Ethnically Targeted Bioweapons?

Politically motivated shitstorms hit the interwebs

Robert Kennedy Jr recently caused quite a tempest in the “progressive” media goo (his sister Kerry stated to NBC that she “strongly condemned his deplorable and untruthful remarks”). His crime - he publicly mentioned that ethnic targeting was studied with respect to whatever was the covid-19 poisoning agent.

Of course, the woke tantrum about this subject is a politically motivated slander. To them an ideological opponent is a racist when he mentions anything that has to do with race or ethnicity. Or mentions anything at all. Or exists.

However, if you are wondering whether ethnically targeted bioweapons are a thing, let’s look into this. This topic is definitely studied and discussed in many press, science, government and military reports. RFK Jr. is perfectly correct to state this. He did not suggest the covid-19 poisoning agent was preferentially designed to protect Ashkenazi population. This is also correct. It wasn’t, really.

Here is a review article on this topic published by Scientific American in 2020. It mentioned an international Rockefeller-affiliated initiative looking precisely into the issue. Nobody accused them of racism as far as I know.

There are several published studies on the ethnic differences in the susceptibility to covid illness, here is one of them:

Link to the study here.

In this study, we investigated genetic susceptibility to COVID-19 by examining DNA polymorphisms in ACE2 and TMPRSS2 (two key host factors of SARS-CoV-2) from ~ 81,000 human genomes. We found unique genetic susceptibility across different populations in ACE2 and TMPRSS2. 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. Unique but prevalent polymorphisms (including p.Val160Met (rs12329760), an expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL)) in TMPRSS2, offer potential explanations for differential genetic susceptibility to COVID-19 as well as for risk factors, including those with cancer and the high-risk group of male patients. We further discussed that polymorphisms in ACE2 or TMPRSS2 could guide effective treatments (i.e., hydroxychloroquine and camostat) for COVID-19.

The study showed a VERY WEAK ethnic differences in susceptibility to covid illness and its severity (whatever the true cause of it). Any ethnic based “risk” identified was much weaker than the risk associated with, for example, male gender. Thus having more ACE2 receptors overall was a larger risk than a particular configuration of them that a university lab can measure and call a “genetic subtype”. The study was conducted by several labs at the Cleveland Clinic and funded by the NIH.

Here is a story by The Guardian, which interestingly points to RNA interference to achieve the objective of ethnic/genetic targeting:

Rather than specifically triggering the toxic effects of organisms such as anthrax, the Sunshine project warned that weapons based on a new medical technique called RNA interference could shut down vital genes… "If as little as 10% or 20% of a target population would be affected, this would wreak havoc among enemy soldiers on a battlefield or in an enemy society as a whole," the group said.

The % of ethnic targeting proposed as a minimal success here is orders of magnitude higher than what was demonstrated for covid ethnic affinities (1% or far less).

The same article contained a rational counter-argument:

Others say the concerns are exaggerated. "Trying to find a weapon that affects quite a few of one ethnic group and none of another ethnic group is just not going to happen," says David Goldstein, who studies population genetics at University College London. "Because all groups are quite similar you will never get something that is highly selective. The best you would probably do is something that kills 20% of one group and 28% of another."

Mr. Goldstein has a point. Targeting by ethnic or population genetics is tricky as there are few ethnic-specific genes, people of the target ethnicity may or may not have them, and many off-target effects with technologies used for targeting.

Speaking of “rational” - RationalWiki is a hilarious read on this topic:

A number of organisations have warned against the danger that such a weapon could be created, including the British Medical Association, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and a subcommittee of the US Congress, and the idea has been reported by various publications. More dubiously, it has been claimed that some existing viruses such as HIV were developed to target specific ethnic groups. Conspiracy theories about racial bioweapons feed on a combination of deep-seated fears: suspicion of genetic technology; the worry that the government is trying to capture deeply personal information (such as genetic codes); and government or institutional racism.

They add “white dog” and “racist AI” to the list of ethnically targeted weapons.

Reading this almost makes me believe that ethnic genetic targeting is actually quite feasible, since they are adamant it is a racist conspiracy. This leads me to think that maybe I should reconsider my prior conclusion. At a minimum, I strongly believe that ethnic genetic targeting has been attempted numerous times by all participants in the Trillion dollar global bio-chemical weapons industry. Of course, the existence of this industry is a crazy conspiracy theory to begin with, because these are an internationally prohibited class of weapons. Thus, no government in the world would do such as thing as to lie, hide those programs in academia, “public health”, “ecological research”, outsource them to foreign contractors (like Wuhan) and lavishly fund them for decades.

