{"id":122883,"date":"2023-06-10T19:06:46","date_gmt":"2023-06-10T19:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/?p=122883"},"modified":"2023-06-10T19:06:46","modified_gmt":"2023-06-10T19:06:46","slug":"researchers-had-a-simple-test-for-determining-if-an-asymptomatic-person-who-tested-positive-for-covid-was-infectious-but-cdc-fauci-ignored-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/researchers-had-a-simple-test-for-determining-if-an-asymptomatic-person-who-tested-positive-for-covid-was-infectious-but-cdc-fauci-ignored-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Had a Simple Test for Determining if an Asymptomatic Person Who Tested Positive for Covid Was Infectious \u2014 But CDC, Fauci Ignored It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Researchers at Stanford University who developed the test also determined that the vast majority of asymptomatic people who tested positive \u2014 96% \u2014 did not transmit the virus.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-122906\" src=\"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/t1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"560\" height=\"292\" srcset=\"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/t1.jpg 800w, https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/t1-300x156.jpg 300w, https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/t1-768x400.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 560px) 100vw, 560px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A test that can accurately determine whether a person with a positive PCR test result for covid-19 is infectious was available as early as May 2020 \u2014 but public health authorities appear to have ignored it.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at Stanford University who developed the test also determined that the vast majority of asymptomatic people who tested positive \u2014 96% \u2014 did not transmit the virus.<\/p>\n<p>Investigative reporter and author David Zweig, a previous contributor to the release of the <em>Twitter files<\/em>, first reported on the test on his <em>Substack<\/em>.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">The Most Important Test You\u2019ve Never Heard Of <\/p>\n<p>In May 2020, Stanford scientists developed a test that could have altered the course of the pandemic response. It was never rolled out.<\/p>\n<p>My latest:<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/NooGSptreF\">https:\/\/t.co\/NooGSptreF<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/rXlAZaJ9uB\">pic.twitter.com\/rXlAZaJ9uB<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; David Zweig (@davidzweig) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/davidzweig\/status\/1655607584450129922?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">May 8, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>Transmission from asymptomatic people is far, far less common than we were led to believe<\/em>,\u201d Zweig wrote. \u201c<em>The novel test at Stanford that showed a very low rate of infectious asymptomatic people who had tested positive was available as early as May 2020.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>Yet the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and other health authorities did nothing<\/em>,\u201d Zweig said.<\/p>\n<p>Zweig appeared on <em>The Hill<\/em>\u2019s \u201c<em>Rising<\/em>,\u201d where he told the show\u2019s hosts:<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>At Stanford, they developed a test in May of 2020, the very beginning of the pandemic, that actually could find out whether or not you were infectious.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>After you had taken a regular PCR test, if it showed you were positive, they could determine whether or not that positive test meant you could actually infect others or not<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Zweig wrote that while the standard PCR test commonly administered during the covid-19 pandemic \u201c<em>detects whether someone has the virus it cannot detect whether the person is capable of infecting others<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The test developed by Stanford researchers, however, was able to accomplish this. As Zweig explained:<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>SARS-CoV-2 is a positive or \u2018plus-stranded\u2019 RNA virus. For it to replicate it must do so with a minus strand.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Brilliantly, the Stanford test looks to see if the minus strand is present. If it is then that indicates the virus is actively replicating, which means it\u2019s potentially infectious. If the minus strand is absent then the virus is not replicating. (It is not possible to transmit the virus if it is not replicating.)<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Benjamin Pinsky, Ph.D., medical director of Stanford\u2019s Clinical Virology Laboratory and medical co-director for Point of Care Testing, was one of the researchers involved in the development of the test. He told Zweig the purpose of the test was to help hospital clinicians accurately determine if patients were infectious or not.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>The minus strand test gave a definitive answer one way or another<\/em>,\u201d Zweig wrote. But although the test was available as early as May 2020, the CDC did not publish the researchers\u2019 paper about the test until February 2021.<\/p>\n<p>The paper, published in the <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases<\/em> journal, stated that the analytical validation for the test was conducted \u201c<em>during May-June 2020<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By publishing the paper in early 2021, federal agencies \u201c<em>certainly were aware that this test existed<\/em>\u201d even prior to its publication date, Zweig told \u201c<em>Rising<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>This raises serious questions for those in charge of the CDC, NIH [National Institutes of Health], and NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] for why resources were not allocated toward making this test broadly available<\/em>,\u201d Zweig wrote on his <em>Substack<\/em>, adding:<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>Though the test was developed for use in hospitals, its utility outside of a medical setting is obvious.