The biggest scandal so far: a retraction paper for the SARS-CoV-19 PCR test was submitted in November 2020 but ignored so far. The retraction paper is here:
https://cormandrostenreview.com/report/
Drosten, Corman et al. from the Charité (among Europe's largest and most reputable university hospitals and medical schools) published a paper [1] in January 2020 [2] in the "Eurosurveillance Journal" in which they described a diagnostic workflow to detect SARS-CoV-2 (not "SARS-CoV-19", as you say) which they had developed and tested (both sensitivity and specificity). That became known as the Drosten PCR, and was the standard procedure initially to detect the virus (at least in Germany).
A group of 22 nutcases with bad English claim that the Drosten/Corman paper is severely flawed, put up a "report" "refuting" it (on a website, not published) and demand that Eurosurveillance retract it.
That report (which highlights a few very minor actual issues, but is otherwise false, misleading, and blown up entirely out of proportion) is later used by covidiots to claim that PCR testing is flawed and full of false positives, the virus doesn't exist, and further nonsense.
Needless to say, there are by now several different PCR testing protocols, they have been developed further, crosschecked, etc, and there is no major problem with PCR testing. Certainly no "big scandal".
This is political posturing and fabrication applied to medicine. Sad.
This comment is a bonanza of appeals to authority, straw man arguments, and ad hominems. At HN we generally prefer to see steelmanning. Would you like to take a shot at explaining why the most charitable interpretation of the Drosten review is misguided?
I just checked the twitter account of the first author (who does not seem to be currently affiliated with any scientific institution). I can only understand his German and English tweets. He likes to push his own book, retweeted a post claiming "just stop testing for the virus and people will die of influenza again", and calls other peoples work pseudoscience.
Why don't you talk about the 10 points that the scientists state to argue that the test is flawed? And what do you have to say about the other 21 scientists? What do you have to say about the former Pfizer chief scientist which is co-author?
This appears to be a totally unrelated set of authors attempting to force a journal to retract someone else’s paper. They literally have a dedicated website to promote this retraction and if you look up the authors, some of them headline their Twitter with it. The first author just today posted on Twitter that mRNA vaccines can alter your DNA.
The intent of the retraction seems to be to suggest that the epidemic is overblown, to which I would respond by pointing to the the two million dead people, and the excellent correlation of positive test results with new dead people.
FabHK|5 years ago
Drosten, Corman et al. from the Charité (among Europe's largest and most reputable university hospitals and medical schools) published a paper [1] in January 2020 [2] in the "Eurosurveillance Journal" in which they described a diagnostic workflow to detect SARS-CoV-2 (not "SARS-CoV-19", as you say) which they had developed and tested (both sensitivity and specificity). That became known as the Drosten PCR, and was the standard procedure initially to detect the virus (at least in Germany).
A group of 22 nutcases with bad English claim that the Drosten/Corman paper is severely flawed, put up a "report" "refuting" it (on a website, not published) and demand that Eurosurveillance retract it.
That report (which highlights a few very minor actual issues, but is otherwise false, misleading, and blown up entirely out of proportion) is later used by covidiots to claim that PCR testing is flawed and full of false positives, the virus doesn't exist, and further nonsense.
Needless to say, there are by now several different PCR testing protocols, they have been developed further, crosschecked, etc, and there is no major problem with PCR testing. Certainly no "big scandal".
This is political posturing and fabrication applied to medicine. Sad.
[1] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31992387/
[2] It was submitted January 21st 2020 and accepted for publication on January 22nd 2020. On January 23rd 2020 the paper was online.
tboyd47|5 years ago
eisstrom|5 years ago
mhkool|5 years ago
bigcorp-slave|5 years ago
The intent of the retraction seems to be to suggest that the epidemic is overblown, to which I would respond by pointing to the the two million dead people, and the excellent correlation of positive test results with new dead people.
briandear|5 years ago
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