Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for president ended Saturday morning when the New York Post published a video from a dinner at a swanky restaurant on the Upper East Side showing the Democratic presidential candidate holding forth in front of some of his supporters, telling them his theories about the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Mr. Kennedy, in a voice raspy and hoarse from a day of campaigning, gave the assembled donors the benefit of his fantastical and conspiratorial mind by claiming that there were “papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact” of COVID-19. The Chinese could have bio-engineered the virus to target white and black people while sparing “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” from severe outcomes, Kennedy conjectured.
“There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said during a dinner on the Upper East Side. “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,” the Democratic hopeful added.
“We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. … They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”
In a tweet later the same day, RFK claimed that’s not what he said:
The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. 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…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 15, 2023
“I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered,” he now claims. That’s splitting hairs so fine an electron microscope would have difficulty seeing them. At the dinner, he said flatly that “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people.” How much more specific can he get?
Kennedy was obviously exhausted and near incoherent. But it’s clear that sometimes his conspiratorial mind runs away with his good judgment.
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There is no intelligence that the Chinese have been able to create any bioweapon that could differentiate between races or ethnicities. And while the U.S. has no doubt been working in that direction, there’s no indication that an American — or any other scientist — has been able to achieve the level of technological sophistication necessary to “target” a race or ethnicity.
There can no longer be a smidgen of doubt that RFK Jr is a menacing idiot. https://t.co/YcWuOMK9Nj
— Edward Luce (@EdwardGLuce) July 15, 2023
Kennedy made a classic error of the uninformed: he took a statistical argument and tried to shoehorn its conclusion into his warped worldview. There’s no solid evidence that just because more white and black people got seriously ill from the coronavirus that it was artificially created to target them. That’s nuts. What about other factors like where they lived, or what precautions they took?
Just to note, the genetic differences between the races are so tiny, that trying to develop a virus that targets one gene pool or another is still science fiction. Mr. Kennedy would do well to go back to scaring everyone about vaccines and pushing the idea that gay people are victims of bad chemicals in the water.
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