July 16, 2023

"COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. "

"The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are — because of the genetic structure, um, genetic differentials among different races, of the, um, of the receptors, of the [unintelligible] receptor, um,  COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and, uh, and, uh, black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and, uh, and Chinese, and, but we don’t know that it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the, you know, the racial and ethnic differential and impact to that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons, and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. That's what all those labs in the Ukraine are about. They're collecting Russian DNA, they're collecting Chinese DNA, so we can target people by race."

That's my transcription of the video available at the NYP article with the headline "RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews." The headline focuses on only one of the alarming things in the quote and it misstates what he said.

He said it may have been "targeted to attack Caucasians and... black people." He's naming 2 groups who, he says, are least susceptible to the disease, and it is striking that the first group he names are Ashkenazi Jews. It's one thing to name the Chinese, given the implication that the disease arose from Chinese labs, but why go out of his way to name the Jews?

Also, he's only saying "there is an argument." To what extent can a politician waft various theories prefaced by "there's an argument." One could say: There's an argument that RFK Jr. is an anti-Semite. It's easy to hedge any accusation you want. You're giving air to an interesting/scary/compelling idea. He's not the only one who does that. You'll see the mainstream media printing things after words like "Some people think...."

Here's RFK Jr.'s tweet responding to the NY Post article:
The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I accurately pointed out — during an off-the-record conversation — that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021 study of the COVID-19 virus shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races since the furin cleave docking site is most compatible with Blacks and Caucasians and least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews. In that sense, it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered. That study is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32664879/
And: 
[The NY Post writer] exploited this OFF-THE-RECORD conversation to smear me by association with an outlandish conspiracy theory.

This cynical maneuver is consistent with the mainstream media playbook to discredit me as a crank — and by association, to discredit revelations of genuine corruption and collusion.

For example: 1. Government / Big Tech collusion to censor dissent on social media; 2. Fauci et al’s suppression of lab leak hypothesis; 3. Censoring of information questioning COVID vaccine safety & efficacy.

As I describe in my new book, “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” ethnically targeted bioweapons are real, and history makes clear there is no population who should be more concerned about a thing like that than people of Jewish and African descent

AND: I'm reading the NYT coverage of this incident — "Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Covid Remarks Raise Questions of Antisemitism/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" (NYT).

Asian Americans suffered through a brutal spate of assaults at the beginning of the Covid pandemic by people who blamed the Chinese for intentionally releasing the virus on the world. And Mr. Kennedy’s remarks about Ashkenazi Jews hit antisemitic tropes on multiple levels. 

Ashkenazi Jews generally descend from those who settled in Eastern Europe after the Roman Empire destroyed the Jewish state around 70 A.D. Sephardic Jews went to the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. The idea that Ashkenazi Jews are somehow separate from Caucasians has fueled deadly bigotry for centuries, and the conspiracy of Jewish immunity from tragedy has been part of antisemitic attacks as far back as the Black Plague and as recently as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 

Abraham Foxman, who worked for decades as the head of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization, condemned “antisemitic stereotypes going back to the Middle Ages that claimed Jews protected themselves from diseases.”... 

 Mr. Kennedy linked to a scientific paper that he said showed the structure of the Covid-19 virus made Black and Caucasian people more susceptible, and “ethnic Chinese, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews” were less receptive. But the study he linked to made no reference to “Ashkenazi Jews” and his conclusions were roundly dismissed by scientists. 

“Jewish or Chinese protease consensus sequences are not a thing in biochemistry, but they are in racism and antisemitism,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan....

115 comments:

Gahrie said...

How is this possible? I was told that race was a social construct.

mikee said...

Heinlein, once again, anticipated this concept of race-selective weaponry and wrote a quick, pretty bad novel (Sixth Column) about the idea of race-based weaponry. In his novel, a death beam that kills only Asians is used to defeat the invading PanAsians (Indians, Soviets, Chinese, Japanese, etc.). IIRC, the death beam ends up killing the Asian American scientist who helped develop it, when he sacrifices himself to make an attack work.

Integration, then, with miscegenation and hybridization of the races, is the only effective way to avoid the horror of race-based weaponry. Protect the future, marry and breed inter-racially!

Gilbert Pinfold said...

Chinese companies are doing the DNA sequencing of all of you doing the Ancestry.com, 23-and-Me search for your roots. Those data are retained in China. Additionally, any DNA or RNA sequencing that supports clinical trials in China is retained in China, and must be accomplished by Chinese companies not sharing incidental data with US partners. Large sums of money have been showered on Chinese genetic researchers working in the US via covert partnerships with Chinese universities and Chinese national funding agencies, all in the interest of access to non-Chinese genetic information (Look up Jackson Laboratory and Yijun Ruan as an example). We support research in China and Ukraine that can't be performed in the US due to federal law, and the ethnic susceptibility of potential bioweapons is an active area of investigation. Being a virologist by training I've weighed in on this before--RFK Jr is an unattractive vessel to call attention to this, but we shouldn't be surprised when these weapons get unleashed.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

"This cynical maneuver is consistent with the mainstream media playbook to discredit me as a crank — and by association, to discredit revelations of genuine corruption and collusion."

-RFK jr

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

The entire pandemic was engineered to kill as many people as possible, kill the economy, shift massive amounts of wealth from the poor, middle and even upper classes to the ultra rich global elites and big pharma. It was used to restore power to the elite. Biden is our husk-puppet.

JPS said...

Hunter Biden's tax payer funded Hooker,

"The entire pandemic was engineered to kill as many people as possible,"

I disagree. The infection fatality rate (I feel heartless saying this, given how many people did die) was too low to be consistent with that intent. Either that, or the people behind it were simultaneously very competent and very incompetent. If the goal were to kill as many people as possible, you'd engineer a virus with significantly higher lethality.

I continue to believe this was a massive foulup. That they had some researchers drop dead after spelunking 1000 miles from Wuhan. They took bats and samples back to their virology institute and studied them, because of course they would. (So would we.) Played with them, genetically, to see what they could do. That our NIH outsourced work to them that we weren't allowed to do, and supported the research in part to gather intelligence on what they were doing.

And then someone slipped up, about as badly as possible; and from there, everyone behaved pretty much exactly as you would expect them to.

William said...

Mostly I'm confused...I don't think Kennedy is quite as bad as the articles suggest, but his remarks were stupid and, one gathers, factually wrong......I guess it would be possible to genetically engineer diseases to target certain ethnic groups and not others. Are we or the Chinese actually doing it? It seems like something that the Chinese would consider more tactically useful than a diverse country like America. One thing I do know with absolute certainty is that the Chinese will never give a full and honest accounting of what happened in Wuhan.

minnesota farm guy said...

The wacky side of Bobby Jr.! Forget the possible selection by race and remember that Covid was engineered and released in China. There is no question about that and the engineering was funded by the US. There are several people who should be having their necks stretched over that.

Chuck said...

Would you care to explain this part, Althouse?
"That's what all those labs in the Ukraine are about. They're collecting Russian DNA, they're collecting Chinese DNA, so we can target people by race."


https://www.rand.org/blog/2022/09/debunking-russian-lies-about-biolabs-at-upcoming-un.html

Richard said...

“Morbidity and mortality due to COVID19 rise dramatically with age and co-existing health conditions, including cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Human genetic factors may contribute to the extremely high transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 and to the relentlessly progressive disease observed in a small but significant proportion of infected individuals, but these factors are largely unknown. … This study suggested that ACE2 or TMPRSS2 DNA polymorphisms were likely associated with genetic susceptibility of COVID-19”

This is pure junk science. Correlation is not causation. The study does not identify a mechanism for the increased morbidity. It just finds a correlation of groups with high rates of co-existing health conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

“Specifically, ACE2 polymorphisms were found to be associated with cardiovascular and pulmonary conditions by altering the angiotensinogen-ACE2 interactions, such as p.Arg514Gly in the African/African-American population.”

If this were the case, they why is there such a low death rate due to Covid-19 in Africa?

