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See also: No, Emily Oster, We Don’t Need A COVID Amnesty—We Need A COVID Nuremberg
I know it’s gone out of fashion since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine (meaning there was a brand-new shiny thing for everyone to virtue-signal about), but let’s go back to the days of the Covid-19 pandemic. I’ve been inspired to take this nostalgic journey by a new study that highlights some fascinating new racial differences in the US in the response to the virus [Significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on race/ethnic differences in US mortality, By Jose Aburto et al., PNAS, 2022]. Bottom line: I was right to stress the importance of honest reporting of the data on racial incidence. The Ruling Class was wrong to suppress it. And because the Ruling Class did suppress the data, people died—especially, in an ironic twist, the very minorities that the Ruling Class claims to care so much about. (See VDARE.com’s reporting on Race and Covid-19 here).
But let’s go on a little journey before we turn to that. You may remember—and this is back in the days when the disease definitely emerged from a Chinese wet market and anyone who suggested otherwise was spreading fiendish “misinformation”—that Covid-19 did not “discriminate by race,” even though the US health system was already showing “familiar biases” in who got ill [The Coronavirus Doesn’t Discriminate, But U.S. Health Care Showing Familiar Biases, By Blake Farmer, NPR, April 2, 2020]. Even so, it absolutely, definitely didn’t discriminate by race.
Now, it occurred to me that Covid-19 probably would discriminate by race. This was because races are adaptations to different environments which, therefore, differ in genotypic frequencies, and some environments are going to have a longer history of dealing with corona viruses, such as flu, than others, making people whose ancestors were from those environments better able to fight off such viruses.
At first, much hampered by the Ruling Class refusal to report racial data, I hypothesized that Covid-19 might be substantially limited to East Asians, which had been the case with the 2003 SARS outbreak This turned out not to be true but I was able to report emerging evidence that it did discriminate by race again and again, A US government report eventually admitted that this was the case and US vaccine distribution policy began to discriminate by race.
In the UK, Covid-19 hit South Asians very badly, seemingly for genetic reasons, while genetics also explained why Nordic countries fared so well.
So, to be clear, Covid-19 did discriminate by race and this wasn’t just because of cultural differences in poverty, health or food choices, it was at least in part because of genetic differences, genetic differences being the essence of race.
“Significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on race/ethnic differences in US mortality,” the study that got me thinking about this again, entitled was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August last year and was undertaken by a team of sociologists at Oxford University. Its findings are illuminating.
Significantly, it found that Blacks and Hispanics suffered far higher levels of mortality than White people. This, of course, makes sense, because White people are evolved to an environment where there are lots of corona viruses, so we would expect them to be better able to deal with any such novel virus. Blacks evolved in tropical Africa, while Hispanics are a cline—a racial mixture—whose members are, on average, 50% white and 50% Native American, though some are far more genetically Native American (This is discussed in Richard Lynn’s 2006 book Race Differences in Intelligence).
Now, you might respond that, “White people are privileged and rich, have better food and live in better conditions and that’s why they weren’t impacted as badly by Covid-19.”
But that argument doesn’t fit with data that the study presents. Until the Covid-19 Pandemic began, the average life-expectancy of Hispanic American males was actually higher than that of White American males. In other words, Hispanic American males were, in a key respect, healthier than White American males.
With the advent of Covid-19, this gap was nearly eliminated. Clearly, this can be interpreted as meaning that White males were better adapted than Hispanic males to fight off Covid-19, particularly as the main cause of the decrease in male Hispanic life expectancy was Covid-19.
At the same time, the life-expectancy advantage enjoyed by White males over Black males significantly grew. Now, of course, this could reflect White-Black differences in poverty and health leading to Black people being more likely to die of Covid-19. But this is not what happened.
According to the study: “Black Americans saw increases in cardiovascular diseases and ‘deaths of despair’ over this period.” In other words, Black males were so emotionally dis-regulated and stressed by what was happening that they started committed suicide and having heart attacks. It was this that reduced their life expectancy. Thus, the inference must be that there was something about Hispanic males—who were otherwise healthy—that made them highly likely to die of Covid-19.
The simplest answer: there weren’t many corona viruses in Hispanics’ ancestral environment, meaning that they are not adapted to them. This shouldn’t be surprising. One the reasons why the Spanish found Central and South America so easy to conquer was that its people had little to no resistance to influenza; this illness not having previously been found in the region, with the invaders spreading it [see Plagues in the Nation: How Epidemics Shaped America, By Polly Price, 2022].
