A gentle introduction to diagnostic tests.

Rebecca Smith <walkerpercyfan@gmail.com>

The discovery of HIV did not occur, as we are led to believe, because people were showing up en masse in emergency rooms with weird illnesses that could be traced back to an immune system that had been largely destroyed. Rather, the hunt for HIV was a response to the failed War on Cancer and its attempt to blame viruses for cancer. When no cancer causing viruses could be found -- but some newly discovered "retroviruses" (which are so called because they contain RNA that is transcribed to DNA within the host cell, not because they were discovered in the seventies) had been found — it wasn't good news that none of these retroviruses actually caused disease in anyone. Rather, some over eager medical researchers, led by Dr. Michael Gottlieb, scoured San Francisco hospitals for "previously healthy" young men who were being admitted for severe immune dysfunction. After a Herculean effort, he managed to find five, none of whom were previously healthy. This was in 1981. (For an excellent falsification of the “previously healthy young men”, I highly recommend “When AIDS Began” by Michelle Cochrane.)

A few years later, Dr. Robert Gallo published a study in Nature claiming to have found the new retrovirus, HIV, in all of his 88 AIDS patients. (In reality, he had only found remnants of viral particles associated with HIV in roughly half of his patients. The other half had no trace of anything associated with HIV.) A press conference was hastily called announcing to all that this new and scary virus that caused severe immune dysfunction and eventually horrible grisly death had been positively identified and that a test for this virus and a vaccine would be available forthwith. Gallo filed the patent on his "HIV antibody test" the next day. This was to be the blueprint for the ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) antibody test that is still used today, but not to diagnose HIV infection on its own, because it is not authorized to do so.

Here's where things get wacky, and might start to sound familiar. The protocol in non-African countries to diagnose HIV is actually a combination of tests, none of which has FDA approval to diagnose anything on their own. All of these tests, nearly forty years later, are still produced under an Emergency Use Authorization, despite there being no discernible HIV or AIDS emergency to be seen. Typically, one is given an ELISA screening test to determine the presence or absence of antibodies against HIV. If it's positive and the patient is not in a "risk group", the test is assumed to be falsely positive and either a second ELISA test is given, or a different test called the Western Blot test is given. It also tests for antibodies, but somewhat differently as the antibodies to ten separate proteins are tested for. They show up basically as lines, like in a pregnancy test. But here's the weird thing - assuming that the proteins define HIV (and in fact there are presumed to be 30+ HIV-associated proteins, of which only ten are tested for reactivity to), one would assume that a "true positive" would test positive for all ten proteins, and then a "true negative" would test negative for all ten. This is not the case. Positivity is instead determined by reactivity to a certain number of these proteins, but the number and the exact proteins themselves that one must react to vary by country and even by laboratory. It is usually 3-4 but may be as few as 2. Let that sink in. It is possible to test positive for one or two proteins and be considered negative, but why would a person react to HIV specific proteins if they do not have HIV?

Moving on, we ask what is the current protocol that eventually lands on HIV+? Currently, the standard is an initial ELISA, followed only if positive by a second ELISA, followed only if positive with a final Western Blot. Remember neither of these tests are authorized to diagnose HIV on their own, but by the magic of HIV “science”, they can diagnose it together and somehow that's kosher.

Once a patient has been identified as HIV-positive, they become a customer of Big Pharma for life. From expensive antiretroviral medications with serious side effects - which are mandatory if you’re pregnant and happen to test positive for HIV, despite the fact that it is documented in the test kits themselves that pregnancy may cause a false positive on an HIV test - to endless laboratory tests to measure things like T-cells and viral load, the patient is a veritable cash cow.

I will address the T-cell depletion definition of AIDS in a future post, but for now I will focus for a few moments on the viral load test. The first thing that is interesting to note is that the viral load test is only used for measurement of disease severity. It is explicitly not used to diagnose HIV - that is the job of the antibody tests. Things start to get interesting here because, and you won’t hear this too often, the reason that the viral load test is not used for diagnosis is because too many people with no trace whatever of HIV have positive viral loads nonetheless. There is a very simple explanation. The viral load relies on PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technology. PCR was invented in the 1980s by the late Dr. Kary Mullis, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for this invention. You can think of it as a photocopy machine for genetic material (DNA or RNA). It takes amounts of RNA or DNA that are too scant to be measured by ordinary technology and amplifies these genetic fragments. Note that the entire genome is never used, only a small fraction thereof. Typically, upwards of 25 PCR cycles are run on each sample, and every cycle doubles the amount of the previous cycle, so we’re talking about multiplying something by 2^25. As in 2 multiplied by itself 25 times, and any lab errors or genetic “debris” get amplified as well. (This is why it has revolutionized crime scene analysis.) The result is then given to the patient as their “viral load”.

This should shock you. Literally millions of people are given a result on a lab test that isn’t even true. An astronomical viral load that is causing rampant illness should not need any amplification whatsoever, which is why during his lifetime, Dr. Mullis was a vocal opponent of using PCR for diagnosis. He was also a vocal skeptic of the HIV causes AIDS paradigm, and repeatedly said “quantitative PCR is an oxymoron”.

As we know, there are several COVID tests on the market now. There are rapid antigen tests, antibody tests, and what is considered the “gold standard” for diagnosis, the PCR test. However, COVID has provided a twist - PCR is not used quantitatively but rather as a simple yes/no, which it explicitly, by definition, cannot provide. And in COVID testing, upwards of 35-40 (!) cycles are used simply to detect proteins associated with SARS-Cov-2. This is a huge leap of faith in the accuracy of this test, which is run currently at upward of 2 million per day in the United States. But here is the question: Why would a test that isn’t good enough to diagnose HIV (which is saying a lot considering how poor the antibody tests are) be the gold standard for COVID testing? What could possibly go wrong?

My next post will answer this question in detail. I will discuss the standard for isolation of both HIV and SARS-Cov-2, and attempt to demonstrate that the proteins and the genetic material used in these tests are almost certainly not unique to either entity, and in fact include quite a bit of our own endogenous genetic material. In so doing, I hope to provide a satisfactory answer to the critically important question: What on earth are these tests measuring?