Trying to Solve a Covid Mystery: Africa’s Low Death Rates
Mar 23, 2022A new W.H.O.-led analysis, not yet peer-reviewed, synthesized surveys from across the continent and found that 65 percent of Africans had been infected by the third quarter of 2021, higher than the...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/health/covid-africa-deaths.html

Rocco said...

RFKjr stated that the "docking site" for the virus is least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews. There has been pushback against his statements about the first and last groups, but none about the middle one. As someone who is apparently a Finnish-American (1% of my DNA per Ancestry.com), I am appalled at the lack of pushback against RFKjr's Finnophobia.

Dave Begley said...

I don't blame Asian-Americans for Covid. I blame Fauci and the Chinese. That's where it belongs.

People are so, so stupid.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The only way for RFK Jr to be covered by the MSM is when he says something that can be easily misinterpreted and manipulated, because it has been decided he is not going to replace Biden on the ticket.

The question is can RFK Jr replicate what Trump did in 2016?

Hubert the Infant said...

RFK Jr. is distinguishing between Caucasians and other whites such as Ashkenazi Jews and Finns, and then lumps all Chinese people together and all black people together. Is he saying that all people from China have the same genotype, and that all people with dark skin have the same genotype? That is too stupid to be racist.

Yancey Ward said...

"If the goal were to kill as many people as possible, you'd engineer a virus with significantly higher lethality."

This isn't as easy as a lot of people think it is. I also think it was a massive fuck-up on the part of the scientists at Wuhan Institute, and I think that they were simply trying to engineer the virus to be human-compatible for what they believed were good and ethical reasons (they were wrong, but I grant them the benefit of the doubt on the overall intent). However, if the goal were to engineer the virus to actually kill as many people as possible, it is completely plausible that this was the best they were able to accomplish in December 2019.

Michael K said...

If this were the case, they why is there such a low death rate due to Covid-19 in Africa?

Common use of Hydroxychloroquin and Ivermectin ?

William said...

Historical footnote: The Bolshevik party was financed by a bank robbery in Tblisi in 1907. It was the largest bank robbery in history and forty people were killed in the course of it. There are reasons to believe that Stalin was its architect, but there is no documentary evidence to prove this. Of course not. No one with such knowledge or evidence would ever come forward with such evidence during the Stalin regime or would even want to...The Bolsheviks are an example of a successful conspiracy. They were the mentors of the Chinese Communists....I don't understand, however, why the Chinese would want to engineer a virus that spares the Jews.

stlcdr said...

When you talk to a reporter OFF THE RECORD, it's on the record.

Michael K said...

the ethnic susceptibility of potential bioweapons is an active area of investigation. Being a virologist by training I've weighed in on this before--RFK Jr is an unattractive vessel to call attention to this, but we shouldn't be surprised when these weapons get unleashed.

Even prematurely by accident. I don't know enough genetics to understand all this. My genetics textbook has gone from VII edition to XII edition in 10 years and a lot of the stuff in VII is wrong. The use of viruses to insert "corrected" genes scares the sh*t out of me. Fortunately, I'll be gone by the time it is ready for prime time.

Drago said...

LLR-democratical and Violent Homosexual Rage Rape Fantasist and Banned Commenter Chuck: "Would you care to explain this part, Althouse?"

In case anyone had forgotten what a massive Fauci/Whitmer/Covid Nazi suckup LLR-democratical Chuck was, he pops back up to remind us with his faux outrage over anyone daring to presume the Fauci/NIH/EcoHealth crew have not been feverishly working with overseas labs on GoF and ethnicity-based bio-weapon targeting research.

And to use Rand as the authority on Truth is even funnier!

The original fake "independent" "non-profit" "non-partisan" "analysis" crew funded by govts/MIC/pigs at the trough.

Too funny.

narciso said...

they didn't but it was a terror weapon, that allowed the lockdowns that had secondary and tertiary effects, I have referred to Gen Chi Haotian and his view on biological and bacteriological warfare,

Michael K said...

However, if the goal were to engineer the virus to actually kill as many people as possible, it is completely plausible that this was the best they were able to accomplish in December 2019.

Remember that lethality is an obstruction to wide spread distribution. The original SARS virus killed 80% of victims and thus was easily isolated. This is the reason why Ebola has never spread outside the endemic region in Africa.

Temujin said...

Dem Joos again.

Ashkenazi Jews are generally caucasian. Even with that, we all have genetic differences- obviously. Ashkenazi Jews have been considered to have perhaps the highest, or among the highest IQ of any ethnic group of people in the world (enter controversy). Though looking at my family you would not know it. Perhaps we're really Irish? We do like a good song after a half bottle of whiskey. (Just kidding, to all my Irish friends. None of you can actually sing.)

But why would a virus be developed to leave out the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews, you ask? It's because Ashkenazi Jews eat an inordinate amount of Chinese food. And, always thinking about economics, the CCP recognizes the importance of keeping their people's restaurants in the US & Europe operating at full levels, even if the world mostly shuts down.

I know I won't have many followers on this theory, but you'll be thinking about it come next Christmas Day. Or as we call it "Lo Mein Eve".

Oh, yeah. As for RFK Jr. When I was first liking listening to him, I still said to my wife that there is something about him not right. Something is still off. I like a lot of what he says, but he's holding back. There are baked in far leftist things in there- I just know it. Or something else. Well...he's leaking out his 'something else' moments over the last couple of weeks.

Biden just needs to stay in a basement and let the world above him self-immolate. We are so screwed.

Amadeus 48 said...

RFKJR can say any damn fool thing he wants. See how free speech and a free press correct him?

Now let's do Tony Fauci, the Wuhan Lab, and gain of function research. If we only got the approved government line, information and debate on this topic would be nonexistent, and we would persist in error.

The Hunter Biden laptop? Government lies (the FBI had the darn thing since 2019) led to further confusion. Another dirty trick by the FBI/Dem alliance. Of course, the bumbling James Comey handed the 2016 election to Trump by the whitewashing of Hillary Clinton and the mishandling of the Anthony Wiener laptop.

As to the Hunter laptop, the problem isn't Hunter's degeneracy, it is the indicated bribery of Joe Biden (the Big Guy) by Burisma and China. It is all there, but no one but the NY Post will touch it.

hpudding said...

Haha! Not like I couldn’t see this one coming. Thought about mentioning it on the open thread last night. Sounds like he’s not as cogent and persuasive as you found him on meathead Joe Rogan’s show now, is he? Isn’t now a time to rethink how liable people are to promoting the glib and slick? Sure, he’s an interesting politician when it comes to mixing and matching memes from the right and left but being as careless with the facts as he is will always catch up with someone. Facts first, feelings later. I really hope this blog learns its lesson on that one.

In any event, the best joke I heard about this guy (and at this point, it really is important to accept that his approach to understanding life and leading a country is either very unserious or seriously in doubt), is that of course vaccines are deadly dangerous. After all, both his uncle JFK and father RFK got shots and now they’re dead. So obviously there’s a connection there.

I really hope more people wake up and realize how useless and pernicious the conspiratorial mindset is. People need to leave their suspicions and paranoias behind where they do them the most good, if they do at all. But too many people can’t approach politics any other way. Sad.

hpudding said...

I guess you could say ethnicity is much a social construct as race is. But at least ethnicity reflects natural community aggregations and not just some ridiculous arbitrary assertion that presumes broad differences in eye shape or skin color mean much more than that. People were as likely to cross-breed with each other across the Ural Mountains or north or south of the Sahara desert as they were over eventually “nationalized” boundaries between France and Germany. Or whatever. The so-called race realists on the right love categorizing people by race because it plays in to ancient prejudices that divide people by appearance and caste or station, which they find more meaningful than the obviously, equally shallow distinctions made as to whether one’s ancestors were Turkish or Polish.

Yancey Ward said...

"If this were the case, they why is there such a low death rate due to Covid-19 in Africa?"

Median age of Africans is 19 years old, Richard. Median age North Americans is twice that. Simplest answer for the variance in the death rates.

wild chicken said...

"There is an argument that - "

Just sayin' eh.

Jeff said...