Overall conclusion so far is that ethnic genetic differences are too diffuse to make a good target, however, there are other, potentially better resolved targets. Targeting microbiome differences rather than differences in the DNA of the host has been identified as one of them.

It also may be possible to engineer a bioweapon to target populations with a specific microbiome profile; any adversary that begins to better parse, store, and analyze the data that are increasingly being collected about human microbiomes will also be in a better position for probabilistic targeting of microbiome threats (see also Chapter 7, Targeting)

Different ethnic communities are known to have distinct microflora - the microbial inhabitants of the human digestive tract, nose, mouth, throat, sinuses and skin. Those organisms are non-human cells, there are in fact more of them than human cells in a body, and they have their own genetics. They live in balance with the human cells and are in fact vital to our metabolism, energy, mental and neurologic function and overall immune system function. When I worked in pharma R&D, one of the requirements of the Japanese regulators for western drug approvals in Japan was to do clinical studies in Japanese subjects. 100% ethnically Japanese immigrants to the US were not qualified to enroll after they resided in the US for 18+ months. The regulators never explained this seemingly capricious requirement, but now I know what they were after. The true Japanese microbiome, which would change over with a relocation of the person to a different continent. Change of the microflora quite literally changes the person’s body.

Other studies looked for differences in susceptibility in different blood type groups and found that some blood types fared better than others. Obviously, blood types have genetic and ethnic components. Many other ethnic-genetic targets have been proposed, such as various enzymes and enzymatic pathways.

Here is another frequently cited study on the topic of ethnic susceptibility to covid “virus” due to electrostatic attraction of ACE2 polymorphisms. This study used different genomic databases and looked for different markers compared to the first study references in this post, which underscores that all these studies are highly dependent on the underlying datasets. However, they also found slight protective advantage to Ashkenazi Jewish population:

The susceptibility of different populations to SARS-CoV-2 infection is not yet understood. Here, we combined ACE2 coding variants' analysis in different populations and computational chemistry calculations to probe the effects on SARS-CoV-2/ACE2 interaction. ACE2-K26R; which is most frequent in Ashkenazi Jewish population decreased the SARS-CoV-2/ACE2 electrostatic attraction. On the contrary, ACE2-I468V, R219C, K341R, D206G, G211R increased the electrostatic attraction; ordered by binding strength from weakest to strongest. The aforementioned variants are most frequent in East Asian, South Asian, African and African American, European, European and South Asian populations, respectively.

The protective differences found were very weak:

The K26R variant which decreases the ACE2-virus binding was found to be most frequent in the Ashkenazi Jewish population (1.2%).

All other ethnic effects found were smaller than 1%, and having male gender carried a much larger risk than any specific ethnicity. Given these tiny rates of the specific ACE2 polymorphism incidence, I started thinking - why are they attributed to the entire ethnicities and races in these studies? An average Ashkenazi Jewish male would be at a far greater risk than an average African American female, despite what this paper says, because the incidence of the protective or disadvantageous polymorphisms is so small. However, for those individuals who are the carriers of K26R the protective difference is indeed quite large. This is because K26R is not at all equally likely to be found in every Ashkenazi Jewish person. So why include all Ashkenazi into the conclusions? Or all African Americans or all Europeans?

This is the product of how the genomics databases are set up. The ethnicity (plus gender and age) of the subjects who contributed the genomic data is a field in the database, while any other information about them, their phenotype, or their family relationships are not. It is off-limits certainly due to data privacy regulations. The self-declared ethnicity is the only phenotype grouping more granular than gender that is possible when using these datasets in published academic research.

The K26R polymorphism is so sparsely found because it is a familial inherited marker first, it only happens to be associated with Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity. Same is true for other polymorphisms and markers studied. They are inherited genetic traits, and people who have them have common genetic lineage. Because of the general trend for marriages within one’s ethnicity, they tend to be found in some ethnicities more often than others.

Could designer choices be part of making a poisoning agent based on known (to them) familial genetic markers? Yes. A designer’s personal bias, or biases of those who pay him are not terribly unusual in making new products or technologies.

While not terribly dangerous overall, the illness was experienced by many, and even excluding the effect of the hospital murder protocols, some people still fared worse then others. Some had to seek hospital care while others had barely a sniffle. Many studies showed associations with certain genetic markers which are familial traits. Where these markers random happenstance, or designer choices? Somebody should ask these questions.

Art for today: At Sunrise, oil on panel, 9x12 in.