According to the study, the age at which Hispanics died of Covid-19 was notably younger than the age at which Whites and Blacks died of Covid-19. This, once more, implies that Hispanics lack genetic resistance to corona viruses.
People generally become less healthy as they get older. They develop underlying health conditions such as diabetes, heart problems, obesity and high blood pressure and their immune systems simply become weaker. These factors all make it more difficult for them to fight off the Covid-19 infection.
But this was not the picture, to the same extent, among Hispanics. To a much greater extent than among Whites and Blacks, young and healthy Hispanics simply died of Covid-19. As I noted above, this is what we would expect if they lacked resistance to such viruses due to the ecology to which their race was evolved.
The authors conclude their paper as follows:
Previous pandemics, such as the 1918 Spanish influenza and the 2009 H1N1 influenza, affected population health and mortality differently across subpopulations. Overwhelming evidence, including our own, shows that so far, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected racial/ethnic minorities in the United States.
I distinctly recall, based on the Spanish Flu, predicting that there would be race differences in the impact of Covid-19. Not being honest about race differences costs lives. There’d probably be Hispanics who’d be alive today if there was no taboo surrounding the concept of race.
Specially, in this case, Wokeness killed non-Whites.
Lance Welton [email him] is the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York.
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Most ironic thing I’ve ever found about COVID-19: Smokers might be resistant to it.
“A putative role for the tobacco mosaic virus in smokers’ resistance to COVID-19”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987720322337
“Smoking and COVID-19, the paradox to discover: An Italian retrospective, observational study in hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987720332825
“Wokeness” is a function of ((jew)) media and Marxist academia. So ((jews)) killed non-Whites, just like they killed a lot of non-Whites via ((Marxist/Maoism)) and Anglo-Zionist Imperialism; just like the killed a lot of Whites via ((Marxist/Bolshevik)) and Anglo-Zionist-incited wars (WWI and WWII, for example)…
The ((jew)) and its stooges are the problem. The ((jew)) and its stooges have always been the problem, even before the 20th Century atrocities. Whereas humanity has continued to progress and evolve, the ((jew)) and its stooges have stayed in a reptilian state, while adopting the illusion of civilization but preserving their reptilian brain.
Here is how you can tap into your reptilian brain, just like the ((jews)) do.
https://medium.com/brand-solutions/how-to-be-more-successful-by-using-reptilian-and-limbic-hot-buttons-71c64de9b366
But it seems everyone is now doing it beyond just the ZOG Anglosphere and Israel: the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Islamic world…
Methinks the ((jews)) liked it better when they were the only ones playing hardball and secretly operating as a conspiracy of organized reptiles. But those days are over. So now we’re down to either putting the ((jews)) and their stooges in their place once and for all, or eventually we all burn, no?
Because no one is going to agree to commit suicide so the “chosen” reptile overlords can feast on their dead bodies (except maybe dumb Zoglodytes).
Mr. Welton, please review and update readers on your thoughts about COVID provenance. I believe that your position has been that things started with a lab leak in Wuhan, China. Is that still the case? To what extent do you believe Uncle Sam is culpable?
Please also review and update readers on your thoughts about prevention/treatment. You’ve long made clear that the dempanic included needless lockdowns and masking, but I don’t recall reading much from you about Pharma’s shots and the Establishment’s coercion. When and what (e.g., “second Pfizer booster”) was your last?
You are NOT right. Far from it.
Certificate Of Vaccine ID entification
Artificial Intelligence is 19. It has
no thing to do with a Mexican beer
Virus. PLEASE get real. WTFU…
sheep get slaughtered. NOW Neo.
Flu viruses are not coronaviruses. You repeat this mistake later in the article. It’s true that ~30% of human colds are caused by endemic coronaviruses. But the flu is its own beast and flus are caused by influenza viruses.
I think the author is grouping different types of seasonal respiratory infections together into a general category. Since flu has apparently disappeared I think the NIH and CDC approve of this approach!
Perhaps, but part of COVID’s puzzles answers in who it hits, hits hard, and kills is likely generic resistance to coronaviruses, parts of them which are extremely conserved having to do with basic functioning. Whereas humans simply don’t achieve immunity to conserved parts of the two families of flu viruses which hit us (A and B). Might also add that people are reconsidering the pathogen for the late 19th Century “Russian flu,” it might be one of the later four endemic “common cold” coronaviruses we had before It Came From Wuhan.
