Kevin McKernan developed the SOLiD sequencer and worked on the Human Genome Project at MIT/WIBR
Important discussion of cycle threshold limits of SarsCov2 PCR tests. Running a test past the recommended cycle number produces a high number of false positive results. Cycle threshold should not be over 30, yet most test labs in the US and around the world set it to 37-40 and even as high as 45. At that point, the RNA is amplified so much that even an inactive, old viral fragment can yield a positive result—causing many people to quarantine unnecessarily.
In any given year, we could have done similar mass testing for any common cold and ended up with similar results. There is no need to lock everyone in their homes. This is destroying our society.
The best option is to stop mass testing. Do not submit to a test unless you are showing symptoms and your doctor recommends a test. Understand the ramifications of a positive test. You will need to quarantine and submit names of all close contacts who will also be forced to quarantine. It is unnecessary. Treat any illness — as we always have. If you become worse, seek medical attention. Most likely it will be no different than any past cold or flu.
12 September 2020. Updated 13 September 2020.by James Ferguson
Are you positive you are ‘positive’?
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?” – John Maynard Keynes
The UK has a big problem with the false positive rate (FPR) of its COVID-19 tests. The authorities acknowledge no FPR, so positive test results are not corrected for false positives and that is a big problem.
The standard COVID-19 RT-PCR test results have a consistent positive rate of ≤ 2% which also appears to be the likely false positive rate (FPR), rendering the number of official ‘cases’ virtually meaningless. The likely low virus prevalence (~0.02%) is consistent with as few as 1% of the 6,100+ Brits now testing positive each week in the wider community (pillar 2) tests actually having the disease.
We are now asked to believe that a random, probably asymptomatic member of the public is 5x more likely to test ‘positive’ than someone tested in hospital, which seems preposterous given that ~40% of diagnosed infections originated in hospitals.
The high amplification of PCR tests requires them to be subject to black box software algorithms, which the numbers suggest are preset at a 2% positive rate. If so, we will never get ‘cases’ down until and unless we reduce, or better yet cease altogether, randomized testing. Instead the government plans to ramp them up to 10m a day at a cost of £100bn, equivalent to the entire NHS budget.
Government interventions have seriously negative political, economic and health implications yet are entirely predicated on test results that are almost entirely false. Despite the prevalence of virus in the UK having fallen to about 2-in-10,000, the chances of testing ‘positive’ stubbornly remain ~100x higher than that.
First do no harm
It may surprise you to know that in medicine, a positive test result does not often, or even usually, mean that an asymptomatic patient has the disease. The lower the prevalence of a disease compared to the false positive rate (FPR) of the test, the more inaccurate the results of the test will be. Consequently, it is often advisable that random testing in the absence of corroborating symptoms, for certain types of cancer for example, is avoided and doubly so if the treatment has non-trivial negative side-effects. In Probabilistic Reasoning in Clinical Medicine (1982), edited by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, David Eddy provided physicians with the following diagnostic puzzle. Women age 40, participate in routine screening for breast cancer which has a prevalence of 1%. The mammogram test has a false negative rate of 20% and a false positive rate of 10%. What is the probability that a woman with a positive test actually has breast cancer? The correct answer in this case is 7.5% but 95/100 doctors in the study gave answers in the range 70-80%, i.e. their estimates were out by an order of magnitude. [The solution: in each batch of 100,000 tests, 800 (80% of the 1,000 women with breast cancer) will be picked up; but so too will 9,920 (10% FPR) of the 99,200 healthy women. Therefore, the chance of actually being positive (800) if tested positive (800 + 9,920 = 10,720) is only 7.46% (800/10,720).]
Conditional probabilities
In the section on conditional probability in their new book Radical Uncertainty, Mervyn King and John Kay quote a similar study by psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute and author of Reckoning with Risk, who illustrated medical experts’ statistical innumeracy with the Haemoccult test for colorectal cancer, a disease with an incidence of 0.3%. The test had a false negative rate of 50% and a false positive rate of 3%. Gigerenzer and co-author Ulrich Hoffrage asked 48 experienced (average 14 years) doctors what the probability was that someone testing positive actually had colorectal cancer. The correct answer in this case is around 5%. However, about half the doctors estimated the probability at either 50% or 47%, i.e. the sensitivity (FNR) or the sensitivity less the specificity (FNR – FPR) respectively. [The solution: from 100,000 test subjects, the test would correctly identify only half of the 300 who had cancer but also falsely identify as positive 2,991 (3%) of the 99,700 healthy subjects. This time the chance of being positive if tested positive (150 + 2,991 = 3,141) is 4.78% (150/3,141).]As Gigerenzer concluded in a subsequent paper in 2003, “many doctors have trouble distinguishing between the sensitivity (FNR), the specificity (FPR), and the positive predictive value (probability that a positive test is a true positive) of test —three conditional probabilities.” Because doctors and patients alike are inclined to believe that almost all ‘positive’ tests indicate the presence of disease, Gigerenzer argues that randomised screening is far too poorly understood and too inaccurate in the case of low incidence diseases and can prove harmful where interventions have non-trivial, negative side-effects. Yet this straightforward lesson in medical statistics from the 1990s has been all but forgotten in the COVID-19 panic of 2020. Whilst false negatives might be the major concern if a disease is rife, when the incidence is low, as with the specific cancers above or COVID-19 PCR test, for example, the overriding problem is the false positive rate (FPR). There have been 17.6m cumulative RT-PCR (antigen) tests in the UK, 350k (2%) of which gave positive results. Westminster assumes this means the prevalence of COVID-19 is about 2% but that conclusion is predicated on the tests being 100% accurate which, as we will see below, is not the case at all.