I have no reason to believe that RFK jr is a Jew-hater of any sort, but there are a 1000 years of blood-soaked history that testifies against any responsible person saying that Jews have some kind of special human-caused resistance to disease unless one is using one's terms very carefully.

Jupiter said...

"It's one thing to name the Chinese, given the implication that the disease arose from Chinese labs, but why go out of his way to name the Jews?"

Hmmmm.... Because they killed his father and his uncle?

Jupiter said...

"Median age of Africans is 19 years old, Richard. Median age North Americans is twice that. Simplest answer for the variance in the death rates."

Well, there's also the fact that a lot of people in Africa take ivermectin regularly.

lamech said...

NYTimes: "Ashkenazi Jews generally descend from those who settled in Eastern Europe after the Roman Empire destroyed the Jewish state around 70 A.D."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ashkenazi:
Ashkenazi, plural Ashkenazim, from Hebrew Ashkenaz (“Germany”), member of the Jews who lived in the Rhineland valley and in neighbouring France before their migration EASTWARD to Slavic lands (e.g., Poland, Lithuania, Russia) after the Crusades (11th–13th century)

Mosk, Carl (2013). Nationalism and economic development in modern Eurasia. New York: Routledge. p. 143. ISBN 978-0415605182. "In general the Ashkenazi originally came out of the Holy Roman Empire" and then went EAST.


NYTimes: "The idea that Ashkenazi Jews are somehow separate from Caucasians has fueled deadly bigotry for centuries"...

Is it merely an "idea", or might some communities actually have some distinct genetic characteristics (... e.g. XX, XY)?


What of RFK Jr.'s mention of the Finns? And, why did he not mention the Amish, who according to the cited study appear to have the least compatibility with the COVID-19 furin cleave docking site?

John henry said...

Thank you Gilbert pimfold for pointing out the the Chinese have one of the biggest databases of American DNA in the world.

Thank you. All you fools who gave it to them via 23 and me et al.

Is there anyone so foolish as to think this is not being weaponized against us? Not necessarily used against us but research bei g done in how to use it if need arises.

I've been complaining about the risks of 23 and me et al for years, since before kung flu. Here and elsewhere.

John Henry

Tina Trent said...

Why are Ashkenazi Jews singled out from among other European whites? That's an idiot observation without more epidemiological explanation, if it even is true.

I don't doubt Fauci and the Hunan lab were playing with fire -- hellfire. We do know that more obese people were likely to suffer severe cases and mortality. And that was how it played out in the U.S. -- with higher rates among relatively uhealthy, overweight, lower income minorities and whites.

I believe racially targeted viruses are being created. But we just don't have enough evidence to make claims like this. We don't understand the differences in death rates between African-Americans and Africans. Is it diet, medical treatment, environment? Are all Chinese that closely genetically related?

So did Kennedy speak too vaguely, or with malice? If he's going to make this a central platform of his race, he's got a lot of explaining to do. Including why he is making this the central platform of his race.

Jupiter said...

Really, RFK is just reporting on the findings of a substantial number of scientific studies. He lives this shit 24/7, and employs people to find out all about it and brief him, so it's hardly surprising that he is aware of things the rest of us aren't aware of. It's amazing, to me, to watch RFK going around saying things I've known for months or in many cases years, and it blows the fuses on all these media drones. They literally know nothing except what they hear from each other and their owners. They sit there with their yaps hanging open, waiting for the voice in their ear to tell them how to make the bad man go away.

Richard said...

Blogger Yancey Ward said...
"If this were the case, they why is there such a low death rate due to Covid-19 in Africa?"

"Median age of Africans is 19 years old, Richard. Median age North Americans is twice that. Simplest answer for the variance in the death rates."

Thanks for making my point. The reason blacks in the US have a higher death rate is due to their high rates of co-existing health conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. It has nothing to do with their genetic susceptibility of COVID-19. If that were the case then their death rate in Africa would be higher.

John henry said...

Kung flu death rates

China 4/100,000

US 4,000/100,000

I suppose that thousand :one disparity could be a coincidence.

Not the way I'd bet, though.

John Henry

gilbar said...

if the goal were to engineer the virus to actually kill as many people as possible,

as Dr K pointed out, a virus with a high lethality won't REALLY kill That Many people;
because they'll get sick and die before spreading it. PLUS a high lethality makes people put down their phones, and pay attention.
On the Other Hand..
a virus that displays NO SYMPTOMS for 1/2 the people infected (while STILL making them contagious)..
a virus that Still KILLS a percent or so OF the people infected..
That Might Well have been However, if the goal were to engineer the virus to actually kill as many people as possible, it might well have been the case, that this was the best they were able to accomplish in December 2019.

Plus, is a Large Number of Deaths, the point of going to war? NO!
This viral attack CRIPPLED the western economy.
This viral attack CRIPPLED the education of western young
This viral attack left real estate COMPLETELY untouched (think: NEUTRON BOMB)
Plus
This viral attack was The ONE THING ON EARTH that could have stopped Trump's reelection

Tina Trent said...

Now that Lyndon La Rouche is dead, I guess someone has to take his place.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

Yancey, thanks for cutting through the crap and presenting the obvious solution. I am wondering, though: What's the COVID situation in Japan? Or South Korea? Those are the most elderly-skewed populations on earth.

tim maguire said...

John henry said...I suppose that thousand :one disparity could be a coincidence.

There are innocent reasons for the disparity—COVID hit the old and sick, the obese, etc. There are proportionately fewer of those in China. The Chinese may have gone into the pandemic with some natural immunity already in place because COVID came from there (this is not negated by the lab-leak theory).

Plus the Chinese are lying.

John henry said...

In case someone else notices, I already know that reported us kung flu deaths are artificially high and have been saying so here since 2020.

I also strongly suspect that reported Chinese rates are low.

But if we say the disparity is 100:1 instead of 1,000:1 my point remains unchanged.

John Henry

mikee said...

Yancey and others debating the genocidal intent of the COVID release: If I wanted to kill a whole lotta people, I'd release smallpox in multiple airports with international flights outbound. Smallpox kills. Different kinds of smallpox have death rates varying from 30% of those infected up to 97%.

COVID killed sick people and old people and fat people because sick. fat and old people are less healthy and resist disease poorly compared to thin, fit young people. So does the flu, so does any viral infection. You're chasing a ghost with your genetic predisposition quests. Yeah, certain genetic makeup will cause one to suffer more or resist better an infection, but that is smothered by fat, sick, and old as factors.

Jupiter said...

NYTimes: "The idea that Ashkenazi Jews are somehow separate from Caucasians has fueled deadly bigotry for centuries"...

"Somehow separate"? Look, how do you think you get a 10-point average IQ difference? Something to do with not eating pork? Maybe it's those little hats?

John henry said...

Not all Chinese are the same ethnic group. There are a dozen or more "Chinese" ethnic groups in China.

The Han Chinese are the dominant ones in numbers and in political and economic power.

In his book "Ethnic America" Thomas Sowell looks at how different ethnic groups came to the US.

Many tend to think of Chinese having come from all over China. In fact, the great majority who came between 1870 and 1920 or so, the peak immigration years came from a single province and most of those from the same region in that province.

John Henry

Big Mike said...

Leave it to American “journalists” to focus on the Ashkenazic Jewish issue and not connect the following dots:

1) The virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory through gain-of-function research indirectly* funded by grants from Anthony Fauci’s fiefdom within the NIH. We know that now to a certainty.

2) The virus appears to be whole orders (plural) of magnitude less lethal to individuals of Chinese extraction than to Caucasian or Negro extraction.

2a). Coincidentally the virus is also less lethal to Finns and the Ashkenazi, however neither Finns nor, to our knowledge, Jewish researchers were involved in bioengineering the virus.

That’s it, just two dots to connect. And American journalists cannot connect them. Well, you don’t go into journalism if you have the brains for STEM courses.
________
* And not particularly indirectly. It’s not that the connection from Fauci and Collins and the NIH as the source of the $$$ to the recipients at the Wuhan lab was a challenge to trace.

hpudding said...

I was told that race was a social construct.

