Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government are moving ahead with plans to hear testimony from Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, after House Democrats and their supporters raised accusations Mr. Kennedy had made anti-Semitic remarks.
At a July 11 campaign event, Mr. Kennedy described research indicating that the genetic structure of SARS‑CoV‑2 had differing impacts on individuals of different races and ethnicities, including a lesser impact on ethnic Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Mr. Kennedy also discussed how bioweapons could potentially be designed with the intent to harm certain ethnic groups over others. The New York Post published an article based on Mr. Kennedy’s remarks, with the headline “RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews.”
Mr. Jordan rebuffed the Democratic pressure campaign to disinvite Mr. Kennedy on Monday. The Republican lawmaker distanced himself from Mr. Kennedy’s remarks about COVID-19 but insisted the House Government Weaponization Subcommittee would still have him on to talk about coordinated efforts between government offices and social media companies to throttle speech.
NTD News reached out to Mr. Jordan for additional comment but did not receive a response by the time this article was published.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), similarly distanced himself from Mr. Kennedy’s remarks, but pushed back on the calls to disinvite the Democratic presidential candidate.
What RFK Jr. Said
In a video clip captured at his July 11 campaign event, Mr. Kennedy said with “COVID-19, there’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted.”“COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” he added before describing how different ethnic groups have differences in the structure of their ACE2 receptors, which are the receptors that bind with SARS‑CoV‑2 and lead to COVID-19 infections.
“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” Mr. Kennedy said. “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 of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we [the United States] are developing ethnic bioweapons.”
In his article titled “RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews,” New York Post wrote that Mr. 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.”
Mr. Kennedy pushed back on the New York Post’s characterization of his comments in a July 15 tweet, saying the Post’s 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,” Mr. Kennedy wrote. “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.”
