note… At the start of the Covid Pandemic, Bill Gates said in several interviews that “Africans would be dying in the street due their susceptibility to the Covid virus. He was terribly wrong.

note..  this article states “Blacks in the UK and Blacks in the US has a higher Covid death rate than the Whites in their respective country” However, data from CDC and MDHHS do not support these statements. This article, although wrong on some paints a more truthful picture of what happened.

data show that even though Detroit had a much lower covid vaccination rate, they also had a lower infection rate than their surrounding suburbs.

Michigan Dept. of Health and Human Services state that Non Hispanic White males had the highest Covid death rate. The regions of Black Africa had one the lowest Covid death rates. Data show African American covid death rate was not higher than White Americans. Their Covid rate was higher than their African Brothers and Sisters likely due to their percentage of Neanderthal DNA from the rape of Black women during slavery. Full blood Africans have no Neanderthal DNA which is why their Covid death rate so low.

 

 

 

 

Part 1: Defying all predictions, Africa is the global COVID-19 ‘cold spot’. How come health officials and the media are not honestly exploring why?

Jon Entine, Patrick Whittle | March 2, 2021

Credit: Louis HB

This article or excerpt is included in the GLP’s daily curated selection of ideologically diverse news, opinion and analysis of biotechnology innovation.

The first confirmed COVID-19 case in Africa was on February 14, 2020 in Egypt. The first in sub-Saharan Africa appeared in Nigeria soon after. Health officials were united in a near-panic about how the novel coronavirus would roll through the world’s second most populous continent.

By mid-month, the World Health Organization listed four sub-Saharan countries on a ‘top 13’ global danger list because of direct air links to China. Writing for Lancet, two scientists with the Africa Center for Disease Control outlined a catastrophe in the making:

With neither treatment nor vaccines, and without pre-existing immunity, the effect [of COVID-19] might be devastating because of the multiple health challenges the continent already faces: rapid population growth and increased movement of people; existing endemic diseases…; remerging and emerging infectious pathogens …, and others; and increasing incidence of non-communicable diseases.

Many medical professionals predicted that Africa could spin into a death spiral. “My advice to Africa is to prepare for the worst, and we must do everything we can to cut the root problem,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the first African director-general of the WHO warned in March. “I think Africa, my continent, must wake up.”

This article is part one of a two-part series. Read the second part here: Part 2: Why is Africa the global COVID-19 ‘cold spot’? — The historical challenge of disentangling genes and environment.

 

 

 

by spring, WHO was projecting 44 million or more cases for Africa and the World Bank issued a map of the continent lored in blood red, anticipating that the worst was imminent.

 

Dire warnings seemed to make sense. After all, the vast majority of the world’s poorest people reside in the region, struggling with unhygienic environments, conflict, fragmented healthcare and education systems and dysfunctional leadership — all factors that could light a match to the tinder of the SARS-CoV2 outbreak. Scientists say that most African countries lack the capacity and expertise to manage endemic deadly diseases like malaria.

Each individual’s risk of dying of a particular disease tends to reflect access to adequate health care and underlying health conditions (co-morbidities). Those factors have proved to be a toxic mix in poorer communities in the United States, Brazil, UK and other countries where lower income groups, often ethnic and racial minorities, are dying at rates higher than others. Africa seemed ripe for catastrophe.

But disaster never came. Africa has not been affected on anything near the scale of most countries in Asia, Europe, and North and South America. (The major exceptions being China, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, which zealously enforced lockdowns). In fact, the vast African continent south of the Sahara desert, more than 1.1 billion people, has emerged as the world’s COVID-19 ‘cold spot’.

Note: ‘Africa’ includes the mostly White countries of North Africa, which have been far harder by COVID than sub-Saharan Africa

The latest statistics show about 3.8 million cases and 100,000 coronavirus-related deaths, concentrated mostly in the Arab majority countries north of the Sahara. Except for South Africa, the most multi-ethnic of the Black majority countries, and Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa has largely been spared.

Courtesy: Africa CDC

According to Worldometers, by late-February, Europe, with less than 2/3 the population of Africa, had almost 33,000,000+ cases, 900% more, and almost 800,000 deaths, 800% more. The US, with less than 1/3 the number of people, has 2900% more cases and 2400% more deaths, according to stats compiled on Wikipedia.

Journalists and even some scientists have been twisting themselves into speculative pretzels (here, here, here) trying to explain this phenomenon. Theories range from sub-Saharan Africa’s ‘quick response’ (no); favourable climate (which did not protect Brazil and other warmer climes in South America); and good community health systems (directly contradicted by WHO and Africa CDC).

In each of those articles acknowledging the “puzzling” statistics, journalists were sure to suggest Armageddon might be right around the corner. “Experts fear a more devastating second surge,” warned National Geographic in late December, although there was no first surge and just two weeks before Africa’s tiny December uptick (driven almost entirely by the mutant variant in South Africa) turned back downward, according to Reuters.

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

Why Africa has been less impacted by COVID-19

What’s going on here? And why are the media and most scientists so unwilling to engage the most likely scenario: Black Africans appear to be protected in part by their ancestral genetics. Combined with the fact that sub-Saharan Africa is the youngest region in the world—youth brings fewer co-morbidities and age is the most significant factor in contracting and dying from COVID-19—DNA is the most likely explanation for sub-Saharan Africa’s comparatively modest case and death count.

Except for one research project in Hawai’i, scientists have all but ignored exploring the population genetics angle, almost certainly fearful of stirring the embers of race science.

“It is really mind boggling why Africa is doing so well, while in US and UK, the people of African ancestry are doing so poorly,” Maarit Tiirikainen, a cancer and bioinformatics researcher at the University of Hawai’i Cancer Center, told us in an email.

Dr. Tiirikainen is a lead researcher in a joint project at the University of Hawaii and LifeDNA in what some believe is a controversial undertaking considering the taboos on ‘race’ research. They are attempting to identify “those that are most vulnerable to the current and future SARS attacks and COVID based on their genetics”.

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

Dr. Maarit Tiirkainen

Blacks (along with other ethnic minorities) in the US and Great Britain have generally fared worse than Whites in contracting COVID-19 and surviving it. “For the latter, it seems the western socioeconomics may play a major role. There may also be genetic differences in immune and other important genes,” Dr Tiirkainen wrote.

(Note: The terms ‘Black’ and ‘White’ are used as shorthand for more cumbersome expressions like ‘those of African descent’ or ‘people of European ancestry’. As addressed below, ‘Black’ and ‘White’ are not science-based population categories.)

Dr. Tirikainen, like many researchers in this field, when communicating candidly, is skeptical that social and environmental factors alone can account for the extraordinarily low COVID-19 African infection and death rates. It is not because Africa took extraordinary steps to insulate itself as the pandemic spread. Health care remains fragmented at best. COVID information outreach has been limited by scant resources.

At the end of March, when much was still to be learned about the science of COVID-19, co-authors of this article — Genetic Literacy Project’s Jon Entine and contributing science journalist Patrick Whittle — discussed some of the potential reasons in the article What’s ‘race’ got to do with it?.  READ MORE…