In newly surfaced July interview, Fauci warns that widely used COVID tests may pick up ‘dead’ virus

Just The News: Over-sensitive tests can just pick up “dead nucleotides” rather than live virus, he said.

In newly resurfaced video from July, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to acknowledge that large numbers of positive COVID-19 cases may arise from oversensitive tests that pick up mere fragments of the virus rather than active, viable infections. 

If true, many patients may have been receiving false-positive test results — causing much needless anxietyand disruption to everyday life — while the numbers of COVID-19 cases reported by public health authorities and major COVID tracking websites could be vastly overstated.

The admission came on a July 16 episode of This Week in Virology, a longtime science podcast hosted by Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had joined the program to discuss various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including testing. 

Concerns have been raised over the last several months that laboratory tests widely deployed to detect SARS-Cov-2 — what are known as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests — may in fact be picking up remnants of the virus instead of meaningful levels of infection. Some critics have argued that significant numbers of purportedly positive COVID-19 tests are actually not infectious at all.

At the center of the debate is the “cycle threshold” at which a PCR test operates. PCR tests work by multiplying a virus fragment over a series of cycles until it can reliably detect and confirm the virus within a sample. The more cycles a test must go through before it detects the virus, the smaller and weaker the original sample was. read more/watch