[FabHK]

Nonsense. So, here's what happened:

Drosten, Corman et al. from the Charité (among Europe's largest and most reputable university hospitals and medical schools) published a paper [1] in January 2020 [2] in the "Eurosurveillance Journal" in which they described a diagnostic workflow to detect SARS-CoV-2 (not "SARS-CoV-19", as you say) which they had developed and tested (both sensitivity and specificity). That became known as the Drosten PCR, and was the standard procedure initially to detect the virus (at least in Germany).

A group of 22 nutcases with bad English claim that the Drosten/Corman paper is severely flawed, put up a "report" "refuting" it (on a website, not published) and demand that Eurosurveillance retract it.

That report (which highlights a few very minor actual issues, but is otherwise false, misleading, and blown up entirely out of proportion) is later used by covidiots to claim that PCR testing is flawed and full of false positives, the virus doesn't exist, and further nonsense.

Needless to say, there are by now several different PCR testing protocols, they have been developed further, crosschecked, etc, and there is no major problem with PCR testing. Certainly no "big scandal".

This is political posturing and fabrication applied to medicine. Sad.

[1] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31992387/

[2] It was submitted January 21st 2020 and accepted for publication on January 22nd 2020. On January 23rd 2020 the paper was online.

[tboyd47]

This comment is a bonanza of appeals to authority, straw man arguments, and ad hominems. At HN we generally prefer to see steelmanning. Would you like to take a shot at explaining why the most charitable interpretation of the Drosten review is misguided?

[FabHK]

It would be ad hominem if I said that they are nutcases with bad English, and therefore their arguments were invalid. It would be an appeal to authority if I said that the Drosten has received Germany's Federal Cross of Merit (twice), is co-discoverer of SARS-CoV (the previous one), has researched MERS-CoV, and has been called "one of the world’s foremost experts on coronaviruses" by Science magazine, and therefore the Drosten PCR is good.

However, I am saying that these guys are nutcases with bad English, and Drosten is an eminent expert on coronaviruses, and also the Drosten PCR has proven to be fine, and also the "report" the nutcases wrote has been largely refuted, by people that know much more about this than I do.

This article outlining the "Ad hominem fallacy fallacy" might be instructive.

https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html

> Put briefly, ad hominem is "You are an ignorant person, therefore your arguments are wrong", and not "Your arguments are wrong, therefore you are an ignorant person." The latter statement may be fallacious, but it's not an ad hominem fallacy.

[tboyd47]

You just repeated the same thoughts in an even more condescending way and still didn’t explain why they’re wrong.

It’s so odd that top level comment would be flagged.

[rualca]

On the contrary. The reply is a clear explanation of why the ad hominem accusation makes no sense.

The initial comment was rightfully flagged because it either ignores the bad and unscientific nature of the attacks on the paper.

[thu2111]

No. The replies don't address a single scientific point whatsoever, instead distracting with irrelevancies like attacking the English of the authors (which is plenty good enough), claiming the PCR test is "fine" when it's obviously nowhere even close to fine for the purposes it's being used for, and writing off things like the evident lack of review as a minor unimportant thing.

It's a classic example of desperately trying to shoot the messengers and tboyd47 is correct to say it doesn't belong here. His post was flagged simply because he's another messenger and thus is getting shot - it obviously has nothing to do with the politeness or quality of his posts.

[rualca]

> No. The replies don't address a single scientific point whatsoever

The reply actually addresses all the points.

* It provides an objective description of the test, supported by primary sources.

* Provides a description of the sources of criticism that were referred to in the initial statement.

* Describes the nature and quality of the criticism.

* Allows you to check that the papers under attack were not retracted, which is the testament to the scientific substance of said attacks.

* More importantly, raises the attention to the fact that there are far more test procedures nowadays which, even if we took the complains at face value, render them null.

There's a radical fringe which for some unexplained reason are both radically anti-science and heavily invested in trying to produce and use fraudulent pseudo-scientific work to attack scientific findings they find politically inconvenient, as a kind of Trojan horse based on appeals to authority.

[aaron695]

Rubbish, it was the well thought out explanations I come here for.

You should have contributed something to the conversation other than saying steelman.

I picked a randomish name (English based since there will be more English articles) from the signatures and found this

Dr. Kevin P. Corbett

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/who-were-the-so-calle...