Flu however is still very much with us, it only all but disappeared, and we heard that from the front lines like the Southern California ER nurse author of the Raconteur Report based on point of care routine testing of all who entered it, for the 2020-2021 flu season. Came right back with a “mild” season, start here for past ones, and their surveillance and coming up with a general picture for the current one is of course a work in progress. Best to review past weeks of FluView if you want to learn more now.
Might also add that when it came to front line medicine, the diversity our host documents was admitted. Specifically who would get necessarily scarce monoclonal antibody treatments. These do no good by the time almost all people get into potentially doomed trouble, for example likely by that time their bodies are producing their own set of poly-clonal (against many SARS-CoV-2 sites) antibody and cellular immune system responses. Anti-virals also generally work, or work best before there’s just too many viruses in your body munching on cells.
So you have to guess and ration the treatments to those most at risk by the probabilities. Which didn’t include whites until they get pretty old, and thus it got politicized by those unaware of these details. Plus “Biden” may have discriminated in general against Florida/DeSantis who horribly embarrassed Team Blue; granted, he didn’t have a goal of reducing Medicaid costs by killing off the state’s very numerous elderly unlike five Blue states, so that made Red states in general do better.
Due to the very generic COVID symptoms and unreliable tests I suspect many COVID cases 2019-2022 were in fact influenza. Nonetheless, I do believe there was a new corona virus which is deadly in a very small group of healthy individuals.
I agree that understanding the particular susceptibility of this small group of patients is an interesting topic, but the fact that the average age of death for these patients is similar to the overall average age of death overall suggests this is not so important. This age information may imply the illness simply kills the weakest, which is not very profound. Perhaps most of the serious cases in reasonably healthy people are largely the result of malpractice. BTW, I know an ER nurse who dealt with deadly cases in healthy people, so I accept they are real.
Except neither of your claims of fact are in the least true. If at all serious, COVID’s symptoms are distinct enough from the flu for differential diagnosis with molecular tests a confirmation (critical before the tests were sufficiently available and automated instead of done by hand), and before then there are often differences.
The molecular tests, very well established for the flu by 2019 down to the point of care level as I mentioned, are also very reliable although in all cases point of care (test strips) less so, a tradeoff for speed of results. This is really basic stuff, looking for different, very specific sequences of RNA. Note also how we applied this to sewershed surveillance, lately in the news in the US for polio.
Except again this is very much not true for the young, at least in short term mortality where flu is a noted killer unlike COVID. Hmmm, now that I think about it I don’t what we think about delayed mortality from the flu, which is significant for COVID, although again I don’t know about that for the young for either disease.
Another difference is that COVID is not a uniform killer of the weakest elderly, nor are the patterns for those, say, starting age thirty clear when I last checked a long time ago. But we were getting clues when I was still following this, like evidence of preexisting immunity to all coronaviruses.
To point yourself in the right direction for prevention/treatment, it helps to have an understanding of the concept of “regulatory capture”. There is often a revolving door between the regulatory bodies and the industries they are regulating, with retired bureaucrats getting lucrative jobs in the industries they regulated. The FDA also receives “user fees”, aka bribes, from Big Pharma. Politicians, like Joe Biden, also received large political donations from Big Pharma.
The goal of Big Pharma is to maximize profits. In a free market economy, they do so by offering products consumers want. In our increasingly Fascist economy, they use political pull to force their products on consumers. Pfizer never tested the vaccines to see if they stopped disease transmission, but they were presented that way in order to justify vaccine mandates so as to maximize vaccine sales. More money was to be made from patented drugs like Molnupiravir or Remdesivir than expired patent ones like Ivermectin or HCQ, so doctors offering the latter were threatened with the loss of their licenses. Common sense suggestions like losing weight, eating a healthy diet, taking nutritional supplements, exercising and getting out in the fresh air and sunshine were downplayed since they would not increase Big Pharma profits. The government even closed parks and beaches, making it more difficult to exercise.
Intersting points.
I assume that any hint of a COVID diagnosis trumped any credible flu diagnosis in 2019-2022. In other words, the government was promoting presumptive COVID diagnoses so why waste time on flu tests, since they will be rejected by protocol anyway? Apparently this has changed.
