Backache
Assistant Pro
He is one of these people who have a background in Science but is speaking outside his area of expertise. His arguments sound superficially plausible until they are examined .i have not come across him, since i dont do deniers.. i responded to my friend who sent it to me.. and he came back with this..
"I heard a lengthy podcast interview of this guy on the delingpole show a few weeks ago. While the forum itself is usually looney, this guy's arguments had 2 important queries...he questioned the assumption of the baseline immune number being 0 and the absence of type 2 error metrics (false +ves) being published as official numbers. I checked a bit and found it hard to refute either. ( not saying that that makes him right ...only that I couldn't find counters to it even after much searching ). Also his credentials are quite relevant and he speaks very clearly ...not a redneck rant type dude....he certainly is not a covid denier...so I guess I am still unclear on whether to write him off or not (especially with 2nd n 3rd waves in the UK )"
As far as I can tell he has no background in diagnostics infectious diseases or epidemiology.
As far as the possibility of false positives are concerned the absolute number cannot be known because there is not another gold standard to test by.
The Pillar one testing has to have a false positive rate of less than 0.04% as these are the labs that did the ONS surveys that had positive rates of 0.04% in the summer. The Pillar 2 may be a little higher, it also slightly depends on what you call a false positive. If the presence of viral RNA that may indicate recent infection but is not currently infectious is considered false the false positive rate may be a little higher but these cases may be important for contact tracing.. A cycle threshold of under 30-35 is considered diagnostic of infectious disease in most labs below this, it may indicate viral RNA that is not currently infectious but this is not certain.
He has I believe also cast doubt on the use of antibody studies to indicate previous infection. This has been studied quite a lot and most longitudinal studies indicate a high level though not 100% seroconversion (which would hold true for most viruses) and is well understood by epidemiologists studying the spread.
AS far as background immunity not being 0 I take it he means there may be some resistance within the population. There has been research done which indicates there is some resistance to coronaviruses from infection by previous coronaviruses, whenever I have heard any speakers on this subject including Shane Crotty who was one of the first to identify it they believe it is probable that this is part of the heterogeneity of the clinical course rather than reflecting immunity to infection and would not contribute to herd immunity or imply that we are nearly through the epidemic.