War has broken out in the scientific literature that strikes at the existential core of Covid-19 and its proposed causative virus.
At the heart of the controversy lies the fact that the creators of the most commonly used test, the RT-PCR, published instructions for how to test for SARS-CoV-2 “without having virus material available,” in their own words, relying instead on the Chinese scientists’ genetic sequence published on the internet.
The paper “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time PCR” was published 24 hours after it was submitted to Eurosurveillance, clearly evading peer review. Its lead authors were Christian Drosten and Victor Corman, which is how it took on the title “Corman-Drosten paper.” It provided the “recipe,” or work flow for the Covid-19 diagnostic test, quickly applied all over the world, after it was accepted as the standard of testing by the WHO.
German scientist Christian Drosten was also a co-discoverer of the SARS-associated coronavirus, and developed a test for it in 2003. Drosten, who heads the Charite Institute of Virology in Berlin, and a team of fellow scientists in Europe and Hong Kong, moved very quickly, as soon as cases of the illness were being reported out of Wuhan in December of 2019. They submitted the paper on Jan. 21, it was published in Eurosurveillance on Jan. 23, and was immediately accepted as the standard of testing internationally, by the WHO, which began sending test kits to affected regions.
In the harrowing months that followed, amid lockdowns, economic collapse, school closures and widespread panic, few were aware of the immense problems with the paper, which tragically offered a testing method that would yield between 80 and 97 percent false positive results, due to a non existent gold standard which would be the virus itself.