An African scientist with a PhD in chemistry, President Magufuli abandoned Covid-19 testing after his own trials allegedly showed fruit juice and engine oil testing positive for the virus. Yet despite being widely ridiculed at the time, many are asking whether the late Tanzanian president was right, with European courts declaring tests unreliable, while the inventor of the Covid-19 PCR test is facing a multi-million-dollar lawsuit for ‘misleading’ world governments. 

In May 2020, the former chemistry teacher president John Magufuli made a speech that has since been removed from much of the internet. In it, he revealed that he clandestinely sent samples of engine oil, goat meat and fruit juice to the country’s official PCR testing lab and the samples came back as ‘positive’ for the novel coronavirus.

Magufuli’s simple stunt threw into question the claim that PCR tests were the ‘gold standard’ for diagnosing Covid-19. His statement unleashed an avalanche of racist ridicule and condemnation against the president from the rest of the world and led to him being smeared as a Covid-denier in Western media. The BBC, for instance, incorrectly reported that Magufuli ‘used the results to justify his denial of the virus.

However, President Magufuli never denied the existence of the Covid-19, he simply questioned the accuracy of the PCR test used in diagnosing the virus. Now, almost a year later, and questions surrounding the reliability of the PCR tests are growing louder. 

Christian Drosten and the other scientists who created the PCR testing protocol used to ‘diagnose’ Covid-19 are being sued by the top trial lawyer Dr Reiner Fuellmich in a historic class-action lawsuit in Germany and the US.

Big money is at stake: If successful, it could lead to national governments being sued by business and individuals over lockdowns, the mask mandates and other restrictions imposed on the basis of deeply flawed Covid-19 tests. The alleged flaws and conflicts on interests of the scientists behind the tests led Fuellmich to declare that ‘those responsible for it must be criminally prosecuted and sued for civil damages’.

The Nobel-prize winning inventor of the original PCR method, Kary Mullis, famously said in 1993 that his technology was never meant to diagnose a virus, adding: ‘It doesn’t tell you that you are sick. These tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all.’

This crucial fact was completely ignored many years later by countries around the world that bought millions of PCR tests to conduct mass Covid-19 testing on their citizens, many of whom were ‘asymptomatic’, showing no symptoms of being sick with the virus.

There is mounting evidence that shows the PCR test is unreliable, resulting in false positives and was never designed to test for a live virus. Dr Pieter Borger described the PCR test as having ‘no relevance for the diagnosis whatsoever’.

While Dolores Cahill, Professor of Translational Science at the University College Dublin warned early on in the pandemic that ‘a positive PCR coronavirus test may testify to the presence of the common cold’.

Concerns about the use of PCR tests are growing around the world. The pathologist Dr Clare Craig explained, for instance, how one Spanish study showed that ‘87 per cent of people in hospital who tested positive for Covid on PCR had not been infected according to antibody testing’. Even for those with Covid on intensive care, 53 per cent did not have antibodies.

Thailand, a country applauded for extremely ‘low’ Covid levels, screens for up to six genes, many of the countries hardest hit by Covid-19, like the UK and the Netherlands, are known to have run a high percentage of their tests using this flawed single-gene approach.

In the UK, for instance, 38 per cent of all positive test results in the first week of February 2021 had been screened for just one gene, raising serious questions about the true extent of the true number of Covid-19 cases and deaths as a result. Several studies around the world found little or no evidence of asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic spread.

Dr David Bell, a former World Health Organization (WHO) programme head praises President Magufuli’s response to the virus. He told NewsAfrica that the late-Tanzanian leader was one of the few world leaders to correctly follow WHO guidelines for dealing with a respiratory illness. WHO has repeatedly warned against mass testing of asymptomatic people.

This apparent misuse of PCR testing by countries like South Africa and Canada hasn’t gone unnoticed beyond the scientific community. In November 2020, an appeals court in Portugal made a landmark ruling stating that ‘the PCR process is not a reliable test for SARS-CoV-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful’.

Despite growing legal and scientific support for warnings about PCR misuse, Western coverage of the Tanzanian president’s funeral repeated many of the earlier slurs against him, deploying dog-whistle terms like ‘African leader’, ‘Catholic’ and ‘Covid denier’, while ignoring his scientific credentials.

The use of such phraseology smacks of ‘prejudice’, according to ex-WHO scientist Dr David Bell, who thinks the Tanzanian should be applauded for his approach to the pandemic. ‘Magufuli followed the evidence-based pandemic guidelines released by WHO in 2019, and those of the US CDC,’ explained the American.

‘These did not envision mass business closures and restrictions on religious freedom. Most Tanzanians are of relatively young age, are not obese, and so are at very low risk from SARS-CoV-2 infection. He acted as you would expect a well-trained scientist.’

With yet more court cases slated over the use of PCR testing and the lockdowns they triggered, Bell thinks there will be a major re-assessment of Magufuli’s legacy.

Even the BBC, whose coverage of President Magufuli’s response to the pandemic has been particularly scathing, has been forced to acknowledge major flaws with the PCR tests recently after its Panorama programme sent an undercover reporter to work at a UK lab earlier this year.

The journalist discovered a series of bio-security breaches, leading to cross-contamination of samples and potential misdiagnoses of Covid-19 during its so-called ‘second wave’.

With the test branded ‘not fit for purpose’ by an increasing number of scientists, perhaps world leaders should have heeded rather than ridiculed the former scientist in their ranks. Source