Have you had a COVID test yet? Was it a lateral flow test or a PCR test?
Maybe you’re not sure which type of test you had – and for a lot of people, especially those who don’t work in science, perhaps it doesn’t seem important to know. However, the differences between types of tests being used has led to some confusion as to their usefulness and accuracy
Ever since the community testing pilot scheme was first launched back in November of 2020 here in Liverpool, I’ve been fielding questions from people about different sorts of COVID test. I thought it was might be useful to answer some of those questions here, as understanding how the tests work, and how they differ, is key to understanding the potential success of community testing.
PCR test
The PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 is generally considered the “gold standard” when it comes to testing for COVID, which is why it is important to use it for symptomatic testing. If you had a test because you had symptoms, it would have been a PCR test.
PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction. The test relies on the use of an enzyme called polymerase which usually exists in normal cells, doing useful things like helping to replicate DNA when we want to make a new cell.
In COVID testing, we use PCR to replicate genetic material belonging to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Once you’ve taken your swab from the back of your throat and up your nose, the sample gets mixed up with some enzyme and a load of other ingredients designed to help the enzyme do its job, and we ask the enzyme to amplify the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2. Importantly we ask it to only amplify the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2.
Imagine the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2 is one half of a zip – the metal teeth down one side. The polymerase enzyme is like the slider, which you pull up to fasten each tooth to its pair. In the case of the PCR test, the enzyme fastens to one end of that genetic material, but rather than finding an existing part to pair it to, the enzyme creates a copy of the half we already have as it moves its way along, creating an entire sealed zip.
So now, we have our original piece of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material, and we have a copy of it, and the original and the copy are connected together. We use some heat to separate the two and then the enzyme can start all over again, making two new copies of the two halves. This process will keep going and going until we have enough copies of the genetic material to be detectable. This threshold of detection is especially useful because we can work out how quickly we reach the threshold – if we reach it really quickly, then we can assume there were already lots of copies of the SARS-CoV-2 genetic material for the enzyme to duplicate, which means the sample had a high viral load. If we reach the threshold really slowly, then there must not have been many copies of the SARS-CoV-2 material initially available, and so the sample had a low viral load.
That’s roughly how it works – but the important thing to understand is this: PCR is really specific (ie it only detects what we ask it to – in this case SARS-CoV-2); PCR is really sensitive (it can detect even very low levels of the virus because of this crucial amplification step); and PCR is pretty reliable (it doesn’t miss many cases of COVID).
PCR is also quite resource heavy – it takes time and expertise to run the test, and it requires special machinery and lab space as well as ingredients to help the enzyme do its job.
Enter the lateral flow test.
Lateral flow test
The lateral flow test is cheap, easy to implement and can be done pretty much anywhere. Test centres have popped up all over Liverpool, and in fact in local authorities across the country, in order to test as many people as possible as quickly as possible. While PCR testing gives you a result in 48 hours, lateral flow testing can give a result in less than an hour.
Lateral flow tests actually work very similarly to pregnancy tests. The idea is this: the SARS-CoV-2 virus is made of proteins, and we can use antibodies to detect proteins.
The lateral flow test contains a small cassette, which holds a piece of filter paper. The filter paper has a “conjugation zone” at the bottom where you apply the sample taken by swabbing the throat and nose.
The conjugation zone is loaded with antibodies which recognise proteins from SARS-CoV-2, and these antibodies are fused to a gold nanoparticle. Once the sample is loaded, the SARS-CoV-2 proteins bind to the antibody and start moving up the filter paper by lateral flow. First, they reach a test zone, where there are more antibodies which also recognise SARS-CoV-2 proteins. If the sample contains the virus, the proteins which are conjugated to the gold-antibody get trapped on the test zone, and because the gold is really concentrated, the zone turns pink (because gold nanoparticles are pink). Then, the sample continues to travel up the strip until it reaches a control zone. The control zone is loaded with an antibody which recognises the gold-antibody. Any of the gold-antibody which is not connected to SARS-CoV-2 protein gets trapped here and turns the control zone pink. This means the test worked as it was supposed to.
We therefore have three possible outcomes:
The test zone is pink and the control zone is pink = the test worked and the sample was positive for COVID
The test zone is blank and the control zone is pink = the test worked and the sample was negative for COVID
The test zone is either pink or blank and the control zone is blank = the test did not work and should be repeated
Research shows that the lateral flow test is really specific (it only detects what we ask it to and does not lead to false positives) but the lateral flow test is not very sensitive. It struggles to detect low levels of virus. This means it is important to wait at least five days from exposure to COVID to take a lateral flow test, because in the first five days the viral load is quite low.
The lateral flow test is also a little unreliable.
Preliminary research from the University of Liverpool during the pilot scheme showed that the lateral flow test only detected 48.83% of the cases that PCR testing was able to detect (and the PCR test cannot detect 100% of cases).
But is this a problem?
The pros and cons of lateral flow testing
Lateral flow testing is only used for asymptomatic testing in the community. Before we introduced this community testing, you could only get tested for COVID if you had symptoms. Which means even if lateral flow testing detects less than 50% of all asymptomatic cases, it is still detecting more cases than we previously knew about. If all of those people it detects go on to self-isolate, then we are making a big dent on reducing transmission.
However, people who are tested using lateral flow testing and receive a negative result could still have COVID. The test misses over 50% of positive cases, giving them a false negative result. It is absolutely crucial that people who have had a negative lateral flow test result continue to social distance, continue to avoid mixing with other households indoors and continue to wear masks in public spaces and wash their hands frequently.
Lateral flow testing, although not as sensitive or reliable as PCR testing, is a reasonable testing strategy for reducing asymptomatic transmission if – and only if – people are aware of the limitations.
What lateral flow testing cannot be used for is to allow people to reduce their social distancing practices and return to “normal”. It cannot be used to permit stadiums and theatres to return to full capacity as long as all people are tested before entry. It cannot be used to allow you to visit your nana in a care home and breathe all over her or lick her face.
Lateral flow testing is a tool along the way to combatting the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is not, and was never designed to be, The Answer.
We live in the age of ‘crap perpetuation’. It is all-immersive in our virtual habitats. It is as insidiously precise in targeting specific audiences as it is varied in its context; a simple recipe for communication success. Then, we also face the lack of easily accessible, credible information resources to counter the misinformation. Blanket fact-spewing and impersonal science communications fail to compete with the misinformation spread, or to have any impact on re-educating the ones who were convinced by “the dark side”.
When it comes to health, online misinformation seeping and spilling over into real life can have detrimental consequences. Case-in-point: the SARS-CoV-2 infodemic. But this issue has long been present in the health science fields, best illustrated by the dangers of peddling bogus alternative treatments instead of approved medical interventions. And the professional, as well as skeptics’, communities have had very limited success in counteracting many claims, as well as almost no success in preventing their rise in the first place. People tend to believe easily-digestible and targeted misinformation and disinformation claims, are less likely to be dissuaded once certain beliefs are adopted, and are less likely to reach out to the sources of credible information due to mistrust, as well as due to their expectation of being ignored, or even ridiculed.
Patient outreach
To address some of these issues, my academic laboratory at EPFL in Switzerland, which investigates the molecular processes of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, also takes part in patient outreach activities. As scientists, we recognise that our duties to society stretch beyond the results of the scientific research. Therefore, we approach the organisation of outreach activities with the same rigor and care as we approach the planning of experiments. Science communication must be done well, or not done at all. Thankfully, participation in such efforts is being increasingly acknowledged as part of the scientific output by the scientific community, academic institutions, as well as by industry employers.