You were told right.

If you presume however that skin color and eye shape should have any kind of biological significance beyond skin color or eye shape, then you are just as racist as people who think skin color or eye shape should determine or reinforce any kind of social circumstance or hierarchy that they did in the past.

I realize right-wingers like to divide people by class, history or appearance though. So it makes sense that some of them would find it hard to let go of choosing arbitrary appearance features to mean so much more than they actually do.

Yancey Ward said...

"What's the COVID situation in Japan? Or South Korea? Those are the most elderly-skewed populations on earth."

Significantly lower mortality compared to the US, but outside of Sumo of Japan and the Kim rulers of North Korea, I have never once seen an overweight Japanese or Korean person that I can remember.

Yancey Ward said...

"The reason blacks in the US have a higher death rate is due to their high rates of co-existing health conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. It has nothing to do with their genetic susceptibility of COVID-19. If that were the case then their death rate in Africa would be higher."

Well, while I suspect that is all true, Richard, the comparison to the death rates to African countries doesn't prove this to any significant degree- it could be, as I was actually trying to demonstrate, is that the age demographics probably overwhelm whatever other characteristics an ethnic group might have with regards to COVID and mortality. You need an apples to apples comparison, and there isn't an easy one to find considering that obesity is also a big confounding factor- not lots of fat Africans either. Other confounders- not a lot of nursing homes, hospitals, or ventilators in Africa, nor any real ability to force people to stay home on the dole for 12 months.

John henry said...

Fun fact

A majority of all mid and lower range hotels and motels in the US are owned by Members of the Patel clan.

The Asian American Hotel Owners Association has over 20,000 members who own 60% of all US hotels and motels. Almost all Indian-American, most of them members of the Patel clan.

Find something to attract their gene and you could screw up the us lodging industry. (just kidding)

Similar applies to Chinese restaurants in the US. But that's for another day.

John Henry

BothSidesNow said...

I am generally doubtful about those who point to a specific event or trend and say "This means the US is in decline." RFK's statements, however, are a clear example of decline. One can parse the words, the gist of what he says is that there is a theory ("some people are saying.") that Covid 19 was engineered, and it was engineered in such a way as to not hit a certain type of Jew and and to not hit the Chinese. This is scion of one of most prominent and wealthy families in recent US history. He is runnign for President, and routinely is mentioned in articles that appear in the leading newspapers of the US. Yet he is giving oxygen to one of the oldest antisemitic libels. After every horrible event, there will be those who say the Jews were spared. September 11 was a recent one, but one can back through history and finds others. Societies which nurture this kind of libel against the Jews don't do well. It is sign of a deep rot. It is not that this one person thinks theses things, or at least seems to beleive that there is enough there to mention it in a public place. It is that a prominent person thinks these things, and is surrounded by others who put him forth as a potential leader of the United States. If JFK thinks it is fine to say these things in a public restaurant while being filmed, imagine what worse rot he says in private?

Big Mike said...

I guess there’s a third dot between (1) and (2) — it has further been established beyond reasonable doubt that the COVID-19 virus was bioengineered. Per the observations of top virologists before the various governments locked down true information, there is a genetic marker in the COVID-19 virus thst nearly always occurs in bioengineered viruses, but hardly ever in naturally-occurring viruses.

And reasoning from A to B and then from B to C is at least one step too far for a liberal.

hpudding said...

Leave it to American “journalists” to focus on the Ashkenazic Jewish issue and not connect the following dots:

Leave it to right-wing autistics to not not connect the following dots:

The zoonotic history of all pandemics, and the social impulse to spread lies about them that elaborately concoct a human-engineered scheme behind them. (I’m sure you would have done a great job of this during the medieval plague).

The fact that the three lab “infected” individuals proposed as vectors for bringing the disease into the public were shown not to have had it. Or the fact that there were multiple lineages spreading early on, all too distant from the lineage in that one lab - of which there are also labs in several other cities which were strangely never accused of being the source for COVID. Why would a lab work on releasing multiple lineages?

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2305081

The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was a STEM person. Engineers make great followers but they and the math dweebs are usually too disconnected from humanity to understand the social world or even the natural patterns they follow and that includes the science of epidemics and disease.

I’m glad Hotez can be followed on forums that aren’t as nonsensical as the ones Little Bobby the vaccine paranoiac controls or influences. He actually appeared on some right-wing show on “News Nation” whatever that means and was allowed to explain the factual details that constitute all scientific understanding, without which everyone and every topic would be as warped as RFK Junior’s stylings. SARS and MERS both had typically natural histories and any idiot who assumes these humanized coronaviruses have to be made in a lab when they didn’t at least twice and likely three times in 20 years is not worth taking seriously.

Such people are likely just covering up for their preference for a lazy right-wing government that would ignore ways to stop the next outbreak which I can guarantee you is right at this moment furiously evolving away in the jungles and wet markets and diseased habitat-human boundaries that are breaking down with every human encroachment on the wild. Trump threw away the pandemic response plan and instead pretended that evolution only happens in labs now or other places nationalized by a country he needs to scapegoat in order to distract from his massive failure as a person and president. But at least he knows how disinfectant works. (Except for the part that says “FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY.”)

And the right-wingers eat it up like powdered Kool Aid. Their need to support him or his hierarchy is greater than their need to think for themselves.

Robert Cook said...

"I was told that race was a social construct."

It is. That doesn't mean that who mates with whom in given geographic areas doesn't have an effect on the gene distribution in a particular population. In some populations one will see a greater than average number of persons with freckles and red hair. A population of in-bred persons will display similar and increasingly more extreme physical and mental abnormalities. This doesn't mean that red-headed freckled people or in-bred persons are separate races because of the gene distribution in their populations. To look at another familiar animal, the manifold and growing number of dog breeds all remain, despite their varied physical characteristics, the same species.

Gospace said...

Michael K said...
. The use of viruses to insert "corrected" genes scares the sh*t out of me. Fortunately, I'll be gone by the time it is ready for prime time.


Perhaps you may have heard of the Johnson and Johnson adenovirus dreaded covid vaccine that inserts genetic material into the cells of your body to cause those cells to manufacture the deadly all by itself spike protein... just like the mRNA dreaded covid vaccine does. It's in use today, right now, and it should scare the sh*t out of you.

John henry said...
Fun fact

A majority of all mid and lower range hotels and motels in the US are owned by Members of the Patel clan.

Funny you should say that. Fun fact- I'm now facebook friends with a female British 3rd cousin 2x removed who married into that very clan. His immediate family owns hotels in 3 states.

About speculation that the dreaded covid was manufactured to target one ethnic group- seems not to be the case looking at cases worldwide. However, as mentioned, there has been work to develop such diseases. I've seen speculation that the Chinese in particular are looking into it to depopulate Africa to make it easier for the Chinese to move there. But there's one flaw in that- there's reasons few if any non-Africans lived anywhere in the interior except for the former Rhodesia and South Africa. Not habitable by non-Africans who are far more susceptible to the viruses and diseases that are prevalent there. And I've seen speculation in well more then one place that the dreaded covid and the vaccine are both designed to kill those who get the original non-mutated dreaded covid or the vaccine. Just not today or quickly, but 10-20 years later. And to be honest, it looks like for the vaccine that that is what is playing out. Death rates in the most highly vaccinated countries should be below projection since the most susceptible parts of the population were killed off early- the elderly and infirmed. But it's still above average, in all age groups.

Gospace said...

hpudding said...
I was told that race was a social construct.

You were told right.

...

I realize right-wingers like to divide people by class, history or appearance though. So it makes sense that some of them would find it hard to let go of choosing arbitrary appearance features to mean so much more than they actually do


So Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor,, and all the others who support racial discrimination based on appearance are right-wingers...

Hey- I got an idea- let's eliminate all racial preferences in college admissions and congressional district drawings! Treat everyone the same according to their qualifications!

Robert Cook said...

"I suppose that thousand :one disparity could be a coincidence.

Not the way I'd bet, though."