It looks like you’ve only been around since last July.
Anyone new to the tiresome game should know that commenter(s) That Would Be Telling posts overlong, abstruse comments, will alternate between chumminess (“we .. we .. we”) and condescension, and say whatever else may be needful to pushing COVID shots and, more recently, deflecting on behalf of Establishment narratives regarding prevention and treatment.
Nope nope nope, differential diagnosis is vital to correctly treating a patient. Flu, COVID and RSV are different viruses with different pathologies and effects. And with a robust flu testing capability unless we ran out of testing materials they’d be routinely used, and we had half a year or more to bulk up on every sort of test for the 2020-21 flu season where we were of course worried that would add to the chaos.
So see for example as I previously mentioned what Aesop of the Raconteur Report told us in December 2020:
Except of course we learned there are a great many nuts who don’t believe in “germs,” viruses in particular, etc. etc.
Before that in this comment he noted correctly a chest X-ray plus the usual symptoms is sufficient to diagnose COVID, the slower molecular tests are confirmation. And I’ll add the tests are for the asymptomatic. That saved a lot of lives before molecular tests were sufficiently available. And see this from a November posting while we’re at it for why we used those COVID molecular tests so much:
There’s also the concept of respiratory panels, testing for more than one virus from a sample at a time, again for differential diagnosis. Flu plus COVID and RSV is also a good idea. Go to the FDA’s page for emergency authorizations for tests and see when those started happening (see also the insane gibbering from the Right when the CDC withdrew their initial manual test in favor of one that tested for both). It was a very obvious thing to do, only limited by reagent availability and machine time.
BTW, it’s getting to the point you need to cite your sources, because your claims of things like “will be rejected by protocol anyway” are completely contrary to everything I learned in this period. When I was watching things closely, before Omicron changed the game and I gave up on the Right getting anything right about all of STEM and medicine.
You are flatly claiming things that are just not true like about test reliability, also with I think a US bias when the whole world was also doing this sort of testing. Initially with a much better test developed in I think Germany that the WHO recommended, instead of the fragile and badly manufactured CDC one, while the FDA blocked anyone else from doing testing in the US until the last day of February 2020. Elections don’t fortify themselves, I assume.
I’ll make it easy to find the Official NIH testing and treatment protocols, here they are on the Wayback Machine, first one captured in that location was on May 12th, 2020, and there’s a section in it updated that date. There are likely earlier versions before they set up this particular web site, but early May is a good time, by then we were getting a handle on COVID and how to treat it, novel pathogen is novel.
Yeah, right. There are race differences in something that doesn’t exist.
I have been reading here a long time, posting about a year.
Thanks for the heads up, I forget about TWBT. Sometimes I can’t keep up with who is who.
How does your “good medicine as usual” stance address the widely employed excessively high cycle threshold for PCR-based COVID tests? I think even your leading lights have acknowledged this was a problem, though without explaining why they promoted it.
How do you respond to the list of “20 COVID topics” recently linked by Obwandiyag andfound in his/her history of the past week?
Doesn’t matter, if there’s no signal in the information theory sense, no initial RNA segments that the test is looking for, 2-3 of them, then zero times many/infinity is still zero.
This would only come into play if there’s cross contamination somewhere, like in taking the sample. If it’s inside the machine doing the test, it’ll be detected in the negative control, which is pure, nucleic free water.
It’s 40 Facts You NEED to Know: The REAL Story of “Covid” from Off Guardian:
1. “Covid19” and the flu have IDENTICAL symptoms. – Obvious, blatant lie. Note they don’t actually list and compare the sets of symptoms, just note some are the same, which is no surprise for a respiratory system virus.
2. “Ground glass opacities” are NOT unique to “Covid”. – Obviously true, else the phenomena wouldn’t have a name. But only relevant if #1 is true; a diagnosis is based on a set of clues that form a pattern, this X-ray one is part of the COVID pattern before you add molecular testing.
3. A loss of smell and taste is NOT unique to “covid”. – Obviously true, again it’s only useful as part of a pattern.
4. It is not possible to clinically diagnose “Covid19”. – This claim depends on the above lies and confusions, plus was only an issue before we had sufficient RT-PCR testing capability. Except of course they claim that’s all a lie, see below.
