So the thing driving the government response to COVID is the PCR tests. Essentially anyone who pops positive for COVID is assumed to be infectious.
Let me repeat that. Any and every positive test result is assumed to have found an infectious individual. Entire state travel rules are based on this premise. Many people have pointed out that such assumptions are completely unfounded. Such persons have been accused of spreading disinformation and banned off certain platforms. But now they are vindicated.
A promising Australian candidate for a coronavirus vaccine has been abandoned after trial participants returned false HIV positive results.
Australia had previously agreed to buy 51 million doses of the vaccine being developed by Australian firm CSL and the University of Queensland (UQ).
The government said orders of other vaccines would now fill the shortfall.
CSL and UQ stressed that the positive results were false - meaning trial participants' health was not at risk.
And in case the article disappears or is altered, because such things have been happening with alarming frequency:
So what happened here? Another article has the details that are very relevant here:
The UQ vaccine candidate used a protein and adjuvant platform, containing the COVID-19 spike protein and a "molecular clamp". A small component is derived from the human immunodeficiency virus, known as HIV, that is not able to infect people or replicate.
A source with knowledge of the clinical results said although the HIV protein fragment posed "absolutely no health risk to people", they had identified that some trial participants who received the vaccine produced a partial antibody response to it. [my underlines]
So lets understand. People have fragments of the HIV virus (technically from the protein surrounding the virus) floating around in them and an HIV test picks it up and the person is thought to be infected with HIV when in fact they are NOT. That is, evidence of HIV protein doesn't mean infectious individual.
Get it?
Many people who have HAD COVID due to being exposed at some point and never got sick (or had extremely mild symptoms) have the fragments floating about. If they have a test they can come up positive even though they are not infectious. Even more important, they could already be immune, in that their immune system recognizes the virus due to previous coronavirus exposure and dealt with the virus and they too can pop up positive even though they are not infectious.
So to recap; governments worldwide are treating PCR positive (often after many many many amplifications) as proof of infectiousness (or assumed infectiousness) and often imprisoning people on that basis, even though it is known that such positives do not prove infectiousness which is the most important thing.