John Henry


It probably stems to a great degree from the greater number of overweight and unhealthy people in the US, as well as the greater number of Americans who did not follow recommended health protocols, particularly social distancing protocols.

hpudding said...

remember that Covid was engineered and released in China. There is no question about that and the engineering was funded by the US.

Actually there are lots of questions about that. Just none that fit your narrative which I understand matters more to you.

It’s hard to remember something that was never established to be true in the first place.

Some people will never let reality get in the way of their nationalism. These are the same folks who believed Bush’s lies about implicating Iraq in 9/11 and it will take them about the same ten-year lag to get around to figuring out that blaming Chinese labs instead of wet markets was propaganda. Designed to distract from Trump’s failed response just like Bush ignored the August 2001 memo and distracted from attacks on America the following month with an optional war in 2003.

We can no longer work on the slow conservative’s delayed learning curve on these things any longer. As George Carlin said, evolution is slow, small pox is fast. Waiting around for conservatives to accommodate reality is a nice idea, but it can get you killed. So it looks like there will be no alternative to trusting AI. Just make sure our new bot overlords dress in an excessively long red tie and have a blonde combover and talk about China and how supposedly rich they are a lot. Then they’ll believe him. And the nation will be able to get on with its business and everyone else can get on with their lives.

MalaiseLongue said...

"COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and . . . black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and . . . Chinese."

Apart from whether this is or is not a true statement, does RFK Jr. actually say here that Ashkenazi Jews are "not Caucasians"? I don't find that assertion in what he is quoted as having said, but I am seeing that accusation in a number of places.

Maybe he is thinking that Ashkenazi Jews are not Caucasians, or maybe he's not thinking any such thing. Maybe he is thinking that Ashkenazi Jews are a subset of Caucasians, or maybe he is having no such thought.

In any case, how does the accusation that he sees Ashkenazi Jews as "not Caucasians" rest on anything but mind reading?

hpudding said...

I would like to see gain-of-function research done on conservatives to see what happens when they are genetically manipulated into incorporating a rational thinking gene.

They should probably be observed in a lab first before releasing them back into the wild, though. Or kept in the wet market.

Michael K said...

Blogger hpudding said...

I was told that race was a social construct.

You were told right.

If you presume however that skin color and eye shape should have any kind of biological significance beyond skin color or eye shape, then you are just as racist as people who think skin color or eye shape should determine or reinforce any kind of social circumstance or hierarchy that they did in the past.


Puddinghead shows us once again why the left hates STEM topics. Ignorance = equity.

Anna Keppa said...

hpudding said...
I was told that race was a social construct.

You were told right.

If you presume however that skin color and eye shape should have any kind of biological significance beyond skin color or eye shape, then you are just as racist as people who think skin color or eye shape should determine or reinforce any kind of social circumstance or hierarchy that they did in the past.
--

As ALL physical characteristics are products of physiology and evolution, ALL have biological significance.

Very obviously the genes for black skin in Africa have become dominant over time, because they convey some evolutionary advantage, likely because of the intensity of the Sun in the tropics.

People living in South India, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are all black. Some are the blackest people on Earth. Put an Irishman unprotected against the Sun in those places, and see what happens to him. HE gets vicious sunburn, and the locals don't. THAT's an example of skin color offering an advantage.

So it is not "racist" to believe that racial characteristics are a product of the physical environment people live in.

Big Mike said...

Has anyone besides me considered the possibility that the difference in COVID-19 mortality between African-Americans in the US and sub-Saharan Africans might be due to (1) malaria is endemic in sub-Saharan Africa, (2) HCQ is a common anti-malarial drug, and (3) before the FDA and CDC banned it, HCQ was showing a lot of promise as a cheap but very effective treatment for COVID-19?

Edmund said...

@Mikee

"a quick, pretty bad novel (Sixth Column) "

Heinlein was given a story written by John Campbell, the editor of the sf magazine that published most of his stuff, and asked to rewrite it for his magazine. Heinlein did it out of obligation and said that he had to remove a lot of racist sections of the story. It is notable that it initially published under a pseudonym.

Anna Keppa said...

John henry said...
"In case someone else notices, I already know that reported us kung flu deaths are artificially high and have been saying so here since 2020.

I also strongly suspect that reported Chinese rates are low.

But if we say the disparity is 100:1 instead of 1,000:1 my point remains unchanged."
-----

But if you really think the Chinese death rate was that low, you are being awfully, awfully gullible.

In any case the mortality rate in the US is around 350/100,000. (IF you accept CDC figures.)

Number of US fatalities = 1.17 million

US population = 330,000,00

number of 100,000 cohorts = 330,000,000 /100,000 = 3,300

therefore, deaths per 100,000 = 1,170,00/3300 = 350

And since we know hospitals were rewarded for reporting covid deaths, thus increaing them, while China has been notorious for years for dicking with their statistics, we are in no position to say China did better in managing the disease.

But Sweden certainly did!





Owen said...

hpudding @ 12:00: Are you saying that those who espouse a “colorblind” approach are just betraying their racism?

gilbar said...

If you presume however that skin color and eye shape should have any kind of biological significance beyond skin color or eye shape

so? people of dark brown skin color AREN'T more likely to have sickle cell anemia?
are You Sure?

gilbar said...

mikee said...
Yancey and others debating the genocidal intent of the COVID release: If I wanted to kill a whole lotta people, I'd release smallpox in multiple airports with international flights outbound

your logistics may vary...
PERSONALLY, IF i wasn't worried about little things like logistics, costs, evidence pointing my way, etc.
and *i* "wanted to kill a whole lotta people", i'd release 12 megaton h-bombs in multiple airports..
Pretty SURE *MY* final death toll would be WAY (WAY!) higher than yours).

But, as I've SAID.. the goal is NOT just to "kill a whole lotta people", that's the easy part.
What happens AFTER your small pox attack?

Oligonicella said...

Anyone giving any "benefit of the doubt" remember: these are the same people who welded their own citizens into their apartments and whose screams of anguish at the mental torture and slow starvation are (were?) readily available to witness on YouTube.

tolkein said...

Here's what the man himself had to say
The insinuation by
@nypost
and others that, as as result of my quoting a peer-reviewed paper on bio-weapons, I am somehow antisemitic, is a disgusting fabrication. I understand the emotional pain that these inaccurate distortions and fabrications have caused to many Jews who recall the blood libels of poison wells and the deliberate spread of disease as the pretext for genocidal programs against their ancestors. My father and my uncles, John F. Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy, devoted enormous political energies during their careers to supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism. I intend to spend my political career making those family causes my priority.

I will fight relentlessly alongside my Jewish brothers and sisters and friends against Jew-hatred and the demonization of Israel. I have just recorded an interview with
@RabbiShmuley
, whom the same New York Post just this month called, “the most famous Rabbi in America.” I have called upon the Biden Administration not to consummate a second Iran deal that would give that genocidal government a legitimized nuclear program. In the same interview, I called upon the Democratic Party to return to the strong, unconditional support of Israel that was the hallmark of the party under the leadership of my uncle and my father.

Today I had a great conversation with Rabbi Shmuley on Judaism and anti-Semitism. He had this to say: “Two things bothered me about the reports I had read about what you had said at that dinner on the upper east side. I said number one, again, this perception that you’re anti-Semitic. I know you’re not. And in fact, I know precisely the opposite is true. I know that in your heart you feel a great closeness to the Jewish people, to the Jewish community, and to Israel. And the second thing that bothered me is, that you’re being portrayed as you said before, a crank, as a loony toon…but you’re brilliant. You know your facts.”

May be he is a nutter - but the state of the US press is such that I am now suspicious of what they report unless it is independently verified.

walter said...

Anna Keppa said...And since we know hospitals were rewarded for reporting covid deaths, thus increaing them, while China has been notorious for years for dicking with their statistics, we are in no position to say China did better
--
Perverse incentive$, censorship and use of PCR test(inventor protested this) made for a complete mess in the stats.
US had hospital protocols also responsible for high death rate.

Mutaman said...

Althouse:

"but why go out of his way to name the Jews?"

Because Kennedy is either anti-semitic or he's a moron, or both.

Mutaman said...

