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In September 2020, Professor Martin Neil received some anonymous emails providing hard evidence that the PCR tests for covid were never accurate or fit for purpose. “Some of the [test] sequences are found in the human genome itself,” the emails noted.

Among other things, the smoking gun emails describe that the cycling threshold was always set too high and no RT-PCR screening kit on the market ever received any kind of approval or certification.  But perhaps the biggest smoking gun was the gene sequencing Dr. Christian Drosten used in his blueprint covid testing system that was used around the world.

Drosten, who invented the screening system for covid, never isolated or had access to the virus.  Instead, he downloaded the virus RNA sequence from a Chinese database.  Drosten subsequently created the first commercially available RT-PCR screening kit based on this genome. The Chinese researchers later claimed the isolated virus sample became unusable shortly after uploading the sequence so they destroyed all remains.

In the absence of an isolated virus, how did Drosten obtain the full virus genome to select his primer sequences, and which, or so he claims, were specific to SARS-CoV-2 only? 

After a deeper dive into the primer sequences that Drosten used in his blueprint testing system, the anonymous emailer highlighted that as well as primers matching naturally occurring sequences of unknown origin in seawater – some of the primer sequences are found in the human genome itself.

The Smoking Man emails

By Martin Neil

Those of you familiar with the cult 90s TV series the X-files will recall the role of the smoking man, who like “deep throat” in the Watergate scandal, would reveal snippets of the truth to Mulder and Scully at critical points in their shared adventures.

Back in 2020, I had my very own smoking man. He was anonymous but I called him “The Cleric.” We started conversing by email around September 2020, after I published some articles on Toby Young’s Lockdown Sceptics website.

He sent me some long emails about the origins story of the so-called pandemic with a special focus on the virus and PCR testing. Much of it I couldn’t understand at the time, and some of it I will admit I still struggle with even today because, as you all know neither Norman nor I are “wetware” scientists – we do software and statistics not human biology or virology or pharmacology or whatever. Given this, we try to be careful not to make fools of ourselves and stay in our lanes.

For all I knew The Cleric might have sent these emails off to many of the movers and shakers in our “movement.” I have no idea. But I didn’t really know what to do with his information. Obviously, I shared it in the small circle of sceptics who were coalescing around seeking answers to open questions about the virus and PCR testing at the time: Mike Yeadon, Clare Craig, Scott McLachlan and a few others. However, I didn’t get much traction, and with hindsight this was probably because we were all grappling together in the dark to some extent, looking for the same key, but each searching in different directions. Plus, given I’m a biological dunce, I probably wasn’t too persuasive.

I have posted The Cleric’s revelations below, and in summary, they covered:

• The role of Dr. Christian Drosten and the SARS-CoV2 virus genomic sequencing.
• The dodgy PCR testing that resulted and the cycle problem (which you will all be familiar with and probably be a little bored by).
• The Instand report, co-authored by Drosten, which confirmed that PCR tests being used in labs worldwide were generating false positives of circa 9%.
• Revealing cross-reactivity and non-specificity of the PCR test, so that it picked up other coronaviruses (and the human genome!?)

A 9% PCR false positive rate sounds pretty high, doesn’t it? Much higher than even sceptics had been postulating at the time. To put that in Bayesian context this would mean that with zero SARS-CoV2 virus prevalence, we’d still see 9% of those tested, testing positive. So, logically, you wouldn’t necessarily need a deadly novel virus to give the world the impression of the widespread presence of the said virus. But something had to be causing the false positives, and if it wasn’t a deadly novel coronavirus then what was it? Well, the cross-reactivity and non-specificity of the PCR test maybe tell us the answer: other coronaviruses and perhaps other pathogens.

At that point in September 2020 no credible voice was shouting to the world that “there is no novel and deadly coronavirus” and I certainly couldn’t persuade anyone of this, being a humble numbers guy. And to be totally honest I wasn’t sure I believed it either. So, I parked The Cleric’s information at the back of my mind and moved on to other things – the UK government were producing a self-replenishing wall of sh*t data to deal with, which warranted my attention. And anyway, as I said, I could not get anyone properly qualified really engaged.

The next chapter in the story developed in early 2021 when I discovered that the UK government had been conducting bogus PCR testing in late 2020 and used it to push the covid wave in the run up the launch of the injections. Peter Doshi helped me get this scandal in the British Medical Journal (“BMJ”) as a rapid response letter. Basically, I revealed that the false positive rate for covid PCR testing was much higher than anyone could ever imagine in their worst nightmares – up to 65% of positive tests were false positives, by the ONS’s own published statistics. However, this wasn’t caused by high PCR cycles but was because the laboratories abandoned using the World Health Organisation guidelines and manufacturer standards for testing. What did they do? Rather than requiring two out of three gene positives to define a positive for covid, they decided only one was enough!

Details here: UK lighthouse laboratories testing for SARS-COV-2 may have breached WHO Emergency Use Assessment and potentially violated Manufacturer Instructions for Use, Martin Neil, 18 March 2021

This evidence again pointed to the cross-reactivity and non-specificity of the PCR test. It looked to be designed to pick up, well, anything that you might want it to detect. So, rather than find residue of SARS-CoV2 virus fragments perhaps it seemed to be quite brilliant at finding any coronavirus. Hence, maybe the test worked perfectly well but just not for the purpose, or in the way they told us it worked.

Personally, I thought this a bit of a bombshell. But when I published the BMJ letter I didn’t get much traction and when I alerted the world on Twitter, only gained a few hundred impressions. Lockdown Sceptics were good enough to publish it, for which I am grateful. And, sure, colleagues on our side thought it a scandal but I got the impression that for them it looked like it was a piece of the jigsaw that didn’t fit the emerging picture before us at the time. The collective focus remained on the lab leak versus Wuhan market theories and our attention then switched to the vaccines, for understandable reasons.

Now many of us are looking back at Spring 2020 and are revisiting some of the origins of the covid-19 debacle. There is a renewed focus on iatrogenic harms resulting from policy and fresh and pertinent questions about whether the virus was ever novel and deadly. This might seem like “raking over old coals” but finding answers to these questions is as important as ever. Because, if our understanding of what happened is wrong the covid nightmare will surely repeat itself in future.

So, without much further ado, and without any comment from me, here are the emails from “The Cleric.” I urge you all to read it.

We haven’t reproduced the emails Prof. Neil received in 2020 from “The Cleric” here.  To read the emails please go to the bottom of the article ‘The smoking man emails’ published by ‘Where are the Numbers?’ HERE.

About the Author

Martin Neil and Norman Fenton are two academic professors who, between them, have authored hundreds of scientific papers and numerous books on statistics, decision making, risk and uncertainty systems and software engineering, and have consulted commercially to scores of commercial organisations. Together, they publish articles on a Substack page titled ‘Where are the numbers?’. If you are interested in science and statistics in the post-Covid era, you can subscribe to and follow their Substack HERE.

Martin Neil is a Professor of computer science and statistics at Queen Mary University of London and Norman Fenton is a Professor Emeritus of Risk at Queen Mary University who retired as a full professor in December 2022.