RFK Jr. and “Ethnically Targeted” Viruses

To support his notion that SARS-CoV-2 might have been constructed to attack certain racial or ethnic groups, RFK Jr. referred to a scientific study. What did that study really show?

On July 14, 2023, during a press event at Tony’s Di Napoli on East 63^rd Street, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “There is an argument that [Covid-19] is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Kennedy then went one step further. “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not.” RFK Jr. later referred to a study that was published, according to him, in 2021.  

About a week later, on July 20, RFK Jr. appeared before Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, where he reiterated his false claims, again referring to that study. To support his claim, one Republican committee member insisted that this study be placed into the Congressional record.

What did this study show?

Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic were interested in understanding who was most susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 virus. They knew that the virus attached to and entered cells via two proteins that sit on the cell’s surface. They also knew that the structure of these two proteins might differ among different populations (so-called genetic polymorphisms), making some people more susceptible to Covid-19. To answer this question, they examined 81,000 human genomes. Based on their findings, they predicted that the groups most susceptible to Covid-19 were Africans, African Americans, and non-Finnish Europeans; those somewhat less susceptible were Latino, East Asian, Finnish, and South Asians; and those least susceptible were the Amish and Ashkenazi Jews.

RFK Jr.’s dangerous extrapolation of this study’s findings was based on three false assumptions:

First, the study did not claim that SARS-CoV-2 had been created in a laboratory, much less “deliberately targeted.” SARS-CoV-2 was an animal-to-human spillover event that occurred in the western section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in late 2019. This is no longer a scientific controversy. Unfortunately, it’s still a cultural controversy. So, it wasn’t hard for RFK Jr. to appeal to a commonly held false belief about the lab origin of this virus.

Second, RFK Jr. claimed that the study was published in 2021, when it was published in 2020. Data were collected and analyzed well before SARS-CoV-2 started killing people in the United States. For that reason, researchers didn’t correlate genetic susceptibilities with clinical outcomes. They were just predicting who they thought would be most likely to suffer from Covid-19.

Third, researchers found that the maximum frequencies of genetic variations among different groups was no greater than 1 in 100. For the European populations, the frequencies ranged from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000. In other words, while it was reasonable to predict that one individual might be more susceptible to Covid-19 than another, these genetic differences were far too rare to account for population differences. Now that the virus has been circulating for almost four years—and killed about 7 million people worldwide—we know that their predictions were wrong. Hospitalizations and deaths weren’t determined by racial or ethnic backgrounds, they were determined mostly by age, underlying health problems, and vaccination status.

RFK Jr. counts on the fact that few people will read the studies he claims support his outlandish views. And if you don’t believe that, just ask the Republican congressman who insisted on entering this study into the Congressional record whether he actually read it.