I fear this mania for mass Covid testing is a hugely expensive blunder: Last week I received an email from someone whose results have flip-flopped from positive to negative four times over two months, and another from a man who has been unable to see his elderly mother, isolated in a care home, because she continues to test positive week after week.
These individuals are trapped, prisoners of the testing regime.
Something is going badly wrong, yet there has been no acknowledgment from politicians or from the scientists advising them. These, remember, are real people – lots of them.
What we are
seeing, I believe, is a major flaw in the rollout of mass swab tests –
the ones that involve wiping the throat or inside the nose. And the
consequences are serious, not just for the individuals concerned, but
for our whole national strategy – even with a vaccine. ...
As Newcastle University’s Professor Allyson Pollock said recently, the
PCR tests were never designed to be used across entire populations. The
manufacturer’s instructions, she says, make it clear that they are no
more than a tool to help with diagnosis and they are ‘not to be used on
healthy people with no symptoms’.