Positives ≠ cases
One clue is that this 2% positive rate crops up worryingly consistently, even though the vast majority of those tested nowadays are not in hospital, unlike the early days. For example, from the 520k pillar 2 (community) tests in the fortnight around the end of May, there were 10.5k positives (2%), in the week ending June 24th there were 4k positives from 160k pillar 2 tests (2%) and last week about 6k of the 300k pillar 2 tests (2% again) were also ‘positive’. There are two big problems with this. First, medically speaking, a positive test result is not a ‘case’. A ‘case’ is by definition both symptomatic and must be diagnosed by a doctor but few of the pillar 2 positives report any symptoms at all and almost none are seen by doctors. Second, NHS diagnosis, hospital admission and death data have all declined consistently since the peak, by over 99% in the case of deaths, suggesting it is the ‘positive’ test data that have been corrupted. The challenge therefore is to deduce what proportion of the reported ‘positives’ actually have the disease (i.e. what is the FPR)? Bear in mind two things. First, the software that comes with the PCR testing machines states that these machines are not to be used for diagnostics (only screening). Second, the positive test rate can never be lower than the FPR.
Is UK prevalence now 0.02%?
The epidemiological rule-of-thumb for novel viruses is that medical cases can be assumed to be about 10x deaths and infections 10x cases. Note too that by medical cases what is meant is symptomatic hospitalisations not asymptomatic ‘positive’ RT-PCR test results. With no reported FPR to analyse and adjust reported test positives with, but with deaths now averaging 7 per day in the UK, we can backwardly estimate 70 daily symptomatic ‘cases’. This we can roughly corroborate with NHS diagnoses, which average 40 per day in England (let’s say 45 for the UK as a whole). The factor 10 rule-of-thumb therefore implies 450-700 new daily infections. UK government figures differ from the NHS and daily hospital admissions are now 84, after peaking in early April at 3,356 (-97.5%). Since the infection period lasts 22-23 days, the official death and diagnosis data indicate roughly 10-18k current active infections in the UK, 90% of whom feel just fine. Even the 2k daily pillar 1 (in hospital) tests only result in about 80 (0.4%) positives, 40 diagnoses and 20 admissions. Crucially, all these data are an order of magnitude lower than the positive test data and result in an inferred virus prevalence of 0.015%-0.025% (average 0.02%), which is far too low for randomized testing with anything less than a 100% perfect test; and the RT-PCR test is certainly less than 100% perfect.
Only 1% of ‘positives’ are positive
So, how do we reconcile an apparent prevalence of around 0.02% with a consistent positive PCR test rate of around 2%, which is some 100x higher? Because of the low prevalence of the disease, reported UK pillar 2 positives rate and the FPR are both about 2%, meaning almost all ‘positive’ test results are false with an overall error rate of 99:1 (99 errors for each correct answer). In other words, for each 100,000 people tested, we are picking up at least 24 of the 25 (98%) true positives but also falsely identifying 2,000 (2%) of the 99,975 healthy people as positives too. Not only do < 1.2% (24/2024) of pillar 2 ‘positives’ really have COVID-19, of which only 0.1% would be medically defined as symptomatic ‘cases’, but this 2% FPR rate also explains the ~2% (2.02% in this case) positive rate so consistently observed in the official UK data.
The priority now: FPR
This illustrates just how much the FPR matters and how seriously compromised the official data are without it. Carl Mayers, Technical Capability Leader at the Ministry of Defence Science and Technology Laborartory (Dstl) at Porton Down, is just one government scientist who is understandably worried about the undisclosed FPR. Mayers and his co-author Kate Baker submitted a paper at the start of June to the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) noting that the RT-PCR assays used for testing in the UK had been verified by Public Health England (PHE) “and show over 95% sensitivity and specificity” (i.e. a sub-5% false positive rate) in idealized laboratory conditions but that “we have been unable to find any data on the operational false positive rate” (their bold) and “this must be measured as a priority” (my bold). Yet SAGE minutes from the following day’s meeting reveal this paper was not even discussed.
