Jaime Andrews says what needs to be said
I read Jamie Andrews’ latest article at the PERFECT time today: during a spectacular lightening storm, in the passenger seat, on Interstate 65 south.
I couldn’t have asked for a better setting to take in the final paragraphs:
“There are an ever changing palette of chemistries involved in the PCR, just read any Reddit board with PCR Lab technicians and they readily describe it as a “Dark Art” where you have to constantly tweak stuff to get the results you want. Compound this with the infinite variables of how the reagents are made in the first place and you have the opportunity to SCULPT the thing it is measuring.
But at the very bottom of the ledger, the only baseline they have is that they are measuring the CHARGE. So that IS the answer.”
Is it me, or should Real Science NOT sound like a class at Hogwarts?
Macbeth also comes to mind (again!!). I’m envisioning the lab techs on Reddit — or Christian Drosten and a Host of Druids — standing around a cauldron, chanting, “Double, double, toil and trouble…”
I had never heard of PCR until it was used to fake a disease-spread emergency and harm billions of people in early 2020.
I took a crash course from my MD sibling (whose “broken cup” metaphor still resonates) and an epidemiologist who helped me dig into the University of Illinois’ saliva testing racket.
However, I can recognize that I was trapped in a false dichotomy described by Martin Neil, Jonathan Engler, and Norman Fenton — and failed to question the validity of “what” was being detected.
The PCR process now strikes me as a form of black magic, and not unlike misguided attempts to define and “measure” human intelligence.1 Before the COVID event, it was weaponized to conjure specters of CAPITAL LETTER THREATS, such as AIDS, SARS-1, MERS, and H1N1. Whatever its esoteric, hyper-academic utility, the procedure is wholly inappropriate for diagnosing or surveilling respiratory illness.
The spell will never be broken by those who keep casting it, so the solution comes from those whose bodies are exploited to create the illusion.
This means saying NO to being tested for a “virus”.
Post-Script (3 April 2026)
In a 14 April 2020 conversation with David Crowe, Dr. Stephen Bustin explains that PCR is measuring whether a chosen genetic snippet gets copied enough times to show up as a fluorescent signal.
The basic process:
- start with RNA from the sample
- turn it into DNA
- copy that DNA over and over
- measure the glow/fluorescence as the copies build up
If I’m understanding Bustin correctly, PCR is not directly measuring “how much virus is in the body” in a simple, clean way. It is indirectly measuring how much “signal” appears as the target sequence is copied, using fluorescence as the readout. That “glow” is used to infer that the target sequence is in the sample.
Bustin’s point seems to be that the process can help answer “is ‘it’ there?” more easily than “exactly how much is there?” He also doesn’t see the readout (ct/cq) as meaningful in and of itself. It has to be interpreted with the rest of the assay conditions. (This is also true for an IQ test score, which is why the analogy to “testing” human intelligence remains appropriate, if imperfect.)
None of this addresses questions about the relationship between the thing being indirectly detected and symptoms of illness, or justifies using PCR testing to diagnose or make treatment decisions about an illness.
A key principle in educational testing, measurement, and assessment is intended use by intended users. I’m not a biologist, but nothing I have read or heard in six years of knowing about and learning about PCR testing has convinced me that this principle isn’t applicable, or that PCR should be used in the ways it has been used with the things called respiratory viruses.
- Recommended reading: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould ↩︎
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