It took a while but I knew sooner or later Kennedy's dopey conspiracy ideas would get around to the Jews.

Readering said...

The world population has passed 8 billion. There are perhaps 10 million Ashkenazi Jews in that figure. Why would RFK be talking about them?

Gospace said...

hpudding - fed or leftist troll? Is there actually a difference between the two?

But let’s talk a about some truths and falsehoods, aka lies, about the dreaded covid and the vaccine that isn’t. Remembering it’s all about numbers- and ferreting the real numbers is difficult since it paid off to manipulate them.

1. A Vitamin D blood level of 50 ng/ml or higher and your chances of dying from the dreaded covid are essentially zero. This was known early on. Official government lie- you get all the D you need from your diet, besides which the VA proved D doesn’t help by giving patients already in ICU a single 300000 IU dose and most of them died anyway. Uh- that’s not how it works.

2. Official lie (previously used with HIV and promulgated by none other than Fraudci) Everyone is equally at risk of catching and dying from the dreaded covid. Diamond Princess and USS Theodore Roosevelt debacle proved this false. Death correlated with age, and much more importantly, with comorbidities.

3. Lie- ivermectin is horse medicine! People shouldn’t take it! The medical practice in FL my one son goes to did not recommend the vax and prescribed ivermectin if a patient contracted the dreaded covid. They lost no patients to covid. They also recommended D even in sunny FL. But that wasn’t a sanctioned double blind study- it was simply people not dying. A practice in TXhad similar results of patients not dying by prescribing budesonide. No off label treatments were ever approved. Seems if a treatment exists a vaccine can’t get EUA, much less approved.

4. Masks worked! Numbers say otherwise despite hpudding’s religious belief in them. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth all throughout the covidiocy and into today “I masked, I social distanced, I got the jab, and I still got covid!” Which they boat, of course, on us evil unvaccinated. Spreading the disease asymptomatically. The only asymptomatic spread came from the vaxxed. Where I got my case late in the game.

5. Current truth as told by the numbers worldwide- The more you’re vaxxed, the more likely you are to get a new covid variant, AND, the more likely you are to die. Of anything. Death rate worldwide is higher for the multiply vaxxed.

Mutaman said...


Blogger tolkein said...

" Rabbi Shmuley : I said number one, again, this perception that you’re anti-Semitic. I know you’re not. And in fact, I know precisely the opposite is true. I know that in your heart you feel a great closeness to the Jewish people, to the Jewish community, and to Israel. And the second thing that bothered me is, that you’re being portrayed as you said before, a crank, as a loony toon…but you’re brilliant. You know your facts.”


Rabbi Shmuley "Boteach was a vocal supporter of (Michael) Jackson and was initially "dismissive of suggestions that Jackson's relationships with children have been anything other than wholesome. "Why would anyone believe those charges? They said anyone who spends that amount of time with kids has to be sick. Well, that's not an indictment of Michael Jackson, that's an indictment of our society!"[92] He said further: "I was friendly with Michael for a year before anyone knew about it. I did my own investigation. He never had sex with the child he made the settlement with, and there are no others."[36]

Wiki

Big Mike said...

There are perhaps 10 million Ashkenazi Jews in that figure. Why would RFK be talking about them?

Completeness. There were three identifiable groups of humans for whom the disease was less lethal than across the entire span of h. sapiens: Chinese (interesting, since the disease was bioengineered in a Chinese laboratory), Finns, and Ashkenazic Jews. He wasn't talking about them; apparently you need remedial help with reading comprehension. He was listing the groups of people for whom the disease was less lethal, and listed all of them.

Moron

Jim at said...

I really hope more people wake up and realize how useless and pernicious the conspiratorial mindset is. People need to leave their suspicions and paranoias behind where they do them the most good, if they do at all. But too many people can’t approach politics any other way. Sad.

Pudding wrote that. Without even the slightest hint at irony.

Weapons-grade projection, dude. It's all you've got.

Drago said...

Readering: "The world population has passed 8 billion. There are perhaps 10 million Ashkenazi Jews in that figure. Why would RFK be talking about them?"

Playing stupid, or actually just that stupid?

Drago said...

Althouse: "but why go out of his way to name the Jews?"

Mutaman: "Because Kennedy is either anti-semitic or he's a moron, or both."

Yep. The "he told us to drink bleach!" hoaxers are going to keep running with this obvious lie as well.

Its all they've got.

Drago said...

tolkien: "May be he is a nutter - but the state of the US press is such that I am now suspicious of what they report unless it is independently verified."

The lefty/LLR-lefty hoaxers believe they have a "winning" hoax hand with this one so, as with russia collusion and russian bounties on US soldiers and hookers peeing on beds and all the others, this latest smear will enter the Pantheon Of Debunked Lefty/LLR-lefty Lies That Will Forever Be True To The True Believers.

Drago said...

One aspect of this latest lefty/LLR-lefty hoax that cannot be discounted: the lefties/LLR-lefties are extremely defensive of their ChiCom allies so the motivation to cover for those allies always guarantees an over the top reaction whenever the ChiComs are part of the discussion.

Drago said...

Owen: "hpudding @ 12:00: Are you saying that those who espouse a “colorblind” approach are just betraying their racism?"

Given all the non-white "white supremacist" groups/individuals that have been helpfully identified by our marxist CRT-ist left/LLR-left amigos, it is now undeniable the "white supremacists" are easily the most diverse group/movement in United States history.

And its not even close.

Congratulations to the White Supremacists for this amazing demographic achievement!

Truly, an example for us all as we move to greater acceptance of a color blind society!

Hey, if the White Supremacists can do it, why cant the dems/LLR-left?

Perhaps even Sen Sheldon Whitehouse's racist all-white democratical RI yacht club will even take notice! (Not holding my breath on that one...)

Mutaman said...

Drago said...

"hoaxers are going to keep running with this obvious lie as well."


Kennedy's statement is on video, it was witnessed by numerous people and Kennedy doesn't deny that he made the statement. But in Drago's Know Nothing world, it's all a lie.

Mutaman said...

Tina Trent said...

"Including why he is making this the central platform of his race."

Because there is obviously something wrong with him.

Yancey Ward said...

"hpudding - fed or leftist troll? Is there actually a difference between the two?"

Troll definitely because to work for the government in law enforcement, one has to have an IQ of at least 95.

Mutaman said...


BothSidesNow said...

"Yet he is giving oxygen to one of the oldest antisemitic libels. After every horrible event, there will be those who say the Jews were spared. September 11 was a recent one, but one can back through history and finds others."


Bingo!
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-conspiracies-about-911-endure-20-years-later

Ironclad said...

For those that say “race is a social construct” I suggest getting behind the effort to eliminate drug testing effectiveness by race. I’m certain the virtue signaling that warms your heart will certainly compensate for the deaths related to drugs acting differently on groups - heart medicines come to mind.

Hpudding reads like very besotted bot if he thinks Hoetz has ANY credibility with anyone with an IQ over their shoe size.

Readering said...

Sorry, Drago, the Ashkenazi reference will enter the pantheon of RFK unforced nutter statements. Which he acknowledges with his "off the record" defense.

hpudding said...

So it is not "racist" to believe that racial characteristics are a product of the physical environment people live in.

It’s idiotic and a holdover from a racist past to believe that three or four broad categories corresponding to continents of origin and a loose sense of a couple specific, arbitrarily chosen external physical features have much more utility than they did to slave traders of the 17th and 18th centuries. And to politicians for many generations thereafter. But feel free to divide people up any way you want. Just admit that it’s arbitrary. Or in homage and servitude to that silly past.

hpudding said...

Lie- ivermectin is horse medicine! People shouldn’t take it!

It’s actually also for humans who get the types of diseases that horses get - namely wormlike parasites that live in your guts and crawl out of your butt. I do hope that if you had this sort of a disease that your anti-parasite medicine helped you.

But any antiviral effect is theoretical and based on in vitro studies that would be toxic if given to humans at the same concentrations.

