A Vital Paper: David Crowe Challenges the Discovery Of the COVID-19 Virus

Source: NoMoreFakeNews

Antibody Testing for COVID-19

David.Crowe@theinfectiousmyth.com
David Crowe
Version 3
May 13, 2020

It is now time for a discussion of antibody testing. Many people now want to know how many have been silently infected in the general population, how many are immune, and how this affects the fatality rate. This requires antibody testing and there is at least as much interest in this now, as there has been in the COVID-19 RT- PCR RNA testing that is used to declare someone infected.

Executive Summary

A positive RT-PCR test is used to tell people that they have COVID-19 RNA and are deemed infected and infectious, despite the technology's numerous flaws and known false positives. Antibody tests are now being used under the assumption that someone who is positive for antibodies for COVID-19 has previously been infected and, if they have recovered from symptoms, is now immune.

Antibodies are our body’s immune system reaction to viral proteins, known as antigens. Antibody tests incorporate antigens, and a chemical that allows the intensity of the reaction to be measured using light. Ideally antigens would come from pure virus, but COVID-19 virus has never been purified, thus antigens are created artificially from proteins based on portions of the 30,000 base RNA genome that is believed to come from the virus.

The major antibody types that are looked for are IgM, believed to be a generic infection fighting antibody that arises about a week or so after infection, and IgG, believed to be more specific, and believed by some to take longer for the body to create. After the infection is resolved, IgM antibodies are believed to gradually disappear, while IgG remain, providing ongoing immunity.

Unfortunately, this idealized picture is not supported by the available evidence, either because the evidence does not exist, is insufficient, or because it directly contradicts the model.

Positive antibody tests should be impossible before the person is first infected (RNA positive). Yet, old blood samples (2019 or before) have tested positive in significant numbers. Almost 14% of saved blood from old donations tested positive in a Dutch study, and in the validation of the Cellex and Chembio tests, 4.4% and 3.6% of old samples were positive.

The idealized antibody model is based on the date of infection as the starting point, but this date is never known with certainty. Even when someone came into contact with a COVID-19 RNA positive person on a certain date that is not a guarantee that this was the date of infection, given that, prior to the lockdown, people could apparently be infected while playing in the park, eating at a restaurant, walking down the street, attending a concert, or participating in any other now banned activity. When antibody surveys are performed, the vast majority of people who test positive had no idea that they had previously been infected, and cannot possibly be sure about the date. Thus, the incubation period for the virus is impossible to determine accurately, as well as the range of days after infection that IgM and IgG start to develop. This makes an accurate antibody model impossible to construct based on currently available data, despite numerous beautiful graphs showing this model in idealized form.

Simple models that illustrate the timing of antibodies show the quantity (titer) rising smoothly and, for IgM, eventually peaking and declining smoothly. Yet many studies have found negative tests throughout the symptomatic period. A test developed by the Wadsworth Centre in New York found 40% of samples negative for antibodies 11-15 days after symptoms started, and even more between 16-20 days. This indicates that antibodies may come and go randomly and not behave in a smooth and predictable fashion.

No test documentation, antibody surveys or scientific studies showed the disappearance of IgM antibodies, predicted by the model, perhaps because it does not happen, or it takes more than 30 days, the maximum examined. This might not be terribly important in practice, but it is another indication that the beautiful models shown in the form of graphs are simplistic, if not outright wrong.

Other problems with antibody tests include a significant number of samples testing antibody positive from people who were COVID-19 RNA negative (although some had 'COVID-like' symptoms), with no evidence that the person was ever infected. In one Chinese study the positive rate on presumably never infected people was 25%. Antibody tests, like most infectious disease tests, are often reported as 'Positive' or 'Negative', but the results are really whether the intensity of a color change in the test kit was above or below an arbitrary number. The reliability of this was called into question, inadvertently, by one test manufacturer, who showed that continually diluting samples 50:50 did not result in a halving of the color change at each step. In some cases, less material resulted in significantly more intense color changes.

Researchers have tried to connect the antibody titer (in reality, this is just the color change intensity) with the severity of symptoms, but two Chinese papers that studied this had to admit that there was no difference between mildly and severely symptomatic people in the quantity of antibodies, nor between those with or without pre-existing conditions, nor in the duration of symptoms.

Test manufacturers always run their test on blood samples from people with unrelated medical conditions as a check. Even though only a small number of samples were examined, for a small number of conditions, different manufacturers found a significant percentage of samples positive for COVID-19 antibodies, that were known not to have COVID-19, but instead contained other viruses, bacteria or mycoplasma, or were from people with auto-immune conditions, indicating that the antibodies are not specific. For example, 10% of Hepatitis B samples were positive, 33% of Respiratory Synctitia Virus, 10% of auto-antibodies and 17% of Streptococcus.

A large number of population surveys have been compiled by Dean Beeler and they reveal a wide range of percentages of populations antibody positive, from less than 1% in many cases to 32% in a poor part of Boston. This is generally seen as an indication of how far through the population that the virus has rampaged. One flaw of most of these surveys is that the population is chosen non-randomly, and does not represent the general population. The group may be a household survey, volunteers, high school students and staff, health care workers, blood donors, or people going for blood tests at a lab.

