What’s the Difference Between a Coronavirus Test and an Antibody Test?
A coronavirus test, sometimes called a diagnostic test, looks for signs of active virus. It’s simpler and faster than an antibody test. But it tells you only if you have the virus in your body at the moment when you’re tested.
An antibody test shows that you had the virus at some point in the past. It could be gone, or you could still be contagious.
Why Do We Need Antibody Testing?
You could have SARS-CoV-2 and not know it. Not everyone who gets it has symptoms. Experts hope antibody tests can give health officials a better idea of how common the virus is.
Once scientists know who has had the virus, they can find out how sick it makes most people. And they can study what happens if people who've had it come into contact with it again. Along with other scientific information, this can help researchers understand who might be immune to the virus.
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Bulgarian doctor Stoyan Aleksov is the Chairman of the Bulgarian Association of Pathology (BPA) and as such participated in a remarkable webinar of the European Society of Pathology (ESP) on COVID-19 on May 8th.
In a video interview with Dr. Aleksov conducted by Dr. Stoycho Katsarov, chair of the Center for Protection of Citizens’ Rights in Sofia and a former Bulgarian deputy minister of health, published on the BPA’s website on May 13th, both medical experts highlight the main points discussed by the European experts on pathology at the ESP webinar.
Dr. Aleksov boldly sums up the main conclusion of the pathologists from Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain:
The coronavirus is not deadly.
No one died of coronavirus!
In order to say that a person has died of a coronavirus, one must establish an inflammatory reaction that led to death, without any other life-incompatible diseases. There are no such cases.
Video Interview, Script
Dr. Katsarov: I am talking to Dr. Stojan Aleksov, who is the President of the Bulgarian Pathology Association. He participated in an international webinar on the topic of the coronavirus infection and will tell us the point of view of the pathologists from different countries in Europe.
Based on that webinar, what are the main conclusions you come up with?
Dr. Aleksov: The topic of the webinar was to share between the pathologists in European countries what is happening in their countries, and from the perspective of pathologists what we should do to stop the so-called “pandemic”. Do we really have accurate information when are we talking about: A pandemic or infection? Is the virus really killing people? If so, how exactly is it killing people, and what mechanical type of process is going on? How are the different organs and systems in the human body impacted by the coronavirus?
The good thing is that the webinar was organized by the European Society of Pathology, and in the webinar, there were many participants from Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland. Many questions were asked. And the main question was: What is happening with the coronavirus infection, not a pandemic. I want to accentuate that: It is an infection, not a pandemic. Because what we hear, many of the facts that are given, the main thing the people are really afraid of is to die, but we the pathologists, we meet with dead people all the time and we are not afraid of death. The main conclusion was that the autopsies that were conducted in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and Switzerland
do not conclude that the virus is deadly.
Dr. Katsarov: What are the specifics of the clinical picture from the histology of the coronavirus that makes it different from the seasonal flu and other respiratory diseases?
Dr. Aleksov: I asked exactly the same question to Professor Moch (Dr. Holger Moch, professor of pathology at the University of Zurich) because he showed us histological pictures or maps of the people they did autopsies on, as well as electron microscopy of the lungs of the people who died, the analyses that they did on those patients, which cannot be done in Bulgaria. He found helin bodies (inaudible ?) in endothelial cells. Based on that, they were considering that the virus creates endotheliitis, and that leads to lung pathology. Endotheliitis is a disease which is the infection of the lung endothelium. And also, what is happening to the first and second level of alveolitis in the lung?
I asked, is there a difference in the autopsy of a person who died from the coronavirus and of another person who died from the seasonal flu? And Dr. Moch answered that to this point from what he has seen in the autopsies there is no difference in the pathology of the person who died from coronavirus and someone who died from seasonal flu. But there is a big difference which is really important to know (see below).
The two doctors from Italy asked if there is a specific monoclonal antibody which we can use in our pathology work to prove that the coronavirus is present. Is there such an antibody that has been isolated? Dr. Moch answered that such a monoclonal antibody has not been isolated – they don’t know of the existence of such an antibody at the moment.
The second question was, is there a different monoclonal antibody that we can use to diagnose a coronavirus infection when we do a biopsy? And to both questions, they answered no, there is no such antibody that we can use to prove coronavirus is present in a biopsy or in autopsy tissue.
In Bulgaria, we have done three autopsies on people whose deaths were attributed to COVID-19. All autopsies were conducted by Dr. Nia Serbianova – she is the head of clinical pathology at Pirogov Hospital (the main academic hospital in Sofia, Bulgaria). She urged me to ask the same question about this antibody to experts from Italy and Spain. They replied that there are no such monoclonal antibodies. What all the pathologists said is that
there is no one who has died FROM the coronavirus.
