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.
“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact,” Kennedy hedged.
In between bites of linguini and clam sauce, Kennedy, 69, warned of more dire biological weapons in the pipeline with a “50% infection fatality rate” that would make COVID-19 “look like a walk in the park.”
“We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons,” he claimed. “They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”
There has been a growing consensus among US intelligence agencies that COVID-19 was man-made and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China — but there is no evidence it was designed to spare certain religious groups or ethnicities, and Kennedy offered no studies to support his claims.
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.
A 2020 Oxford University study found nearly 1 in 5 British peoplebelieved Jews created the coronavirus pandemic for financial gain.
“No no no no no,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi Professor of medicine and infectious disease at the University of California, San Francisco, and a longtime critic of pandemic-related school closures. “I don’t see any evidence that there was any design or bioterrorism that anyone tried to design something to knock off certain groups.”
The son of former Attorney General Robert Kennedy and nephew of former President Kennedy has in the past palled around with Nation of Islam leader and notorious antisemite Louis Farrakhan.
He also met with NOI leadership in Los Angeles in 2020 and told them the COVID vaccine had been “genetically modified to attack black and Latino boys.”