Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a two-part account of getting tested for COVID-19.
In our government’s rush to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a flurry of emergency approvals for COVID-19 tests, drugs, and medical devices, authorizing their use without “adequate, approved, and available alternatives.”
On one hand, the orders enabled critical supplies and technology to be quickly deployed across the country. On the other hand, the scramble left us vulnerable to unreliable products and even scams.
Antibody tests—blood tests that look for COVID-19 antibodies to indicate whether someone acquired the virus in the past—fall onto that blurry category. To date, there are 13 different antibody tests with FDA authorization; none of them are 100 percent reliable. Until recently, the FDA also allowed unauthorized antibody tests to flood the market. Those are even less reliable.
Medical experts, including the FDA and Centers for Disease Control (CDC), warn that antibody tests should be approached with caution, their results taken with a grain of salt. Even an accurate positive test doesn’t guarantee immunity from the virus in the future. Yet, health officials also say they can provide the patient and the medical community useful data about the historical spread of COVID-19.
Knowing the controversy and uncertainty about antibody tests, I decided to seek one out as part of this series. In Part I (“Getting tested,” May 28), I shared my experience of getting tested for an active COVID-19 infection. This free swab test, available to all San Luis Obispo County residents, came back negative for me.
Finding an antibody test requires a little more digging. In my research, I find that most local medical clinics, like Dignity Health’s, only offer the test on a physician order.
Kevin Ferguson, pathologist laboratory medical director for Dignity Health Central Coast, tells me that antibody testing “can be helpful in determining if an individual may have had COVID-19 previously.” But he added that they’re “most useful in patients who demonstrated COVID-related symptoms in the past” and emphasized that “it is still unknown whether or not the presence of the antibody confers any immunity to future infection.”
While the tests are expected to become more widely available this summer, they’ll continue to only be offered at Dignity “as determined and ordered by a physician.”
“Patients with antibody test orders can present to any of the Dignity Health Laboratory Patient Service Centers across the Central Coast,” Ferguson says. “There is no cost to a patient for antibody testing.”
But because seeing a doctor usually costs a chunk of change, and I’m looking for the lowest cost option available, I keep looking.
That’s when I come across LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics—two national lab giants. Both companies are advertising their antibody tests online, and LabCorp has local offices in Arroyo Grande and Templeton.
I call LabCorp’s Arroyo Grande location and ask if I can sign up for a test directly. The answer is yes, and they point me to their website. There, I fill out an antibody test questionnaire, provide my insurance information, and create a patient account. At the end, I’m accepted for testing and offered an appointment for the next morning. I’m charged a $10 fee upfront, which they say is the extent of the out-of-pocket costs. But I remain skeptical.
When I arrive at LabCorp’s suite in the Oak Park Plaza Shopping Center the next day, I am the only patient there. A person at the counter checks me in and directs me to a chair to draw my blood. After filling one vial, she says the sample will be shipped to a LabCorp lab for testing, and I’ll have my results in a couple of days.
I call Anthem Blue Cross, my insurance provider, to ask if this test is really fully covered. I’m assured that it is—that all COVID-19 related tests are covered. I’m not sure if that’s the case for all insurances or how uninsured patients are handled.
The next morning, my results come back: They’re negative. Based on my research, I know to check which testing device LabCorp used to make sure it’s one of the 13 authorized by the FDA. It is: the DiaSorin Liasion SARS-CoV-2 IgG assay. According to the FDA, this test is estimated to be 99 percent accurate on negative tests and 98 percent on positive tests.
In my mind, these results confirm that, in all likelihood, I did not unwittingly contract COVID-19 in the past. My blood shows no evidence of an immune response to the virus. That said, my patient report explicitly reminds me that “serologic results should not be used as the sole basis to diagnose or exclude recent [COVID-19] infection.” Δ
Assistant Editor Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Summer Guide 2020.
The PCR test, according to the person who invented it, was not designed to detect viral infection. All that the PCR test can do is acknowledge the presence or not of a particular virus in R/DNA, and since all humans have dozens and dozens of inactive viruses in our bodies ALL THE TIME, the test presents 80% or more false-positives for COVID-19. That means, 4 in 5 humans have that virus in their body, but the test cannot show whether the virus is active or not. This is why the CV-19 numbers have been hyper-inflated and used by the media to ramp up the fear porn, when, in fact, the actual numbers of COVID-19 related deaths are less than even the typical flu.
This whole PLANdemic is a manufactured crisis to implement global social control: Masks are dehumanizing muzzles that inhibit natural respiratory activity; social distancing reduces the efficacy of our natural human energy network; and lockdowns are a smokescreen for implementation of harmful EMF technologies like 5G in our schools, hospitals, town centers, rural areas, and eventually the entire physical world (see the Secure 5G and Beyond Act that was signed into law on Monday, March 23, 2020, calling for a fast-track, 180-day, nationwide roll-out of 5G infrastructure).
If humanity doesn’t wake up now to the fact that governments, “royal” bloodlines, and super-wealthy people like Gates, Bezos, and Musk are aligned in forming illegitimate groups of bandits that have absolutely zero interest in the well-being of any other human, then we are all doomed to living as total slaves, “vaxxed and traxxed” by micro-chips and tracing apps, oppressed by social credit systems, and mind-controlled even further in their New World Order agenda. We need to stand in our sovereignty NOW before they strip us naked of our unalienable rights and all that is sacred.
Just to confirm Anthem didn’t charge you later?
Regarding the long comment here – please note that this article is NOT about PCR tests.