RFK Jr on ethnic allele frequencies
« previous post | next post »
tl;dr: RFK Jr. asserted recently that "COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people", while "the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese", also implying that this "racial and ethnic differential" means that the virus may have been created as an "ethnic bio weapon". In response to objections, he defended his assertion on the basis of total misrepresentation of a scientific publication, itself problematic. Details below…
Jon Levine, "RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews", NY Post 7/15/2023:
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dished out wild COVID-19 conspiracy theories this week during a press event at an Upper East Side restaurant, claiming the bug was a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
Kennedy floated the idea during a question-and-answer portion of raucous booze and fart-filled dinner at Tony’s Di Napoli on East 63d Street.
“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact,” Kennedy hedged.
There's been a fair amount of mostly-negative reaction in the mass media, with more varied responses in social media.
RFK Jr. defended himself on twitter:
There are at least three problems with this defense.
The first (and least important) problem is that he gets the date of the cited paper wrong — it's not a "2021 study", it's Yuan Hou et al., "New insights into genetic susceptibility of COVID-19: an ACE2 and TMPRSS2 polymorphism analysis", BMC Med. July 15 2020. (Submitted April 25, 2020…) The date matters only because it was relatively early in the pandemic, and the paper's proposed genetic connections are prospective and speculative, based only on the authors' ideas about what molecular mechanisms might turn out to be crucial. Those speculations also motivate the paper's proposal that hydroxychloroquine would be an "effective treatment" — which turned out not to be true.
Facts about actual infection rates by ethnicity are missing from the paper that RFK Jr. cited, perhaps because they were not available in the spring of 2020. When those facts became available, they mostly contradict the paper's 2020 predictions and RFK Jr.'s 2023 claims.
The second (and slightly more important) problem is that RFK Jr., contrary to his defense, did very clearly imply the the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.
He starts by stating directly (and falsely) that the virus is "targeted to attack" certain ethnic groups and spare others:
COVID 19 is targeted
to attack
uh Caucasians and
and uh and
uh Black people.
The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews
and uh and Chinese.
And then he goes on to raise the question of "whether it was deliberately targeted or not", strongly implying a positive conclusion by citing "papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential" and asserting that the Chinese and the Ukrainians are developing "ethnic bio weapons":
And but ((might)) we don't know whether it was deliberately targeted that or not
but there are papers out there that show the
you know the um
the racial and ethnic differential and impact to that.
We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bio weapons
and we are developing ethnic bio weapons.
That's what all those labs in the Ukraine are about.
They're collecting Russian DNA, they're collecting Chinese DNA
so that we can target people by race and
Finally, the third (and most important) problem with his defense is that he's massively misrepresenting the article he cites in support of his assertion about ethnic targeting. As mentioned above, the article is based on speculative possible relations between genomic variations and susceptibility to infection — but the big issue is the tiny rates of the cited variants across all the surveyed populations. Here's panel b of figure 1 from that paper:
CAPTION: Distribution of 61 deleterious variants in the ACE2 coding region identified in gnomAD (v3). Polyphen2 > 0.96 and CADD scores > 20 as cutoff identify putative deleterious variants. The upper panel using 3 colors shows the functional domains of ACE2, and the height of the vertical line represents the number of populations that carry this variant. The lower heatmap shows the allele frequencies (color key) of a variant across different populations.
Zeroing in on the "color key" for that "lower heatmap":
In other words, the maximum population frequency of any the variants surveyed is 1 person in 100 — and for the EUR population, most of the variants are more in the range between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 100,000.
This is yet another example of the pernicious effects of statistical ignorance and the propensity towards what I've called "grouping-think". Some relevant links:
The Pirahã and us, 10/6/2007
"Mandatory treatment for generic plurals?", 9/13/2009
"Grouping-think", 6/9/2022
"Generic Plurals Considered Harmful", 6/20/2022
"The psychology of thinking discretely", 10/20/2022
Update — more about the alleged Ukrainian biolabs here.
AntC said,
July 17, 2023 @ 7:50 am
Thanks Mark, but errm I'm looking in vain for a language-y angle here. Are we now bad-research-maliciously-mis-cited-Log?
and the Ukrainians …
The Ukrainians have/are developing bioweapons that 'target' Caucasians, which includes Russians and other Eastern Europeans, but not errm Ukrainians? I see Finns are less susceptible too. What does 'Caucasian' denote in this batshit-crazy racism?
