By Lance Welton
03/25/2023
See also: No, Emily Oster, We Don’t Need A COVID Amnesty — We Need A COVID Nuremberg
I know it’s gone out of fashion since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine (meaning there was a brand-new shiny thing for everyone to virtue-signal about), but let’s go back to the days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve been inspired to take this nostalgic journey by a new study that highlights some fascinating new racial differences in the U.S. in the response to the virus [Significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on race/ethnic differences in US mortality, by Jose Aburto et al., PNAS, 2022]. Bottom line: I was right to stress the importance of honest reporting of the data on racial incidence. The Ruling Class was wrong to suppress it. And because the Ruling Class did suppress the data, people died — especially, in an ironic twist, the very minorities that the Ruling Class claims to care so much about. (See VDARE.com’s reporting on Race and COVID-19 here.)
But let’s go on a little journey before we turn to that. You may remember — and this is back in the days when the disease definitely emerged from a Chinese wet market and anyone who suggested otherwise was spreading fiendish “misinformation” — that COVID-19 did not “discriminate by race,” even though the U.S. health system was already showing “familiar biases” in who got ill [The Coronavirus Doesn’t Discriminate, But U.S. Health Care Showing Familiar Biases, by Blake Farmer, NPR, April 2, 2020]. Even so, it absolutely, definitely didn’t discriminate by race.
Now, it occurred to me that COVID-19 probably would discriminate by race. This was because races are adaptations to different environments which, therefore, differ in genotypic frequencies, and some environments are going to have a longer history of dealing with corona viruses, such as flu, than others, making people whose ancestors were from those environments better able to fight off such viruses.
At first, much hampered by the Ruling Class refusal to report racial data, I hypothesized that COVID-19 might be substantially limited to East Asians, which had been the case with the 2003 SARS outbreak. This turned out not to be true, but I was able to report emerging evidence that it did discriminate by race again and again. A U.S. government report eventually admitted that this was the case and U,S, vaccine distribution policy began to discriminate by race.
In the UK, COVID-19 hit South Asians very badly, seemingly for genetic reasons, while genetics also explained why Nordic countries fared so well.
So, to be clear, COVID-19 did discriminate by race and this wasn’t just because of cultural differences in poverty, health or food choices; it was at least in part because of genetic differences, genetic differences being the essence of race.
“Significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on race/ethnic differences in US mortality,” the study that got me thinking about this again, entitled was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August last year and was undertaken by a team of sociologists at Oxford University. Its findings are illuminating.
Significantly, it found that blacks and Hispanics suffered far higher levels of mortality than white people. This, of course, makes sense, because white people are evolved to an environment where there are lots of corona viruses, so we would expect them to be better able to deal with any such novel virus. blacks evolved in tropical Africa, while Hispanics are a cline — a racial mixture — whose members are, on average, 50% white and 50% Native American, though some are far more genetically Native American. (This is discussed in Richard Lynn’s 2006 book Race Differences in Intelligence.)
Now, you might respond that, “White people are privileged and rich, have better food and live in better conditions and that’s why they weren’t impacted as badly by COVID-19.”
But that argument doesn’t fit with data that the study presents. Until the COVID-19 pandemic began, the average life-expectancy of Hispanic American males was actually higher than that of White American males. In other words, Hispanic American males were, in a key respect, healthier than white American males.
With the advent of COVID-19, this gap was nearly eliminated. Clearly, this can be interpreted as meaning that white males were better adapted than Hispanic males to fight off COVID-19, particularly as the main cause of the decrease in male Hispanic life expectancy was COVID-19.
At the same time, the life-expectancy advantage enjoyed by white males over black males significantly grew. Now, of course, this could reflect white-black differences in poverty and health leading to black people being more likely to die of COVID-19. But this is not what happened.
According to the study: “Black Americans saw increases in cardiovascular diseases and ‘deaths of despair’ over this period.” In other words, Black males were so emotionally dis-regulated and stressed by what was happening that they started committing suicide and having heart attacks. It was this that reduced their life expectancy. Thus, the inference must be that there was something about Hispanic males — who were otherwise healthy — that made them highly likely to die of COVID-19.
The simplest answer: There weren’t many corona viruses in Hispanics’ ancestral environment, meaning that they are not adapted to them. This shouldn’t be surprising. One the reasons why the Spanish found Central and South America so easy to conquer was that its people had little to no resistance to influenza; this illness not having previously been found in the region, with the invaders spreading it [see Plagues in the Nation: How Epidemics Shaped America, by Polly Price, 2022].
According to the study, the age at which Hispanics died of COVID-19 was notably younger than the age at which whites and blacks died of COVID-19. This, once more, implies that Hispanics lack genetic resistance to corona viruses.
People generally become less healthy as they get older. They develop underlying health conditions such as diabetes, heart problems, obesity and high blood pressure, and their immune systems simply become weaker. These factors all make it more difficult for them to fight off the COVID-19 infection.
But this was not the picture, to the same extent, among Hispanics. To a much greater extent than among whites and blacks, young and healthy Hispanics simply died of COVID-19. As I noted above, this is what we would expect if they lacked resistance to such viruses due to the ecology to which their race was evolved.
The authors conclude their paper as follows:
Previous pandemics, such as the 1918 Spanish influenza and the 2009 H1N1 influenza, affected population health and mortality differently across subpopulations. Overwhelming evidence, including our own, shows that so far, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected racial/ethnic minorities in the United States.
I distinctly recall, based on the Spanish Flu, predicting that there would be race differences in the impact of COVID-19. Not being honest about race differences costs lives. There’d probably be Hispanics who’d be alive today if there were no taboo surrounding the concept of race.
Specially, in this case, Wokeness killed non-whites.
Lance Welton is the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.