Many scientists citing two scandalous Covid-19 papers ignore their retractions

Amongst scientists everybody ignored those political papers, just as the many political models with doomsday predictions (also Lancet). They understand the need for politicians to be inaccurate and unscientific. Within the covid-19 community most flaws in preprint papers were immediately pointed out, but you could not blog about without loosing your job (Trump), but nevertheless news magazines still published the worst nonsense.

The reply actually addresses all the points.

* It provides an objective description of the test, supported by primary sources.

* Provides a description of the sources of criticism that were referred to in the initial statement.

* Describes the nature and quality of the criticism.

* Allows you to check that the papers under attack were not retracted, which is the testament to the scientific substance of said attacks.

* More importantly, raises the attention to the fact that there are far more test procedures nowadays which, even if we took the complains at face value, render them null.

There's a radical fringe which for some unexplained reason are both radically anti-science and heavily invested in trying to produce and use fraudulent pseudo-scientific work to attack scientific findings they find politically inconvenient, as a kind of Trojan horse based on appeals to authority.

Firstly, lack of retraction does not imply quality. I've read papers about COVID that were not merely wrong but deliberatively deceptive, and they haven't been retracted. Public health research just has a huge problem with bad papers, and it's not one they're admitting to.

Secondly, have you actually read the criticisms? A big part of it is that the Drosten protocol appears to have been published via a journal that he himself controls, hence the 24 hour submission-to-publication turnaround time. Obviously if that is true the paper will never be retracted, thus using lack of retraction as a way to attack the critics is circular; the non-independence of the publication path is itself a part of their criticism.

Thirdly, I read the criticism. A few things were indeed quibbly and didn't seem that important, others were not good but perhaps understandable if you make allowances for extreme speed. Other criticisms were highly substantive. But this may depend on your pre-existing value system. A critical problem with PCR testing is the way the people behind it appear to consider false positives either non-existent or entirely free: it's clear that everything about these testing programmes is designed to maximize positive results at all costs. They're terrified of false negatives but don't care about FPs at all. That isn't excusable.

Finally, w.r.t. "more test procedures", they all seem to have very similar reliability problems that are dismissed with circular logic of the form, "COVID is anyone who tests positive, therefore there are no false positives" or "A PCR positive means it detected RNA, and PCR is the most sensitive way to detect RNA, therefore if RNA is present you get a PCR positive, therefore the test works fine", all of which is entirely blind to the way it's being used in the real world.

There's a radical fringe which for some unexplained reason are both radically anti-science and heavily invested in trying to produce and use fraudulent pseudo-scientific work to attack scientific findings they find politically inconvenient, as a kind of Trojan horse based on appeals to authority

Yes, that fringe is called the public health establishment.