Mark Liberman said,
July 17, 2023 @ 7:58 am
@AntC: I'm looking in vain for a language-y angle here.
Try looking through the "relevant links" at the end. There's a cluster of lexical, semantic, and pragmatic issues around generic and group reference, ways of thinking and talking about properties of distributions, etc.
In the particular case of RFK Jr.'s defense, there's also a pragmatic question about what it means to "imply" something.
Mark Liberman said,
July 17, 2023 @ 8:08 am
@AntC: What does 'Caucasian' denote in this batshit-crazy racism?
As far as I can tell, for RFK Jr. it means "people like me".
The paper he cites does not use the term "Caucasian". The categories discussed are
AFR, African/African-American; AMI, Amish; AMR, Latino/Admixed American; ASJ, Ashkenazi Jewish; EAS, East Asian; FIN, Finnish; EUR, Non-Finnish European; SAS, South Asian; PNA, population not assigned
…and those categories are taken directly from the three genomic databases that the paper relied on, which were
Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD v3: gnomad.broadinstitute.org, covering 9 geographical areas), (ii) Exome Sequencing Project (ESP: evs.gs.washington.edu/EVS/), and (iii) 1000 Genomes Project (1KGP, http://www.internationalgenome.org
The classification criteria used in those datasets are complex, varied, and basically irrelevant to ethnic stereotypes anyhow.
Joe said,
July 17, 2023 @ 8:19 am
Well here's a language angle: "Caucasians", "Black people", "Ashkenazi Jews", and "Chinese", which he used successively in the span of two sentences, sound like they're from four completely different vocabulary lists.
Aardvark Cheeselog said,
July 17, 2023 @ 10:23 am
Alas, I find myself skimming OP, impatient with Yet Another deconstruction of loonieness of RFK Jr and his mysterious hold on public attention.
But I followed the link to the item about the Pirahã and read that with some interest. The topic itself is not news to me, exactly, but the comparison with innumeracy specifically about probability and statistics was novel.
To us, surely, the natural numbers are as natural as air. It's right there in the name! "The natural numbers alone are God's, all else is the work of Man." Or words to that effect. I took the course for math majors, where you learn how to prove that 2 + 2 = 4.(1) Ideas like "you can count things" and "you can tell if two collections are the same" and "you can tell if one collection is bigger than another" are presented as "primitive notions" in that context. You don't prove them, you use them as the stuff of which proofs are made.
But we don't have any such primitive intuitions about median versus mode versus average, and don't even get started on variance. Probabilistic reasoning is one of those things that you get intuition for, if at all, through exercise and practice.
What the case of the Pirahã suggests is that the "natural" numbers aren't natural at all. Which maybe that's not a very original observation but it's new to me and my mind is a bit boggled by it.
(1) I didn't do too terribly well at it. I think the professor gave me a C because he felt sorry for me and admired the attempt.
Peter B. Golden said,
July 17, 2023 @ 10:44 am
RFK Sr. in his youth (just after graduating law school) worked for the infamous Joe McCarthy (who was a family friend and even dated several of the Kennedy daughters). He lasted about 6 months working for McCarthy, heaving, apparently, because of clashes with Roy Cohn, who was later also the legal mentor of DJ Trump. RFK Sr. had the capacity to grow and became an outstanding political figure. RFK Jr. seems to be sliding into some deep pit of racism and anti-semitism… or is simply bat-shit crazy…or all combined.
David Marjanović said,
July 17, 2023 @ 11:44 am
Our esteemed host has often dissected recordings like this to discuss what various more or less famous figures really said exactly. Here's a beautiful example from 2005.
Missed opportunity to call him "DJT Sr."…
AntC said,
July 18, 2023 @ 2:21 am
@myl There's a cluster of lexical, semantic, and pragmatic issues around generic and group reference, ways of thinking and talking about properties of distributions, etc.
I think you're attributing far too much intelligence to JFK Jr. He had an agenda already. He (or some acolyte on a QAnon channel) found "papers out there" (which might be only the one paper you identify, but I doubt it [**]) with a word-salad that could be plugged into the agenda. Nobody went looking for other research to confirm or contradict the interpretation. If this paper hadn't suitable word-salad, they'd have simply kept looking for some paper that did.
