It’s time to stop cloning around. If you’ve heard the unfounded claims that PCR tests are being used to clone humans, that makes at least two of you. Many people may have already seen the video accompanying the following Facebook post that makes such assertions about polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests that are being used to test for the presence of the Covid-19 coronavirus:
As you can see, Facebook has labelled this video as “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” That’s not because Facebook wants to suppress “free speech,” as some may claim. There’s already plenty of free speech on social media. Instead, Facebook fact-checkers presumably had a “clone” to pick with a number of the video’s statements that are not consistent with science, evidence, and reality in general. For example, there was that claim that “PCR kits have never been about testing for Covid … they are cloning devices” and that “This has been admitted to by the NIH [National Institutes for Health]. It’s on their website in a study entitled 'molecular cloning polymerase chain reaction: an educational guide for cellular engineering’.”
Umm, finding a 2015 publication in the Journal of Biological Engineering that’s indexed on the PubMed website is not the same thing as listing something on the NIH website. Even though the National Library of Medicine (NLM) does run PubMed, it doesn’t vouch for every publication that appears on PubMed.
Plus, if you actually read the publication from 2015,...
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