COVID-19 Is a Bioweapon Designed to Spare Jewish and Chinese People

What we know

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in his 2021 book "The Real Anthony Fauci" that COVID-19 may have been engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people while disproportionately harming other ethnic groups, a claim reported by multiple outlets after audio of Kennedy making similar remarks at a private event surfaced publicly in 2023.

There is no peer-reviewed virological or genomic evidence supporting the claim that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered to selectively affect specific ethnic groups. Genomic epidemiology studies tracking the virus's spread and mutation, published in journals including Nature and Science, show that susceptibility and severity differences observed across populations during the pandemic are explained by well-documented, non-genetic factors: age distribution, prevalence of comorbidities such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, population density, access to healthcare, occupational exposure, and multigenerational household structure, not ethnic-specific genetic targeting.

The scientific and genetic basis for the specific claim Kennedy made, that the virus spares Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, does not hold up against actual pandemic data. China itself experienced substantial COVID-19 mortality, particularly during its major outbreak waves in 2022 and 2023 after loosening "zero-COVID" restrictions, directly contradicting the idea that ethnic Chinese populations were spared. Israel, whose population is majority Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish, experienced multiple significant COVID-19 waves with substantial case counts and hospitalizations, also contradicting the claim.

Geneticists who study population-specific disease susceptibility, including researchers who commented publicly following the surfacing of Kennedy's remarks, note that engineering a virus to selectively spare or target broad ethnic categories such as "Ashkenazi Jews" or "Chinese people" is not scientifically plausible given the actual genetic architecture involved; these are not genetically uniform or clearly bounded groups at the level of specificity a targeted bioweapon would require, and no known genetic markers would allow such precise ethnic targeting through a respiratory virus.

The Anti-Defamation League and other organizations that track antisemitism condemned Kennedy's remarks as invoking a long-standing and specifically antisemitic conspiracy trope about Jewish people being either responsible for engineered plagues or uniquely protected from them, a narrative pattern with documented historical roots predating COVID-19 by centuries. Kennedy later said his comments were mischaracterized, but the recorded audio of his original remarks, reviewed by multiple news organizations including the New York Post, which first published it, shows the claim was made largely as reported.

Kennedy's remarks were made at a private dinner in New York in July 2023 and were reported by the New York Post after obtaining audio of the event; Kennedy's presidential campaign initially disputed the characterization before the full audio confirmed the substance of the reporting. The episode occurred amid a broader pattern in Kennedy's public career of promoting claims about vaccines and public health that have been reviewed and rejected by the scientific and medical community, including his long-standing assertion, also independently debunked, that vaccines cause autism, a claim originating from a single, later-retracted 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that has been contradicted by subsequent studies involving millions of children across multiple countries.

Public health historians who study conspiracy narratives note that bioweapon-targeting claims of this kind tend to recur during major disease outbreaks throughout history, including similar claims made about HIV/AIDS in the 1980s alleging the virus targeted specific populations deliberately, claims that were also later shown to have no scientific basis once the actual biology and epidemiology of the disease were understood. The recurrence of this narrative pattern across different diseases and decades is itself a data point cited by researchers studying misinformation, suggesting the appeal of such claims lies less in the specific evidence for any one disease and more in a durable narrative structure that resurfaces whenever a new outbreak creates uncertainty and fear.

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

Evidence hierarchy

All sources

• RFK Jr.'s history of medical misinformation raises concerns over HHS nominationBrookings Institution · 2025
• Genetic ancestry and susceptibility to diseaseNational Institutes of Health · 2023
• COVID-19 racial and ethnic health disparitiesCenters for Disease Control and Prevention · 2023
• RFK Jr.'s false claim that COVID-19 was ethnically targetedPolitiFact · 2023

Related terms