Another court decision you won’t read about in the mainstream media.
On 24 March 2021 an Austrian administrative court ruled that the Viennese County Police wrongfully prohibited a protest in the country’s capital which was slated for 31 Jan 2021. The demonstration was organised by a political party and was aimed at the Austrian Government’s severe Covid-19 measures. The court acknowledged the limitations of PCR and antigen testing for evaluating the epidemiological situation.
Below I summarise the parts of the reasons for judgment which are particularly interesting.
The court criticises the Health Service of the City of Vienna, as in advising the Viennese County Police it used various expressions such as “case numbers”, “test results”, “case incidents” and “number of infections” in a way that does not do justice to the need for a scientific assessment of the epidemiological situation.
The court notes that what is relevant for the WHO (in its Information Notice for IVD Users 2020/05) is the number of infections and people with symptoms, not the number of people who tested positive or other “case numbers”. This means it was not clear on what numbers the Health Service based its advice.
Due to a lack of information the court could not evaluate whether the case numbers in the Health Service‘s advice only referred to people who were deemed positive in accordance with the WHO guidance regarding the interpretation of PCR tests of 20 Jan 2021. In particular, there is no evidence as to what Ct value each test result had, and whether tested persons without symptoms were tested again and then clinically assessed.
The court says that this WHO guidance follows the advice of the inventor of the PCR test [Kary Mullis] who in a video (the court probably referred to this one) says that PCR tests are not suitable for diagnosis, and therefore by themselves say nothing about the illness or the infection of a person.
The court then references this study by Bullard (2020), which says that in positive tests with Ct values greater than 24 no replicating virus can be found and a PCR test is not suitable to determine infectiousness.
Also, the reliance on an antigen test in people with clinical criteria leaves open the question whether the clinical assessment has been done by a physician. However, according to Austrian legislation, only physicians can determine whether a person is sick or healthy.
The court also notes that antigen tests are highly unreliable in persons without symptoms.
The court concludes that if the Austrian Corona Commission is not basing its case definition on that of the WHO, the commission’s numbers are wrong.
The court is critical of the methods of the Austrian Corona Commission’s latest risk assessment of 21 Jan 2021. The Commission only uses secondary sources and adopts numbers provided by two other Austrian health agencies without checking the numbers or evaluating the methodology these two agencies use. In particular, the court notes that rising case numbers are associated with rising test numbers.
Finally, the court notes that the limitations of the Australian Corona Commission are highlighted by its own assessment that no conclusions can be drawn on the effectiveness of the various measures (NPIs), as one needs to assume that they are influencing each other.
The court concludes that the mere abstract general fear that case numbers would rise if the protest were to go ahead could not form the basis for prohibiting the event.
