT particularly dangerous to most people, especially the younger and fitter among us. Vaccines are NOT going to save us all – based on the latest evidence, there may be a need for annual COVID-19 vaccines. And given the untested nature of mRNA vaccines, we may well be in for some very nasty shocks a few years down the line.

We were sold a real bill of goods with COVID-19. The most sensible nations in the world – Russia, for instance – tacitly understand this and have partially or fully reopened. I know personally that Muscovites are quite free to live their lives without fear – and do so. You can find plenty of videos of young people having fun in dance clubs, rocking out at concerts, gathering in the streets near Red Square to watch the lights, and eating out at restaurants. They are not afraid. They know that the threat was greatly exaggerated from the outset.

Meanwhile, in PommieBastardLande, Kiwiland, Aussieland, and America, the authorities seek to crack down ever harder in the vain hope of stamping out a disease that is not, in fact, all that dangerous. And they are using a tool that is wantonly unsuitable to help them.

This is idiotic. And it needs to stop. The world needs to reopen, stop being afraid, and get on with the actual fun of living.