If you are wondering what factors have contributed to economic dislocations, business failures and rising prices since the Covid pandemic began, part of the answer lies in governments splurging on items for which there is little, if any, consumer demand. That splurging eats up capital that cannot be deployed for production of goods that consumers actually have a use for.
The federal government is sitting on a stockpile of 39 million extra rapid tests for COVID-19 and is struggling to get rid of them without chucking them in the trash, an internal Health Canada memo shows.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Canada has spent roughly $5 billion on rapid tests.
Give them away or dump them, as Canadians will never use them. We are done!
There is enough info out there to show that they were untested, have some side effects and do not work.
I would consider throwing them in the trash a positive move.
Tests for which there was no practical use BECAUSE the Ct rate used (35 to 40) violated its use according to the late Kari Mullis, the creator of the PCR (polyamerase chain reaction) test (who specified a maximum rate of 25), OR it was used, in the case of RAT (rapid antigen tests) on people without clinical symptoms, a situation for which the manufacturer had NO long term test data because it wasn’t supposed to be used in that manner. Either way, a lot of money was wasted for no practical gain.
Kary Mullis was an idiot. In addition to not understanding how quantitative PCR works, he was an HIV/AIDS denialist.
Kary Mullis was too busy doing real science to flap his gums on a website.
He made one invention and then transitioned to nuttery. I understand qPCR better than he ever did.
You funny.
Ok, I’ll bite. Tell me what part of quantitative PCR its inventor and Nobel Prize winner Kari Mullis didn’t understand. Be specific. As to his denial of AIDS, he attributed AIDS to a bad lifestyle that left the immune system drawn down and completely compromised and susceptible to infection. That is not the same as denying that AIDs exists as a condition, merely a disagreement over cause. He shared the same sort of lifestyle for a time, but did not suffer the effects.
1) KM invented PCR, not qPCR, which is an ‘evolution’ of PCR but not the same (PCR is in itself not quantitative). qPCR isn’t even my main game (molbio, ugh) but I do know that not only is the Ct threshold of 25 grabbed from thin air, Ct doesn’t even matter that much. This article explains why albeit somewhat tediously: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking/covid-19-pcr-test-reliable-despite-commotion-about-ct-values
2) “merely a disagreement over cause. ” = HIV/AIDS denialism and it’s claptrap. There is no non-HIV AIDS in the human population outside of perhaps bizarre lab experiments. AIDS is not the immune system being ‘drawn down’; it is the depletion of CD4+ T cells below a cutoff and it is only caused by HIV.
The underlying problem is the Ct. As Kari Mullis put it, you can find anything in anyone (a direct quote). It does not prove illness, only presence of a molecular substance. That is why you need a clinical diagnosis, not just a test, because there may not be sufficient viral load before the patient is considered “ill” which allows the physician to look at the whole patient not just the presence of the substance. The Ct merely proves existence, not load.
Your article does not discuss that point at all. It is that point that which makes the difference. The human body has a constant presence of viral pneumonia in the lungs. People are not always ill with pneumonia despite the presence of the substance. A sufficient viral load is required to be present before symptoms of the disease are present, and the body then ramps up its defenses. The PCR test simply finds a trace substance of what it intends to find; it does not quantify it initially. Secondly, the longer the CT threshold takes to find said signal, the more likely it is based on junk RNA / DNA or a low viral load. If the test works by amplifying a signal, that does not make it immune to the old adage : “Garbage in, garbage out”. If the presence of a virus is there in sufficient quantities, it should not take a large number of cycles to detect the virus. The more cycles, the greater the risk of false positives by the test “finding what it’s looking for”. Multiple studies have confirmed this with regards to both the PCR and qPCR. You would think the guy who designed the test would know its ins and outs better than anyone else. The qPCR simply uses the number of cycles to estimate the load; it is not a precise diagnosis tool.
The Ct value used to determine whether or not the signal is just background varies with each ‘recipe’ and cycle. It is true that it doesn’t necessarily quantify the target as a standard curve is need for that.
Un one, you are one of the dumbest people I have ever read.
So it’s not “quantitative “ if it isn’t calibrated to response curve. Therefore it’s a WAG based on the number of cycles used to detect a fragment. Doesn’t sound like you understand metrology
The PCR test cannot identify any infection period.
Well you know justine had to buy all these kits from his friends that set up companies to sell this garbage to the government at highly inflated prices to fleece the taxpayer some more.