False positives
According to Mayers, an establishment insider, PHE is aware the COVID-19 PCR test false positive rate (FPR) may be as high as 5%, even in idealized ‘analytical’ laboratory environments. Out in the real world though, ‘operational’ false positives are often at least twice as likely to occur: via contamination of equipment (poor manufacturing) or reagents (poor handling), during sampling (poor execution), ‘aerosolization’ during swab extraction (poor luck), cross-reaction with other genetic material during DNA amplification (poor design specification), and contamination of the DNA target (poor lab protocol), all of which are aggravating factors additional to any problems inherent in the analytic sensitivity of the test process itself, which is itself far less binary than the policymakers seem to believe. As if this wasn’t bad enough, over-amplification of viral samples (i.e. a cycle threshold ‘Ct’ > 30) causes old cases to test positive, at least 6 weeks after recovery when people are no longer infectious and the virus in their system is no longer remotely viable, leading Jason Leitch, Scotland’s National Clinical Director to call the current PCR test ‘a bit rubbish.’
Test…
The RT-PCR swab test looks for the existence of viral RNA in infected people. Reverse Transcription (RT) is where viral RNA is converted into DNA, which is then amplified (doubling each cycle) in a polymerase chain reaction (PCR). A primer is used to select the specific DNA and PCR works on the assumption that only the desired DNA will be duplicated and detected. Whilst each repeat cycle increases the likelihood of detecting viral DNA, it also increases the chances that broken bits of DNA, contaminating DNA or merely similar DNA may be duplicated as well, which increases the chances that any DNA match found is not from the Covid viral sequence.
…and repeat
Amplification makes it easier to discover virus DNA but too much amplification makes it too easy. In Europe the amplification, or ‘cycle threshold’ (Ct), is limited to 30Ct, i.e. doubling 30x (2 to the power of 30 = 1 billion copies). It has been known since April, that even apparently heavy viral load cases “with Ct above 33-34 using our RT-PCR system are not contagious and can thus be discharged from hospital care or strict confinement for non-hospitalized patients.” A review of 25 related papers by Carl Heneghan at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) also has concluded that any positive result above 30Ct is essentially non-viable even in lab cultures (i.e. in the absence of any functional immune system), let alone in humans. However, in the US, an amplification of 40Ct is common (1 trillion copies) and in the UK, COVID-19 RT-PCR tests are amplified by up to 42Ct. This is 2 to the power of 42 (i.e. 4.4 trillion copies), which is 4,400x the ‘safe’ screening limit. The higher the amplification, the more likely you are to get a ‘positive’ but the more likely it is that this positive will be false. True positives can be confirmed by genetic sequencing, for example at the Sanger Institute, but this check is not made, or at least if it is, the data is also unreported.
The sliding scale
Whatever else you may therefore have previously thought about the PCR COVID-19 test, it should be clear by now that it is far from either fully accurate, objective or binary. Positive results are not black or white but on a sliding scale of grey. This means labs are required to decide, somewhat subjectively, where to draw the line because ultimately, if you run enough cycles, every single sample would eventually turn positive due to amplification, viral breakdown and contamination. As Marianne Jakobsen of Odense University Hospital Denmark puts it on UgenTec’s website: “there is a real risk of errors if you simply accept cycler software calls at face value. You either need to add a time-consuming manual review step, or adopt intelligent software.”
Adjusting Ct test results
Most labs therefore run software to adjust positive results (i.e. decide the threshold) closer to some sort of ‘expected’ rate. However, as we have painfully discovered with Prof. Neil Ferguson’s spectacularly inaccurate epidemiological model (expected UK deaths 510,000; actual deaths 41,537) if the model disagrees with reality, some modelers prefer to adjust reality not their model. Software programming companies are no exception and one of them, diagnostics.ai, is taking another one UgenTec (which won the no-contest bid for setting and interpreting the Lighthouse Labs thresholds), to the High Court on September 23rd apparently claiming UgenTec had no track record, external quality assurance (EQA) or experience in this field. Whilst this case may prove no more than sour grapes on diagnostics.ai’s part, it does show that PCR test result interpretation, whether done by human or computer, is ultimately not only subjective but as such will always effectively bury the FPR.
Increase tests, increase ‘cases’
So, is it the software that is setting the UK positive case rate ≤ 2%? Because if it is, we will never get the positive rate below 2% until we cease testing asymptomatics. Last week (ending August 26th) there were just over 6,122 positives from 316,909 pillar 2 tests (1.93%), as with the week of July 22nd (1.9%). Pillar 2 tests deliver a (suspiciously) stable proportion of positive results, consistently averaging ≤ 2%. As Carl Heneghan at the CEBM in Oxford has explained, the increase in absolute number of pillar 2 positives is nothing more than a function of increased testing, not increased disease as erroneously reported in the media. Heneghan shows that whilst pillar 1 cases per 100,000 tests have been steadily declining for months, pillar 2 cases per 100,000 tests are “flatlining” (at around 2%).
