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Kennedy said “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people,” but not “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He later denied saying that, despite video evidence.
At an off-the-rails event Tuesday in New York City, notable anti-vaxxer and longshot 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. parroted what has been characterized as a white supremacist COVID-19 conspiracy theory.
“In fact, COVID-19, there’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” Kennedy told a room full of press in a video obtained by the New York Post. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and Black people. The people that are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
The Anti-Defamation League and other organizations have previously identified those claims as one iteration of a baseless anti-semitic and sinophobic conspiracy theory voiced by white nationalists.
Jewish advocacy groups on both the right and left have torn into the Kennedy family scion for his unhinged remarks. The ADL said in a statement that Kennedy’s claim “feeds into sinophobic and anti-semitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”
The Post also quoted an infectious disease expert, who said, “I don’t see any evidence that there was any design or bioterrorism that anyone tried to design something to knock off certain groups.”
In a Twitter post on Saturday, RFK Jr. insisted—despite video evidence—that he “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews.” Rather, he argued that he was simply pointing out that COVID-19 is “least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews,” during a conversation about how “the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons.”
“In that sense, it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons,” Kennedy wrote. “I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”
Kennedy was also peeved that the Post exposed what he called an off-the-record conversation.
Squeezed between other attendees at a packed dinner table, Kennedy went on to expound on other outlandish theories that have helped form the basis of his conspiracy-fueled bid for the Democratic nomination.
“We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons,” Kennedy said. “They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”