COVID Myths: Dissecting the studies used to defend mandates

Asymptomatic Spread -the cornerstone of the argument for lockdowns, masks and vaccines

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

“A science that insists on possessing the only correct method and the only acceptable results is ideology and must be separated from the state, and especially from the process of education.” (Paul Feyerabend, The Tyranny of Science). In the past two years, we have seen ideology masquerading as science used by governments across the world to enact tyrannical COVID-19 mitigation strategies in the name of public safety. My goal is to provide an overview of the science underlying the narrative that SARSCoV2 was so highly transmissible, so deadly, and so unlike any virus we had ever seen, that the only course of action was to shut down society, cover our faces and wait for a vaccine. Mantras, based on flawed conclusions have been recited with religious fervor: “Stay home; save lives”. “My mask protects you; your mask protects me”.  “SARSCov2 is ten times more infectious than the flu”. “We all need to get vaccinated to beat this virus”. Presenting these mitigation strategies as necessary to protect others exploited the intrinsic desire of many people to do the right thing, creating a moral panic that was more contagious than the virus itself. Dissenters were not just silenced, but vilified and accused of peddling conspiracy theories, discouraging all scientific debate. My first article in this series will focus on asymptomatic transmission, because without this claim, there is no argument for locking down or masking the healthy. I will break down key studies so that the readers can understand the difference between what the data in the studies showed and the conclusions that were drawn. I will follow up in subsequent articles with the science behind masking and vaccines.

In January of 2020, Anthony Fauci, the anointed head of the COVID task force, attested to how rare asymptomatic spread of a respiratory virus was, and how it was historically NOT a major driver of overall transmission.

A month later, he did an about-face and yet, contrary to media claims, no evidence has emerged to suggest that asymptomatic transmission played a major role in the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC joined this asymptomatic transmission narrative right out of the gate, and on their webpage touting the purported benefits of universal masking they stated, “Masks are primarily intended to reduce the emission of virus-laden droplets (“source control”), which is especially relevant for asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic infected wearers who feel well and may be unaware of their infectiousness to others, and who are estimated to account for more than 50% of transmissions.” The references cited to defend this statement were not designed to quantify the number of secondary infections associated with asymptomatic individuals. Instead, they consist primarily of epidemiological models that use statistical theories to predict when during the illness infections occur and how many people will ultimately become infected, and case studies in which the authors look at small groups of individuals in a single setting who tested positive and try to create a timeline to determine when infections occurred. I provide a detailed discussion of these papers here.

[Click here for explanation of epidemiological models.]

In June of 2020, the WHO’s Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove stated that, based on the data thus far, asymptomatic SARSCoV2 transmission was extremely rare. I had hope for a moment that we could put this damaging narrative of asymptomatic transmission to rest, but she was immediately forced to walk back the statement by Anthony Fauci and others, who cited the epidemiological models as evidence to counter her assertions (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-coronavirus-patients-arent-spreading-new-infections-who-says.html). I would like to point out that a scientist NEVER counters data with a model. A model is presented based on observations; a hypothesis based on that model is then tested and data either refute or confirm it.

There was no evidence presented to justify the pressure on Dr. Van Kerkhove to revise her initial statement. Nonetheless, over the past two years, the most prolific scientists -those in academia- have largely adopted the narrative of widespread asymptomatic spread and they perpetuate it in scientific journals. As an example, a highly cited paper in the esteemed journal, Science, is actually an editorial from well-respected investigators at Scripps, UCSD and National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/1422.long), who were advocating for strict mitigation strategies. They open their argument with the statement, “Traditional respiratory disease control measures are designed to reduce transmission by droplets produced in the sneezes and coughs of infected individuals. However, a large proportion of the spread of COVID-19 appears to be occurring through airborne transmission of aerosols produced by asymptomatic individuals during breathing and speaking.” This statement acknowledges the previously accepted paradigm that pandemics are not driven by asymptomatic spread but implies that new information has emerged from studies on SARSCoV2 that clearly demonstrate widespread transmission by asymptomatic individuals. Three references are provided, but none are studies that examine transmission. Instead, they are all commentaries positing aerosolized transmission of SARSCoV2 as an explanation for how someone who is not coughing and sneezing might transmit the virus. In other words, they are all editorials by scientists offering their theory of how asymptomatic spread occurs; they are not attempting to show that it occurs. I provide a detailed discussion of the citations associated with this article below. The point is that there are hundreds of papers that journalists and lockdown/mandate enthusiasts cite as they shout “Follow the Science” that do not even attempt to address asymptomatic transmission, much less prove it.