But a far bigger problem is that the number produced is impossible to validate. When 1.5% of Santa Clara volunteers tested positive, it was assumed that that was truth. This ‘truth’ asserts that all of these people were RNA-positive at some point in the recent past. But there is absolutely no evidence for this. The ‘truth’ assumes that all the people were negative for COVID-19 antibodies prior to the assumed period of RNA-positivity. But there is absolutely no evidence for this.

It assumes that the 98.5% who tested negative were never RNA-positive. But there is absolutely no evidence for this. It assumes that the 98.5% never had the antibodies being looked for before. But there is absolutely no evidence for this.

I could assert that the real fraction positive in Santa Clara was 98.5%, not 1.5%, and there is no less evidence for my assertion than for the results from antibody testing.

These surveys often ask if people who tested antibody positive had 'COVID-like' symptoms in the last few weeks or months (and most say that they did not). But these symptoms (fever, cough, loss of smell or taste, fatigue) are so generic that they are absolutely not evidence that the people were previously COVID-19 RNA positive.

One solution would be a time series survey of a large number of people currently negative on both RNA and antibody tests (uninfected and never infected). Every few days these people would give a drop of blood and a nasal swab. Some would become RNA positive, and then could be examined more frequently for the exact pattern of antibody development, through to the disappearance of IgM antibodies. This experiment would be time consuming, intrusive, inefficient (as most people may never become infected) and expensive. But considering the vast sums of money spent on COVID-19 research, quarantining and treatment, and the even more tremendous sums of money lost by a hobbled economy, and the assertion of our politicians that they follow the science (not the head lemming), this would surely be worthwhile.

Antibody tests might be fatally flawed, but they can be used in highly destructive ways. If the number of people who are antibody positive remains below the level of ‘herd immunity’ (90% or so) it will be an excuse to promote or even mandate vaccination, after a vaccine is rushed onto the market. Antibody tests could also be used to indefinitely quarantine people who do not test positive, asserting that they are at danger of becoming infected, and then spreading it to others. They could be used to separate families, arguing that the children must be put in foster homes because the parents are at risk of an infection at any time.

Faulty tests have been used to indefinitely quarantine Chinese citizens. But now, do we have more civil rights in the UK, United States, Canada or other modern, once democratic countries?

We have been here before. A BBC story from 2008, "Life Sentence", always makes me cry. Starting in 1907 nearly 50 women were locked in an asylum within the Long Grove insane asylum in Surrey because they were deemed carriers of typhoid. They were sane and healthy when they entered, but most were driven mad by the solitary confinement, by humiliations like toilets that flushed boiling water, warmly reminding them that even their excrement was a danger to the world, by the nurses wearing PPE. After they stopped imprisoning such women in the 1950s, the prisoners remained. In 1992, when the asylum closed for good, the three remaining women were deemed insane and relocated to other institutions, their entire lives destroyed by an infectious panic. Despite this, the UK Department of Health told the BBC that there never had been a policy of incarcerating people deemed carriers of an infectious disease [32].

This document is based on an examination of all antibody test documentation submitted to the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and a series of antibody surveys of groups of people from around the world.

A Little Background

COVID-19 is alleged to be an RNA virus, so the RNA will be in your body as soon as you are infected. RT-PCR is an ultra-sensitive test (capable of reliably detecting as few as five molecules of RNA in a sample, and possibly triggering on just one) and therefore should be positive almost immediately after infection.

IgM antibodies are believed to be produced by the body as generic infection fighters, soon after infection. An infected person will not be IgM positive immediately, but within a few days at most. These antibodies persist for a while after the infection is resolved, but then fade away.

IgG antibodies are believed to be produced by the body as very specific fighters of a particular invader, such as COVID-19. Some scientists believer they take longer than IgM to be produced, but all agree that they persist long after the infection is resolved, possibly for a lifetime.

Antibodies and Antigens

Antibodies are believed to be generated by the immune system in response to a foreign protein, known as an antigen. In the case of COVID-19, an antigen would be a protein probably found on the outer shell of the virus (because the internal proteins
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1 Often only samples from some areas of the body are positive (e.g. nose but not throat or stool), leading to the belief that the virus, unlike blood borne viruses, only colonizes a small part of the respiratory tract. Samples from deep in the nose (nasopharyngeal) are believed to be most reliable for early detection [27]
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are unlikely to stimulate an immune reaction). When an antibody binds to an antigen, it is a signal to the body to destroy the foreign object, such as a virus particle.

Antibody tests contain one of more of these antigens, that are bound to chemicals that produce some kind of color change or fluorescence when an antibody binds to them. The result of the antibody test is read as the intensity of this color change or fluorescence. This makes reading tests results easier to automate.

The antibody-antigen reaction is continuous, and not binary, not naturally 'negative' or 'positive'. Therefore, manufacturers recommend a particular intensity of color change or fluorescence as the division between 'negative' (antibodies not present) and 'positive' (antibodies present). Some manufacturers recommend an intermediate zone between negative and positive, and specimens in this zone may be re-tested, possibly immediately, or possibly in the future, when it is believed that, if the reaction is real, antibody levels will have increased to a clearly detectable level.

Since antigens are viral proteins the obvious place to obtain them would be from purified virus. However, since COVID-19 virus has never been purified, this is currently impossible.

In lieu of this, traditional, impure materials (e.g. nasal swab) would be added to a cell culture, and proteins that were believed to be viral would be purified and used as antigens. But in modern tests most antigen proteins are 'recombinant', produced artificially from the published 30,000 base RNA sequence believed to be COVID-19.

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