I will repeat that: no one has died from the coronavirus. Most of the people died WITH a coronavirus. You would ask why? Because if you were listening to me, you would say that I am crazy. I will explain why I am not crazy. But I am explaining this from the perspective of pathology. And as a professional who is working in pathology, we have certain procedures, protocols, which we apply to autopsy as well as to biopsy. Our protocol should list the first disease, second disease, third disease, and the reason for the death. When we say that the patient died because of the coronavirus, we mean that the coronavirus led to interstitial pneumonia, afterward leading to the death of the person, with no other diseases in other organs and systems.
But such facts have not been found; nobody has reported this. And because of that, I am really concerned with the inadequate behavior of the World Health Organization (WHO). It is the first time in my practice since I have been practicing for 30 years as a doctor that the WHO is announcing a pandemic before it has facts to support this. They didn’t announce an epidemic but instead a pandemic! Pandemic means that many people will die from the coronavirus. I don’t know why many governments and country leaders are saying that people are going to die from it.
While we, the pathologists, are not scared by that because we meet with death every day – we work with dead bodies.
Dr. Katsarov: Are you saying that the information was presented in a manipulative way?
Dr. Aleksov: Yes, in an absolutely manipulated way. Misrepresented. In many countries, the people who are pathologists and virologists work together in laboratories, so they talk to each other. And that is why I am telling you what the other people are saying. I am not the only person to listen to; we should listen to people from other countries as well. We need to listen to the people and the colleagues who work together with virologists, with biologists, and listen to what they think of that. And the people who died, did they die from the coronavirus or WITH the coronavirus?
The real term we use is that the people in Italy and France and in Spain are dying WITH the coronavirus – NOT from the coronavirus – on top of their very poor clinical picture from their illnesses, that is, they had serious co-morbid diseases.
Dr. Katsarov: Can we do this comparison: In Bulgaria, we have 200,000-300,000 people who get sick from the seasonal flu every year — and if we know that some of them will die because of different reasons, can we just say they died from the seasonal flu?
Dr. Aleksov: No, we can’t do that, because there is a big difference between the seasonal flu and the coronavirus. No, in many cases the people who die from the seasonal flu also include young people. This is a big difference. The difference to the coronavirus pandemic is that we haven’t yet had young people dying.
Which is a big difference. Because with the seasonal flu, we can find a virus that can cause a young person to die with no other illness present. And it is different than saying that somebody died from the coronavirus who has a cardiac infarct and with two other diseases. One of the people who died from COVID that we did an autopsy on was a 78-year-old with high blood pressure and an infarct from a heart attack and he didn’t have a single body system that was working properly. And then the people are saying that coronavirus infections are so difficult to be cured. In other words, the coronavirus infection is an infection that does not lead to death. But the flu can lead to death.
Dr. Katsarov: What I have in mind is if a person has a heart attack and a flu, we can either say that he died from a heart attack or we can say he died from the flu; that is what is happening now with the coronavirus.
Dr. Aleksov: Yes, exactly. At the moment there is a total resistance of the pathologists in Europe, in China, as well as in Australia, USA and in Canada because the pathologists have been pushed and pressured: if the patient has a coronavirus, the reason for the death is to be written that it is nothing else but the coronavirus. That is quite stressful for us, and for me in particular because we have protocols and procedures which we need to follow. Because when we do autopsies, we take necropsy material from all the body systems, we put it in paraffin blocks, and in 100 years we can take a look at them again. And another pathologist 100 years from now is going to say: Hey, those pathologists didn’t know what they were doing! So we need to be really strict with our diagnoses, because they could be proven or disproved, and they could be checked again later.
In this case, there is the WHO that doesn’t want us to do autopsies. It is not clear to me why the WHO doesn’t want us to do autopsies when we need to prove what is the virulence of this specific virus. But I don’t know why the WHO doesn’t really want us to do autopsies; I assume they have the information that the virus is not deadly.
Dr. Katsarov: Is this the reason that in Bulgaria we are not doing autopsies (in this epidemic)?
Dr. Aleksov: Exactly! We are required to follow the WHO. And I am really sad that we need to follow those instructions without even thinking about them. But in Germany, France, Italy, and England they are starting to think that we shouldn’t follow the WHO so strictly, and when we are writing the reason for death, we should have the pathological results to back that up, and we should follow the protocol. That is because when we say something, we need to be able to prove it.
We have information from Spain, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland: We didn’t find anybody that died from coronavirus. Did you find it in your country? Then we start asking each other internationally, asking: Where is the problem? Who is making that problem?