If the CDC, Fauci, and the academic establishment are going to claim that asymptomatic individuals account for at least 50% of transmission, then the experiment to test that hypothesis is not an epidemiological model nor a case study.   You need a group of COVID-19 positive individuals, broken into groups defined by their symptoms, whose contacts can be identified, and secondary infections in that group of contacts must be quantified. If the hypothesis is correct, you would expect that 50% of any secondary infections will be in the contacts traced to asymptomatic individuals (after accounting for any differences in the number of people each individual encounters). There are not many such studies because they require detailed contact tracing, and this is logistically difficult in most places. However, two such studies have been conducted and both found no evidence of transmission from individuals who never showed symptoms. The first study by Cheng et al, published in JAMA Internal Medicine (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2765641), looked at transmission between 100 COVID-positive subjects and their 2761 contacts who had been exposed for at least 15 minutes, with no social distancing or facemasks. Nine of the subjects had no symptoms, and none of their 91 contacts became infected. This study was particularly informative because they also demonstrated negligible transmission by pre-symptomatic individuals outside the household and pre-symptomatic individuals accounted for less than 10% of the cases. A second study by Cao et al., published in Nature Communications (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w), examined secondary infections in the 1174 contacts of 300 asymptomatic individuals, once again finding no transmission from this group. One thing that I found disturbing was that the authors of the first study did not stress these findings about asymptomatic transmission in their conclusions, and they combined the data of people exposed to pre-symptomatic individuals with those exposed during the first five days of symptoms, such that their data better fit the epidemiological models. The data presented in the tables and figures are quite transparent in their demonstration of limited asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic transmission, but unfortunately many people simply read the conclusions and do not look at the raw data. Detailed analysis of these two studies is presented below. I am not simply selecting studies that support my claim. These studies address and prove false the claim that asymptomatic transmission accounts for a significant percentage of cases, while the studies cited by the public health officials merely provide isolated examples  in which a person may have transmitted the virus while not experiencing symptoms.

               There are several reasons the question of asymptomatic spread has been so controversial with this pandemic when compared to others we have seen in the past. First, we are routinely testing people without symptoms, using a method that can detect trace amounts of viral mRNA. I will present a more detailed explanation of RT-PCR in a separate post but suffice it to say that the upper cut-off for a positive COVID-19 test often corresponds to a viral load that is insufficient to cause an infection.  (An example of assay performance of a commonly used test can be seen in section 11 of this link https://www.fda.gov/media/140354/download. The cut-off for positivity is 40 cycles which detects as few as 200 copies/mL, but the amount needed to detect infectivity in cells is over 100 times that.)  In the past, this methodology would be used as a means of confirming a viral illness in someone with clinical symptoms, but most people would not go to the doctor to get tested for a respiratory virus when they weren’t sick. For this reason, we have not typically been counting people who never develop symptoms as “cases” when collecting statistics on diseases like seasonal flu. It is likely that if we tested healthy people for a panel of viruses by RT-PCR, we would be seeing a huge number of “asymptomatic cases” of influenza, common cold coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, etc. Second, the term asymptomatic typically referred to the period between infection and symptom onset (i.e., pre-symptomatic individuals), which is very different from people who never develop symptoms. These two distinct groups of people (COVID-positive/pre-symptomatic and COVID positive/never developing symptoms) have been conflated in most of the studies addressing asymptomatic transmission, and most of the modeling studies that have been cited by the public health experts have been seeded with the assumption that people with no symptoms transmit at approximately 70-75% the rate of those with symptoms, something that is not supported by the data I discussed above.

       Remember, the most important claim used to defend shelter-in-place orders, business and school closures, and universal masking was that anyone can be a silent carrier of the disease, depositing lethal viral loads as they go about their daily business. This narrative ran counter to existing scientific paradigms but was repeated daily by public health officials and the media.  Presenting new theories and challenging existing paradigms are important for scientific progress, but the burden of proof would typically fall upon those posing a hypothesis that counters the current paradigm. Instead, a handful of government-sanctioned “experts” embraced a set of uncorroborated narratives, insisting that they be treated as dogma unless the skeptics could prove their assumptions incorrect. This is the antithesis of the scientific method. Nonetheless, this narrative of widespread asymptomatic transmission has been used to sow the seeds of fear into the general population. People are convinced that anyone could be a carrier and the healthy can kill the vulnerable merely by breathing near them. It’s almost impossible to disprove this claim, without doing the somewhat invasive contact tracing studies I described earlier in this article. Many people seem unable to acknowledge the illogic embedded in the belief that this disease is so deadly that we need to shut down, mask up and force everyone to be vaccinated, because most people don’t actually get sick. This idea is internally inconsistent.  I hope this analysis helps prepare people to look at the sources being touted as “the science” so that our society can never again be manipulated by politically motivated public health officials and politicians.