by James Lyons-Weiler, PhD, President, IPAK | Founder IPAK-EDU.org | Founder, NAATEC Popular Rationalism, ©2025
(Dec. 2, 2025) — The settings for a COVID 2.0 Pandemic of False Positives are all in place. “We must catch every case” is no excuse to misdiagnose individuals and let them cook and potentially die at home quarantined w/untreated, misdiagnosed bacterial pneumonia or other less virulent respiratory illnesses.
We could have saved millions and millions of lives if people had understood and acted in April 2020: False positives in PCR tests drove the COVID-19. We must not allow a repeat with avian flu.
In 2020, I warned—publicly, repeatedly, in articles, podcasts, and tweets, and with evidence, fighting censorship all the way—that using non‑quantitative RT‑PCR as the primary driver of pandemic policy would guarantee a tidal wave of false positives, distort epidemiology, and weaponize diagnostic noise as public fear. Those warnings were not vague or speculative; they were precise, technically grounded, peer‑reviewed, and absolutely correct.
I explained that without internal negative controls for Ct‑stratification, nested PCR confirmation, or sequencing, PCR tests would be repurposed into fear‑amplifiers rather than disease‑detectors. I warned that once governments built policy on raw PCR counts and arbitrary Ct values, no one would be able to distinguish real outbreaks from diagnostic artifacts. I said we would lose the ability to tell signal from noise, disease from contamination, and epidemiology from hysteria. I knew I was right. But too few could understand how central the diagnostic grift was the COVID-19 fear mongering.
People in high places heard the warnings. They understood them. I know, because I warned Peter Marks at US F.D.A. And others.
And he and the others who knew did nothing. Millions died after developing severe, untreated, misdiagnosed bacterial pneumonia.
That inaction helped create a world where some actors benefited from chaos—whether through political leverage, pharmaceutical opportunism, or supranational control frameworks. Call them what they are: enemies of stability who thrive when populations panic.
I warned too early. Nothing happened.
But then they came after all of our jobs. All of them. That got our attention. But cataclysmic damage was already done, including millions of deaths due to misdiagnosed and untreated bacterial pneumonia and sepsis.
We Must Call them “PANDEMANIACS”
Now, those same forces stand ready to exploit the next diagnostic mirage. Pandemaniacs are all over Twitter, Bluesky, everywhere posting one-off references to H5N1 as an inevitable next pandemic.
Standard H5/AIV RT-qPCR assays include NTCs, negative extraction controls, and internal positive controls, though they do not include a true sample-matched internal negative template.
Instead, they rely on fixed Ct thresholds (usually ~35–38 depending on the lab/kit) and internal positive controls to assess severity of, not yes/no, infection.
Ct cutoffs are supposed to originate from analytical LoD validation and per-sample control and to thereby compensate for variable starting material; despite this, labs still use them as binary yes/no decision points rather than quantitative measures in spite of the fact they do not adjust for variation in starting material on swabs. The concern, of course, is non-specific amplification.
They have a No-template control (NTC) run separately to detect contamination, but that is not useful. A matching negative control source is needed for off-site amplification assessment. Or, sequencing. This is a NON-NEGOTIABLE.
Unless we act immediately and forcefully, AIV H5 RT‑qPCR will repeat—and possibly exceed—the PCR‑driven chaos of COVID‑19.
We must hold the line: NO PROOF OF SEQUENCE? NO DIAGNOSIS. NO DIAGNOSIS? NO PANDEMIC.
Read the rest here.