Why The New York Times, Facebook, and Twitter Can't Say The G-Word When It Comes To Coronavirus
Why Google, Amazon, and the military will eventually get your genetics and you'll love it.
There are two maps that I think explain a lot of the state of affairs in COVID-19.
The first was published in December 2020.
The second was published in a peer reviewed scientific paper.
And there’s this graph, raising the prospect of whether or not we could have done anything at all about covid rates in the United States.
But these genetic and policy facts were kept from readers of the New York Times when its global health reporter Stephanie Nolen journeyed to Africa to answer a question that has proven puzzling:
Why are so few Africans dying of the coronavirus?
It was even the subject of the Daily, the popular podcast, and titled, “A Covid Mystery in Africa.” You can listen here.
Nolen became the New York Times correspondent after a stint at the The Globe and Mail. (It appears she got the job after Donald G. McNeil Jr. was fired for using racial epithets with privileged students.)
At the Globe and Mail, Nolen wrote about the genetics of cancer in Brazil but you’ll find no mention whatsoever about the genetics of COVID risk. I searched through the transcript.
Apparently the publication where all the news that’s fit to print can’t inform people about their own genetic risks. They seemingly have all the time in the world to have people play word games like Wordle.
Why is that?
In a phrase, the religion of sameness and the logic of lockdown.
Such thinking’ll kill us all but hey, at least we will all be equal in the grave. After all, that’s the ultimate form of lockdown, isn’t it?
I launched my latest company Traitwell with some friends last year in part because I was so upset about the prevailing and largely wrong approaches our public health authorities were taking toward the coronavirus. Over the decades they’d gotten utterly compromised by the Chinese and so they weren’t capable of doing their own studies and their own analysis.
Rather than encourage the population to get mass sequenced and save lives, politics entered into the discussion and it became impossible to buy ads encouraging people to get sequenced and test their own risks of getting the very bad covid.
DeRay McKesson even targeted yours truly when I attempted to share some of these charts.
McKesson, using his old friend Dick Costolo, who is himself quite close to the Chinese, censored yours truly in May 2015. The company has seldom traded higher after I was banned. But hey, Twitter is not a business but a battlefield.
McKesson, like a lot of BlackLivesMatter, has backing from groups tied to China. As time has gone on, we’ve learned that he’s also had complicated dealings with his business partners who accuse him of being an unethical grifter. Never you mind that McKesson kicked off the race protests that have sought to burn down American cities or that he’s been affiliated with scammers who stole millions to buy houses. How Chinese of him! I’m sure it was but a coincidence that all those foreign actors descended upon Ferguson — a quiet suburb of St. Louis ahead of the decision to expand the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Racial peace isn’t McKesson’s business model.
Of course the tech community never had an incentive to provide you realistic information about covid because having you locked down was good for their data generation and bottom line. Just as Dick Costolo once admitted that riots were good for Twitter’s business model, so too were lockdowns.
What began from frustration has now taken on a new life of its own and Traitwell is raising its Series A. I couldn’t be prouder of the small team that I’ve put together that includes veterans of Bayer and the federal contractor class. There’s much work to go but our track record thus far with the minimal amount of capital we’ve raised is impressive.
We’re released a number of apps on our site to help people learn about their likelihood of getting severe covid, their educational attainment, likelihood of addiction, or now schizophrenia.
If you’ve taken a genetic test, upload your data to our apps at Traitwell.com.
Just today I went to the eye doctor’s — I have Fuchs disease, something which runs in my family — and had to fill out one of those annoying family history charts. How soon until that, too, is gone thanks to our genetics?
Perhaps soon enough. There are more genome wide associated studies being published all the time so they’ll be a lot more common. Organizing them is what Traitwell is all about. You'll be sequenced by the state soon enough. Might as well get a jump on it yourself.
The idea is innocuous enough. In a world of 7 billion people the idea of one size fits all approaches doesn’t really work. We are different from one another and we know it even if we aren’t allowed to talk about it.
Regrettably the State can only act in a universal sort of way. It can only see what its sensors detect and its sensors had missed genetic surveillance altogether.
There’s a concerted push by some countries and individuals who don’t want to see the West take up genetics seriously. Indeed were we to genetically sequence our entire population the results would be nothing sort of extraordinary.
A member of Congress friend of mine who is also an MD tells me that “the future of a lot of medicine will be determined by genetics” and also “the future of bio weaponry unfortunately.”
But the increasing genetic diversity of the United States may well prove to be an asset rather than a liability. Diversity may well be our greatest strength. We are so diverse that it’s hard to wipe us all out — unlike our peer competitors.
Regrettably the United States is pretty behind when it comes to sequencing this human bioversity in large measure because it refuses to say it exists.
And while there’s a lot of attention on hypersonics, say, there isn’t much on the agenda about preserving America’s genetic diversity and how essential it may well be for the wars of the future. That stands in contrast to projects already underway by the Russians, the Chinese, and even the British and the Israelis.
We all know that the conflict over Taiwan will be much more cloak and dagger than a maritime invasion. You’ll need the latest in biometrics — genetics and facial recognition — if you want to win that war.
The Russians are already sequencing all of their soldiers and assigning them duties based upon their genetic passports. They’re going full Gattaca.
Here’s how The National Interest described the project in 2019.
“The project is far-reaching, scientific, fundamental,” Alexander Sergeyev, the chief of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, told Russian news agency TASS back in the summer (English translation here). “Its essence is to find such genetic predispositions among military personnel, which will allow them to be properly oriented according to military specialties.”
…Russian President Vladimir Putin has embraced genetics with a passion. In March, the Kremlinissued a decree that called for “implementation of genetic certification of the population, taking into account the legal framework for the protection of data on the personal human genome and the formation of the genetic profile of the population.” Ostensibly this is to protect Russia’s population against chemical and biological attack, as well as safeguard Russia’s genetic patrimony from Western spies and saboteurs.
…the Russian military will be using genetics to assess that most unpredictable of human qualities: how a person will react in combat. “The project involves not only the assessment of the physiological state, but also the prediction of human behavior in stressful, critical situations that are associated with the military profession,” says Sergeyev, Russia's chief scientist. “Resistance to stress, the ability to perform physical and mental operations under the conditions of this stress, and so on—all this may be contained in a soldier’s genetic passport.”
It is not just soldiers who will be genetically profiled. In December 2018, another Russian scientist announced that cosmonauts will be tested. “The first area is the research into the human’s genetics from the viewpoint of using it in the selection [for the cosmonaut program], said Lyudmila Buravkova, deputy director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “The second area is the attempt to remedy genetic errors as much as this should be done before a flight.”
To be clear, many militaries use some kind of testing, such as the U.S. military’s Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), to determine whether someone is qualified for military service, and whether they are suitable for certain positions such as technical jobs. The U.S. military collects DNA from soldiers to identify their bodies if they are killed. The Defense Health Agency told the National Interest that the U.S. military does not use genetic testing to assign personnel.
You might get a lot further still on the question of reparations for those wrongly dismissed from the military for refusing the covid vaccine if you could show — genetically — that it was harmful.
But then you’d have to get over “muh privacy” nonsense. Ain’t nobody got time for that when you have thousands of satellites and missiles trained on every inch of Ukraine and the straits of Formosa.
Ultimately Amazon and Google, with their vast cloud infrastructure, will prove the ideal place to store all of that genetic data. They’ll build the system (or buy it more likely) because they’ll want to know everything about how they can make your shopping a more pleasurable experience. Imagine search results tailored to your genetics.