I haven’t paid too much attention to Robert Kennedy Jr. or his campaign for president.
The headlines about him paint him to be a bit of a nut, but others who’ve heard him on podcasts say he’s sharp. And yes, I should know better than to put too much stock in news headlines, but the recent ones about Covid caught my eye.
The New York Times said he, “Airs Bigoted New Covid Conspiracy Theory About Jews and Chinese.” The press headlines were unanimously awful, the White House called his comments “vile” and a CNN anchor called them “deranged lies.”
But I noticed that most coverage didn’t report his full statement, just a couple words within quotes, which is always a red flag. They followed that with a few experts decrying his wrongness, then a few more quotes from people calling him a racist.
Here’s what Kennedy said:
“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately … COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”
“We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. . . . They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”
Intriguing or crazy? I decided to take a closer look.
It begs three questions: 1) Did Covid genetically target people by race? 2) Could scientists actually design Covid to target by race? 3) Do governments develop ethnic bioweapons?
For this, we need to ignore all of the non-genetic reasons that different ethnicities were affected. Racial groups have different levels of obesity, high blood pressure, types of disease co-morbidities, levels of health care, and different types of socializing and jobs that require being around more people. Those are ALL factors that mattered, although a genetic element is less clear.
1) Did Covid genetically target people by race?
Covid affected different countries and ethnicities differently. As a reference, the United States had an overall death rate of 3,018 per million people. China reported its death rate at only 87, but lies so regularly that no one takes their government statistics seriously. Still, most other outside estimates show China’s death rate to be about a third of the U.S.
Overall, the reported death rates varied greatly by country, which undoubtedly occurred for all sorts of reasons, from behavior to health care mandates to bad data. China isn’t the only country that fictionalizes its reporting statistics.
But could human genetics have been one of those reasons? We see all over the world that different groups of people are afflicted with different diseases, so it’s not an entirely off-the-wall concept.
When SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid 19 – enters the body, it looks for cells with a receptor protein created by the ACE2 gene. All humans have an ACE2 gene, but it has somewhat different structures and functions that vary by race, just like other genes with small variations that make us look differently.
And yes, some studies suggest ACE2 variants could cause different infection rates, and that Ashkenazi Jews (from central/Eastern Europe) and East Asians (China, Japan, Koreas) would have greater protection.
So the answer is that there’s indeed reason to suspect that Covid, as a disease, did in fact “target” people by race. But that’s still not proven by a long shot. These studies relied heavily on computer simulations and data analysis, and didn’t prove their thesis through lab-based work.
That part isn’t a nutty conspiracy, but supported by science. The word “target” doesn’t mean, however, that it was created that way intentionally, so let’s get to that part.
2) Could scientists actually design Covid to target by race?
You may have noticed I used a bit of a weasel word there … “could” instead of “did”.
First, let me be clear. There’s no real reason to believe Covid was created that way, besides general suspicion, which isn’t proof of anything. I couldn’t find a shred of evidence that Covid was designed by China, or anyone else, to target specific races.
Even if they wanted to, though, could they? There’s not much published on this, but it appears to be a huge long-shot.
While theoretically possible, there's no evidence that such bioweapons could be effectively developed or used. It would be immensely challenging to create a pathogen that targets specific genetic traits common enough in one ethnic group but rare in others.
If they did, though, they’d keep quiet since it violates international law. Which leads us to ….
3) Do governments develop ethnic bioweapons?
Kennedy stands by that statement, but it’s impossible to verify. There’s no credible, publicly available evidence to suggest that governments are actively developing ethnic bioweapons. If they’re doing it, they keep that quiet.
Yet it’s naive to think that governments are too nice to do that.
Biological warfare has been used throughout history. Ancient peoples poisoned wells and tossed plague-infected corpses over city walls. In 1763, during the French and Indian War, British forces gave blankets from smallpox patients to Native Americans.
Does anyone believe that Hitler or the Japanese wouldn’t have used a race-based virus in WWII if they were clever enough to create it? Hitler was all about killing certain races, and the Japanese weren’t any better.
Japan’s “Project Cherry Blossoms at Night” was to use kamikaze attacks to spread plague-infected fleas to America. The plan was to launch from a submarine off the San Diego coast, but was never implemented when cooler heads prevailed.
Those crazy-sounding methods rarely work well, but let’s not forget that WWII ended not with conventional warfare, but U.S. scientists developing a super-weapon.
Treaties notwithstanding, it’s reasonable to think that governments would look at all ways to defeat future enemies, as well as learn how to protect their citizens against any probability.
China has been investing heavily in genomics research and has large-scale DNA collection efforts, and in 2017, Putin spoke out publicly that “foreign agents” were collecting DNA from Russians.
Interestingly, it’s one possible reason why the U.S. government was monkeying around in the Wuhan lab. It’s in America’s interest to keep an eye on the scientific capabilities of China, and everyone else for that matter.
In all of this, there are no clear answers or evidence, but that’s the nature of complicated issues.
Kennedy seems quick to draw conclusions in that murky world, or at least give them more credibility than most. I used to call people like that “conspiracy theorists”, but I’ve seen enough conspiracies proven true that I’ve retired that phrase from my lexicon.
Whether he’s brilliant or fanciful, though, the media has once again twisted reality to destroy someone who challenges their power structure.
— Ken
PS: This seems like a good time to tell a friend about this article and this column. There’s got to be someone you can forward this to right now, no?
Why don’t we just ask Anthony Faucci
I think the flimsy science behind RFK Jr.'s theory is less interesting than what it says about the modern conspiratorial mindset, and how people on both sides of the political aisle can get sucked into it.
Those folks are so distrustful of the establishment that they'll buy into any conspiracy theory, no matter how distasteful or crazy. It has a radicalizing effect. Once you believe something as outlandish as QAnon, suddenly "COVID is a racial bioweapon that spares the Jews" doesn't seem so crazy.
Rebuilding faith in democratic institutions has to be a generational project, and it starts with each of us learning to identify reliable sources of information and tune out the garbage. If RFK Jr. can't do that, he's not the president we need.