But that’s right-wing science lab for you. Failing to account for how their bogus ideas work or don’t in people. That’s why Trump thought he could look smart by advocating internal use of disinfectants. You know, the cleansers that say “FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY.”

Right-wing science lab is like ordinary science lab, except for the part where you’re supposed to read the labels. Very deep thinkers, those right-wingers.

hpudding said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
hpudding said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Bruce Hayden said...

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ashkenazi:
“Ashkenazi, plural Ashkenazim, from Hebrew Ashkenaz (“Germany”), member of the Jews who lived in the Rhineland valley and in neighbouring France before their migration EASTWARD to Slavic lands (e.g., Poland, Lithuania, Russia) after the Crusades (11th–13th century)”

Stumbled into a series of videos a month or two ago by a Rabbi on the origins of the Ashkenazim. Through genetic testing and the like, it appears that their Jewish ancestors came out of Rome (where they had had a relatively privileged existence), migrated up the coast, through southern, then northern Italy, over the Alps, and into Rhineland. Again, they had a privileged existence for many years, with some towns allowing self rule, side by side with the mayor and the Christians. It was apparently the antisemitism of the Middle Ages that ultimately pushed them into Eastern Europe. Interestingly, the genes that they picked up in their migration had more of a northern Italian component than elsewhere. The other interesting thing is that the best preserved Ashkenazi chromosome is the Y - passed down through the male line, and is found in other Jewish populations. This is interesting because, at least in recent years, Judaism is considered to be passed down through the womb - through the female line. The genetic bottleneck that resulted in higher IQ, but also increased susceptibility to some genetic diseases came with the end of the Crusades, and great increase in antisemitism.

hpudding said...

As ALL physical characteristics are products of physiology and evolution, ALL have biological significance.

I do hope that whichever right-wing doctor or non-doctor told you this did his best to convince you that you should never get an infected appendix removed. You know, because the appendix has huge biological significance. It’s a physical characteristic, after all.

Just like skin color, eye shape, and whichever other characteristic conservatives want to fixate on and use to divide up people in their never-ending quest to misunderstand the world and society.

gilbar said...

off label treatments

Just to be clear.. off label treatments are ALWAYS BAD, and should NEVER be used..
Umm, unless you're using a chemical castration treatment off label... Then it's GREAT!!!
</sarc

traditionalguy said...

The interesting thing about the targeting of bio weapons is the amazing human immune system is what is keeping us all alive. Turning it against us is as evil an endeavor as has ever been seen. The DEPOPULATORS are the evil ones. Call them Globalists or call them eliminators of the miracle benefits of fossil fuels, they are the ones who are committing crimes against humanity with the help of Fake News.

Bruce Hayden said...

Could the Chinese have built a virus that is keyed to non-Chinese? Probably not, yet. As noted above, China is a multicultural country. One problem is that the majority Han are closer to the Koreans and Japanese, genetically (as well as early migration American Indians - the late migration Indians, including Inuit and Navajo are apparently descended from Mongolians), than to many of their other ethnicities.

One intriguing theory though is that blood type (O, A, B, AB) May effect transmissibility of the virus. This is fairly consistent among the Han. This may be due to the interaction between the virus and ACE2 receptors, which may vary slightly with blood type. Another theory is that the historical proximity of the bats and associated coronaviruses to these populations may have bred some weak immunity into the population.

My theory though is that the ChiComs lie, and if national shame is involved, as it was here, they will lie at epic levels. I think that it is highly likely that the virus originally escaped through sloppy lab work, from one the virology labs in Wuhan, and was able to take off because the local authorities tried to cover it up. But then, they started brutal quarantining, welding gates and doors shut on apartment buildings, until the virus had burned through it. Those who died were not well counted, because that would be an admission of the brutality of their quarantine methods, and an admission that it hit them early. It worked. Their brutal quarantine methods worked. But then the virus mutated to the more contagious Omicron variants, and it spread like wildfire through China faster than they could fight it. But the flip side of Omicron is that it was significantly less deadly than the early variants. So most of the Chinese ultimately caught the virus, but caught the less deadly Omicron variants, so a larger percentage survived. I don’t think that was planned, but rather just dumb luck.

traditionalguy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
traditionalguy said...

Stupid is as stupid does. The Finns and the Ashkenazi Jews genes were not being attacked by bio weapons getting the blacks and whites.

The only conspiracy theory from that would be thatbthe world will be ruled by sephardic Jews. Fine with me, I always liked them better.

Mark said...

Drago, given you think lefties are virtue signaling idiots, please tell us why you think they will vote for RFK given statements like this?

Marcus Bressler said...

hpudding has apparently never read The Bell Curve.

MarcusB. THEOLDMAN

Everyone is NOT exactly the same. And some groups are different from other groups in myriad ways. Pointing this out is not "right wing" but obvious to anyone who isn't a deranged leftist.

Darkisland said...

Statista used to have a nice table with Kung flu stats updated daily or weekly. That is where I got Chinese and US death rates. I looked for it before commenting but could not find it so numbers (4 and 4,000 per million) were rounded and from memory.

Wikipedia gives the following death rates per million. Updated today:

World 871

China 85

US 3,331


While we are there, Kenya has 182 and Nigeria has 14. Both countries have very high rates of HCQL use with tablets provided by govt and taken weekly to combat malaria. Probably just a coincidence, though. (koff, koff)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country#covid-19-pandemic-cases-and-mortality-by-country

John Henry

Darkisland said...

Blogger John henry said...

Kung flu death rates

China 4/100,000

US 4,000/100,000


Those should have been per million, not per 100,000.

Per Worldometers just now, where I was remembering the data from and had cited a number of times in comments over the past 3 years:

Kung flu deaths per million

World 885.2
USA 3,491
China 4

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Anna and I agreed more or less on the US death rate.

We agree that the Chinese reported rate is probably not accurate, though I don't know why she calls me gullible for pointing out that it may be off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude.

She does not provide any alternative number, though.

I pointed out, again, as I have for 3 years now, that the US number is way high, though I don't know how much too high. 2 times? 5? 20? The data has been so diddled that I don't think it is possible for anyone to know accurately including the CDC.

Anna, are you accepting the US number as being in the 3,000s somewhere? Or do you think it is overstated?

Age as a factor has been mentioned several times. Median age in China is 37.4. US median age is 38.1. Close enough as to probably be statistically the same. (CIA Factbook cited in Wikipedia)

John Henry

Drago said...

Dumb Lefty Mark: "Drago, given you think lefties are virtue signaling idiots, please tell us why you think they will vote for RFK given statements like this?"

Number one: lefties have conclusively demonstrated they are "virtue signaling idiots"...mostly by their repeated, serial, idiotic virtue signalling....so there's that.

Moving on: Dumb Lefties, such as yourself, are hivemind types and, thus, not only are you incapable of leaving the rhetorical and cognitive (such as it is) collective, you are utterly incapable of imagining why someone else might want to!

There is a significant chunk of democratical populist voters that are inclined to view negatively the undeniable corporate suckup/neocon affiliated/forever war/pro-crime/sexually psychotic/authoritarian and censorious deep staters that comprise the leadership of the dem party aligned with the transparently ridiculous legacy media.

What is that percentage? It fluctuates.

They are open to an RFK.

There is also still a small percentage (and shrinking on the dem side) of lower middle class and working class voters that pull the blue handle historically but are having second thoughts now. See: United Auto Workers

And there are floating coalitions of moms (normal moms, not fake "trans" moms) and families (and latinos and muslims and immigrants) that normally vote blue but see what the dems are doing to school children and will decide to try and put a stop to "the madness" and take the red pill. See: Youngkin

But I wouldn't worry about all those people leaving the democratical plantation if I were you.

The New Soviet Democratical Party appears to have a hammerlock on the "voting" processes, in true Stalinist fashion(!), and can probably manufacture as many votes as they need to "win"...along with a corrupted court system and completely corrupted DOJ/FBI to make sure no one gets "out of line" after the next "fortified" "election".

And you'll have plenty of GOPe-ers lining up to help you out as well!

So there you go!

Gospace said...