30,000 under house arrest
In the week ending August 26th, there were 1.45m tests processed in the UK across all 4 pillars, though there seem to be no published results for the 1m of these tests that were pillar 3 (antibody tests) or pillar 4 “national surveillance” tests (NB. none of the UK numbers ever seem to match up). But as far as pillar 1 (hospital) cases are concerned, these have fallen by about 90% since the start of June, so almost all positive cases now reported in the UK (> 92% of the total) come from the largely asymptomatic pillar 2 tests in the wider community. Whilst pillar 2 tests were originally intended to be only for the symptomatic (doctor referral etc) the facilities have been swamped with asymptomatics wanting testing, and their numbers are only increasing (+25% over the last two weeks alone) perhaps because there are now very few symptomatics out there. The proportion of pillar 2 tests that that are taken by asymptomatics is yet another figure that is not published but there are 320k pillar 2 tests per week, whilst the weekly rate of COVID-19 diagnoses by NHS England is just 280. Assume that Brits are total hypochrondriacs and only 1% of those reporting respiratory symptoms to their doctor (who sends them out to get a pillar 2 test) end up diagnosed, that still means well over 90% of all pillar 2 tests are taken by the asymptomatic; and asymptomatics taking PCR tests when the FPR is higher than the prevalence (100x higher in this instance) results in a meaningless FPR (of 99% in this instance).Believing six impossible things before breakfast
Whilst the positive rate for pillar 2 is consistently ~2% (with that suspiciously low degree of variability), it is more than possible that the raw data FPR is 5-10% (consistent with the numbers that Carl Mayers referred to) and the only reason we don’t see such high numbers is that the software is adjusting the positive threshold back down to 2%. However, if that is the case, no matter what the true prevalence of the disease, the positive count will always and forever be stuck at ~2% of the number of tests. The only way to ‘eradicate’ COVID-19 in that case would be to cease randomized testing altogether, which Gerd Gigerenzer might tell you wouldn’t be a bad idea at all. Instead, lamentably, the UK government is reportedly doubling down with its ill-informed ‘Operation Moonshot’, an epically misguided plan to increase testing to 10m/day, which would obviously mean almost exclusively asymptomatics, and which we can therefore confidently expect to generate an apparent surge in positive ‘cases’ to 200,000 a day, equivalent to the FPR and proportionate to the increase in the number of tests.
Emperor’s new clothes
Interestingly, though not in a good way, the positive rate seems to differ markedly depending on whether we are talking about pillar 1 tests (mainly NHS labs) or pillar 2 tests, mainly managed by Deloitte (weird but true) which gave the software contract to UgenTec and which between them set the ~2% positive thresholds for the Lighthouse Lab network. This has had the quirky result that a gullible British public is now expected to believe that people in hospital are 4-5x less likely to test positive (0.45%) than fairly randomly selected, largely asymptomatic members of the general public (~2%), despite 40% of transmissions being nosocomial (at hospital). The positive rate, it seems, is not just suspiciously stable but subject to worrying lab-by-lab idiosyncrasies pre-set by management consultants, not doctors. It is little wonder no one is willing to reveal what the FPR is, since there’s a good chance nobody really knows any longer; but that is absolutely no excuse for implying it is zero.
Wave Two or wave goodbye?
The implications of the overt discrepancy between the trajectories of UK positive tests (up) and diagnoses, hospital admissions and deaths (all down) need to be explained. Positives bottomed below 550 per day on July 8th and have since gone up by a factor of three to 1500+ per day. Yet over the same period (shifted forward 12 days to reflect the lag between hospitalisation and death), daily deaths have dropped, also by a factor of three, from 22 to 7, as indeed have admissions, from 62 to 20 (compare the right-hand side of the upper and lower panels in the Chart below). Much more likely, positive but asymptomatic tests are false positives. The Vivaldi 1 study of all UK care home residents found that 81% of positives were asymptomatic, which for this most vulnerable cohort, probably means false positive.
Chart: UK daily & 7-day COVID-19 cases (top) and deaths (below)
This almost tenfold discrepancy between positive test results and the true incidence of the disease also shows up in the NHS data for 9th August (the most recent available), showing daily diagnoses (40) and hospital admissions (33) in England that are way below the Gov.UK positive ‘cases’ (1,351) and admissions (53) data for the same day. Wards are empty and admissions are so low that I know of at least one hospital (Taunton in Devon), for example, which discharged its last COVID-19 patient three weeks ago and hasn’t had a single admission since. Thus the most likely reason < 3% (40/1351) of positive ‘cases’ are confirmed by diagnosis is the ~2% FPR. Hence the FPR needs to be expressly reported and incorporated into an explicit adjustment of the positive data before even more harm is done.