Patient involvement and organised interactions with the academic research community are relatively new concepts for the biomedical research field. They offer us several benefits, such as participation and personalised communications with a specific and defined audience. Patient outreach allows us to disseminate the relevant information at the level of the audience’s knowledge and understanding. It allows us to teach critical thinking skills, scientific method basics, and critical evaluation of the claims. Patient outreach helps to dispel the views of academia as the impenetrable “ivory tower” and recognise the fallibility of science, as of any human endeavour. Together, these efforts contribute to increasing the public’s trust in professional authorities by creating a welcoming environment for high-quality, two-way dialogue between academics and patients.
Patient interactions have benefits for the researchers too, and especially trainees. First and foremost, it humanises the basic research. As research scientists, we do not routinely interact with the patients of disorders we study. For a molecular biologist, Parkinson’s is an abstract concept, derived from the peculiar shapes and forms of the pathogenic protein implicated in this condition. Patient interactions remind us that there are human beings at the other end of the pipette, who will benefit only from our best efforts to do excellent science.
Furthermore, patients are the only ones who have continuous access to their condition. As shown throughout history, the inconspicuous details, revealed by scrupulous observation, often lead to major breakthroughs and new avenues of exploration. As we are still learning, Parkinson’s is a multifaceted condition. It is known that non-motor symptoms – such as loss of smell, acting out dreams during sleep, and depression – are prevalent years, and even decades, before the motor symptom onset. Now we also know that body odour changes during early stages of Parkinson’s. And we know it precisely because of listening carefully to the observations and experiences of patients, and their carers. None of these could have been found in the laboratory, but now we can investigate their underlying mechanisms to develop solutions.
How to do it?
Patient outreach activities can take multiple forms. From our experience, high quality events and effective communication efforts include live and virtual seminars and Q-and-A sessions tailored to specific groups of patients, laboratory Open Day visits and interactions with the staff, as well as having dedicated lines of communication with the research staff for specific questions (such as phone, mail, email, online form, chat).
On the other hand, we found other efforts to be less effective and time-consuming, mostly where they involved one-way and out-of-context communications. These include tweeting of factoids, posting links to scientific papers, or even general interest articles without a defined purpose and follow-up engagement. Creation or sharing of non-specific resource databases or webpages, as well as explanations in a highly technical and jargon-laden language, can be especially fruitless and disengaging.
Tips for patient outreach
There are several things to keep in mind when you decide to participate in patient outreach. First, it is important to determine the amount of time and effort your lab is prepared to devote. Quality in this case is more important than quantity – several well-prepared activities per year are perfectly effective.
Second, choosing the type of activities must be based on realistic evaluation of the staff abilities, willingness to participate, and expertise. For example, not everyone is capable of writing and performing a song about the brain synapse loss in Alzheimer’s disease, however many are likely to ace teaching how to load and run the gel for Western blotting, and enjoy doing it too! Often, there is no need to push yourself out of the comfort zone. Stay right in it – exactly where you are the expert, and invite others in.
Third, know your audience and tailor your communication approaches accordingly. For example, if you are reaching out to an older population, bulletin board notices, contacting patient advocacy and support groups, as well as physicians and disease specialists in the hospital take precedence over advertising online.
In addition, ask what specific topics your audience is interested in learning about. Do not impose the information you think and decide they are interested in, or need to hear. Face tough and provoking questions head on, address it to the best of your expertise, and clearly define the limitations of our collective knowledge of some topics. This is crucial to dispel the promises of magical alternative treatments.
Finally, always show humility and respect for your audience. Although they are not experts in your field, you are likely not an expert in theirs. Most of us will become patients at some point in our lives, and all of us know someone who is a patient. It does not invalidate anyone of being a human before anything else.
In summary
Many – and perhaps, even, most – efforts of scientific and skeptics’ communities to tackle and prevent spread of misinformation suffer from ineffective impersonal approaches; patient outreach is a targeted science communication effort. This direct, two-way communication strategy allows scientists to reach the specific patient communities and their carers and families, provide relevant and actionable knowledge at the level of their understanding, and focus time-limited efforts for the best return. This holds promise to pre-emptively prime communities to detect and be suspicious of unsubstantiated claims regarding alternative treatments, and provides direct communication opportunities in case of a need for clarification.
Whether you are a scientist, concerned citizen or veteran skeptic, it is important to remember that you should not attempt to change the whole world in a single attempt. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. If enough of us do this, changing the world for the better is just a logical and inevitable outcome.
Join me in a thought experiment: You’re at the lectern in an auditorium delivering a productivity report to a packed audience of your most valuable clients. You notice there’s an elephant in the room. More like a herd of them actually. They’re making a LOT of noise. It looks like there’s going to be a stampede. Your livelihood now depends on one of three things:
Your paying customers not noticing the elephants, or at least not being overly concerned by them, despite the risk of being trampled.
Your paying customers somehow ignoring the fact that you failed to warn them there would be elephants, but are now looking to you for advice in how to navigate the stampede.
You convincing those paying customers that you knew about those elephants all along, and you even warned them that the elephants would be there.
It’s not an enviable position to be in, so I’d like to ask you to extend your sympathies to those unfortunate souls who now live in that reality. By that, of course, I mean Psychics, Astrologers, Clairvoyants, Fortune Tellers, Numerologists, and any other mystical future-predictors.
Con-undrum
Your sympathy should however be limited, as it turns out that those folks are doing just fine. Astrology in particular seems to be enjoying a lucrative renaissance, fueled by social media and an understandable (if misplaced) desire to seek some kind of certitude in a deeply uncertain time. Their continued success however contributes to what will surely be one of the great mysteries of our time: Why did none of them warn us about the COVID-19 pandemic? The entirety of 2020 was filled with death, disease, hunger, and (culture) wars. Those four horsemen brought all their unpleasant friends and relatives along with them as well. It was so bad that it even kicked our Brexit worries to the sidelines at times.
Was the year so tumultuous that it literally went off the astrologers’ charts? Did all those spirit guides misplace their guidebook? Did the numerologists forget to carry the one? Did the mystics get misty-eyed with clairvoyant-cataracts?
Forethought experiment
Hold your indignation for a moment though. It turns out that we do actually have a few practitioners out there who are now claiming that they didindeed predict the pandemic, and it appears to be doing wonders for their careers, even if they’ve yet to be recruited by the WHO to form some kind of Pandemic Precog Unit.
Before we examine some of those claims though, imagine for a moment that you had some genuine supernatural powers of prediction, or perhaps you’d somehow got hold of a Virus Almanac from a mysterious older doppelganger in a DeLorean. What would you do to warn the world if you knew a pandemic was on the way? It would be difficult to get the world’s attention without coming across as somewhat unhinged, but please compare your communication plan to what we saw from the supernatural superheroes I’m about to introduce you to.
My personal advice would be to focus on that one prediction only, and not a raft of other celebrity / political / sporting and other assorted shenanigans which may well turn out to be wrong, potentially undermining your credibility. It would also help if you hadn’t produced similar lengthy lists of predictions in previous years with results no better than chance. Perhaps contact government representatives or scientists instead of tabloid newspapers. I’d also recommend being as specific as possible, and very clear about the magnitude of the impending devastation. Let’s see how they got on…
Astrolo-jest
As far as claimants are concerned, the one who appears to be getting the most mileage out of it is Jessica Adams. The header photo on her twitter homepage is a Daily Mail banner with a headline about how she predicted Covid, which highlights the exposure she’s getting for her alleged powers. She even managed to make it on to television juggernaut This Morning with national treasures Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield.
