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Corona rapid tests
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The Munich virologist Oliver Keppler considers the favorable assessment of rapid corona tests by the federal Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) to be wrong.
The head of virology at Munich's Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) accuses the authors of the PEI study that a work published by the PEI last week does not meet scientific standards.
Among other things, Keppler criticizes that the number of samples was far too small for a reliable study.
The PEI, based in Langen, Hesse, rejected the criticism.
In the study, the institute came to the conclusion that 20 rapid antigen tests examined recognized the omicron and delta variants of the corona pathogen with comparable reliability.
This contradicted the results of a Munich study as well as a study by the University Hospitals in Geneva.
"The number of respiratory samples per virus variant examined was far too small, namely 4, compared with 50 to 100 in most international studies," writes Keppler in his evaluation of the PEI study.
The PEI data do not meet minimum scientific standards and are therefore not meaningful.
"Such investigations require sufficiently large sample sets in order to achieve statistical comparability," says Keppler's statement.
In addition, further investigations were carried out with virus variants expanded in cell cultures, although the clinical validity of this method is now being seriously questioned.
Everyday life says otherwise
“The many everyday reports of multiple false-negative rapid antigen tests, even in symptomatic people, who are only diagnosed days later with Covid-19 via PCR, should give us all food for thought,” wrote Keppler – and sharply criticized the PEI: “For one with Millions of federal authorities funded by the federal government, whose genuine task and responsibility is to clarify these questions in a well-founded and reliable manner for the pandemic management in our country, this is much too late, almost four months after the first description of omicron cases in Germany, thin in content and meaningful questionable."
The PEI rejected the allegations: Their studies met "the high requirements for scientific work, the results are published in recognized scientific journals and are subjected to an independent assessment by other scientists there," it said in a statement.
According to this, for the PEI investigation, in addition to a previous comprehensive evaluation with 50 samples, “10 selected samples of known concentration for the omicron variant, 4 for the delta variant and 6 characterized samples for the Wuhan variant were used”.
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 a reduced omicron detection for many tests," the PEI responded to Keppler's criticism.
dpa/hei
