The Lugenpress, or Lying Press, lie by commission and omission. Commission dishonesty, which is obvious, includes incessant propagandizing progressive policies and political correctness as news. Lies of omission often are difficult to detect. The Lugenpress’s lack of coverage avoids bringing ideas, events, or people to the fore to debate and discuss problems to decide the most reasonable recourse. Lugenpress lies of omission can be greater than their lies of commission. This article surveys one particular example of omission involving the World Health Organization (“WHO”).

Over the last four years, examples of Lugenpress lies of omission include disinforming and un-informing citizens about:

• The left’s transition (both leaders and the pack) into progressive fascism,
• Coverage of First Lady Melania Trump,
• Coverage of President Donald Trump’s accomplishments,
• The Russia collusion hoax fueling a coup attempt,
• Worldwide coordination of climate alarmism,
• Black and Hispanic prosperity under President Trump’s economic policies,
• True loaded costs of solar and wind energy to the grid,
• Federal Reserve actions causing the previous credit bubble leading to the Bernanke-Yellen-Powell 2020 recession,
• Impacts from the Federal Reserve’s current actions re-inflating the credit bubble,
• Disclosure of the coordination of the worldwide coronavirus stampede,
• The totalitarian natures of BLM and Antifa organizations and their attendant violence and destruction,
• Barack Obama’s role as puppet-master selecting Joe Biden for the Democrat nomination,
• Elevated Black and Hispanic voting rates for President Trump,
• Multiple nominations of President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, and
• Details of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Most recently, hidden from media scrutiny, the WHO is sitting on the horns of a dilemma that the media have kept hidden from the public. This article addresses that WHO’s inaccurate testing protocols and the changes that need to occur.

To avoid additional accusations of incompetence, the WHO now want accurate data for Wuhan virus infection cases and deaths from the coronavirus. This is because worldwide vaccinations have begun.

Two principal sources have generated inflated infection and death numbers. The first is the WHO’s protocol and methodology for PCR testing. Even the CDC acknowledges the large discrepancy between numbers of deaths with and from the coronavirus, indicating, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.” The second is the federal government’s financial incentive to healthcare industries to ignore co-morbidities and count deaths with the virus.

A cynical interpretation is that the inflated data has been intentional because “mere” excess deaths were insufficient to facilitate stampeding Americans. Excess deaths are good for capturing any and all mortality aspects related to COVID-19, but those data are conflated when patients died because they couldn’t get timely medical treatment for other conditions because of some coronavirus related reason.

Decision-makers stampeding cowed citizens to “just do what you’re told” have acted without remorse for the consequences flowing from government actions. Fallout from the COVID-19 stampede includes wresting away constitutional rights, destroying businesses, elevating unemployment, causing millions worldwide to die of hunger, creating hundreds of millions of newly poor people worldwide.

To get to more reliable numbers, the WHO recently issued a statement deprecating PCR testing to diagnose COVID-19 infection in favor of more traditional practices. However, this statement was pulled without explanation (although it is archived on the Wayback Machine). The reason likely is that the WHO immediately received adverse pushback about the impracticality of their recommendation. This isn’t a scalable solution inside the United States, much less the world.

A first diagnostic option determining coronavirus infection cultures the virus. There are important constraints, however, because “…the ability of viral culture to inform infectivity is an important aspect of diagnostics, but its use is hampered by its difficult and labor-intensive nature…” Additionally, laboratories would need to implement safety protocols, which is a high hurdle.

A second diagnostic alternative is to employ traditional, thorough medical diagnostics practices, which are expensive and time-consuming because they require highly trained, highly skilled practitioners. This is the recommendation the WHO pulled.

In a third diagnostic option, a clinician can be paid minimum wage, be trained in about an hour, and take swabs to ship to a lab for PCR testing. The WHO’s protocol for real time reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing was derived from European researchers’ early work in January, 2020 (1, 2). The amplification cycle threshold (Ct) was set at 45 thermal cycles to replicate enough material for detection. 

Unfortunately, the PCR test has a limitation: “[T]he test cannot discriminate between the whole virus and viral fragments. The test cannot be used as a diagnostic for SARS-viruses…” Another study made a similar point: “A major drawback to PCR and other diagnostic approaches (including other nucleic amplification, serology, and antigen detection) is that they all fail to determine virus infectivity; PCR sensitivity is excellent but specificity for detecting replicative virus is poor…”

Although the PCR test is inappropriate by itself for diagnosis, this approach is practical to save time and money, enabling worldwide testing. Despite important shortcomings, the WHO and other authorities endorsed this third approach throughout 2020.

Fortunately for liberty and prosperity, the WHO doesn’t have regulatory authority. It has caused enough damage with complicity in the pandemic stampede. However, it is likely that, sometime soon, the WHO will communicate the inappropriateness of providing guidance using Ct=45 rather than a much lower value.

Explicitly coming clean would be cathartic but expect the WHO to obfuscate any mea culpa. One study found “patients could not be contagious with Ct >25 as the virus is not detected in culture above this value…At Ct=35, the value…used to report a positive result for PCR, <3% of cultures are positive…” Another study indicates to get to 100% confirmed real positive assessments, the PCR Ct must be 17. Amplification cycles above this result in false positive assessments.

These data point the way forward. A PCR test can be finessed to be more useful diagnostically by reducing the Ct count. Any positive result implies actual infection because it indicates the test replicated and detected a high viral load using low Ct.

Low viral loads (e.g. from dead virus or viral fragments) require high Ct counts because many more thermal cycles must be done to replicate enough material for detection. Results from high Ct counts increasingly lead to false positive assessments that skew data for infected cases and deaths with the coronavirus. PCR tests with high Ct counts just shouldn’t be done.

All of which gets us back to the Lugenpress. The above surveyed the WHO’s dilemma regarding coronavirus data accuracy. It is doubtful the Lugenpress will do a more extensive expose on how we got to this sad place and who’s responsible for the myriad costs of this data integrity debacle.

However, when Team Blue benefits, the Lugenpress and tyrannical Big Tech will pivot and accommodate the truth. Otherwise, a political consensus will emerge to attenuate financial incentives inflating infection and death numbers.

If it’s not stopped completely, taxpayer fleecing should at least be reduced. Counts for infected cases will be reduced with a lower PCR Ct.

Deaths attributed to COVID will be lowered sharply because counts will be limited to deaths solely from the virus. Public confidence in published data will climb as data become more accurate and concomitantly lower. Sooner or later, it will dawn on the Biden Administration there are political benefits to more accurate numbers. Doubtless, Joe Biden will take full credit for reductions.

IMAGE: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. YouTube screengrab.