Comment by nozzlegear

Comment by nozzlegear 6 months ago

I hesitate to dive into this because I'm really not interested in arguing the nuances of RFK with people on the internet (not you, others). RFK Jr. has a long history of controversial statements regarding COVID, COVID vaccines and being anti-vaccine, or vaccine-skeptical as his supporters like to frame him.

For me, one of his most controversial statements in recent memory had to be during a press conference he gave in 2023 when he stated that COVID might have been "ethnically targeted" to "attack Caucasians and Black people" and that "the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."

He tried to defend the statement by citing scientific studies, which is a habit of his that his supporters admire about him. However, actual experts in the field pointed out that his interpretation of the studies was flawed and there was no credible evidence to support the idea that COVID was engineered or had evolved to target or spare certain groups.

Sources:

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-f-kennedy-jr-false-claim...

2. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jul/19/robert-f-k...

3. https://nypost.com/2024/11/15/media/jake-tapper-rips-rfk-jr-...

Dig1t 6 months ago

https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...

>COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

>Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research

So the US government has concluded that the virus almost certainly came from a lab conducting gain of function research.

What is gain of function? Making a virus more lethal.

RFKs words:

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

It DOES impact some races more than others.

This is a completely plausible theory. I don’t understand why it’s a crazy idea at all.

Why wouldn’t a country trying to make a virus more lethal also try to curve its lethality away from its own people?

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nozzlegear 6 months ago

Yeah, this shit is why I was hesitant to dive into the topic. You've made several leaps of logic here that I don't feel like debunking or discussing further, and I'll note that you've conveniently forgotten to defend the most controversial part of his statement – that the engineered virus supposedly curves its lethality away from Ashkenazi Jews as well, which would imply that that group also had something to do with its manufacture.

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- Dig1t 6 months ago
  
  It’s entirely possible that it’s a coincidence, groups of people share genes in common. It’s actually rather unlikely that a gene, especially one that seems to confer some resistance to the effects of a virus, would exist for only one group of people in the entire world.
  I would love to hear about my leaps in logic honestly.
  Nobody is saying that it was definitely ethnically targeted, but it IS plausible. Just because the ethnicity involved makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean that it’s not possible.
  Your comment suggests it’s an outrageous notion, but if that’s true then just give a decent argument why it’s actually outrageous.
  Chinese leadership have specifically mentioned ethnically targeted bio weapons:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_bioweapon
  >In 2017, a textbook published by the People's Liberation Army National Defence University called the Science of Military Strategy debuted the potential for biological warfare to include "specific ethnic genetic attacks."[10][11] The same year, former People's Liberation Army general Zhang Shibo authored a book that concluded that "modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability," including "specific ethnic genetic attacks" (特定种族基因攻击).[10] In 2020, a professor at the same PLA university spoke of the "huge war effectiveness" of a "targeted attack that destroys a race, or a specific group of people."
  
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