On her website she makes a few claims about when she predicted the pandemic. One of them is a blog post from March 2019 where she mentions viruses (plural) with an associated date of 10th January 2020. Superficially that sounds vaguely impressive, but a little less so when you see the context in which it is mentioned. To quote: “One Last Note – Post-Millennium Bugs, Hackers and Viruses”. It’s clear therefore that she was talking about computer viruses, and not the human variety.
She also cites another blog post, this time from November of 2019, where the dates to look out for are the 8th & 9th March (by which time three UK Citizens had already died). On this occasion the text does actually mention human viruses:
“you can circle these dates in your diary now, because we’re going to see computer and human viruses, and regular traffic, air traffic and shipping affected by wave after wave of rain/flooding.”
It’s a little better, but by no means indicative of an imminent public health crisis.
Disappointingly, her December blog post returns to the theme of computer viruses, and while I applaud her dedication to studying celestial bodies as a means of promoting cybersecurity, there’s no mention of human viruses (or other terms such as ‘sick’, ‘ill’, ‘pandemic’, ‘outbreak’, etc). If I’d read these blog posts back in 2019 I’d be less wary and more malware-y. Disappointing so far.
Even before her Covid claim to fame, Jessica made it into the newspapers with reasonable regularity. So, what did she have to say about what 2020 had in store for us? A piece in the Japan Times on the 1st January carries no mention of any impending outbreak, and a similar article in the Metro on the same day is equally void of health warnings.
What about Social Media? If there’s one place that’s well suited for going viral about viral goings-on it’s Twitter. Unfortunately, this comes up empty as well. An advanced search shows no mention whatsoever of terms like virus, flu, pandemic, disease, or Covid at any time in the three years running up to January 2020.
The final nails in the coffin are from that very Daily Mail article from October 2020 that she seems to be so proud of. Firstly, it says that she moved to Tasmania in February to avoid the worst of the pandemic. This is simply not true, as shown in her Twitter history she has spent much of her time living there over the past few years, and she appeared to be over there well before February. Secondly, and more importantly, she said there would be no Covid vaccine. At the time of writing we have three approved vaccines, and there are more on the way.
The best of the mediocre-st
Nicolas Aujula claims in a Daily Mirror article that he actually predicted Covid back in 2018: “an ‘influenza’ disaster would dominate the world”. Unfortunately for Nicolas, most people can Google better than the Daily Mirror can. He did indeed mention influenza in a few places, including The Sun and the Metro, but was making predictions for 2019 and not 2020. Nitpickers will of course point out that COVID-19 did actually arrive in 2019 (the clue’s in the name), however he said specifically in both cases that he was referring to the livestock industry. As such, unless he’s a fan of human trafficking he scores no points in this case. His Twitter history is equally empty of pandemic predictions.
Sylvia Browne, best known for incorrectly telling a mother that her kidnapped daughter was dead on the Montel Williams show (and failing to apologise when proved wrong), ironically went viral last year even though she herself was already dead. The claim that she predicted Covid in a book she wrote in 2008 has already been taken apart nicely in various places, including TheHour, not least that she also claimed the virus would “vanish quickly”.
Anupam V Kapil is Google’s top hit for numerologists who make the claim. Unfortunately, his Twitter feed comes up empty for any form of virus prediction, as does his 2020 prediction article for the Times of India. For those counting, his score adds up to zero.
Annual publication Old Moore’s Almanac made a pandemic claim which, on further investigation, boils down to just one vague sentence in the entire book: “An unusual virus has people worried”. If this was a genuine reference to COVID-19, they should also win the award for Understatement of the Year. Old Moore’s appear to take a scattergun approach to their predictions, and then make as much noise as they can about the ones they got right. Interestingly, there was an article in extra.ie around the turn of the year with the biggest 2020 predictions from Old Moore’s – no mention of any virus, or anything health-related. Their primary predictions are as follows; An Oasis reunion (nope), a major volcanic eruption in Iceland (nope), Miley Cyrus to marry Cody Simpson (nope – they broke up), Julian Assange would be extradited to the US (nope), a terrorist drone strike (nope), but all is not lost, as they did manage to hurdle 50/50 odds to predict that Donald Trump would lose the election (it should be noted that former President Trump disputes that though).
Last and equal least, June Field is considered by many as the UK’s leading psychic. She even won an ‘International Psychic Battle’ in Ukraine in 2013, which was disappointingly lacking in hand-to-hand combat, but the footage of her winning is amazing for all the wrong reasons. She is quoted as saying the following:
“I started January 2020 with a feeling of dread. Long before coronavirus arrived in the UK, I had cancelled work commitments – theatre dates and events. I felt death coming. I wanted to give the year a miss.”
We get a different story from her website though, with her events page showing entries all the way through the year, with the ones from March onwards showing as cancelled specifically due to “coronavirus”. Even more interestingly the ones earlier in the year which didn’t take place show as ‘rescheduled to October’, which shows a disappointing lack of foresight. Her Twitter feed has no mention of cancelled events, or anything related to COVID-19 between January and May 2020. On a side note, I went to one of her shows a few years back. It was less than impressive, particularly the part where she gave me a reading. That’s a story for another day though.
Destiny’s filed
To summarise, the evidence that any of the above were able to predict the horrors of 2020 is flimsy at best. If they genuinely have powers of prediction, then it appears to be indistinguishable from the methods we see again and again from known charlatans. It could of course be a particularly delusional form of confirmation bias they’re applying to validate themselves. The worst-case scenario would be that they’re lying (or exaggerating) in order to promote themselves on the back of a horrific pandemic which, at the time of writing, has claimed almost two million lives.
Certain parts of the media and the public unfortunately appear to have a very low bar when it comes to believing these claims. So, just in case any tabloid writers are reading this article I’d like to finish by providing my prediction for all star signs for every single year until the extinction of the human race. Feel free to publish it, and to contact me for other such nuggets of infallible foresight:
Viruses will have a significant effect on your life.
The Qanon conspiracy theory has become arguably the most influential conspiracy in the world. For those who are not yet aware, the theory posits that Donald Trump is fighting a war against a shadowy cabal that is responsible for all that is bad that is happening in the United States, and indeed the whole world. According to Qanon believers, this evil cabal is torturing kids, and/or using them in their rituals for blackmail, and/or sacrificing them to Satan. Clues as to the plans by the good guys – led by Donald Trump, naturally – to put a stop to all of this are posted to a message board by someone named Q (also called Qanon), who is revealing all of this information in order to awaken people and prepare them for things to come. According to the theory, the anonymity of the message board is the only place safe enough to post this information, away from the mainstream media which prevents the truth from getting out.
That is the Qanon belief in brief, and there are longer and more detailed articles elsewhere on the internet about the Qanon movement and its beliefs and influences, but what I want to address is an element of the theory that is often overlooked. It relates to something called ‘Adrenochrome’: according to Q followers, Adrenochrome is a substance produced in the brains of children when they are terrified and even tortured, their fear creating the chemical. The elites then, apparently, use this substance to make themselves younger, or ingest it as a psychotropic drug and become hooked on its amazing high.
