RFK, Jr, race and COVID-19
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, the notional Democratic presidential candidate, made himself even more foolish than he already was recently by speculating that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered to protect people of Chinese and Jewish descent. Setting aside the fact that there is zero evidence that the virus was engineered and most evidence points to an animal origin, the notion that a virus could be reliably engineered to target specific ethnicities is risible. Furthermore, even stipulating that such a virus could be created, once it’s released there’s nothing preventing variants from arising that could infect the ostensibly protected populations. We’ve seen this movie before, folks. RFK, Jr, isn’t interested in virology or viral epidemiology, he’s interested in sowing ethnic strife. He deserves our scorn and contempt.
Why anyone would believe anything RFK, Jr, has to say about science or medicine is beyond me. He has been a long-time anti-vaxxer who subscribes to the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism. He is willing to repeat lies if it gets him votes and press coverage.
It’s certainly true that direct-to-consumer genomics companies like 23AndMe, Ancestry and Veritas (among others) can tell whether you have recent Chinese or Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors based on allele frequency differences between these groups and other human populations. But I don’t know of any evidence that any of these differences convey differential response to SARS-CoV-2, never mind whether the magnitude of the effect is overwhelmingly greater than the many other factors that influence the course of infection (high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, age, access to health care). And I’m certain that RFK, Jr, doesn’t either.
I’m sorry to even give the RFK Jr campaign any oxygen by bringing this up, but what he’s doing is dangerous to public health and to American society. It needs to stop.
Programming note: The subject of this post is RFK Jr, not me. Comments about the subject of the post are welcome. Comments that attempt to hijack the thread by making me the topic will be deleted.
I agree.
On-topic comment posted. Will it get through ‘moderation’? Time will tell.
Go for it. I can’t moderate what I can’t see.
I posted an excerpt of a Boston Globe article citing RFK Jr siblings strenously disavowing his views.
Boston Globe: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drew strong criticism from several members of his own family on Monday for remarks he made suggesting COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted.” …
That outpouring of criticism included two of Kennedy’s siblings. Kennedy’s sister Kerry Kennedy, distanced her brother from the nonprofit named for their father, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation.
“I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” Kerry Kennedy said in a statement as president of the organization. “His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stand for, with our 50 [plus]-year track record of protecting rights and standing against
Another of their siblings, Joseph Kennedy II, also criticized the remarks. He is a former congressman and chair of Citizens Energy.
“Bobby’s comments are morally and factually wrong,” he said in a statement provided to The Globe. “They play on antisemitic myths and stoke mistrust of the Chinese. His remarks in no way reflect the words and actions of our father, Robert F. Kennedy.” …
I’ve posted the gist of the Globe piece twice. Not going to post it again.
RFK Jr is a loon, in the modern Trumpy tradition.
@ Fred,
He’s more dangerous than just a loon. He’s an anti-semite, a racist, and an anti-vaxxer. His right-wing financial support tells you everything you need to know. He’s a stalking horse for Trump.
The purpose of my post is to debunk his Jewish and Chinese conspiracy theory on SARS-CoV-2. That his siblings are disowning him is good for their brand, but it doesn’t address the specious science. What RFK Jr did is like what the Nazis did when they claimed the mantle of Darwin for their racial extermination policies.
See also:
Wikipedia: Social Darwinism
RFK Jr. is running on the Kennedy name. What does that mean for the family’s legacy?
Boston Globe – July 17
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his presidential campaign is carrying on his famous family’s legacy. Some who revere that legacy fear he’s carrying it right off a cliff.
The 69-year-old environmental lawyer and antivaccine activist is waging a quixotic challenge to President Biden for the Democratic nomination. Polling usually shows his support somewhere in the teens, posing virtually no threat other than some mild embarrassment to Biden, despite some Democrats’ reservations about the octogenarian incumbent.
But the campaign has brought new and widespread attention to Kennedy, which in turn has elevated his conspiracy theory-laden views. Those include repeatedly debunked falsehoods and misleading statements about vaccines, public health, and about the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Each new comment has put an unwelcome spotlight on the broader family.
That was true again over the weekend when video from the New York Post surfaced of him claiming that the COVID virus is “ethnically targeted” to attack white and Black people, while “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Ashkenazi Jews are Jewish people of specifically Northern and Eastern European descent.
Two of his siblings specifically tried to distance his remarks from the legacy of their father, Robert F. Kennedy.
“I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks,” Kerry Kennedy said in a statement as president of the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation. “His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stand for.”
“Bobby’s comments are morally and factually wrong,” said Joseph Kennedy II, a former congressman and chair of Citizens Energy. “They play on antisemitic myths and stoke mistrust of the Chinese. His remarks in no way reflect the words and actions of our father, Robert F. Kennedy.” …
An engineered bioweapon that misfires and produces no noticeable illness a good part of the time and that harms some percentage of the “safe” groups doesn’t sound like the work of genius bioweapons engineers. If you could protect groups of people, why could you not do more real harm to the ones you want to target? It sounds like it did neither really well, so why think it was “engineered” at all?
