Coronavirus testing lab 'chaotic and dangerous', scientist claims - BBC News
Dr Julian Harris & another, unnamed, scientist resigned from a major coronavirus testing lab, citing chaos & even poor safety practises.
It was this item, preceded by a few... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54552620

...other news items, usually fronted by the horribly under qualified ‘medical correspondent’, Fergus Walsh, which got my attention. Followers will note I discussed the impact of inexperience on error induced false positives. I am more sure of this now. It may be that there is...

...no cross reactivity whatsoever with even partial sequence identity between certain PCR primers & sequences in common cold-producing coronaviruses (there are four which are endemic & apparently around 3% of us has one of these colds at any time from now on. But it’s not....

...necessary for anything other than greatly increased manual handling errors in over-worked labs, now staffed by people, many of whom have never worked professionally in a lab, to drive up the false positive rate quite markedly. I’m not saying that every positive is false. But..

...I am saying that Mr Hancock cannot say how many are false & how many are genuine. This is because they never publish even the internal QA which, I hope to heaven, they are actually doing. Working with Julia H-B, we eventually got Hancock to confess that Pillar 2 had...

...associated with it a FPR of just under 0.8%. During summer, most of the time, that FPR, in the context of very low prevalence per ONS, would account for substantially ALL of the cases reported breathlessly to you on the TV news. There then followed an internal edict to the...

...testers that they must minimise the FPR that henceforth they are to retest all ‘weak positives’ and also to limit the number of amplification cycles, so as no longer to pick up as positive those with clearly sub clinical levels of virus. And of course they’ve done not one....

...thing about this. Now, in the darkening days of autumn, as we push up towards 500,000 manually pipetted tests per day, we’re yet again invited to assume that the operational false positive rate is zero.
We’re having the wool pulled over our eyes. I no longer have even the...

...slightest confidence in the daily case count. As false positives flow through the system to false positive admissions & ultimately false positive deaths, you really should demand to know the operational FPR for each of the last 8 weeks together with supporting QA reports,

...even if just in draft. If you don’t do this, there is no end to the damage this out of control & unreliable test will do to the country.
I had the horrible thought the other day. Perhaps someone else can answer this thought experiment: if the virus stopped circulating, how...

...would we know? Surely not by reference to “cases”, which might substantially be the product of a faulty testing system? I think you should demand a proper answer to this question, unless you like the idea of rolling lockdowns until the inevitable sterling crisis...

...than I’m aware is boiling away at the back of our Debt Management Office. We’re running on empty & then some. We’re being lent money at eye watering rates, because lenders are no longer imbued with the belief in the “full faith & credit in the Bank of England”.
Back to my...

..knitting: Mr Hancock, release the QA reports on the last 8 weeks Pillar 2 FPR. If they don’t exist then HALT mass testing until you do know.
I’ve come to the ghastly conclusion that the pathology striding the land may no longer be the virus. We’re pretty much at herd immunity.

We must be, for the Covid19 deaths are incredibly low in London compared with several hundred per day in spring. No, the pathology infecting our society now is the error prone & out of control testing system. Because everything flows from it.
I believe if we halted Pillar 2...

...testing today, and used PCR only in hospitals & care homes, always retesting positives, then within 2-3 weeks, we’d notice that there is absolutely nothing unusual going on in our country, in terms of admissions, respiratory patients, ICU usage & deaths, nothing different....

....from any of the last five years at the same time of year.
Will anyone do anything? Is there just one honest, competent scientist in government service today?