Robert Kennedy Jr. has denied reporting from the New York Post that said the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate thinks COVID-19 may have been “ethnically targeted” and engineered with Chinese, Finn and Ashkenazie Jews being least susceptible to catching the virus.
The comments were caught on videotape during a press event at Upper East Side restaurant Napoli in New York City.
“The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews,” Kennedy wrote via Twitter on Saturday. “I accurately pointed out — during an off-the-record conversation — that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021 study of the COVID-19 virus shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races since the furin cleave docking site is most compatible with Blacks and Caucasians and least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews.”
The politician added that “in that sense, it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”
The tweet also included a link to a study that Kennedy said backs his statements.
In a follow-up threaded tweet, Kennedy said that the Post’s report was a “cynical maneuver” that is “consistent with the mainstream media playbook to discredit me as a crank.”
The nearly two-minute clip of Kennedy’s comments from the Post report began making the rounds on social media Saturday.
“The technology that we now have… We’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes. The Chinese have done the same thing. In fact, COVID-19, there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said in the video. “The races that are most immune to COVID-19 because of the genetic differentials among different races of the receptors, COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
He then clarified that it remains unclear whether that was a deliberate development on the part of the Chinese.
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and impact for that,” Kennedy added. “We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons.”
There has been a growing number of theories both official and unofficial that COVID-19 could have been manmade, but no concrete evidence has been presented that the virus is geo-targeted towards any specific race or religious group.