Dr. Katsarov: In the media, there is information that the WHO is giving instructions to all the health organizations, and in this information, the instructions are that every person who has a positive PCR test is to be counted as having the coronavirus. And if that person dies from something, it is to be written that he died from the coronavirus. That’s a directive that came from the WHO, which proves what you’re saying.
I don’t know if this had some specific goal. But even if the goal had a good rationale, the way it’s been done it’s a source of panic, it’s a source of stress to the whole world. Because all the people, when they are pronounced to have died because of the coronavirus that changes the character of the infection, which is really scary; the people are afraid. And in reality, there is not such a high mortality rate from it.
Dr. Aleksov: I compare it with the flu infection that we had in January and February 2020, when young people died from the flu. It was quite aggressive this year, and we had kids who died from it, as well as people of working age. Versus now with coronavirus, there aren’t as many cases and definitely not as many deaths. My opinion about that, and I will sign under what I am saying, is that the behavior of the World Health Organization is a criminal behavior and I subscribe to this statement with both my hands. It is irresponsible for the WHO to create worldwide chaos, with no real facts behind what they are saying.
In Bulgaria, there aren’t many virologists and pathologists, and there isn’t much funding from the government. But as a pathologist, which is my personal specialty, I work with proofs — material proofs — and I am asking the World Health Organization:
Where are your proofs?
WHO developed a protocol, in which if somebody died from AIDS, we did the autopsy and took different samples from different organs, so that we could see exactly what was happening in the different systems and organs, and collect that data. We had a similar protocol for tuberculosis, which as you know is quite a dangerous infection. So we developed these protocols for tuberculosis as well.
My pathologist colleagues from Italy and Germany, they are attacking one of the instructions, they describe it as a law from the World Health Organization adopted by the EU parliament, that for the coronavirus we need to follow special instructions for really dangerous infections. But we already have similar directives. And as I said, we used that protocol from 1990 when we were collecting data for tuberculosis and collecting data for HIV. Those protocols began to be developed in 1919, after the Spanish flu, when 10-12% of the population died from it, and that was the population in the working age between 10 and 50 years. And it took decades to develop those protocols. It seems as if the WHO expected this same mortality rate with the coronavirus.
At this moment (May 12th), we are talking about 70,000 people worldwide who have died from the coronavirus, who are over the age of 70. And here I am asking why we didn’t try to do the autopsies of those people to see exactly why they died. And why do we say it is the coronavirus? Did they die from or did they die with the coronavirus?
There are also some different sources that were saying that in Italy the coronavirus led to the death of so many people because they were immunized with the H1N1 flu vaccine, which basically suppresses adults’ immune systems. And after that, they were getting the coronavirus easily, because as a result of the vaccine their immune systems weren’t very strong. This could be cleared up with autopsies, but at the moment it is not clear.
Dr. Katsarov: So your opinion is that they need to do research and they need to take into account the pathology?
Dr. Aleksov: Yes, of course! We are missing the main points. With the autopsies, we can take a lot of lung material. And we can take some of that material and do research on it, and we can keep about 80% for future research if future research is needed. The paraffin that we put the material into from autopsies can stay intact for up to 300 years. So maybe after 20, 30 years, when we have a different but maybe similar pandemic — or epidemic because I don’t believe it’s a pandemic — we can maybe compare the lung histological pictures between now and later.
Because coronavirus infections, for the people who don’t know it, exist in many people, but what we know from our Chinese colleagues, the Chinese pathologists, who studied it from 2002, 2007, 2008, 2013, 2017, and 2018. And based on this pathology material, we can see what the difference is with this pandemic. And again I won’t talk specifically about a pandemic, because I believe we don’t have the facts necessary to call it a pandemic. I think it is not reasonable that the World Health Organization is still saying pandemic for an epidemic. I haven’t seen such an advertisement for a virus before.
Dr. Katsarov: I don’t know whether that is a lack of professionalism, or there are different goals, but obviously there is some controversy about the behavior and the facts.
I want to wrap up with the observation that there is a massive concentration of attention and a building up of this attention into a panic, which will really impact the people who don’t have the coronavirus but have got different chronic diseases, various people who need medical care, who are the other victims of the failing healthcare resources that are focused instead on the coronavirus. These people are afraid to visit the doctor. And the health authorities don’t allow visits to GPs. I think this could be as serious a problem later on as the real coronavirus: the number of people who need the doctor’s attention and aren’t getting it, could grow and become an even bigger problem. In other words, I think more people possibly will die from their chronic diseases in the near future because their chronic diseases aren’t being taken of care of compared with the coronavirus.