Occam’s Razor
Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta believes it is entirely possible that the effective herd immunity threshold (HIT) has already been reached, especially given that there hasn’t been a genuine second wave anywhere. The only measure suggesting higher prevalence than 0.025% is the positive test rate but this data is corrupted by the FPR. The very low prevalence of the disease means that the most rational explanation for almost all the positives (2%), at least in the wider community, is the 2% FPR. This benign conclusion is further supported by the ‘case’ fatality rate (CFR), which has declined 40-fold: from 19% of all ‘cases’ at the mid-April peak to just 0.45% of all ‘positives’ now. The official line is that we are getting better at treating the disease and/or it is only healthy young people getting it now; but surely the far simpler explanation is the mathematically supported one that we are wrongly assuming, against all the evidence, that the PCR test results are 100% accurate.
Fear and confusion
Deaths and hospitalizations have always provided a far truer, and harder to misrepresent, profile of the progress of the disease. Happily, hospital wards are empty and deaths had already all but disappeared off the bottom of the chart (lower panel, in the chart above) as long ago as mid/late July; implying the infection was all but gone as long ago as mid-June. So, why are UK businesses still facing restrictions and enduring localized lockdowns and 10pm curfews (Glasgow, Bury, Bolton and Caerphilly)? Why are Brits forced to wear masks, subjected to traveler quarantines and, if randomly tested positive, forced into self-isolation along with their friends and families? Why has the UK government listened to the histrionics of discredited self-publicists like Neil Ferguson (who vaingloriously and quite sickeningly claims to have ‘saved’ 3.1m lives) rather than the calm, quiet and sage interpretations offered by Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta, Cambridge University’s Sir David Spiegelhalter, the CEBM’s Carl Heneghan or Porton Down’s Carl Mayers? Let’s be clear: it certainly has nothing to do with ‘the science’ (if by science we mean ‘math’); but it has a lot to do with a generally poor grasp of statistics in Westminster; and even more to do with political interference and overreach.
Bad Math II
As an important aside, it appears that the whole global lockdown fiasco might have been caused by another elementary mathematical mistake from the start. The case fatality rate (CFR) is not to be confused with the infection fatality rate (IFR), which is usually 10x smaller. This is epidemiology 101. The epidemiological rule-of-thumb mentioned above is that (mild and therefore unreported) infections can be initially assumed to be approximately 10x cases (hospital admissions) which are in turn about 10x deaths. The initial WHO and CDC guidance following Wuhan back in February was that COVID-19 could be expected to have the same 0.1% CFR as flu. The mistake was that 0.1% was flu’s IFR, not its CFR. Somehow, within days, Congress was then informed on March 11th that the estimated mortality for the novel coronavirus was 10x that of flu and days after that, the lockdowns started.
Neil Ferguson: Covid’s Matthew Hopkins
This slip-of-the-tongue error was, naturally enough, copied, compounded and legitimized by the notorious Prof. Neil Ferguson, who referenced a paper from March 13th he had co-authored with Verity et al. which took “the CFR in China of 1.38% (to) obtain an overall IFR estimate for China of 0.66%”. Not three days later his ICL team’s infamous March 16th paper further bumped up “the IFR estimates from Verity et al… to account for a non-uniform attack rate giving an overall IFR of 0.9%.” Just like magic, the IFR implied by his own CFR estimate of 1.38% had, without cause, justification or excuse, risen 6.5-fold from his peers’ rule-of-thumb of 0.14% to 0.9%, which incidentally meant his mortality forecast would also be similarly multiplied. Not satisfied with that, he then exaggerated terminal herd immunity.
Compounding errors
Because Ferguson’s model simplistically assumed no natural immunity (there is) and that all socialization is homogenous (it isn’t), his model doesn’t anticipate herd immunity until 81% of the population has been infected. All the evidence since as far back as February and the Diamond Princess indicated that effective herd immunity is occurring around a 20-25% infection rate; but the modelers have still not updated their models to any of the real world data yet and I don’t suppose they ever will. This is also why these models continue to report an R of ≥ 1.0 (growth) when the data, at least on hospital admissions and deaths, suggest the R has been 0.3-0.6 (steadily declining) since March. Compound all these errors and Ferguson’s expected UK death toll of 510k has proved to be 12x too high. His forecast of 2.2m US deaths has also, thankfully but no thanks to him, been 11x too high too. The residual problem is that the politicians still believe this is merely Armageddon postponed, not Armageddon averted. “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once” (Shakespeare).
