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On October 24, 2020, a pediatrician named Franco D’Urso publishes a video in which he reports on his statements about Covid19 and Sars-Cov-2, in particular about the tampon and its usefulness, considering it “unnatural” for both children who prefers not to try them despite some possible symptoms. In his speech he relates several falsehoods, such as the completely erroneous quote attributed to the Nobel laureate Kary Mullis.
According to Franco D’Urso, the inventor of PCR, Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, allegedly stated that “no virus diagnosis can be made” with this technique. We discussed this rumor in August, it is a quote from John Lauritsen reported on a 1996 text and wrongly attributed to Mullis.
On the San Raffaele site in Milan there are some articles on Sars-Cov-2, including one dedicated to the PCR test and what you can get, all explained thanks to the collaboration of Dr. Massimo Degano, who teaches Structural Biology In Progress Degree in Biotechnology Research in Medicine.
Franco D’Urso reports one of the most popular theses in denialist circles, namely that of the Sars-Cov-2 virus that would never have been isolated. Actually it was, even in Italy at the Spallanzani in February while other strains were isolated in March at the San Raffaele in Milan.
What good is this isolation? Perfecting the diagnosis and bringing new diagnostic methods (not only, but for now let’s talk about this), thanks not only to the work done by Spallanzani and San Raffaele. In fact, all those who isolated the virus deposited the sequences found in the GenBank and GISAID databases (established in 2008, recalling the work of Ilaria Capua), making them available to the entire international scientific community.
There is another thing to say. By isolating the virus in Codogno, three genomes closely related to the isolate in Germany were found. Well, thanks to these databases it was possible to track the trend of the virus in the world.
Still. We must remember that thanks to the isolation of the virus, the virologist Shi Zhengli, called “Batwoman” for her studies on coronaviruses from bats, had noticed that Sars-Cov-2 was not one of the pathogens registered in her research center. returning to the sender the theory in which he sees her accused of having let him escape.
The San Raffaele website explains what it means to isolate the virus:
Isolating a virus, as the word suggests, indicates the ability to “separate” it from the organism it came from. The objective is to obtain large quantities in culture and to be able to study it in the laboratory. Isolation is done from a sample, such as blood or saliva, taken from an infected patient. Using a complex and delicate procedure, the researchers can remove the useless material contained in the sample, such as the patient’s cells or any bacteria, and inoculate the virus into ad hoc cell cultures, where the virus can replicate (virus in fact, unlike bacteria – they need cells to reproduce). Virus isolation can be more or less easy depending on the infectious capacity of the pathogen.
About PCR and its usefulness in virus detection (remember that Sars-Cov-2 is an RNA pathogen) we can report Treccani in the medicine section under the heading “Molecular diagnosis”:
The transition from dm to a higher level of precision and definition occurred in the mid-1980s with the invention of PCR, a technique that allows to amplify and characterize specific DNA and RNA sequences at the nucleotide level, and with RT- PCR (Real Time-PCR), a quantitative technique that allows studying its gene expression.
Today we know a lot about the virus, but not enough. Despite this, other doctors like D’Urso also accuse the lack of isolation of the virus for unfounded reasons, as is the case of Stefano Scoglio, who we reported in a previous article.
In the video, the pediatrician argues that the isolation, despite having occurred in different parts of the world, is incorrect and relates an insinuation against doctors and health workers from Italian public hospitals: they would pocket cash prizes as a production prize for the number of hospitalized Covid19 patients. That is why they would also be hospitalizing the asymptomatic, frightening the positive without symptoms, making them believe they are sick. Not only that, it “guarantees” that asymptomatic people cannot infect without any scientific evidence refuting studies published in authoritative, non-predatory scientific journals. What would you be willing to do to prove it? Go to dinner with 10 positives. Avoid imitating it.
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