Thanks for the education on the cluster, etc; but all I need to know is that JFK Jr said it.
And nobody who's listening to JFK Jr will care a hoot for your cluster, etc.
[**] Are you sure there isn't another easily-found paper — perhaps actually published 2021 — perhaps this one — with equally suitable word-salad? JFK Jr's tweet "furin cleave docking site" comes from the swirl (mostly 2021) of linkages to the Wuhan Bat research laboratories/from which the COVID virus escaped — multiple "allegedly"s to all that, of course. [see wikip on 'COVID19 lab leak theory']
Seth said,
July 18, 2023 @ 2:41 am
There's a recurrent problem which runs along these lines:
1) A politician hated by a faction says something garbled or full of misunderstandings or generally confused.
2) The faction's media interprets the statement in the most uncharitable way, to make the political sound as hateful as possible.
3) Nobody in the faction wants to defend the politician, because why are you being an apologist for hatred? Lesser version – how can you defend the [garble/misunderstanding/confusion] as meaningful.
For example, I have zero support of RFK Jr's politics, but what he said here: "COVID 19 is targeted to attack uh Caucasians and and uh and uh Black people.", I think in context he was using "targeted" more at the technical medical sense ("that virus is *targeted* against XYZ mechanism"), as "differentially affects", rather than meaning "was deliberately engineered". It's a pretty common usage in a medical context, which he'd see extensively even if he's a crank. That's why he then contrasts to the more common English meaning here "And but ((might)) we don't know whether it was deliberately targeted that or not".
This has gotten reported as if he claimed definitely that it was engineered, capitalizing on the confusion between the two senses of "targeted".
Again, it's a mess of statement and wrong in a lot of ways, but not quite as insanely bigoted as media distortions would have it.
AntC said,
July 18, 2023 @ 4:36 am
There's ready explanations (of course prior to the availability of a vaccine) for why certain races/certain countries would experience differing rates of serious morbidity and mortality from the virus: being a respiratory infection, it 'targets' (scare quotes) those with already compromised health status: obesity, heart disease, smoking, obesity, poor diet, respiratory illness, obesity. So (going by general life expectancy as a proxy) that's 'Caucasians' in Western countries, African-ethnicity in both U.S.A. (poor diet) and Africa (inadequate diet); but Finns not so much (higher life expectancy), Asians not so much (adequate diet, not over-refined), Ashkenazy Jews probably not (at least in Israel higher life expectancy), etc.
And that's not considering the incompetence of certain governments' response to the challenge: we might find in the long run China measures pretty poorly — not that we'll ever see the data.
IOW JFK Jr might have blurted out something like a reasonably accurate prediction, but with entirely the wrong explanation; and so with entirely wrong approaches to 'fix' anything.
AntC said,
July 18, 2023 @ 5:40 am
aaargh /JFK Jr/RFK Jr/ braino
Mark Liberman said,
July 18, 2023 @ 8:04 am
@AntC: I think you're attributing far too much intelligence to JFK Jr. He had an agenda already
No doubt. But motived misunderstanding is still misunderstanding.
Are you sure there isn't another easily-found paper — perhaps actually published 2021 — perhaps this one — with equally suitable word-salad? JFK Jr's tweet "furin cleave docking site" comes from the swirl (mostly 2021) of linkages to the Wuhan Bat research laboratories/from which the COVID virus escaped — multiple "allegedly"s to all that, of course. [see wikip on 'COVID19 lab leak theory']
There are many relevant papers — and indeed, we need to look beyond the link that RFK Jr offered to find any reference to the "furin cleave docking site". But I limited myself to examining the paper that he specifically cited as his basis for the ethnic targeting claim.
Mark Liberman said,
July 18, 2023 @ 8:16 am
@AntC: IOW JFK Jr might have blurted out something like a reasonably accurate prediction, but with entirely the wrong explanation; and so with entirely wrong approaches to 'fix' anything.
But in fact the prediction is substantially false to fact, because some of the irrelevant co-variates go in the opposite direction — e.g. orthodox Jews had substantially higher infection and death rates than other groups, worldwide, apparently due to vaccination resistance and social gathering practices. Ditto, apparently, for the Amish.
rpsms said,
July 18, 2023 @ 1:14 pm
The Ukraine reference is probably just a repeat of Russian claims that Ukrainians are using NATO biolabs to engineer Russian-killing mosquitos.