COVID-19 Is a Bioweapon Designed to Spare Jewish and Chinese People
RFK Jr. publicly claimed in 2023 that COVID-19 was an 'ethnically targeted' bioweapon that disproportionately affects White and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people have genetic protection. Epidemiologists described the claim as biologically impossible. RFK Jr. denies it, but fact-checkers confirmed the original statement.
What we know
In July 2023, while running for the US presidency, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was recorded at a dinner in New York saying that COVID-19 'attacks disproportionately White and Black people' and that 'Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are the least affected.' He claimed there were genetic reasons for this difference and implicitly suggested the virus might have been designed with those genetic differences in mind.
Epidemiologist Dr Michael Mina, who worked on COVID testing for Harvard, said: 'Beyond the absurdity, biological know-how simply isn't there to make a virus that targets only certain ethnicities.' The epidemiological data from the pandemic directly contradict Kennedy's claims: COVID-19 disproportionately affected older people, the obese, and the immunocompromised - not specific ethnic groups. Chinese people, in particular, were devastated by the disease in Wuhan and Shanghai. The claim of ethnic targeting is contrary to both the actual data and the underlying biological principles.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and numerous organisations that monitor antisemitism responded immediately: the claim that a virus 'spares Jewish people' is a direct antisemitic trope - the same motif used in Nazi propaganda and one that recurs in modern antisemitic narratives about the control of the pandemic. Kennedy denied that this had been his intention and claimed he had been misquoted, but fact-checkers at the Brookings Institution and the New York Post confirmed the authenticity of the video and the context of the statement.
This incident arises in the context of Kennedy's broader rhetoric, in which he suggests that corporate and governmental interests deliberately misled the public about COVID-19 - a narrative which, in its most extreme form, logically leads to the question 'who benefits?', opening the door to antisemitic conspiratorial answers.
Common claims
- COVID-19 is a bioweapon designed to target specific races.False - biologically impossible and contrary to epidemiological data
- Ashkenazi Jews are genetically protected from COVID-19.False - contradicted by actual mortality data
- RFK Jr. publicly made this claim.Supported - fact-checkers confirmed the authenticity of the video