Front Porch Forum, Unaccountable Censors
Front Porch Forum is a social network that is popular in Vermont. It is essentially a set of mailing lists, one for each town group in the state. It’s useful for posting event notices, or selling things, or asking for help.
FPF is also censors anything that contradicts the Covid fear narrative. If you regurgitate propaganda and fear porn from the Vermont Department of Health or the CDC, you’re fine. If you try to post a message containing factual information that points out the lies and deceit from the DOH and the CDC, you will be censored, because you violated the FPF Covid-19 Content Policy. There is no recourse, because the policy is entirely arbitrary. FPF merely has to claim that you are providing “false or misleading” information in order to justify shutting you down.
Below are three posts that I submitted to FPF. The first was approved, and the second and third were were censored. All three deal with the insanity of using a PCR test to define the false and misleading notion of “case”.
My first post was approved, quite to my surprise. It was written in response to a fear-mongering message about rising “cases” written by my town’s “Covid Response Team”. That team appears to be a propaganda channel comprised of some frightened and deluded residents of my town. Here is the post:
My concern about the state’s data for towns is that people may be become unnecessarily fearful and panicky. First, the state does not make it clear what it means by “cases”. Before 2020, the term “case” meant someone with actual illness symptoms. I believe that the state now calls a positive PCR test as a “case”, even if the person never had symptoms and wasn’t ill.
Secondly, we don’t know what standards are being used to administer the PCR tests. It is widely known, and was acknowledged by Dr. Fauci, that a cycle threshold (Ct) greater than 35 makes the test’s accuracy “miniscule” (Fauci’s word, not mine). The greater the Ct, the more likely the test will produce false positives.
We need to know the test’s specificity and sensitivity, and the seroprevalence in the population, in order to calculate the test’s positive predictive value (or PPV). This is a more important metric than false positive rate (FP). The PPV tells a clinician the probability that a person who tests positive actually has the disease. If the Ct of a test is very high (we know that it has been higher than 40 in many places), the PPV is likely to be no better than flipping a coin.
Since we don’t have these figures for the PCR tests being used here in Vermont (or at least, I’ve been unable to find them), we can’t judge the accuracy of the tests. Hence, I believe it is prudent to not panic in the absence of good, solid data.
Here is the first censored post, written to clarify my earlier, approved post:
Thank you to all who responded to my original posting about PCR tests. I realize now that my posting was a bit sketchy about the tests and their positive predictive value (PPV). To clear up any confusion, it might be helpful for people to view this video by Dr. Roger Seheult, who has a very popular “Medcram” channel on YouTube. In this video, made in May last year, he explains PPV, and how it tells a doctor the likelihood that person testing positive actually has the disease:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSRK41UbTEU&t=140s
Next, here is a video from Norman Fenton, a mathematician and Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London. In this video he talks about how defining a “case” as a positive PCR test can leading to misleading interpretations of safety statistics, and how looking at all-cause mortality is a better way of making these assessments:
Here is the second censored post, written in response to more fear-mongering from the “Covid Response Team” about the super-scary Omicron variant:
I would like to remind my neighbors again not to be unnecessarily frightened by the latest statistics. The state defines “case” and “infection” to mean a positive PCR test. Until we know the characteristics of the test, we cannot know its false positive rate, or its positive predictive value (i.e., the likelihood that someone who tests positive actually has the virus).
PCR was designed as a research tool, not as a stand-alone medical diagnostic tool. It should be used only to confirm a diagnosis based on symptoms. In other words, using it on healthy people does not provide meaningful information.
Kary Mullis, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of the PCR test, had this to say about the test in an interview:
“PCR is just a process that is used to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick, and it doesn’t tell you that the thing you ended up with really was going to hurt you.”
Finally, it’s worth remembering that the overall IFR (infection fatality rate) is somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% (depending on location), and that for healthy, young people the IFR is very close to zero.
It makes sense to continue to do what we always did in the annual flu seasons: protect the elderly and infirm, and stay home if you’re sick. But unnecessary fear is not going to help. As FDR said when the nation was faced with a genuine threat: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. And Frank Herbert said this in his novel “Dune”: “Fear is the mind-killer.”
Update 2021-12-25: I wrote back to the FPF, asking them to tell me which parts of my two censored posts violated their Covid Content Policy. They did not reply. I can only assume that they are choosing not to respond because they would then need to use facts and logic.