Quality control
It is wholly standard to insist on external quality assurance (EQA) for any test but none such has been provided here. Indeed all information is held back on a need-to-know rather than a free society basis. The UK carried out 1.45m tests last week but published the results for only 452k of them. No pillar 3 (antibody) test results have been published at all, which begs the question: why not (official reason – the data has been anonymized, as if that makes any sense)? The problem is that instead of addressing the FPR, the authorities act as if it is zero, and so assume relatively high virus prevalence. If however, the 2% positive rate is merely a reflection of the FPR, a likely explanation for why pillar 3 results remain unpublished might be that they counterintuitively show a decline in antibody positives. Yet this is only to be expected if the prevalence is both very low and declining. T-cells retain the information to make antibodies but if there is no call for them because people are no longer coming into contact with infections, antibodies present in the blood stream decline. Why there are no published data on pillar 4 (‘national surveillance’ PCR tests remains a mystery).
It’s not difficult
However, it is relatively straightforward to resolve the FPR issue. The Sanger Institute is gene sequencing positive results but will fail to achieve this with any false positives, so publishing the proportion of failed sequencing samples would go a long way to answering the FPR question. Alternatively, we could subject positive PCR tests to a protein test for confirmation. Lab contaminated and/or previously-infected-now-recovered samples would not be able to generate these proteins like a live virus would, so once again, the proportion of positive tests absent protein would give us a reliable indication of the FPR.
Scared to death
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has filtered four facts from the international COVID-19 experience and these are: that the growth in daily deaths declines to zero within 25-30 days, that they then decline, that this profile is ubiquitous and so much so that governmental non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) made little or no difference. The UK government needs to understand that neither assuming that ‘cases’ are growing, without at least first discounting the possibility that what is observed is merely a property of the FPR, nor ordering anti-liberal NPIs, is in any way ‘following the science’. Even a quite simple understanding of statistics indicates that positive test results must be parsed through the filter of the relevant FPR. Fortunately, we can estimate the FPR from what little raw data the government has given us but worryingly, this estimate suggests that ~99% of all positive tests are ‘false’. Meanwhile, increased deaths from drug and alcohol abuse during lockdowns, the inevitable increase in cases of depression and suicide once job losses after furlough, business and marriage failures post loan forbearance become manifest and, most seriously, the missed cancer diagnoses from the 2.1m screenings that have been delayed must be balanced against a government response to COVID-19 that looks increasingly out of all proportion to the hard evidence. The unacknowledged FPR is taking lives, so establishing the FPR, and therefore accurate numbers for the true community prevalence of the virus, is absolutely essential.
James Ferguson is the Founding Partner of MacroStrategy
Exonerations are at an all time high as more wrongful conviction cases continue to surface. While some are due to mistakes, an overwhelming number of them involve abuses of power — fraud and corruption — coerced witnesses, jailhouse snitches, junk science, fabricated evidence, perjury, prosecutorial misconduct and unfair judges.
In two Wake County, North Carolina murder cases — Michelle Young and Nancy Cooper — civil lawsuits were used to influence the outcome of the criminal cases. Brad Cooper and Jason Young were convicted for the murders with no real evidence of guilt. In both cases, civil lawsuits set things in motion that ultimately contributed to their (wrongful) convictions.
It is perfectly legal for a party to file a civil suit against a person during a criminal investigation — for custody or wrongful death or whatever. However, these cases are unique because police and the district attorney’s office assisted the plaintiffs by sharing the case files and filing affidavits in support of their claims. The district attorney was Colin Willoughby who stepped down in 2014 to go into private practice.
Legal Extortion / 5th Amendment Rights Violated
Cooper Case:
It’s common sense to avoid talking to police if you’re under investigation . . . police have been known to twist things. It’s advised to have an attorney present if you do wish to answer questions, but it’s also okay to completely refuse to speak to them. Well, when a civil suit is filed against a person, things become complicated because remaining silent is no longer an option, unless the suit is ignored. There are major consequences either way.
First consider the Cooper case. Brad was under investigation for the murder of his wife, Nancy in 2008. You can read more about the case here. Nancy’s parents filed for custody of the Cooper children immediately after Nancy was found dead. Naturally the spouse is always investigated in a murder case, but the person is presumed innocent barring proof of their involvement.
Two days after Nancy was found dead, Judge Sasser granted emergency temporary custody of Brad’s daughters (via an ex-parte meeting with Nancy’s family, their attorney, and the police) to Nancy’s parents, Gary and Donna Rentz. Police took the girls (ages 2 and 4) from Brad in a traumatic scene as the children were crying. In order to regain custody, Brad would have to submit to a deposition (and later go to court to fight to maintain custody of his own children).
A deposition is a very detailed interview. The person is under oath and must answer all questions. During the Cooper investigation, the law firm representing the Rentzes (Tharrington-Smith) was working directly with the Cary police department who were investigating the murder. Many witnesses wrote affidavits in support of the Rentz family winning custody. Police told the witnesses that they could assist the investigation by speaking with the Rentzes’ attorney.
