roger hao wrote:Giles -
I knew you would jump on that aspect of the vid.
In your spirit of debate. My earlier comments to you about debate
was not understood - you took it point by point.
I am hoping that if your kids come to you saying Uncle did something
inappropriate you will go and pound on Uncle for an answer.
What I am hoping you will see in that article is that the testing
is flawed - the numbers are flawed - and that makes stats and conclusions
taken from them flawed. Will you debunk Kary Mullis?
If you or anyone else would like to post a video indicating why coronavirus testing is flawed (there are several variants of testing, by the way) and which itself is based on rational argument and (more or less) science, then I would be happy to engage with that, too. (It's already common knowledge and not denied by the scientific community that some test methods, or even more the actual products based on them, have not been fully reliable. Which doesn't mean, however, that current testing and the delivered results are essentially wrong.)
The thing is, in the posted video the majority of the base claims and the majority of the arguments built on them are rubbish. Hence also the case made by the video as to why SARS Cov-19 testing may be questionable is also rubbish. I understood your previous comment about debate. But what is there to debate with you here, if not working from the statements made in the video? I mean, if I say I want to discuss/debate the origins of taijiquan and I do this by posting the film "Tai Chi Master",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_Chi_Master_(film)saying "Check out the film, many interesting points made here, calls into question a lot of received wisdom about the origins!", how should one respond? The only sensible response I can imagine would be to say: Giles, maybe we can discuss the subject in some way, but I have to point out first of all that this film is fiction, it has nothing to do with any real-world possibilities about how taijiquan originated. So we can't use it as a basis for debate, apart from showing how any historical reality will be very different to the film story.
Will you debunk Kary Mullis?
No. His 1993 statement about his PCR test (which identifies the RNA of the virus, as opposed to the antibodies produced in response to it) not being recommended for infectious diseases is because of the chance of
false negatives. Which means that there's a chance that the test will miss some people who have been infected by a particular virus. Meaning that taking the results of the PCR test alone, there's a chance that more people have been infected by SARS CoV-19. But not many times more, in line with current testing accuracy then possibly up to ca. 33% more. That's why, to get the bigger picture of what's going on in a population, it should be conducted in tandem with the antibodies test.
But this isn't anything close to the arguments applied in the video, which goes off in directions that would have Dr. Mullis (and his motorbike) spinning in the grave. The video itself makes no case about the reliability or not of PCR testing, because it's banging on about the disease being caused by exosomes (been there, done that, don't wanna go back...
)
Source:
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-comments-on-different-types-of-test-for-covid-19/And on a personal level: I freely admit that videos like these, which make staggeringly false claims about things like basic virology and infectious diseases - and probably do this knowingly, at least to some extent - tend to get my goat. Maybe I'm seeing it as a civic duty to dismantle these, since I currently have more time on my hands. But any more responses by me in this vein on RSF will surely be repetitive and maybe boring for forum members, so I guess I'll give it a rest from now on.
PS. I don't really get what you're saying about a child-molesting uncle in connection with the issue of fair debate.