(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
RFK, Jr.'s big tell [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-24
The son of former Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, and nephew of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, attended a private dinner recently, and his remarks were caught on camera. He was apparently speaking extemporaneously about bioweapons (for some reason), and he veered off into Covid territory.
He referenced certain differences in the ACE2 docking site due to gene variation, and he linked these to four specific groups. Caucasians and Blacks were “targeted” by the virus most, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese persons were largely spared. In this way, he designated some groups as beneficiaries and others as victims.
He situated these claims against a backdrop that SARS-CoV-2 was cooked up deliberately—bioweapons, after all, are intentionally made. Every single one of RFK, Jr.’s insinuations were insidious.
We have people [who’ve put] hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes. The Chinese have done the same thing. In fact, COVID-19, 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 structure of the genetic structure, the genetic differentials among different races of the receptors. The ACE2 receptor. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. Now we don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show, you know, that the racial and ethnic differential impact to that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing bioweapons. And we are developing ethnic bioweapons. That’s what all those labs in the Ukraine are out there collecting Russian DNA.
After days of this utterance burbling in the news, BBC.com was able to track down which NIH study RFK, Jr. supposedly was referencing (he’d given no identifying information when he spouted this theory but pointed to it in a statement he released after the video was made public).
The study is here: “ New insights into genetic susceptibility of COVID-19: an ACE2 and TMPRSS2 polymorphism analysis ” (Hou et al., BMC Medicine, 2020).
As David Pakman helpfully pointed out, the percentages of each demographic category specified were so small as to not be statistically significant, in terms of real-world effects. These allele frequencies, as they’re called, occurred anywhere from 0.003% to 0.01% in the populations noted.
Also, the authors of the study note:
We found that the distribution of deleterious variants in ACE2 differs among 9 populations in gnomAD (v3). 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, respectively[.]
Those large percentage numbers? Those relate to a very small band of genes in three databases that had been extracted and crunched for comparison. The numbers do not show that 39% and 54% of those populations have the polymorphisms noted—they show that of the 61 genes identified in this cross-comparison, those were the percentages of the very small band of genes they had identified and that they were scattered in the populations noted.
Those double-digit percentages do not refer to populations on the ground. 24 polymorphisms out of 61 identified by the database does not suddenly mean that approximately 4 out of 10 of that corresponding demographic have the gene variant. These are apples to oranges, and we want apples to apples.
But I want to point to one of the categories that RFK, Jr. got all wrong.
He had said that the Asian demographic was unusually shielded from the disease. In actuality, the study refers to the Amish.
Prevalence of deleterious variants [identified using this analysis] 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[.]
Now, I don’t know about you, but the idea of Amish people being identified in such a way makes my ears perk up, if only because I find it rare to hear of the Amish as a population reservoir for any broad scientific study. That rarity makes the information stick out, so it’s curious why the info wasn’t top of mind when RFK, Jr. decided to lay out his recollection of these findings.
Why didn’t RFK, Jr., bring up the Amish? Because no one in their right might would think of the Amish as a separate race.
To bring up the Amish would go against his project, his narrative of genetically determined race. So he just disappears them.
The inclusion of the Amish would also render his point unintelligible, because on the one hand you’d have “Caucasians” being “targeted” especially, but on the other have this other population segment readily considered White to be “most immune.” His conjecture disintegrates into pure nonsense.
The idea of the Amish being either specifically saved or susceptible puts the lie to his whole framework, the whole spiel he’s trying to weave here. He means to revive the concept of scientific racism, that race is determined by genetics.
In fact, race is an idea that is socially constructed. Race does not reside in genes, though that belief was very popular about a hundred years ago.
What RFK, Jr., is engaged in right now has been considered junk science for a long time. Scientific racism led directly to eugenics, which in turn led to some of the most heinous crimes against humanity (Nazi torture upon prisoners, up to and including the Holocaust) that the world has ever seen. But it’s bad science besides.
RFK, Jr.’s foray into epidemiology and bioweapon systems satisfies the QAnon fringe following that he’s cultivating. But he should not be taken seriously by the rest of us. (To be clear, “taking him seriously” includes debunking the COVID stats one by one, which some have ably done. He deserves none of that goodwill, no benefit of the doubt.) He’s a shit-stirrer, and he should be treated as one.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/24/2183065/-RFK-Jr-s-big-tell
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
