By Lance Welton
07/18/2023
Okay. The Democrat/Media Complex is trying to destroy Robert F. Kennedy, and smother in the crib his chances of being the party’s nominee for president, this time because he has speculated (in a supposedly off-the-record meeting) that the clear racial differences in susceptibility to Covid-19 may have been due to genetic differences. And not only that, he also speculated that the Chinese may have deliberately engineered the virus to be less harmful to Northeast Asians (formerly known as Orientals) than to other races. My take as a veteran of the COVID Race Wars: Kennedy’s speculation — and he made it clear he was speculating — was completely reasonable. The reaction to him is crazy, when not actually deliberately unfair. Our Ruling Class’s behavior during COVID was a scandal and a disgrace. This is just the latest example.
The story was broken (see off-the-record, above) by the famously impartial New York Post:
In RFK’s words, Covid was a bioweapon and, “there’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. The races that are most immune to Covid-19, because of the … genetic structure … the genetic differentials among different races … of the receptors … of the A2 receptor … Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He adds that “we know” that the Chinese, and Americans, are developing ethnic bioweapons.
[RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews, by Jon Levine, July 15, 2023].
You can judge how fair this summary is by watching the whole thing (warning: the captions are terrible):
In a subsequent interview with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:
I will continue to stand alongside my Jewish brothers and sisters. Here is an excerpt from my great conversation with @RabbiShmuley about the inaccurate distortion propagated by the @nypost pic.twitter.com/0b5KIQlvpM
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 17, 2023
RFK made it clear that he was thinking of one study in particular: [New insights into genetic susceptibility of COVID-19: an ACE2 and TMPRSS2 polymorphism analysis, by Yuan Hou et al., BMC Medicine, 2020].
He’s right that this study is a big deal. Published in a premier journal, it found that there is a particular form of a gene, ACE2, that makes you more susceptible to COVID. As RFK said, there are race differences in this. According to the study:
Specifically, 39% (24/61) and 54% (33/61) of deleterious variants in ACE2 occur in African/African-American (AFR) and Non-Finnish European (EUR) populations…
meaning that they are highly susceptible. The study continues:
Prevalence of deleterious variants among Latino/Admixed American (AMR), East Asian (EAS), Finnish (FIN), and South Asian (SAS) populations is 2–10%, while Amish (AMI) and Ashkenazi Jewish (ASJ) populations do not appear to carry such variants in ACE2 coding regions.
Note carefully: this is not at all the same thing as saying that the actual incidence of the disease among Ashkenazi Jews was lower — a point Rabbi Boteach was particularly concerned about. It could be higher, either because of other genetic factors or because of other factors, e.g., culture. Jews were certainly worried about this possibility.
Their worry was disgracefully exacerbated by the prolonged refusal of our Ruling Class to release the facts about COVID and Race.
As I kept reporting during the pandemic, based on the limited facts that were available, there appeared to be clear evidence that, when controlling for socioeconomic status, there were racial differences in the impact of COVID-19. But the Ruling Class dogma — the unquestionable fact — was that COVID-19 absolutely did not discriminate by race at all and to suggest that it might do was racist.
To quite my mantra during my VDARE.com coverage:
And there is evidence of genetic-based racial differences beyond those mentioned by RFK. Fearless and cancelled former Cambridge University academic Dr. Noah Carl presented a detailed analysis showing that when you control for socioeconomic status and age, which also strongly crosses over with having underlying health conditions, non-whites in the UK, in particular South Asians, were far more heavily impacted by COVID-19 than whites. The key factor appeared to be Vitamin D deficiency, caused by having dark skin in an environment in which native people have light, or, at least, lighter skin, allowing them to better synthesize sunlight into Vitamin D.
Another study in the U.S., which controlled for socioeconomic status, found that blacks reacted far worse than whites to COVID-19, possibly due to Vitamin D deficiency [Multivariate Analysis of Factors Affecting COVID-19 Case and Death Rate in U.S. Counties: The Significant Effects of Black Race and Temperature, by Adam Li et al., medRxiv, April 24, 2020].
Yet another study, which I also reported at the time, found that blacks are much more likely to carry a particular gene which makes them far more susceptible to COVID-19, even if you control for “inequality”:
The expression of the Transmembrane serine protease 2 (shortened to TMPRSS2) was significantly higher among black individuals than it was in Asian, Latino, mixed race/ethnicity, or white individuals.
The Chinese reacted badly to COVID-19 at first because it originated in China and was brand new, and thus at a highly virulent stage when they were first exposed it. However, subsequently, Chinese scientists found large differences between Northeast Asians and everybody on a particular gene which made you more susceptible to COVID-19. The Chinese were more likely to have the COVID-resistant form of the gene.