Brad agreed to the terms set by the Rentzes’ attorney and submitted to both a psychological examination and deposition as he desperately fought to keep his children. The deposition was essentially a seven hour interrogation. Police supplied the firm with questions to ask Brad Cooper, so the attorney (Alice Stubbs) essentially became an arm of law enforcement. The deposition was then aired by a local news station and of course police scrutinized it, trying to find anything they could use against Brad Cooper. They really didn’t come up with anything (but they altered their notes to make it appear that they had). I won’t get into the details about that here.
The main focus of this article is the unethical active participation of public officials in this process. Lead detective George Daniels filed an affidavit in support of the plaintiffs stating that he believed Brad killed Nancy, though he didn’t specify a single piece of evidence to support his belief. In doing so, it made it extremely unlikely for any court to rule in Brad’s favor. Losing the custody case would bolster the state’s case against Cooper. Motions were filed by Cooper’s attorneys to have the affidavit thrown out, but the judge denied them.
This alliance between the civil attorneys and those conducting the criminal investigation seems highly unethical and should not be permitted. In my opinion, the detective overstepped his bounds by involving himself in the civil matter. Police even supplied the plaintiff with the official 911 recording, while the defense only had the version shared with the media. The detective also gave a witness a copy of her cell phone records so she could prepare for her deposition with Brad’s custody attorney. This was unethical and an interference. The incentive for police to become involved in the civil matter was obvious — They would force their suspect to talk and the public airing of the deposition — in which Cooper was forced to describe intimate details about sexual encounters was prejudicial enough to influence the case in their favor — trial by media.
It didn’t stop there. Since police were involved in the matter, Brad’s attorneys should have been given access to discovery. The prosecution refused, citing that it was still an ongoing investigation. Brad’s attorneys filed motions for discovery, they were denied.
Before moving on to the Young case, I want to point out that this isn’t about innocence versus guilt in the murders, it’s about officials removing ones constitutional rights to make their jobs easier. “Weak criminal case? We can always push a civil case through to clear a path.” This is wrong.
Brad was indicted for murder on October 27, 2008 — approximately two weeks after the custody trial and before Judge Sasser had ruled on the case. Naturally he lost custody of his children as he was denied bail since he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. The criminal trial — which didn’t take place until the spring of 2011 would end up being a repeat of the custody trial, though none of the testimony revealed any indication that he had any involvement in the murder. It was all about character assassination. Brad was convicted but went on to win his appeal. The court of appeal found overwhelming evidence that the judge had abused his discretion. Brad later accepted a plea deal rather than face the same judge in a new trial. He will be released in 2020.
Young Case:
Around the same time as Brad’s arrest, on October 29, 2008 a civil lawsuit was filed against Jason Young. Young was also under investigation for the murder of his wife, Michelle (also in Wake County). You can read more about the case here. This time the victim’s family filed a wrongful death suit against Young. It is very rare for a wrongful death suit to precede a criminal trial. Similarly, the police detective — Detective Richard Spivey of the Wake County Sheriff’s Office filed an affidavit citing his opinion that Young was responsible for his wife’s death.
This case differs from the Cooper case in that Young did not respond to the civil action. He was advised by his attorney to maintain his silence since he was under investigation. And again, the affidavit did not specify any evidence of his involvement in the murder. It was simply the detective’s opinion. Police in both cases should have stayed out of it. The investigation was still underway. If they had enough evidence, they should have charged them, rather than waiting for the civil cases to play out.
The case also differs from the Cooper case in a very interesting way. Remember that the prosecutor refused to share discovery with Brad’s attorneys since the investigation was ongoing. Well, the investigation into Michelle Young’s death was also ongoing; however the same prosecutor shared the discovery files with the plaintiff’s attorneys — further strengthening the civil case against Young — essentially making it unwinnable. When it suited them, they were more than happy to share the files. This is unacceptable and another reason why there needs to be a law forbidding the government from becoming involved in civil cases when there is an ongoing criminal investigation and they have much to gain from a civil judgement against their main suspect.
Since Jason didn’t respond, the plaintiffs pushed for a default judgment. Judge Donald Stephens did in fact declare Jason Young the slayer as part of a Slayer Statute, even though he could have deferred judgment pending the outcome of the criminal case.
Two weeks later Michelle’s family filed for custody of Young’s four year old daughter. Again, the police affidavit was part of the filing, as well as the discovery files from the prosecution. Young didn’t respond at the advice of his attorney. Again, he chose to maintain his silence. He did so with the understanding that once the investigation was over, custody could always be revisited.
