RFK Jr. does damage control on alleged claims that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted”

During a press dinner on Tuesday, 2024 Democratic presidential candidate and COVID-19 conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. allegedly made comments stating his belief that “COVID-19 may have been deliberately created as an ‘ethnically targeted’ bioweapon designed to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews,” according to New York Post. 

Engaged in a back and forth while seated at the restaurant Tony’s Di Napoli on East 63d Street in NYC, Kennedy is said to have backed up his claims saying, “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,” going on to warn 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.'”

On Saturday, Kennedy took to Twitter for some damage control, writing “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 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. 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.”