July 17, 2023

In what may turn out to be one of the most glaring examples of fake news in recent memory, the New York Post, in an exclusive on Saturday morning, published an incendiary article titled “RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews.”

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Before that, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  had enjoyed his highest profile week yet in his campaign to win the 2024 Democrat presidential nomination. He had appeared live and in studio on three programs on the FOX News channel, the country’s #1 cable news network, and in another 20-minute interview with Piers Morgan on FOX’s streaming FOX Nation platform, and had raised additional millions of dollars in donations for his campaign.

Suddenly, his insurgent campaign was put on the defensive on social media and the mainstream and some of the alternative media by the Post article, assisted by a blaring headline on the Drudge Report that as of press time has been on Drudge’s home page for more than 36 hours.

This is lede in the Post story by Jon Levine:

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.

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The NY Post, according to Similar Web, is the #6 most visited site among News & Media Publishers in the United States. It has gained credibility and fans on the right for its fearless original reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and much more.

In his article Saturday, Levine offered his negative analysis and some early critical comments about what Kennedy had supposedly said at the dinner.

Kennedy’s remark echoes well-worn anti-Semitic literature blaming Jews for the emergence and spread of coronavirus which began circulating online shortly after the pandemic broke out, according to The Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at the University of Tel Aviv’s 2021 Antisemitism Worldwide Report. . .

“This is crazy,” said Morton Klein, President of the right-leaning Zionist Organization of America. “It makes no sense that they would do that. I read everything. I was totally against the vaccine. . . I wanted to convince myself it was correct not to take it. I have never seen anything like this.”

Klein, who said he had been advising Kennedy on Israel issues and called him a “good friend,” said the remark left him “worried.” . . .

The left-leaning Anti-Defamation League went further saying in a statement saying: “The claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and black people is deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and anti-semitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”

The only problem is that the possibility and potential use of genetically engineered, racially- and ethnically-targeted, bioweapons has been reported on for years including in the mainstream media and the peer reviewed scientific literature.

The first hit to come up in an Internet search of the subject was an April 10, 2023 article in the National Review by Jim Geraghty, “The Coming Threat of a Genetically Engineered ‘Ethnic Bioweapon.’” Geraghty begins with a quote from a Wall Street Journal article by Paul M. Dabbar one week earlier:

Around 2017, the Energy Department’s national laboratories started having significant concerns about biosecurity with regard to China. A Chinese general [Zhang Shibo] who was head of the National Defense University in Beijing publicly declared an interest in using gene sequencing and editing to develop pathogenic bioweapons that would target specific ethnic groups, which may be the most evil idea I have ever encountered. . . Biology is among seven “new domains of warfare” discussed in a 2017 book by Zhang Shibo (张仕波), a retired general and former president of the National Defense University, who concludes: “Modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability,” including the possibility that “specific ethnic genetic attacks” (特定种族基因攻击) could be employed.

In the scientific literature in 2009, in the Journal of Medical Ethics published by BMJ – the British Medical Journal – an article “Is all fair in biological warfare? The controversy over genetically engineered biological weapons” by J. M. Appel begins:

Advances in genetics may soon make possible the development of ethnic bioweapons that target specific ethnic or racial groups based upon genetic markers. While occasional published reports of such research generate public outrage, little has been written about the ethical distinction (if any) between the development of such weapons and ethnically neutral bioweapons.

More recently is a post-COVID article published in the British Medical Journal in 2020, “New insights into genetic susceptibility of COVID-19: an ACE2 and TMPRSS2 polymorphism analysis,” cited yesterday by RFK, Jr in a tweet on Twitter.