In March, 2009 Michelle Young’s mother, Linda Fisher was awarded $15.5 million in damages in the wrongful death suit. Jason Young would be responsible for this. The lawyers received a million dollars of the life insurance as their fee. Notice how costly Jason’s silence had become. Was it fair that he was put into that situation? “Talk or you will be declared a slayer . . . talk or you will lose your daughter.” Don’t talk and you will lose anyhow because the government has aligned with the plaintiff.
The Young case gets much worse. Jason Young was charged with the murder in the winter of 2009. Consider how damaging the media attention over the civil suits must have been. He was tried in the spring of 2011, which resulted in a mistrial as the jury was deadlocked at 8-4 in favor of innocence. The state decided to try him again and this time they used his silence to win a conviction. The jury heard that the same judge presiding over the criminal trial declared him a slayer in the civil lawsuit. Prosecutors got away with it even though there is a long standing statute that forbids it. Jason’s attorneys didn’t properly object to the civil suit testimony. Jason was slammed repeatedly by prosecutors throughout the trial for not fighting for his daughter and for not responding to the wrongful death suit . . . even though they knew he would have had NO chance of winning because they themselves were participating in it.
The case is still ongoing. The Court of Appeals ruled that the judge abused his discretion by allowing the testimony. They reversed the conviction, however, the NC Supreme Court reversed the CoA decision, removing Jason’s chance to have a fair trial. The Supreme Court ruled that the defense was at fault for not properly objecting to the admission of the civil suit testimony. There are other issues of the appeal still pending.
Update: In June, 2017 there was a hearing to discuss Young’s ineffective assistance of counsel claim. At this time, we are awaiting Judge Ridgeway’s decision. He is deciding if Young deserves a new trial because his attorneys failed to properly object to the civil case testimony.
Collusion?
Is it possible there was collusion between the district attorney’s office and the families and their attorneys who launched the civil lawsuits? (We would never know.) Is it not a coincidence that both occurred around the same time and in the same county? And in both cases police were willing to write affidavits. The same attorneys were involved as well. The firm that filed the suit against Brad Cooper represented Jason Young with his custody case.
A lose/lose scenario
These cases reveal that both Young and Cooper were pushed into a corner — submit to an interrogation (deposition) or give up your children. With the government’s involvement, there was no way for either of them to survive. It was impossible to win and this was an abuse of power.
Young and Cooper each took a different path and it didn’t work out for either of them. There wasn’t any evidence connecting either of them to the murders, so the civil suits helped the government gain a foothold. Public opinion is a powerful tool and these civil cases certainly influenced public opinion about both men who ultimately were convicted of the murders.
The government should not be permitted to either align with civil attorneys or actively assist them in winning cases against those they are investigating for a crime. I am going to send this article to the NC General Assembly to request that they pass legislation prohibiting governmental involvement in civil matters when a criminal investigation is ongoing so that rights of the accused can be maintained.
What if the government hadn’t been involved in the civil actions?
No court would have ruled for the removal of the children from their fathers. There simply wasn’t cause. Both were good fathers. There was no testimony in either case that disputed that.
I published books about each case and go into much more detail about exactly what occurred with the civil actions and how unfair it was. It is unacceptable, and if nothing changes the government will repeat this same maneuver over and over.
Can the government withhold evidence that could prove your innocence? In this shocking case, the state of North Carolina cited national security reasons for doing just that. It crippled any possible defense case for Brad Cooper who was charged with the murder of his wife, Nancy in 2008.
Nancy left home to go jogging and never returned. She was later found murdered. A shoddy and corrupt investigation followed, as evidence was destroyed and mishandled; witnesses were coached and evidence of innocence was ignored.
Learn the facts about this tragic case that will leave you appalled at the state of our justice system.
**Note that this book was previously published as Framed With Google Maps**
(Click on the image to read a sample)
Michelle Young was living the American dream. The former NC State cheerleader was married to Jason. They had a beautiful two year old daughter and a son on the way. The couple enjoyed a comfortable life in the quiet Enchanted Oaks community of Raleigh, North Carolina.
It was autumn—a time for football games and holiday plans, but on November 3, 2006 Michelle was found beaten to death in her home. It shook the community and quickly attracted national attention.
Police immediately began investigating Jason . . . but he was out of town at the time of the murder. Would they discover enough evidence to solve the crime? Discover the facts about this fascinating and controversial case.
It’s common sense to avoid talking to police if you’re under investigation . . . police have been known to twist things. It’s advised to have an attorney present if you do wish to answer questions, but it’s also okay to completely refuse to speak to them. Well, when a civil suit is filed against a person, things become complicated because remaining silent is no longer an option, unless the suit is ignored. There are major consequences either way.
Around the same time as Brad’s arrest, on October 29, 2008 a civil lawsuit was filed against Jason Young. Young was also under investigation for the murder of his wife, Michelle (also in Wake County). You can read more about the case 
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