Interestingly, although Adrenochrome has become a key part of the Qanon belief, ‘Q’ has never once mentioned it: at the time of writing, there have been 4952 posts (‘drops’) by ‘Q’, and not a single one mentions Adrenochrome. Q mentions crimes against children, and the rituals done to them, but nothing about a supposed magical drug. Yet the Adrenochrome belief is everywhere in the Q community; it has become part of the movement to such a degree that most believers would be shocked to learn their “prophet” has never mentioned it – it appeared organically.
Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizzeria was wrongly accused of housing a paedophile network in its basement. The restaurant does not have a basement.
This organic development is interesting. We can see it in the evolution of Qanon from a previous conspiracy theory, ‘Pizzagate’, which was a precursor to Qanon and alleged that an evil cabal was torturing kids and committing acts of paedophilia in the basement of a Pizzeria. All of the ‘information’ regarding this conspiracy was found in the hacked emails of American political consultant John Podesta, which according to Pizzagate believers were filled with coded messages and weird symbolism involving Pizza. Some argue that it was the Pizzagate conspiracy where this narrative of Adrenochrome as a drug of the elite was brought up – though its origins predate that theory, too.
David Icke, a famous conspiracy theorist, has spoken for years about the elites consuming blood of their victims; Jay Meyers another prolific conspiracist, has also talked about it. Some even point to the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson, which mentions Adrenochrome as a drug that gives an amazing high. So where did it come from?
A point I often stress when understanding conspiracy theory is that they constantly repeat and reuse old narratives. These narratives are adapted to fit the latest fears and paranoias of society, but their main structure remains the same. When it comes to Adrenochrome, the old narrative it takes and repackages is about another old myth: the Blood Libel.
To understand Blood Libel, we need to go back to medieval Europe, and as such look to one of the oldest false accusations against Jews: that they ritualistically kill young Christians. Many versions of this anti-Semitic slur posit that the reason for these heinous crimes is the intention of using Christian blood for Jewish rituals. This Blood Libel has had a vast influence on anti-Semitic narratives for centuries. One such example is the case of Simon of Trent – his death was particularly important for this type of narrative, and it serves as a blueprint for Blood Libel as such.
As the story goes, the body of a young Christian called Simon, in the city of Trent, was found in the water cellar of a member of the city’s Jewish community. Understandably fearing being framed for a murder, the finder of the body reported his grisly discovery immediately. Unfortunately, this honesty counted for nothing, and the entire Jewish community was arrested and tortured, and a story was created to justify the response: that the Jewish community killed Simon, and did it in a way to specifically mock Christians: crucifying the child before using his blood in their religious rituals, even putting it in their bread, in a mockery of the Eucharist.
What we see in this false narrative is that notion that Jews mocked Christianity by carrying out a murder in a macabre, sacrilegious way, used the victim’s blood for strange rituals, and consumed flesh in the form of bread. These are very strong symbolic tropes: attacking the youth of the community, mocking their religion, and twisting their rituals by eating bread made with the corpse of a Christian. It doesn’t matter that none of it ever actually happened; it was a powerful image used to attack Jewish communities. The same imagery has served as the base of most cases of supposed Blood Libel.
So is Adrenochrome connected to the Blood Libel? There are some very clear points of similarity between the two, with the ritualistic use of young victims’ blood, child sacrifice, and the perversion of Christian rituals. The next question, naturally is: why? Why readapt an accusation against Jews and apply it to a new conspiracy belief? Quite simply, it was a powerful persuasive narrative in the time of Simon of Trent, and it remains so today.
The Blood Libel narrative was designed and molded through hate, to prey on primal fears. It talks about killing children – the innocents who are the future of a community. It is built on the perversion of traditional values – the drinking of blood and consuming it in bread, just like in Christian communion. When we look at Adrenochrome narratives, we see clear similarities: children killed for rituals that are a mockery of Christianity (as they are dedicated to Satan). We see the torture of those same kids, in order to steal their lifeforce to guarantee a high or to make the recipient live longer – an unhealthy dose of decadence thrown into the mix.
I would argue that Adrenochrome grew organically in the Qanon community because they needed another way to hate their enemies. If ‘Q’ wasn’t going to add anything beyond vague “crimes against children and rituals” then the followers would have to fill in the gaps for themselves. With the anti-Semitic Blood Libel, they had a deep well of centuries of conspiracy theory narratives to choose from, and they picked the elements that fitted this modern paranoia best.
This act of dipping into well-trodden conspiracy tropes to strengthen the fears of the day is nothing new – we saw the same elements crop up in the Pizzagate belief, and before that in the Satanic Panic. These ideas, even organically, pick the elements of what went before that fit their new fears best, and adapt them to fit the panic of the day.
As ever, conspiracy theories always adapt, and always evolve – as long as we have fears, prejudices and paranoias, they always will.
Dentistry in England changed beyond recognition on the 25th March 2020. In the middle of the morning, every dentist in the country received a letter via email from the Chief Dental Officer (CDO) telling us to down tools and cease seeing patients face-to-face. It followed similar letters from the CDOs of the other nations of the union to their respective practitioners. Although the CDO technically only holds sway over NHS practice, the majority of private practices also stopped seeing patients.
By the end of the day, routine dentistry across the UK had ground to a halt with no idea of when it would resume. If you had a dire emergency, you could be referred to an Urgent Dental Centre (UDC) which were hurriedly set up by the NHS to provide care for those who had ongoing pain. But the scope of treatment in UDCs was initially limited, often only being able to remove teeth. Understandably, the shutdown of routine dental practice has had a deleterious effect on the dental health of the nation. The cause? As with most things in 2020, COVID-19.
As you read this, many practices are back open, able to see patients. The UDC system is still running, but with an expanded scope for treatment. But what are the risks of going to the dentist at the moment? What are dentists doing about those risks? And, most importantly, is it safe?
Let’s start with some basics. As SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, has been studied, we’ve learned more about its mode of transmission. Initially, many believed that surface to surface contact was the primary method of spread, but it’s now thought that respiratory aerosols are the key route. For dentists, this, theoretically at least, causes a problem.
Dentists are quite literally in the firing line when it comes to respiratory aerosols. You lot breathe, cough and sneeze on us every single day of our practicing lives.
Dentists are quite literally in the firing line when it comes to respiratory aerosols. You lot breathe, cough and sneeze on us every single day of our practicing lives. And many of the tools we use to do our job produce significant amounts of aerosols themselves. The handpieces (drills) and ultrasonic instruments (such as the scalers that your dentist or hygienist regularly use) all spray out a fine mist of aerosol that not only mixes with your saliva but can cause it to be aerosolised itself into the atmosphere of the dental surgery.
It’s perhaps understandable then that given the theoretical risks of treatment we had to stop seeing patients face to face. But now we’re back, so what’s changed?
Well, firstly, we know more about the virus. It may sound obvious, but at the beginning of the pandemic, the precautionaryprinciple had to apply, purely due to the number of unknown factors concerning SARS-CoV-2 and the spread of COVID-19. Work done by several groups over the first period of lockdown allowed for the production of guidelines for safe practice. Each practice should by now have constructed their own Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) drawing on these guidelines, and tailor-making them to their practice. This document should give clear guidance to everyone in the practice on how to best care for patients in a safe way, from new cleaning routines to ensuring minimal contact time between everyone in the building. Most importantly, it will include many factors to ensure that any treatment provided is as safe as possible.