I don’t want to minimize the harm done and the lives lost, but the random nature of results is more in line with natural evolution of a strain of virus than an intelligently engineered product.
@JaneE
Extensive genomics analysis of thousands of SARS-CoV-2 isolates make it very clear that the virus was not engineered. Nobody besides conspiracy theorists believes that anymore. There is a small possibility that it escaped from a research lab where the virus was being studied, but the most likely possibility is that it jumped from an infected animal.
I was trying to make the point that it didn’t make sense to try to call it engineered in the first place.
The irony is there’s a conspiracy out there about Israel cooking up the SARS-similar MERS ~ Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome ~ virus of a decade ago, that appeared to have 1) ‘escaped’ a bioweapons facility in Tel Aviv and 2) targets Arabs, Egyptians and Palestinians. He has literally cherry-picked, pipelined, the headlines of a fever-swamp antisemitic allegation into a mainstream Republican talking point without understanding the background, and got it backwards.
Or turned it around
Even his racism is a put on, what stupid thinks smart sounds like …
As for what was identified as a novel coronavirus at the beginning of January 2020, the Chinese decoded the genomes of 6 samples from patients in the first 2 weeks of January and immediately sent the codes to the WHO, and a network of international geneticists, and to regions through China including Hong Kong and Taiwan. Records of the first identified coronavirus patients were assembled and analyzed and the analysis was sent along to the WHO and NEJM and published late in January. *
The coronavirus tests that the WHO and several countries produced were developed with the Chinese data. The revolutionary vaccine that would be produced in Germany, was produced using the Chinese data.
* https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001316?query=featured_coronavirus
January 29, 2020
Early Transmission Dynamics in Wuhan, China, of Novel Coronavirus–Infected Pneumonia
It’s correct to call RFK out here, but he is running and Newsom and others aren’t (yet). President Biden has a really strong chance of being increasingly perceived as not up to the job, plus, even though the process is slow, the perception that the most likely reasons for Hunter and Jim Biden (and others) cashing in involve “the Big Guy” doing stuff that Big Guys can do but their substantially untalented relatives can’t is growing. Although the DNC is accused of rigging the 2020 nomination, the mechanism still involved getting primary votes for a declared candidate who was on all the ballots. Maybe Biden sails on unperturbed, but he just might crumple like a dried out milkweed pod. Then what? If this occurs in August, well still lots of time to jump in. If next February? That the most popular of the two declared alternatives to President Biden is not acceptable cries out to add some more alternatives while there is still time. Many Sanders’ supporters think they got gypped, but Sanders clearly didn’t get enough votes. But wait long enough this time and RFK supporters will have a better case for feeling done wrong if rules get changed in February or March.
Joel Eissenberg,
This column is important to me, since I immediately found Mr. Kennedy unfortunate as a public figure and paid no attention to Kennedy since. I hope I did not distract from your post, by my remarks on the early days of the coronavirus epidemic. I hoped a little background could be helpful.
Thank you for the fine post.
What a terrible person we are discussing. This is all frightening:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/15/us/politics/rfk-jr-remarks-covid.html
July 15, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Airs Bigoted New Covid Conspiracy Theory About Jews and Chinese
The long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has a history of embracing conspiracy theories. His latest comments claimed the virus spared certain ethnic and religious groups.
By Jonathan Weisman
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/15/us/politics/rfk-jr-remarks-covid.html
July 15, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Airs Bigoted New Covid Conspiracy Theory About Jews and Chinese
The long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has a history of embracing conspiracy theories. His latest comments claimed the virus spared certain ethnic and religious groups.
By Jonathan Weisman
Well, just to give you something you will completely misunderstand:[all Right now if I had to choose between a person who didn’t believe in vaccines but could stop global warming I’d vote for him before someone who believed in the vaccines but did nothing to stop global warming.
Never mind the blindfold.
[All we are saying is…maybe the Left needs to get it’s priorities straight and learn how to use its leverage to get better candidates…and stop alienating people it doesn’t need to alienate.]
Mark:
There is no reason for Joel to go further than his first sentence and for that matter the 1st paragraph. RFK deserves no testimony or reasoning establishing a foundation for RFK’s remarks which are laughable. The people believing RFK’s words are not going to be convinced by scientific evidence. They have not in the past and they will not in the future.
@run,
I deleted Mark’s post because (a) it makes me the topic of his comment and (b) he links to a site that promotes the discredited link between vaccines and autism.
Not a problem Joel.
this is the Cleveland Clinic’s genetic susceptibility of Covid study that RFK Jr was talking about:
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-020-01673-z
there’s nothing here suggesting that Covid was a genetically engineered bioweapon…