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Regular people could have paid for the test to find out after they got over a bout of covid whether they were still infectious or not, enabling them to go to work, visit relatives, and so on. Millions of kids could have tested out of isolation<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Zweig told \u201c<em>Rising<\/em>\u201d that while it\u2019s unclear why the paper wasn\u2019t put out more broadly, \u201c<em>the fascinating part is we had this tool to give us an answer to a question that was merely conjecture for the entire pandemic<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s more, according to Zweig, Stanford researchers \u201c<em>later looked at data from this test from July of 2020 through April 2022, and answered the question health authorities neglected to answer<\/em>,\u201d finding that \u201c<em>only 4% of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 PCR-positive patients were shown to be infectious<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Zweig noted, however, that this percentage did decrease during the \u201c<em>Omicron wave<\/em>,\u201d where the infection rate among asymptomatic patients \u201c<em>peaked at about 25%<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"fitvidsignore\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3EnYUJNo3Lw\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>One of the researchers involved with the follow-up study, Dr. Ralph Tayyar, is an Infectious Diseases fellow at Stanford. He presented his findings at the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America\u2019s conference in April and told Zweig that the effectiveness of restrictions on asymptomatic people was likely lower than claimed.<\/p>\n<p>Using the classroom environment as an analogy, Tayyar told Zweig, \u201c<em>The probability of a kid in class who is not sick actually being infectious is very low<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tayyar noted that while public health officials did not adopt the Stanford test, Stanford itself stopped conducting admission screen testing. He said there was no evidence that this resulted in an increase in transmission of covid-19.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>The CDC could have immediately conducted a huge study to actually answer the question health officials had only been conjecturing about \u2014 what percentage of positive people without symptoms have the capability of infecting others<\/em>,\u201d Zweig said, but opted not to.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, Zweig wrote, during the first few months of the covid-19 pandemic, \u201c<em>The specter of asymptomatic transmission undergirded not just policies on masks, but on distancing, and quarantines as well<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>According to Zweig, Dr. Anthony Fauci referred to the purported threat of asymptomatic spread to justify his \u201c<em>180 on community mask recommendations<\/em>.\u201d For instance, Fauci told <em>The Washington Post<\/em> in July 2020:<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>We didn\u2019t realize the extent of asymptotic spread as the weeks and months came by, two things became clear: one, that there wasn\u2019t a shortage of masks, we had plenty of masks and coverings that you could put on that\u2019s plain cloth so that took care of that problem.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Secondly, we fully realized that there are a lot of people who are asymptomatic who are spreading infection. So, it became clear that we absolutely should be wearing masks consistently<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The concept of \u201c<em>silent spread<\/em>\u201d was so influential that Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator from Feb. 27, 2020, to Jan. 20, 2021, named her book <em>Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It\u2019s Too Late<\/em> after it, Zweig said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>The entire apparatus of our pandemic response \u2014 which, most consequentially, kept millions of healthy children out of full-time school for more than a year \u2014 was based on this notion<\/em>,\u201d Zweig wrote.<\/p>\n<p>Other studies also showed that asymptomatic spread of covid-19 was uncommon.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>In June 2020, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization\u2019s [WHO] emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said that transmission from asymptomatic people was \u2018very rare,\u2019<\/em>\u201d a \u201c<em>conclusion based on a number of countries doing very detailed contact tracing<\/em>,\u201d Zweig wrote.<\/p>\n<p>However, \u201c<em>the next day, after criticism from some health professionals, WHO officials walked back her statement, and Van Kerkhove said it was a \u2018complex question,<\/em>\u2019\u201d Zweig added.<\/p>\n<p>And an editorial published in <em>The BMJ<\/em> in December 2020 stated that \u201c<em>Searching for people who are asymptomatic yet infectious is like searching for needles that appear and reappear transiently in haystacks<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>However, these findings were overshadowed by research claiming that a substantial percentage of covid-19 infections were caused by asymptomatic people.<\/p>\n<p>According to Zweig, such findings \u201c<em>supported the health authorities\u2019 messaging justified various community interventions<\/em>\u201d and were \u201c<em>covered everywhere<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>[Many] of the actions we were told \u2014 or compelled \u2014 to take, including an acceptance of all those closed or half-empty schools, had little to no benefit<\/em>,\u201d Zweig wrote. \u201c<em>Schools \u2014 as they did in Sweden \u2014 and most of society could have simply followed the classic advice \u2018if you\u2019re sick, stay home,\u2019 and we would have ended up in the same place<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Zweig told \u201c<em>Rising<\/em>\u201d he did not want to speculate on why the Stanford study wasn\u2019t rolled out. \u201c<em>I view my job as to merely bring this to light and that\u2019s a larger conversation<\/em>,\u201d he said. \u201c<em>Perhaps something even that investigators within the Congress or others can look into<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>yogaesoteric<br \/>\nJune 10, 2023<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers at Stanford University who developed the test also determined that the vast majority of asymptomatic people who tested positive \u2014 96% \u2014 did not transmit the virus. A test that can accurately determine whether a person with a positive PCR test result for covid-19 is infectious was available as early as May 2020 \u2014 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1362],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid-19-crisis-1602-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122883"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122909,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122883\/revisions\/122909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}