This right here above ^
And who manufactures these tests?
And who authorized buying them? Liberals are running the country into the ground.
Probably the same P-HAC that approved the destruction of “expired” PPE in sealed packages, and then approved the shipment of much of the remaining PPE to china, which was then sold back to P-HAC at a greatly inflated rate, or maybe it was the P-HAC that approved the unsolicited Baylis Medical respirator contract, even though Baylis never manufactured a respirator before, and was using the patented plans that were released for free by the biggest respirator manufacturer?
You have to wonder how these kinds of profits allow the buying of those kind of politicians.
BTW, what happened with the promised 30,000 ventilators? I remember PM ShinyPony promised this in 2020 when everyone was panicking re covid and ER.
Also, what happened with the millions and millions of vaccines/boosters purchased and expired?
Damn good thing those ventilators did not show up and get used, thousands of lives were saved by their absence. Ditto for the useless zero efficacy vaxxes, lives were saved.
All 32 million of them useless vaxxes.
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/canada-set-to-waste-1-billion-worth-of-covid-19-vaccines.
Plus the temp hospitals SNC never built.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-federal-mobile-hospital-units-sitting-in-warehouses-as-omicron-surges/
Kleptocracy…
I worked for a company that was working on spec with SNC Lavalin to provide temporary shelters to be deployed in hospital parking lots to house sick Covid patients. They kept us on the hook for at least eight months in 2020. I had already looked at at the initial reports from Italy about who was dying from Covid and the ages of the departed. So I knew that the average age of the deceased was approximately 80 years old, same as the flu.
I told our management that they better hurry up and sign a contract with SCN Lavalin before the shelters were no longer required. I said we shouldn’t spend another dime designing them until they “showed us the money!” Everybody scoffed at me. Six months later, no contract, and no compensation for all the work we did. As usual, nobody came to me and said I was right after all.
Suckers.
This is an odd time to see this. A coincidence. Yesterday I cleaned out the a bathroom vanity drawer, found a rapid test and threw it out.
It was useless then and still is.
I’m embarrassed that I was too cowardly to refuse the jab or the booster especially because I am mathematically inclined. I had reviewed the death statistics and sent lots of E-mail and tweets to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and his feckless health minister Tyler Shandro telling them that it was all fake and that CMO Deena Hinshaw was the usual civil servant combination of commie and stupid.
Never again.
They are trying to give them away. Just about every Walmart I’ve been in has a pile of them inside the front door for sheeple to take. What blows me away is the number of asymptomatic people who continue to use these useless pieces of garbage and test “positive” (yeah, for stupidity). BTW, I learned this week that Trillium-Mississauga hospital has a Covid outbreak. First I’ve heard of this and only because my sister was admitted and wasn’t allowed visitors.
Got some, try the tequila test.
I think there’s still employers, namely government, that will give time off for covid isolating.
It’s stupid but those”workers”will keep testing to get some sweet sweet free vacation.
When I see the “free” tests on a counter, I always take a couple, then promptly throw them in the garbage. I figure that’s the best way to get rid of two false positives.
If only I could find a way to do “business” with the “Canadian” gov’t during the next theatrical release of “Plandemic,” like overselling items of uselessness for billions, I could afford to move the whole kit ‘n caboodle away from the country of my birth I no longer recognize.
At 5 billion how much did each cost and what was profit into Lieberal supporter pockets?
Wonder about the spreading of the common cold. Seems to me it spreads pretty and has since I was very young.
CTV is such garbage.. where do I start?
‘Now that far fewer people are subjecting themselves to the brain-tickling sensation’.. there was no brain tickling sensation with RAT tests.. that was the stupid PCR test.
‘The federal health department plans to keep up to 55 million in reserve to prepare for the next emergency’ – so the feds are preparing for “the next covid-19 emergency” hmmm?
‘Another 38,722 are expected to perish in August and September, the memo shows. Most tests will expire in 2024.’ The feds have 90 MILLION RAT tests that will never be used and this crack reporter is telling us about 38,000 that “are going to perish” soon.
‘The department recommended shipping the tests abroad to countries that need them, or even potentially paying the manufacturers to take the tests back. To date, neither of those things has happened.’ – OH I wonder why neither of those two things has happened??? Tell us crack CTV reporting…. oh nothing?
‘In the memo, staff said they plan to come up for a plan to start disposing of unused tests for the deputy minister’s approval.’ – Hey everyone! Staff is coming up for a plan!!!