Munich virologist dissects rapid test study by the Paul Ehrlich Institute: "Should make us all think"
Created: 03/30/2022, 21:41
By: Kathrin Reikowski
A medical worker takes a nasal swab from a man for a rapid corona test.
© Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/symbol image
A rapid coronavirus test study does not meet scientific standards, says Munich virologist Keppler.
His criticism of the Paul Ehrlich Institute is harsh.
Munich – “The many everyday reports of multiple false-negative rapid antigen tests, even in symptomatic people, who are only diagnosed with Covid-19 days later via PCR, should give us all food for thought,” says the Munich virologist Oliver Keppler.
He sharply criticizes the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which had positively evaluated around 20 rapid coronavirus tests last week.
In the study published last week, the institute came to the conclusion that 20 rapid antigen tests examined recognized the omicron and delta variants of the corona pathogen comparably reliably.
This contradicted the results of a Munich study as well as a study by the University Hospitals in Geneva.
The Munich virologist Oliver Keppler warns against labeling Omikron as "mild".
© MvP Institute/dpa
“For a federal authority funded by the federal government with millions, whose genuine task and responsibility is to clarify these questions in a well-founded and reliable way for pandemic management in our country, this is much too late, almost four months after the first description of omicron cases in Germany, and the content is thin and the significance is questionable."
Oliver Keppler, Munich virologist
Rapid coronavirus tests: The virologist's criticisms of the Paul Ehrlich Institute study
The virologist's points of criticism at the PEI:
"The number of respiratory samples per virus variant analyzed was far too small, namely 4, compared to 50 to 100 in most international studies."
"Such investigations require sufficiently large sample sets in order to achieve statistical comparability."
"Investigations with virus variants expanded in cell cultures were carried out, although the clinical significance of this method is now being seriously questioned."
The study does not meet minimum scientific standards.
The results of the rapid coronavirus tests are therefore not meaningful.
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Coronavirus rapid tests: PEI reacts to Keppler's allegations about the rapid test study
The PEI rejected the allegations: "The scientific work of the Paul Ehrlich Institute meets the high requirements of scientific work, the results are published in recognized scientific journals and are subjected to an independent assessment by other scientists there," it said in one Opinion.
According to this, in addition to a previous comprehensive evaluation with 50 samples, “10 selected samples of known concentration for the omicron virus variant, 4 for the delta variant and 6 characterized samples for the Wuhan variant” were used for the PEI investigation.
Most tests used target regions within the nucleocapsid protein to identify the pathogen "that are not affected by one of the omicron mutations, so that there is theoretically no basis for many tests to show reduced omicron detection," the PEI responded to Keppler's criticism .
(dpa/kat)
