The trading suspension is serving no purpose. Whether the...

The trading suspension is serving no purpose. Whether the Doherty report is released or not the levels of understanding that determine the share price should be no different than usual.

The Doherty’s first Final Report on three selected kits made no recommendation on whether they should or should not be used. That would be outside its terms of reference anyway. It only stated the obvious – that the tests detect the build up of antibodies in response to the virus and not the presence of the virus itself.

If anything the Report’s summary and discussion was misleading. It simply gave an average value for the antibody sensitivity of each test and ignored the fact that the value changes with time.

Moreover, the reported sensitivities were assayed against RT-PCR methodology assuming it to be gold standard. The three average values reported were 56.9%, 51.8% and 68.1%. These values are little different from those obtained for RT_PCR itself.

With microneutralisation used as the reference standard instead of RT-PCR these sensitivities increased to 88.6%. 86.8% and 97.7% respectively. The Report completely ignored this alternative assay in discussing the accuracy of the tests. The next ‘Final’ Report is likely to be little different, and journalists are unlikely to read through and decipher it in detail.

The independent assay results on Wondfo undertaken by UCSF already are in the public domain. So also are the Company’s ‘Response’ and ‘Utility’ documents and detailed information in the EGM Presentation. Doherty’s contribution should just mirror the UCSF results and have little effect, so resumed trading now should be no more false than normal.