Part II
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s battle against vaccines -- and against the institutions that promote them -- goes back to at least the mid-2000s, as we explain in the first article of this series. But the arrival of COVID-19 gave the environmental attorney fresh grounds to intensify his attacks and a...
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Deep Misrepresentation of Early Pandemic Genomic Study
One of Kennedy’s most notable recent comments is the false claim that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may have been “targeted” to attack Caucasians and Black people — and that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are the “most immune” to the disease.
“In fact, COVID-19 — there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said while talking about bioweapons and “ethnically targeted microbes,” during a
press dinner in New York, made public by
the New York Post. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
It is not known, he added, “whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the … racial and ethnic differential and impact to that.” As we will explain, studies do not support his claims.
A nurse supports a patient as they walk in the COVID-19 alternative care site, built into a parking garage, at Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nevada, on Dec. 16, 2020. Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images.
His comments, published the morning of July 15,
were widely and strongly criticized and condemned.
Hours after publication, Kennedy took to Twitter, which is now known as X, to defend himself. He
said the New York Post story was “mistaken,” since he had “never, ever suggested” that SARS-CoV-2 “was targeted to spare Jews,” referring to the
Post’s headline.
But then he added that he had “accurately pointed out … 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.” His post included a link to a
study published in July 2020, not 2021.
As
we’ve written, all U.S. intelligence agencies agree that COVID-19 is not the result of a biological weapon.
In addition, the study’s
findings “never supported” Kennedy’s claim, one of the authors
told CBS News.
The study was done early in the pandemic, before any treatment was available, and the
authors wanted to find out if genetic factors contributed to COVID-19 susceptibility, since that information could help in the development of personalized treatments.
But the study didn’t test whether certain gene variants actually make people more susceptible to the coronavirus — and it did not find that “COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races” because of genetic factors, as Kennedy claimed.
Instead, the authors probed around 81,000 human genomes for mutations in two proteins that allow the coronavirus to enter cells, ACE2 and TMPRSS2. They then used computer programs to identify 124 mutations that might make COVID-19 worse, and looked to see how common those mutations were in different populations.
The team found that certain groups, specifically African or African American and Non-Finnish Europeans, were more likely to have these possibly harmful variants than others — and that for ACE2, no mutations were identified in genomes from Ashkenazi Jewish or Amish populations (East Asian, along with Finnish, South Asian and Latino populations, were in between).
But as the authors acknowledged, the results only “suggested possible associations” between certain gene variants and COVID-19 susceptibility — and needed to be validated in COVID-19 patients.
One genomics expert
noted on X that it’s possible the paper’s findings simply reflect the bias in the genome sampling, since very few genomes were from Ashkenazi Jewish or Amish people, while far more were from African or African American or European people.
Moreover, most of the possibly harmful mutations are rare in the populations — often 0.01% or less — so they hardly represent a good way of creating an ethnically-targeted bioweapon, even if the findings were to be validated.
“Even if there are links to certain genetic makeups that MAY put you at higher or lower risk,” Florian Krammer, a virologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai,
told PolitiFact, “these influences have a low effect size.”
Another
study, published in April 2021, which did perform some biochemical assays to try to confirm some results, found ACE2 variants that increase or decrease COVID-19 susceptibility “to be rare, which is consistent with the overall low number of ACE2 receptor population level polymorphisms.” The researchers also said they didn’t find any statistically significant difference in the frequency of ACE2 variants in different population groups.
Studies have found that racial disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths are explained mostly by structural social and economic inequities, such as access to quality healthcare, not by genetic differences. Research has not suggested that Jewish or Chinese people have any kind of genetic “immunity” to COVID-19.
This is not the first time Kennedy has made controversial comments about Jewish people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a rally against vaccine mandates in 2022, he
said Jewish people were in a better situation in Nazi Germany than people in the U.S. under public health policies adopted to slow the spread of COVID-19. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he
said.
During a hearing convened by House Republicans in July, Kennedy
denied accusations of racism and antisemitism, and in an exchange with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida, falsely claimed he had
“never ever” compared public health measures during the pandemic with Hitler’s Germany.
Interesting that Kennedy is constantly denying he did say what he said, and his personal organization supports.
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