Talking of treatment, the way that dentists classify the treatment we provide has changed. Before COVID, no matter what you were turning up to have done, my appointments would have always had roughly the same structure: Say hello to the patient, have a chat about what we were going to do, make sure my hands were clean, pop some gloves and a surgical mask on, do whatever needs doing then say goodbye to the patient. Pretty simple.
In a post-COVID world, everything is now either an Aerosol Generating Procedure (AGP) or a Non-Aerosol Generating Procedure (Non-AGP). You can probably guess what the difference is. Procedures classed as AGPs generally include most fillings, root canal treatment and the use of an ultrasonic scaler for example. Non-AGPs include examinations (that’s check-ups to most people), straightforward extractions and the various stages of making dentures.
If you’re coming in for a non-AGP appointment, the only real difference you’ll see in the surgery is that I’ll be wearing a disposable apron and I’ll have a surgical mask on at all times. When I look in your mouth, I’ll have a visor on as well. Dental surgeries generally have high levels of infection control, with strict procedures to follow after every patient. For low-risk procedures, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, these standard precautions are adequate to ensure patient and practitioner safety.
With AGPs, it’s a different ball game. Firstly, dentists and their nurses have to wear enhanced PPE. This means some form of surgical gown and a high filtration mask. These are a bit cumbersome and reduce the ability to communicate, but otherwise, I’ve found them to be generally OK. Many others have not, with some of the masks being uncomfortable when used for extended periods.
The real issue is that once we’ve done treatment, we have to vacate the room and leave the aerosol to settle before someone can clean it. For many surgeries, this is a significant problem. If you work in a small practice, this could leave you with swathes of downtime where you can’t access your surgery to see patients. Initially, this fallow time, as it’s called, was an hour. More recently, thanks to work by the people of the Scottish Dental Clinical Effectiveness Programme amongst others, we’ve been able to adopt a more granular approach, reducing fallow times to as little as 10 minutes in some circumstances. This has enabled routine dentistry to return in many practices, but in many others, there are still issues to overcome, which is delaying their return to regular care.
There are still questions about how risky AGPs are. It may be that we’re being overcautious with our guidelines. If we stop to think for a minute about the aerosols produced in a dental setting, there are a variety of sources. Obviously, dentist, nurse and patient will be producing respiratory aerosols just by breathing. But our current guidelines suggest that face coverings and maintaining social distancing as much as possible mitigate against that, so the aerosols we’re attempting to protect ourselves from during AGP appointments are of a dental origin. They come from our handpieces and ultrasonic units. And they’re not respiratory aerosols. They’re clean water, that’s treated with a disinfectant. This clearly isn’t going to increase the risk of COVID transmission, although if it mixes with saliva and this saliva is projected into the air, then there is an escalation of risk. But guess what? That straw like device that nurses use to stop you from drowning while you’re having a filling also sucks up potentially COVID containing aerosols.
Also, if we use a rubber dam, a sheet of material that we punch holes in to isolate your teeth from the rest of your mouth, the amount of our clean water mixing with your unclean saliva is reduced to virtually nothing. It’s quite possible that actual treatment is much less of a risk than we’re assuming it is. But the evidence isn’t there. So again, we must act with an abundance of caution.
So, back to the original question of how safe is it to go to the dentist at the moment? Pretty safe, actually. The dental profession has an already high standard of infection control protocols. In addition to this, we’ve taken all kinds of extra measures to protect you, us and the outside world. And, as far as I’m aware, there have been no recorded cases of COVID transmission from dental appointments. Having said that, low risk doesn’t mean no risk. Coming to see us is riskier than staying at home, but probably not as risky as going to the pub or supermarket. You might want to consider delaying your appointment if it’s not super urgent, or if you’re in a higher risk group. But we’re here to help you if you need us.
This article was first published in April 2018, for Gizmodo UK. Since then, David Icke has re-entered the mainstream, becoming a leading figure in the COVID-denialism movement, addressing thousands of people at a number of anti-lockdown marches across. As Gizmodo UK has shut down, The Skeptic has chosen to republish this piece.
David Icke wants you to know that he is not a racist. He may be arguably the world’s most recognisable conspiracy theorist, and yes, he has ideas that he’s happy to share about how the world’s leaders are controlled by an unseen force connected and identified through their bloodline, but he is not a racist. Even though, as Icke outlines at length, he isn’t one to care at all what anyone thinks of him and, as he explicitly states, he is intends to offend as many people as possible, he does need you to be quite clear that he definitely isn’t a racist.
“Those that shout racism the loudest are those that are obsessed with race, while I see it as an experience, nothing more”, Icke explained to the 1400-strong audience at his recent lecture in Southport. Looking around the room at the surprisingly broad mix of young and old, male and female, it seems like Icke has plenty of support – few people seem to want to point out that, say, police seem pretty obsessed with crimes, and firefighters seem to bang on a lot about fires, so his point on race isn’t really the slam-dunk defence he thinks it is.
“We are all expressions of the same one consciousness having different experiences. What is race? Same consciousness, different colour vehicle. That’s all it is,” continues Icke, either deliberately or accidentally ignoring that some of those vehicles get to drive on the motorway, while others have to stick to B-roads, as a result of their colour.
It’s easy to see why Icke is so keen to dismiss the accusations of racism that have followed him for decades – those accusations have seen multiple venues turn Icke down, meaning the Liverpool leg of his UK tour took place in Southport, 20 miles away. Still, the trip did nothing to deter the crowds, with die-hard conspiracy theorists arriving en masse to see Icke tell it like he thinks it is. At the very least, punters could rest assured they’d get their money’s worth: Icke’s lecture would run for two and three-quarter hours, followed by a ten-minute break before powering through a final hour.
You may not have heard of Icke, but you will almost certainly be familiar with his theories – most notably, that the world is run by a secret cabal of shape-shifting reptilian aliens, whose ranks include the Royal family, an international cabal of bankers, and a network of political operatives the world over.
Exposing the shadowy ‘unseen’
My copy of Icke’s self-published 2017 tome
While explaining Icke’s full worldview is no small task (his latest book – self-published, naturally – checks in at over 750 pages), it can effectively be boiled down to: nation states are actually under the control of shadow organisations like the Bilderberg Group and the Rockefellers, which in turn are controlled and operated by an even more shadowy group Icke refers to as the ‘unseen’. According to Icke, we can track the arrival of the ‘unseen’ to 6,000 years ago in the Middle East, and from there its influence spread to take over the world, allowing them to sow anxiety and fear, which (according to Icke) the unseen actually literally feed on. Although he never explicitly stated it in the lecture, Icke heavily implied this unseen force is alien in origin, almost certainly the reptilians of Icke’s prior work.
The appearance of the ‘unseen’ in the Middle East 6,000 years ago seems to be no coincidence, and it’s little wonder that Icke’s work is so often accused of anti-Semitism. However, if we were to accept that Icke himself does not hold such views, and that his work is merely co-opted by groups who undeniably are anti-Semitic, we also have to acknowledge that Icke often does his case no favours. Take, for instance, his repeated attacks throughout the lecture on George Soros, who Icke labels “Mr Evil”, depicts as a malevolent figure with reptilian eyes, and even accuses, despite Soros being Jewish, of collaborating with the Nazis (a claim that has been debunked, though it continues to be spread).