Dr. Aleksov: This is not 100% right, you are 200% right. And I can say that for sure, because all of us who are working in oncology, we know that stress significantly suppresses the immune system, so I can really claim 200% that all the chronic diseases will be more severe and more acute. Specifically, carcinoma, over 50% of these are going to become invasive. So I will say that this epidemic isn’t so much an epidemic of the virus, but it is an epidemic in the sense of giving the people a lot of fear and stress. Because the people aren’t like me and other pathologists who understand that the coronavirus is nothing serious. The people are afraid of it.
Dr. Katsarov: How has your work changed because of the coronavirus?
Dr. Aleksov: Our work is down by 90%. In some hospitals, the work is down 100%, in others 50%, in some hospitals the work for the medical personnel is down by 10-15%.
Dr. Katsarov: I will just tell you now that your job as a pathologist is like the supreme court: you are giving the cause of death after they die. Specifically for cancer — if it is cancer or it is not cancer. Same with biopsies, you are the supreme court. For all the different tests, the people are waiting for the pathologists to say whether they have cancer or not. Specifically for cancer, same for the in-situ-mass biopsies and Pap tests: what’s the pathology. And if your job is 90% down, this means you are not getting those tests from the people. This means the people don’t have their proper diagnosis. And this means that the disease is developing without being diagnosed and treated.
Dr. Aleksov: Exactly. Pathology includes cytology, histology, immunochemistry, and molecular pathology. For example, when we tell a woman that she has to have a Pap test every three months and she hasn’t done it for six months if that patient had a risk of developing cancer, those six months could be crucial to the development. This means that instead of spending 5 leva ($3) to test the problem and to start treating it early, the problem is getting worse and we’ll need to treat it later much more expensively. It’s a similar thing when we are not doing autopsies for the coronavirus: it is as if somebody goes to the supreme court and that person was shot ten times, but the supreme court says: Well, maybe out of those 10 times one time he shot himself, so we consider it to be a suicide.
I know about similar situations. A really, really interesting situation was a person in the U.S. who was in a bus accident on the street, he had brain damage and he was put on life support in the hospital for four days. He was positive on the PCR test for the coronavirus, so on his death certificate, it said that he died from coronavirus. I don’t think that’s medicine. This is not serious science.
After the coronavirus epidemic has subsided, and this stupidity and primitiveness have finished, there will be a lot of people who will have lost trust in the medical profession. We can measure that, but it will be a big problem. I want also to add about the pandemic that we need to have people’s trust. Because in my opinion, the coronavirus infection isn’t that dangerous, and how are the people going to have trust in me doing cancer pathology, much of which is related to viruses as well? But nobody is talking about that, and nobody is thinking …
We have some patients who have lung cancer caused by a papilloma-virus infection. And nobody has ever made a big deal about this. And we have many patients like that. And also, each year about a million and a half people die worldwide from lung cancer due to smoking. If we compare that to the coronavirus, it would be like a pandemic and everybody would be told to stop smoking — let’s say pandemic of smoking.
Dr. Katsarov: What you are saying is that the reaction to this infection is disproportionate and that this amount of panic isn’t necessary. And maybe another risk is that after a year or two there’ll be a really dangerous infection, but the people won’t trust us and won’t believe us if we are saying that it is really dangerous.
Dr. Aleksov: I was talking with some friends who are specialists in virology, and they said that if we have global warming, perhaps it would cause the spread of viruses from frozen areas that humankind has never seen before. And if those viruses become active/alive, we would have to combat them, and we wouldn’t know how to do that. And if the people don’t believe us because we have lied to them, if a similar type of infection happens again, what are we going to do then? For example with ebola, which we have learned over the last few years is not really an infection that people are used to because it doesn’t infect many humans.
We need to see exactly how the law in the USA will deal with immunization and that vaccine that we are all talking about because I am certain that
it is not possible to create a vaccine against COVID.
I am not sure what exactly Bill Gates is doing with his laboratories, is it really a vaccine he is producing, or something else? [joking/laughs] But we need to leave this question to the internal agencies, FBI, KGB and …
Dr. Katsarov: Okay, let’s stick to talking about medicine, and the conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories. We don’t know what we are going to learn.
(In the end, the discussion becomes somewhat trivial as both doctors are approaching the problem from a conventional point of view and profess many medical ideas that are obsolete in the light of the General Theory of Biological Regulation and how organic matter and life are created and regulated in All-That-Is. But most of this discussion on the current coronavirus scam is a nuclear bomb for the cabal from a practical medical point of view as this lockdown was declared based on fake medical considerations. N.B. George)
Dr. Katsarov: I want to say thank you for this conversation.
Dr. Aleksov: I want to say again the last sentence, which is that
no one has died from the coronavirus.
The people are dying WITH coronavirus, NOT from it. There is no need for either the term pandemic or epidemic. Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Switzerland – this is what my colleagues from all those countries said.
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