‘Stunning’: Only 1 in 7 Germans With Positive PCR Test Had COVID Infection
What was once dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” is now peer-reviewed science.
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
The authors of a new peer-reviewed study that identified an 86% false positive rate for COVID-19 PCR tests said their findings suggest a “significant overcounting” of COVID-19 infections during the pandemic. By the end of 2021, 92% of Germans had already acquired a natural infection, indicating near-universal immunity in the population.
Only about 1 in 7 positive PCR tests in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic indicated an actual coronavirus infection that triggered an antibody response, according to a new peer-reviewed study.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), called the study’s findings of an 86% false positive rate “stunning.”
The study also found that by late December 2020, when COVID-19 vaccines rolled out, about 25% of Germans had already acquired a natural infection. By the end of 2021, the figure rose to 92%, indicating near-universal immunity in the population.
PCR tests led to ‘significant overcounting’ of COVID infections
The study by three German researchers, published last month in Frontiers in Epidemiology, used two mathematical models to analyze how well PCR test results aligned with the results of blood tests for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
The findings were based on data obtained from accredited labs in Germany that handled about 90% of PCR tests in the country from March 2020 to early 2023, and also performed antibody (IgG) blood tests until May 2021.
The researchers — Michael Günther, Ph.D., Robert Rockenfeller, Ph.D., and Harald Walach, Ph.D. — said their models aligned data from PCR tests that detect “small bits of viral genetic material in the nose or throat,” and antibody tests that show if a person’s immune system “responded to an actual infection weeks or months earlier.”
They told The Defender:
“When we compared the number of PCR positives with later antibody results, only about 1 out of 7 PCR-positive people showed the kind of immune response that indicates a true infection. Under conservative assumptions, it could be closer to 1 out of 10.”
Their analysis also showed that by the end of 2021, “nearly everyone” in Germany had been “infected, vaccinated, or both.”
The 1 in 7 PCR test figure “almost perfectly” aligns with a year-end population-wide immunity rate of 92%, they said, according to the study’s mathematical model.
The researchers explained that antibody tests “tell us that a person was infected at some point in the past year or so,” while a positive PCR test result can indicate infection — or “brief exposure without infection, leftover viral fragments or detection at very low levels that never lead to illness.”
They said their study showed that only about 14% of PCR-positive tests corresponded to actual infections that triggered IgG antibodies — suggesting that PCR tests led to a “significant overcounting” of infections.
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Mass PCR testing ‘increases the relative share of false positives’
Critics of official COVID-19 policies frequently cited the reliance on PCR tests and inconsistencies in the viral thresholds used to generate a “positive” test result.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist at CHD, said PCR tests are an unreliable tool for detecting and tracking infectious disease outbreaks. He cited a 2006 incident at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where an alleged pertussis (whooping cough) outbreak led to 134 positive test results.
“Over 1,300 prescriptions of antibiotics were distributed and 4,500 people were prophylactically vaccinated” — even though there were “zero laboratory-confirmed cases.” The misuse of PCR testing led health officials to falsely declare an outbreak, he said.
A PCR test is “not a diagnostic test for a population,” Jablonowski said. “It is best used as a confirmatory test, essentially answering, ‘What virus has infected you?’ and not, ‘Are you infected?’”
The German researchers said their findings don’t indicate that PCR technology is “flawed as a laboratory method.” However, the study shows that the way in which PCR tests were used for mass testing during the pandemic “did not reliably indicate how many people were actually infected.”
They said PCR tests reliably detect viral DNA fragments, including in “extremely small amounts” that “pose no infection risk” — but not whether the virus is replicating in the body.
Positive results should not be used “as a proxy for infection,” because mass PCR testing “increases the relative share of false positives,” the researchers concluded.
Mass PCR testing led to ‘unnecessary social, economic and personal harms’
Governments’ reliance on PCR test results to track COVID-19 infection levels resulted in pandemic-related restrictions that contributed to “unnecessary social, economic and personal harms,” the researchers said.
Governments used PCR test results to justify strict restrictions, even though public health agencies had access to higher-quality antibody test data.
“Better information existed than what was communicated publicly,” the researchers said. This raised “serious questions about transparency and about whether policy was based on the most informative data available.”
Jablonowski said that in the early days of the pandemic, PCR tests likely provided a more accurate picture of the spread of infection as test kits were scarce, so they were used on those more likely to be infected.
But as tests became more readily available, “they were used on those with no symptoms and mandated for hospital admissions, air travel, employers and many other access-controlled activities,” Jablonowski said.
The authors of the German study said a more scientifically sound approach would have included more accurate data on PCR tests that showed results as a proportion of the number of tests performed, routine monitoring of antibody levels in the population and “transparent communication … clearly stating what PCR can and cannot measure.”
“This set of practices … should guide future public-health policy,” the researchers said.
German government documents leaked last year suggested the country’s official response to the COVID-19 pandemic was based on political objectives, and that Germany’s recommended countermeasures and restrictions often contradicted scientific evidence.
During a 2022 interview on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast,” mathematician Norman Fenton, Ph.D., said government officials across the world manipulated PCR test data to exaggerate the extent of the pandemic.
Jablonowski said the “hysteria of the mandated PCR tests prepared the population’s mindset for the mandated vaccinations to come. The tests had nothing to do with population health and everything to do with population control.”
PCR testing for COVID-19 is far less prevalent today than during the peak of the pandemic. However, the researchers said their study “matters today because the structural error it reveals — treating PCR positives as infections — has not been corrected.”
“As we face new pathogens, like bird flu, relying on PCR alone risks repeating the same mistakes,” the researchers said.
‘Polarized’ response, as results ‘challenge assumptions that shaped pandemic policy’
The researchers said they encountered “considerable difficulty” in getting their paper published. This included rejections by six other journals, out of which only two sent the manuscript for peer review.
These journals sought to “protect the prevailing narrative, rather than engaging with the core of our analysis,” the researchers said.
The researchers said that two of the original three reviewers for Frontiers in Epidemiology “withdrew from their assignments.” This forced the editor to recruit a fourth reviewer, which delayed the paper’s publication.
Response to the paper has been “polarized,” they said. “Some readers have welcomed the quantitative comparison of PCR and IgG data as overdue, while others have questioned the study’s implications or attempted to dismiss it without engaging with the underlying methodology.
This wasn’t surprising, “given that the results challenge assumptions that shaped pandemic policy,” they said.
Related articles in The Defender
PCR Testing for Bird Flu ‘Will Only Serve to Raise False Case Count’ Critics Say
Officials Manipulated COVID Data to Exaggerate Crisis, Mathematician Tells RFK Jr.
CDC Changes Rules for Counting Breakthrough Cases, as More Fully Vaccinated People Test Positive
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Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR, said his tech should never be used to diagnose a disease
He was also an outspoken critic of Fauci, and died suddenly just months before the Plandemic began...
Exceptional analysis of the Günther et al. study. The methodological elegance here is in comparing PCR positives against IgG seroconversion rather than relying on PCR cycle thresholds alone. What's particularly illuminating is how the 14% true positive rate intersects with the 92% population immunity by end-2021. This suggests that mass PCR testing essentially captured viral shedding across all stages (pre-symptomatic, asymptomatic, post-infection) without distinguishing replication-competent virus from residual fragments. The cascading policy implications are profound. If 86% of "cases" weren't infections capable of triggering robust adaptive immunity, then the denominator for infection fatality rates, hosptalization burden, and transmission modeling was systematically inflated. The real question going forward is whether public health institutions will internalize this or continue defaulting to PCR-as-proxy for future pathogen surveillance.