While Icke’s criticisms of Soros come with a personal edge (somewhat undermining Icke’s repeated message of love and shared consciousness), they lacked internal consistency. Take, for instance, Icke’s claim that Soros is “overthrowing governments in Europe, Africa and the Middle East” – if, as Icke had previously claimed, all of those governments were put in place and controlled by the shadowy hand of the ‘unseen’ anyway, surely overthrowing them would be a good thing? Or perhaps those governments and Soros are both controlled by the unseen, in which case all of that overthrowing would surely be irrelevant? Who knows; this is the world of conspiracy mongering, where self-contradiction is no barrier to believability.
The Soros image was far from the only moment which threatened to undermine Icke’s defence against accusations of anti-Semitism. In one alarmingly busy picture, Icke outlined the multiple layers of control in the world, in concentric circles with the most sinister agencies in the middle. At the centre, atop symbols of major world religions (including the you-know-who’s), sat the imposing figure of a spider, representing the ‘unseen’ in the centre of their vast web of connections. Around the spider are six controlling groups – including the Bilderberg group, the Club of Rome, and the Rockefellers – and, of course, lines connecting those groups form an unmistakable Star of David.
As it happens, Icke has a video series called “Dot Connector”. On the strength of his imagery, he seems to have no problem connecting six dots.
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If Icke feels accusations of anti-Semitism are unfair, he can hardly deny the charge of glaring hypocrisy: he talked at length about how Facebook is an evil tool of the CIA, but in the next breath complained that his Facebook page would have more fans if Facebook weren’t shadow banning him – so, presumably, he wants more of his followers to submit to an evil tool of oppression. Google, says Icke, is a front of the US intelligence agency, hell-bent on uploading our minds to the cloud to form a sinister collective consciousness, and you can hear all about it via his thrice-weekly video series on YouTube. And, of course, the move towards a cashless society is an attempt by the shadow government to exert total digital control over every element of your life, which is why he was selling his latest book at the merch stall via contactless payment.
What is remarkable about Icke is his ability to incorporate yet another thread into his vast tapestry of conspiracy. There is no event that is not proof of the conspiracy, in some way or another. 9/11 was an inside job, because the ‘unseen’ wanted to instigate a series of regime changes ultimately driving the West into a war with Russia to start World War III (which “would have started by now, if it weren’t for the maturity of the Russians”). How do we know this is true? As Icke says, “look for the outcome and you’ll see the journey”. Which is another way of saying “decide what you want to be true, and then come up with facts that fit”.
Mass school shootings in America were caused by mind-controlling antidepressants, yet also somehow faked by professionals masquerading as students. The chemical attacks in Syria were obviously faked, because some of the White Helmets were filming their rescue work (or, in reality, taking part in a very ill-advised Mannequin Challenge), plus elsewhere the White Helmets were handling victims of Sarin “without protection” (except, sarin evaporates quickly, so it presents a short-lived threat…and the photo he used as evidence even shows the White Helmets wearing gas masks for protection from the gas!). Icke isn’t convinced we evolved from monkeys. Brexit is a hoax. The CIA own Jeff Bezos because they once gave him some money (side note: I now part-own David Icke). “The physicist Michio Kaku says we should fear robots, not aliens, but what if the robots are being controlled by aliens?” Chemtrails are actually nanobots built to facilitate universal control. How do we know that? Sorry, we’re already onto the next subject already. It’s staggering that a four-hour lecture could be so entirely devoid of substance.
Sometimes, Icke’s logic unravelled itself in almost successive sentences: take, for instance, his assertion that science cannot be trusted because scientists are merely religious dogmatists who never change their minds; and in the 1950s they were saying there was only one galaxy whereas now they say there are trillions of galaxies so they can’t be trusted because they keep changing minds; and we know they were wrong in the 1950s because we (well, scientists) know how many galaxies there actually are now. Somehow Icke delivers all of this as if every sentence didn’t fatally undermine the last.
Similarly, we need to fear the rise of technology and the oncoming robotic revolution, because, as Icke said, “I’m 65, I’m old enough to remember when the world was run by humans” – although, he said this three hours into a lecture about how the world has been run by ‘unseen’ aliens for 6,000 years. Pick a lane, David. Those aliens, it’s worth noting, literally feed on human anxiety and fear to survive, which is why their grand plan is to wipe humans out and replace them with robots.
Elsewhere, we’re told that the UK government are bringing in 5G technology (which is a “stratospheric and dangerous leap from 4G technology”) without testing it, but that they have already announced where it will be tested, but secretly they have been testing it already. And we know it is harmful because 5G technology is “what American police use, in a higher power, to disperse crowds”. It’s worth pointing out that police also use water to disperse crowds. According to Icke’s logic, the existence of water cannons means your kitchen taps are evil.
Argument by quote memes
Peppered throughout Icke’s lecture were quotations from great thinkers, like Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Einstein and (on quite a number of occasions)… David Icke.
However, even those quotes weren’t as straightforward as they might have seemed – take, for instance, Icke’s repeated quoting of that time Albert Einstein said:
“Everything is energy… Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. This is physics.”.
If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like something Einstein would say, that’s because he never said it – it, like many other quotes, has been misattributed to Einstein. Who is the quote actually from? As best as anyone can tell, it was first said by Bashar, a multidimensional being from the future who is channelled by a psychic medium called Darryl. It’s a shame Icke thinks that Google is evil, because two minutes with a search engine might have shown him that the quote was a fake.
Perhaps most annoying (beyond Icke’s infuriating habit of pronouncing “minutiae” as “my-new-tie”, making me want to strangle him with a recently-acquired cravat) was Icke’s use of Orwell throughout his lecture. According to Icke, the echoes of accuracy in Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian future in 1984 were no coincidence: when studying at Oxford, Orwell rubbed shoulders with the shadowy elite, and was able to glean insights into their plans, which he then used to inform some of his writing, as a warning to the world of what was to come. This is of course perfectly consistent with Orwell’s character, as he clearly wasn’t the sort to throw himself into the fray when it comes to fighting fascism.
Repeatedly, Icke referred to his drive for free speech by quoting Winston Smith’s iconic line, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four”; that objective truths should not be suppressed. It struck me as I watched him speak for almost four hours, that Icke is far more invested in the right to share an opinion regardless of how much it runs contrary to reality and objective truth. In short, Icke is fighting for the freedom to say that two plus two equals five.
Unfortunately, on the strength of the audience in Southport at least, people are buying it. When Icke joked that the UK government wants us to believe there has never been any conspiracy by anyone ever, unless it involves the Russians, “in which case it’s all true”, he received a startling round of applause. By the end, an alarming proportion of the audience gave a standing ovation.
Standing up to the ‘unseen’
As he came to conclude his talk, Icke advised the audience that the way to change the system and repel the shadowy hand of the unseen is to realise our strength in number, and to non-violently refuse to do as we are told. Illustrating the point, he showed a still from a Nazi rally, pointing out the thousands of people listening to a single “nutter”. David Icke said that if thousands of people just decided to stop listening to a “nutter”, he would have no power or importance at all. On this, Icke and I are in total agreement.
David’s abhorrence of violence, for the least part, does seem sincere. However, what struck me about his worldview is that it was almost as if he is a pacifist unable to believe that a human being could wish to harm another. Those that bomb countries at the behest of the government must have been malevolently “programmed” to do so simply because a right-thinking person never could – there is no other plausible explanation, for Icke. Perhaps this is why he is so ideologically committed to the position that terrorist attacks and chemical attacks are false flags orchestrated by the shadowy unseen hand of the unseen alien controllers: to accept that they are human actions jeopardises his core belief that violence doesn’t come naturally to some.