Eventually the Equal Opportunity Disease dogma collapsed, probably when a way was figured out to blame White Supremacy. But this development never got as much publicity as the collapse of the ban on mentioning the possibility that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory.
(I have a personal stake in this. In February 2020, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow killed a column I wrote about the evidence that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory and speculating that it might have been a bioweapon. Brimelow’s motive was frankly fear: Silicon Valley’s Tech Totalitarians were on the rampage against any deviationism, especially from the elite-enforced line that COVID-19 originated naturally. Twitter had just banned the huge ZeroHedge account for running a story about Covid’s possible lab origin [Twitter bans Zero Hedge after it posts coronavirus conspiracy theory, by Kate Gibson, CBS News, February 3, 2020]. (ZeroHedge was subsequently mysteriously restored.) Facebook had just banned VDARE.com for obviously fallacious reasons, part of its campaign to defeat Donald Trump. Brimelow just didn’t want to take the risk, especially since the origins of the disease were not central to VDARE.com Immigration Disaster / National Question focus. But I was denied a scoop).
Needless to say, none of this genetic evidence had any influence at all on the Democrat/ Media Complex’s reaction to Kennedy. ABC News called RFK’s idea not just a “conspiracy theory” — obviously this is no longer a neutral, analytic term: it is now a weaponized “shut up word” employed to close down discussion — but a “false conspiracy theory” [RFK Jr. accused of making antisemitic, racist claims about COVID-19 but insists he was misunderstood, by Nicholas Kerr, ABC News, July 18, 2022].
But let us not forget that, once upon a time, COVID-19 emerged, by chance, from a Chinese wet market, and the “lab leak” hypothesis was also a “false conspiracy theory” — espoused by deranged malcontents who needed to be thrown off social media.
ABC News adds: “Health officials and leading experts all agree that evidence does not indicate the virus was engineered.”
Well, these same people also all agreed that COVID-19 had accidentally emerged from a Chinese wet market.
And as for calling Kennedy’s remarks “Anti-Semitic,” because he claimed that Jews were also spared to a greater extent, there is, likely, no more emotive, manipulative and, so, non-neutral word in the English language than “Anti-Semitic.” You don’t use a word like that if you care about reasoned, logical discussion.
Shockingly, the Kennedy family itself has allowed itself to be drafted to the campaign. “I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” Kennedy’s sister Kerry wrote on Monday [RFK Jr’s conspiracy theories and Republican supporters, by Sam Cabral, BBC News, July 17, 2023].
The implication? That even if RFK’s remarks are true, they are “deplorable” — just like Trump supporters? — and so mustn’t be said.
These tactics are all further exemplified by Jonathan Weisman in the New York Times:
A conspiracy-filled rant by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the Covid-19 virus was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people has stirred accusations of antisemitism and racism…
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Airs Bigoted New Covid Conspiracy Theory About Jews and Chinese, July 15, 2023]
For good measure, Weisman added:
Health officials worldwide have determined the virus disproportionally killed some groups of people not because of their race but because of underlying health inequities.
This is demonstrably false (see above).
The latest — Kennedy’s own wife of almost ten years, actress Cheryl Hines, seems on the point of deserting him:
Furthermore, as I further argued when Marjorie Taylor Green raised the possibility in July 2021, is it really so ridiculously improbable that COVID-19 might have been a racially targeted Chinese bioweapon?
Races are genetic clusters, so you could easily make a racially targeted bioweapon. These clusters cross over to some extent, so you’d kill many of your own group as well — but the Chinese are notoriously amoral and cruel even to their own people. They are also extremely ethnocentric, compared to most other races: they are extremely hostile to outsiders.
So what were they doing playing around with a deadly disease in a lab — a deadly disease which just happens to be particularly lethal to races other than their own and especially to their great rival, the South Asians, specifically in India?
What did this secretive, highly ambitious, expansionist, authoritarian society have in mind?
Is it really a crazy “conspiracy theory” to think that they were developing a bioweapon? So is it just a lucky coincidence, for the Chinese, that this bioweapon discriminated by race?
RFK is now said to be promoting a “false conspiracy theory” that is also, for good measure, “Anti-Semitic.”
We will wait and see, just as we did with Lab Leak and the Equal Opportunity Disease.
But I do wonder: Why would the Chinese want a bioweapon that specifically spares Ashkenazi Jews?
Could that aspect of the weapon not be a coincidence, as with the Amish — the product of their unusual genetic profile caused by a genetic bottle neck?
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.