5. Lateral flow tests are unreliable. – Less reliable than RT-PCR, you trade off convenience and time for a fast result. In technical details, they use antibodies for recognition and those aren’t 100%.
6. PCR tests were not designed to diagnose illness. – Again, they’re part of a diagnosis pattern, plus as previously mentioned critical for segregating patients into isolation rooms and wards. The conveniently dead Kary Mullis is an authority on PCR per se, but not its use in testing, although he’s obviously have learned a lot about it over the years.
7. PCR Tests have a history of being inaccurate and unreliable. – Not going to dig into all the examples, the one from the CDC’s (WARNING!!!) infamous self-manufactured test kits is enough to show the author is a liar. And again, see the proper uses of the tests.
8. The CT values of the PCR tests are too high. – Right off the bat we get one of the COVID Truther’s most disgusting type of lying, making a claim with a link to a source (NYT) that upon drilling down and reading it does not support the claim. I guess they do it because it works on people like you or Troll obwandiyag who don’t take the time to investigate claims. Really, this stuff is not at all hard to confirm if your reading comprehension is good, although lots of it obviously gets into scientific details. But we’ve all had three years to (re-)learn the basic science here, if you haven’t and make authoritative claims you’re just plain evil.
9. If you trust the WHO…., but skipping this one because:
10. The scientific basis for ALL “Covid” tests is questionable. – which boils down to “The Corman-Drosten assays are the root of every ‘Covid’ PCR test in the world.” which is referring to the WHO’s first endorsed and necessarily manual test from Germany (which I haven’t examined, but was credibly said to be lots better than the CDC’s). The sentence a lie so blatant it’s utterly disqualifying. Everyone started from the initial release of SARS-CoV-2 sequence data on January 10th, 2020 and developed their initial tests in parallel. Then the companies with fancy automated test machines joined in.
Their “Since then, a consortium of over forty life scientists has petitioned for the withdrawal of the paper, writing a lengthy report detailing 10 major errors in the paper’s methodology.” is a dead link, goes to a parked domain, but here it’s at the Wayback Machine. Dated November 27, 2020 … it’s obvious garbage because in the intervening ten months the testing landscape completely changed. For example, see:
Well, yes, because the PRC did not throughout 2020 and as far as I know ever supplied anyone outside the country sample cultures. But it took very little time for other countries to isolate their own ex-PRC cultures, Australia was the first, the CDC did it around January 20th based on their first positive test.
That’s enough wasting of my time, and specifically your completely ignoring my comments and questions in favor of throwing more stuff you don’t understand and/or have not vetted yourself against the wall to see if it sticks. Reply to some of mine or you go back to Troll/Ignore Commenter status where I doubt you’ll get a third chance. You’ll have to forgive me if your previous reply to Troll Greta Handel isn’t a signal you’ve abandoned good faith discussion with me.
I’ll go further, one of your biggest claims is about confounding COVID with the flu based on your specific claims of knowledge of Official US government protocols. Do a binary search on the NIH protocols I linked to and confirm your claim, or admit you’re just plain wrong for whatever reason.
That was a very interesting article. Thank you.
Thanks for answering. I have learned a few things from your comments and agree on many points. Yet I think your rational skepticism has not been adequately triggered by some of the obvious red flags in the COVID mess. You may be in good company with Ron.
Your comments related to PCR cycle threshold appear to be at odds with many mainstream acknowledgments from your fellow travelers. I don’t claim to have any technical knowledge of viruses, so my positions are based on other aspects of the discussion.
I stated my detailed positions on COVID last year in one of my early TUR comments. Much of it is not controversial and has not changed much. Some aspects are:
COVID is a real disease
Highly contagious as these can be
Cases mostly minor, even asymptomatic
Bad/lethal for certain generally compromised patients
Bad for a small unexplained group
…
Apparently credible reports suggest is man-made
…
The mRNA shots were not adequately tested
The mRNA shots are much more dangerous than any previously accepted vaccine, as predicted by experts in the field
Many aspects of this situation are very “fishy”, so much so that any sensible person should be asking hard questions. I won’t reply unless you own some of these questions and stop trying to be a “fact” checker.
Here’s another TWBTPSA: Troll indicates that you’re on target.
Get vaxxed (and become wrecked)
Video Link
Vitamin D levels predict your reaction to covid. The darker your skin, the less vit. D you will have, especially in sunlight scarce cities like NYC.
There are anti-semites, and there are anti-semites.