What’s more, if Icke had to accept that a government regime in the Middle East really were using chemical weapons to innocents, he would face the kind of impossible dilemma many people in Western democracies are currently facing: do you do nothing, and allow the atrocities to continue? Or do you intervene, and perpetrate violence in doing so? To write the whole affair off as a fake perpetrated by sinister aliens affords Icke a third way, albeit one that is unconnected to reality.
After leaving the lecture, I was struck most of all not by how extreme and out-there Icke sounded, but how comparatively tame. The lizards barely got a look in, sanitised instead behind euphemisms like “unseen” and avatars like “the spider”. I felt like I had seen Icke–lite, all of the paranoia but none of the specifics, none of the claims that might send an audience recoiling back to reality (I’ve subsequently discovered that his book contains no such restraint).
By sanitising some of his more outré claims, and playing to the gallery on hot button issues of free speech and gender rights, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Icke is edging closer to the mainstream.
I was also surprised by how much of the evening he’d given over to extended rants about freedom of speech, PC culture, safe spaces and the giving and taking of offence – rants that, stripped of their context and author, could have appeared verbatim on a million Facebook threads and in the comments of every other article on Spiked Online. A number of asides about trans rights and gender fluidity – notably that activists are pushing an agenda that is designed to cause gender confusion in children who otherwise wouldn’t be confused at all – could have come straight from the blogs and forums of some who would otherwise consider themselves feminists. Those people may argue it is a stopped-clock phenomena, but when your opinions can be accurately and eloquently expressed by David Icke, it may be time to re-examine the factual basis of your worldview.
By arguably sanitising some of his more outré claims, and playing to the gallery on hot button issues of free speech and gender rights, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Icke is edging closer to the mainstream. And at a time when there is a noted rise in anti-Semitism and acceptance of Russian propaganda regarding incidents from Syria to Salisbury, I can’t confidently rule out Icke’s views being accepted back into everyday discourse. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.
The origins of modern spiritualism, the belief that the dead can talk to the living through the agency of specially gifted persons called ‘channelers’ or ‘mediums’, are usually traced to the town of Hydesville, New York, in 1848, when two teenagers, Maggie and Kate Fox, began communicating with a ghost. Decades later, both sisters would, at several occasions, confess to fraud and denounce the movement they had unwittingly started, but with little to no effect on its popularity.
Existing initially in the crossroads between religion and science – often seen as a source of empirical, scientific validation for beliefs that are tenets of several religious and metaphysical systems, such as the survival of the personality after bodily death – spiritualism, in the English-speaking world at least, later fragmented into a variety of populist religious cults or crowd-driving spectacles, not too different from the faith healing business, and similarly plagued by shady operators and exploitative practices. Meanwhile, the most scientifically-minded wing of the movement divested itself, at least in public, from the metaphysical pretensions of their forebears to found the field of parapsychology.
In Brazil, however, things happened quite differently: here when spiritualism fragmented, one aspect – called “spiritism”, “Kardecism” or “Kardecist spiritism” – supplanted all others, and was embraced by relevant members of the intellectual and professional elites – including medical doctors, lawyers, judges, politicians. This became the main nexus of Brazilian pseudoscience, incorporating ufology, parapsychology, faith healing and all kinds of “magnetic”, “energy-based” alternative medicines.
Allan Kardec
Kardecism takes its name from Allan Kardec, the pseudonym of French writer and educator Hippolyte Rivail (1804-1869), who wrote extensively on the subject, building a “spiritist doctrine” all of his own, including successive reincarnations and the progression of the soul. Kardec ideas were influenced by the “animal magnetism” of the 18th century Mesmerists, and by Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1668-1772) supposed conversations with spirits from other planets.
Kardec’s ideas failed to impress most of the spiritualists of his time – the Scottish medium D.D. Home (1833-1886), a veritable “rock star” of the Victorian spiritualist scene, described them as “delusions” and “fantasies” – but they took root in Brazil and went through a very Brazilian process of syncretism, the fusion of diverse doctrines into very nimble ideological chimeras.
For instance, one of the main proponents of Brazilian Kardecism, the medical doctor Bezerra de Menezes (1831-1900) left a posthumous psychiatric tract, “Insanity Under a New Prism”, saying that mental disorders that occur without a noticeable brain lesion should be attributed to spiritual interference. The book ends with a letter supposedly written by the ghost of Samuel Hahnemann (1775-1779), the creator of homeopathy. As a result, in the late 19th century, it was common for spirit mediums in Brazil to prescribe homeopathic medicine while in trance.
During the 20th century, Kardecist syncretism mingled with ufology (UFOS and aliens could be manifestations of extraterrestrial spirits of Swedenborgian inspiration), alternative medicine (homeopathy, and acupuncture), faith healing (transfers of “energy” to patients via hand-waving, not unlike reiki or therapeutical touch, and the more dangerous psychic surgery), parapsychology (the canonical book on the investigation of poltergeists in Brazil, by Hernani Guimarães Andrade (1913-2003) is a spiritist work), and even jurisprudence.
When the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964-1985 came to an end and the country drafted a new democratic Constitution, spiritists were on the forefront of the effort to institutionalise alternative medicine in the healthcare system. Spiritists leaders demanded “a New Epistemology for a New Republic”, and the First International Congress on Alternative Therapies that took place in São Paulo in February, 1985, was a de facto spiritist Congress. If Brazil was to have political freedom, why not epistemic freedom? So now, 36 years on, we have 29 complementary and alternative therapies paid for with government funds.
The problem with epistemic freedom is that we can’t vote to decide if an antibiotic works or not, we have to test it in rigorous clinical trials. And if the trials show that the antibiotic works, it doesn’t matter how you feel about it, or if you don’t believe in it: it will work regardless.
When the scientific method is criticised for not being a perfect method, we can draw a useful comparison with democracy: we know democracy is not perfect, as sometimes authoritarian or incompetent governments get elected, but it’s the best system we have so far. Similarly, science is the best system we have for testing hypothesis and developing technologies and therapies that actually work.
However, the overall feeling of freedom in our young Brazilian democracy back in the 1980s may have given rise to an environment where, as Isaac Asimov puts it: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
In this environment, alternative medicine flourished. Endorsed by both public opinion and religious sentiment, it quickly gained official recognition as medicine, and went unchallenged for several decades. Very few questioned its presence in our public healthcare system, and soon alternative therapies were introduced in Medical Schools and private healthcare. Speaking against alternative medicine was considered “scientism”, and disrespectful towards the wisdom of “the people”.
Such a mindset strongly impacts how a society reacts to evidence-based medicine. It’s no wonder Brazil has been the hub of miracle cures during the pandemic. Magical thinking extends from homeopathy to chloroquine, ivermectin, nitazoxanide, and all sorts of bogus ‘cures’ currently endorsed and promoted by our Ministry of Health.
The arguments are the same ones endorsed by the “epistemic democracy” of the 80’s: the valuing of anecdotal evidence, the inversion of the burden of proof demanding that scientists prove that these treatments don’t work, the misuse of the old trope “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
Our history with spiritism and alternative medicine shows that we have a long way to go if we want to promote science literacy. It’s not just an issue of explaining how science works, but of understanding decades of cultural habits and religious beliefs that got mixed up with science and medicine, and worse, religion disguised as science. The epistemic exceptionalism of science exists for a reason: science-based therapies can be proven to work.