So it seems that every anti-parasitic drug tried seems to have had positive results in reducing covid damage. Not just ivermectin and HCQ. But hey, let's ignore all the evidence of that and just claim the worthless vaccine actually functions as a vaccine and that masks and social distancing worked wonders and it was only us unvaccinated causing the vaccinated to get the dreaded covid not just once after getting vaccinated, but multiple times!

None of my unvaxxed acquaintances has had covid more then once- while most of my vaxxed ones have had it more then once. Especially the ones that bought into the whole scam and received multiple jabs.

The official treatment approved by the powers that be- remdesivir - killed people on a regular basis. Which I suppose cures covid in a way. Taking ivermectin as recommended by the Front Line Critical Care Alliance didn't. I only personally know a dozen or so that took ivermectin for covid- none were hospitalized, none died. All of them also had their Vitamin D levels checked- like me - and all were up in the 50-70 ng/ml range.

Use of anti-parasite meds off label haven't really been studied much. Can't recall who, but one of the people who looked at the numbers noted something curious. In areas where HCQ is taken on a regular basis to prevent malaria- taken before you have parasites- there seem to fewer cancers of all kinds, age adjusted. After all, it's taken that way mostly in Africa, where the population is younger, and for other reasons, people don't get as old... But age adjusted cancer rates are lower. HCQ is used for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, auto immune diseases. And cancer occurs when the immune system is fooled and allows the cancer cells to proliferate. And the dreaded covid attacks the immune system and "long covid" appears to be an auto-immune type disease...

IMHO- everyone should be supplementing with Vitamin D and be regularly tested to check their blood levels to make sure 1. They're getting enough to stay in the now generally recognized optimal range and 2. Aren't taking so much that they're suffering from Vitamin D intoxication. Yes, there were a few people taking 100,000 IU daily during the covidiocy because they heard it was good- but didn't do any research on proper dosing. And it's entirely possible based on several people I've read who've looked into it that we should be doing the same for HCQ.

And a real good case can be made for everyone to be taking metformin daily.

jim5301 said...

Where are the resident antisemites? Dancing naked in the heat? Sometimes this blog disappoints

Free Manure While You Wait! said...

"I was told that race was a social construct."

It is.

"How much human variation falls within any population, and how much between "races"?

Richard Lewontin did an amazing piece of work which he published in 1972, in a famous article called "The Apportionment of Human Variation." Literally what he tried to do was see how much genetic variation showed up at three different levels.

One level was the variation that showed up among or between purported races. And the conventional idea is that quite a bit of variation would show up at that level. And then he also explored two other levels at the same time. How much variation occurred within a race, but between or among sub-groups within that purported race.

So, for instance, in Europe, how much variation would there be between the Germans, the Finns and the Spanish? Or how much variation could we call local variation, occurring within an ethnicity such as the Navaho or Hopi or the Chatua.

And the amazing result was that, on average, about 85% of the variation occurred within any given group. The vast majority of that variation was found at a local level. In fact, groups like the Finns are not homogeneous - they actually contain, I guess one could literally say, 85% of the genetic diversity of the world.

Secondly, of that remaining 15%, about half of that, seven and a half percent or so, was found to be still within the continent, but just between local populations; between the Germans and the Finns and the Spanish. So, now we're over 90%, something like 93% of variation actually occurs within any given continental group. And only about 6-7% of that variation occurs between "races," leaving one to say that race actually explains very little of human variation.

You know, geography perhaps is the better way to explain that 15% more than race or anything else. For instance, there can be accumulations of genes in one place in the globe, and not another.

But, for the most part, you know that basic human plan is really a basic human plan, and is found almost anywhere in the world. Most variation is found locally within any group. Why don't we believe that? Because we happen to ascribe great significance to skin color, and a few other physical cues that tell us that that's not so. And, in fact though, these may happen to be a few of the things that do widely vary from place to place. But, that's not true under the skin. Rather, quite another story is told by looking at genes under the skin.

https://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-01-07.htm

Free Manure While You Wait! said...

"Though looking at my family you would not know it. Perhaps we're really Irish? We do like a good song after a half bottle of whiskey. (Just kidding, to all my Irish friends. None of you can actually sing.)"

This is why I come here. Thanks.

Hey Skipper said...

@John Henry:

Kung flu death rates

China 4/100,000

US 4,000/100,000


Per Johns Hopkins University, the US Mao Tse Lung death rate is 341/100,000.

But wait, there's more. This morning's NYT News Digest (via email) reports that US excess mortality has declined to historical average for the first time since MTL arrived. It also says this:

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.


Emphasis added. Nowhere does David Leonhardt, the author draw the glaringly obvious conclusion: if one-third of recent MTL deaths are incorrectly attributed to MTL, when they have become relatively rare, then why shouldn't we also conclude that the but-for MTL mortality is more like 200/100,000.

And that's before getting to the veracity of Chinese stats.

Joanne Jacobs said...

The Covid mortality rates for Finland (.68%) and Israel (.26%) are lower than average, but not the lowest in the world. China is .12% and South Korea .11%. New Zealand is .13%. Denmark is .26% and the Netherlands .27%.
https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid

Age of the population is the biggest risk factor, followed by obesity.

hpudding said...

“IMHO-“

Yeah, your opinion is definitely humble.

No one has ever gone to you to treat a malady they had. Nor relied on you to interpret a medical study. When that changes let us know.

Your need to sound smart on the internet doesn’t change that, but is so strong that you don’t even realize how far from humble it makes you to spout the nonsense DIY medical confabulation that you love so much.

Cameron said...

"Blogger William said...
Mostly I'm confused...I don't think Kennedy is quite as bad as the articles suggest, but his remarks were stupid and, one gathers, factually wrong......I guess it would be possible to genetically engineer diseases to target certain ethnic groups and not others. Are we or the Chinese actually doing it? It seems like something that the Chinese would consider more tactically useful than a diverse country like America. One thing I do know with absolute certainty is that the Chinese will never give a full and honest accounting of what happened in Wuhan."

He's factually correct and even provided the studies that say exactly what he said.

The problem is he's a lawyer involved in scientific based litigation, so speaks that way instead of as a politician. He isn't worried about how the jewish lobby will hyperventilate about needing to be treated with kid gloves due to the precedent of the Holocaust. He simply spoke facts without worrying about feelings.

No one honestly believes that he is implying the jews were complicit with the Chinese in developing Covid, yet that is the narrative the media is running with.

As for whether its feasible its certainly been a literary device. I know of it from Area 7 by Michael Reilly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_7_(novel)) but I've seen other people reference that Heinlann used it way earlier.

Does anyone really believe the Chinese are not working on biological warfare that has a lessened impact on Chinese ? Lessened impacts on other ethnicities would be by accident rather than design, but would it be pure coincidence that a virus released from a Chinese Lab has less impact on ethnic chinese than other races ?

Cameron said...

"Blogger MalaiseLongue said...
"COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and . . . black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and . . . Chinese."

Apart from whether this is or is not a true statement, does RFK Jr. actually say here that Ashkenazi Jews are "not Caucasians"? I don't find that assertion in what he is quoted as having said, but I am seeing that accusation in a number of places.

Maybe he is thinking that Ashkenazi Jews are not Caucasians, or maybe he's not thinking any such thing. Maybe he is thinking that Ashkenazi Jews are a subset of Caucasians, or maybe he is having no such thought.

In any case, how does the accusation that he sees Ashkenazi Jews as "not Caucasians" rest on anything but mind reading?"

He makes a distinction between Caucasians and Ashkenazi Jews because the paper he is citing distinguished between them and showed disparate effects. Its not mind reading when you're quoting a research paper.

He's not making the distinction - he's reporting it.

Tina Trent said...

Cameron: if a Kennedy can't even handle a drunken pub fart-fest, how will he fare in a White House presser? The man blazons his messianic legacy like Jackie O's blood-splattered dress (she had every right to do so under the circumstances: it's deranged and morbid for him to continue to waggle bloody and disgraced Camelot, including his father's murder, as a campaign strategy).

If he sincerely wishes to budge an Overton window, he should start with his family tree. After all, he's made it a core campaign issue.