I very much appreciate this substantive and very informative post (as well as being quite far from dry and unreadable!) from someone with the specific skillset and professional experience requisite to virology. It has been sorely needed in the maelstrom of disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda swirling around the all too scanty real and factual information available during the last couple years of political trauma.

Given your expertise, I wonder if you would be kind enough to address some questions that I have, or have been asked of me my personal education has not enabled me to answer with certainty. If you can, I would be grateful.

Kary Mullis directly stated the PCR technique was absolutely not usable as a diagnostic test. He explained that simply by cranking up the cycles, PCR could be used to provide positive results for virtually anything tested for. I have read several sources that say 20-24 cycles is the upwards limit for reliable detection of sequences being replicated. Would you address the suitability of PCR as a testing mechanism for these parameters?

I have also read that PCR tests are cranked up to as many as 40-45 cycles, which Kary Mullis compared to the Buddhist philosophy that you can find all things in all things, he often cracking wise while he was with us. Because of this, and the CDC allowing tests contaminated with genetic material known to them to be certain to produce positive results, as many as 97% of the PCR positive test results are claimed to be false. These issues are perhaps best addressed in addition to the potential of PCR to be suitable at all for diagnostic testing.

There has been much claimed about Koch's Postulate and how it has not been met for SARS2, which you briefly address, rather indirectly. I have not yet read the link provided to the paper you mention that is claimed to show SARS2 viruses taken directly from a patient, but will read that, and if I have any questions as to whether it resolves the issue of proof that SARS2 is the pathogen causing Covid, I will ask them at that time.

I hope you can find the time and are willing to address my questions.

Thanks!