The nature and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic was the subject of intense discussion throughout 2020, both inside and outside of science. Some argued that with severe lockdown measures the government was overestimating the problem, others considered those measures to be appropriate and proportionate, and still others believed that the government was taking irresponsible risks in removing restrictions.
However, everyone seems to agree on one thing: the disease is caused by a new virus, which has been given the name SARS-CoV-2. Or, at least, everybody except a small group of natural healers, who hold a completely different opinion. According to this committed bunch, viruses don’t exist at all. And if they do exist, they aren’t that dangerous at all. And if they are really dangerous, it’s all a big conspiracy. Scientists, they say, just don’t understand it at all.
David Icke, the British former football player and sports journalist who became an influential propagator of conspiracy theories around 1990, was interviewed in April this year by the online platform London Real. The conversation accumulated 65,000 live viewers before YouTube removed it “for recommending medically unsound methods to prevent the coronavirus.”
In the interview, Icke stated that COVID-19 (by which he meant the virus) does not exist, that the reported symptoms are actually the result of 5G radiation, before explaining that he believes Bill Gates belongs in prison.
To back up his 5G claims, Icke brought up the work of forensic psychiatrist Andrew Kaufman, who offers a range of detoxifying health advice on his own YouTube channel, including a holistic root canal treatment. Kaufman has also argued that COVID-19 could be the result of all manner of causes, but that it is certainly not caused by a virus. Instead, he claims the disease is the result of stress, improper nutrition, pollution, ionizing radiation and a variety of unspecified conditions. However, for a direct relationship with 5G, he said he had found no data in the research literature. So much for him supporting Icke’s 5G theory.
Koch’s Postulates and chain reactions
Kaufman makes even more dubious claims in his COVID-19 video, which has now been viewed 225,000 times and is frequently referred to on the internet in the alternative circuit. For example, he claims it is not proven that SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of COVID-19 according to Koch’s Postulates – the criteria that Robert Koch established in 1884 to identify microorganisms as the cause of a disease. In particular, the virus had not been isolated – a claim that has become a common complaint in these circles.
Kaufman also claims that the numerous electron microscopic images available of the virus are either animations or that they show very small but normal cell parts, called ‘exosomes’, which few people have heard of. Exosomes are small membrane bound structures released by cells into the space surrounding them; they are about the same size as coronaviruses. Could it really be true that the virologist community mistakenly confused these with viruses? And that a forensic psychiatrist is now helping the world clear up this misunderstanding? I will come back to that later.
Kaufman also discussed the reliability of the PCR test, the Polymerase Chain Reaction, a method for detecting minute amounts of hereditary material. He says that its inventor, Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, had already warned that the method is not suitable for detecting viral material. The test could only detect common – in this case human – genetic material. And this, according to Kaufman, would explain why so many people are given a positive result on this test, and thus are wrongly labeled as infected persons.
Obviously, the PCR patent already explicitly states that the method is suitable for detecting viral material. Moreover, this test is precisely designed to search very specifically for genetic material that only occurs in the targeted micro-organism and not in others. Even though the total genome of SARS-CoV-2 consists of 30,000 bases, it is sufficient to detect only 1 per thousand (30 bases) to make sure that we are dealing with this specific virus. It appears that the forensic psychiatrist Kaufman missed this revolution in microbiology.
In conspiracy circles, in short, the pandemic is all about a non-existent disease, which they explain away by suggesting the evil medical profession, led by the World Health Organization, is doing everything it can to artificially add to the number of cases. In addition, all deaths that could indicate even the slightest indication of COVID-19 are ‘unfairly’ included in the statistics.
Measles virus challenge
Kaufman in turn refers to yet another scientist, Stefan Lanka, to substantiate his theses. This German biologist and anti-vaxxer briefly made international headlines when, in 2011, he offered a reward of 100,000 euros if someone could show him one scientific article proving both the existence and, among other things, the size of the measles virus. According to Lanka, measles was nothing more than a rash from some kind of psychological trauma. When his countryman David Bardens, then a medical student, sent him six articles and claimed the reward, Lanka refused to pay it. Bardens filed a lawsuit, which he won. Lanka was nevertheless right on appeal – after all, he had asked for one article and not six. An attempt by Bardens to challenge this decision at an even higher legal level failed. In the alternate world, this outcome is presented as definitive proof that viruses don’t exist.
Lanka also believes that even if viruses exist, they cannot be detected with current technology. The fact that the entire genome of SARS-CoV-2 had been unraveled within a very short time, and that people can be tested on that basis, makes little impression on him or on Kaufman.
Lanka is now again challenging the experts and has published an open letter to German virologist Christian Drosten accusing him of ‘crimes against humanity’ for advocating vaccinations on unscientific grounds and developing a virus test prematurely. Drosten is thus, according to Lanka, responsible for ‘the increase and globalization of the Chinese disease panic’.
And what is Lanka’s view of health based on? It is based on the ideas of Ryke Geerd Hamer, a well-known figure in the Netherlands and Germany who claimed at the end of the last century that he could offer a new “Germanic” alternative to “Jewish medical science”, which he believes is aimed at exterminating the non-Jewish population. Hamer, in turn, based his ideas on those of the Nazi physician Gerhard Wagner, adding, among other things, his own ‘observation’ that most German oncologists these days were Jewish, and that no Jew in Germany receives chemotherapy… because the needles used to deliver it also implant nanochips containing venom compartments which can be activated via artificial moons.
Here we end up in a morass of anti-Semitism, pseudoscience and paranoia from which some people seem unable to escape.
The virus exists. Period
In order to make a final attempt to see if there could be any truth in Kaufman’s claims, I contacted several researchers. Kaufman quite prominently quotes in his video American virologist James Hildreth, who allegedly claimed that “the virus is an exosome in every way.”
Now, first of all, this is a quote taken out of context: Hildreth wanted to point out that in some cases a virus can behave like an exosome, if it is looking for a way to leave the infected cells – his 2003 “Trojan exosome hypothesis”. When I pointed out this interpretation of his work to Hildreth via Twitter, he resolutely replied, “The virus exists. The pandemic exists and is caused by the virus. Period.”
Swedish researcher Jan Lötvall, himself an expert on exosomes research, interviewed American molecular biologist Kenneth Witwer in April of this year for his YouTube channel about the views of Kaufman and associates that researchers would confuse viruses and exosomes. In the interview, Witwer confirmed the presence of viruses is no longer determined by means of a microscope, so it does not matter whether they look like exosomes.
And on the statement that the virus does not exist at all, or at least is harmless: “Why anyone would believe that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is unclear.”
This article first appeared in the Dutch Skepsis FoundationSkepter magazine in September 2020.
![A COVID Home Test Kit from the UK Government and the NHS. The kit contains a sterile swab, a plastic sample bag, a labelled tube with a lid to put the swab inside and an instruction booklet. [CC-by-SA-4.0] image by Wikimedia user Fae.](https://www.skeptic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/covid-test-kit-375x281.jpg)
![The store front of Comet Ping Pong, the pizza place at the centre of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The store is painted dark green and has the word "comet" written in lighted yellow letters. Image by DOCLVHUGO [CC-by-4.0]](https://www.skeptic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Comet-ping-pong-pizza-pizzagate-podesta-brock-375x200.jpg)
