White House responds to ‘vile’ RFK Jr. comments on Covid and race

WASHINGTON — The White House on Monday condemned Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for making “vile” and “false” claims that Covid-19 was bioengineered to spare Jews and Chinese people.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Kennedy’s comments “put our fellow Americans at risk.”

“Should you think in regards to the racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories that come out of claiming those varieties of things … it’s an attack on our fellow residents, our fellow Americans,” Jean-Pierre told reporters at a briefing.

She spoke as Democrats and Republicans rushed to sentence Kennedy’s conspiracy theories that were made at a campaign press dinner on July 11 and captured on video by a reporter for the Latest York Post.

Kennedy is difficult President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.

Within the video, Kennedy answers a matter about alleged Covid-19 “bioweapons” by suggesting that the virus is “ethnically targeted” to disproportionally affect some races greater than others, and to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

“We do not know whether it was deliberately targeted or not,” Kennedy said. He then claims that the USA and China are “developing ethnic bioweapons …. so we will goal people by race.”

Kennedy later contended that his comments weren’t antisemitic, and he didn’t retract them.

“I accurately identified — during an off-the-record conversation — that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons,” he wrote on Twitter shortly after the Post published the video.

Speaking on Monday, Jean-Pierre was careful to avoid any mention of Kennedy’s political campaign against the president, as a substitute saying the character of his remarks demanded a response.

“Every aspect of those comments reflect a number of the most abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history and contributes to today’s dangerous rise of antisemitism,” she said. “So that is something … this president and this whole administration goes to face against.”

Kennedy’s remarks drew a right away backlash from members of Congress, in addition to members of his own storied political family.

“The disgusting use of a vile antisemitic trope and unhinged xenophobic conspiracy theory by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is unacceptable and unconscionable,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in an announcement Sunday.

Kennedy’s sister, Kerry Kennedy, and his nephew, former Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., also publicly disavowed his comments.

“I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” Kerry Kennedy said in a statement Monday.

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy responded to a matter about Kennedy on Monday by saying, “I disagree with every thing he said.”

Yet McCarthy refused to say that a House committee scheduled to listen to testimony from Kennedy later this week should disinvite him within the wake of the false claims.

“The hearing that now we have this week is about censorship, I do not think censoring someone is definitely the reply here,” McCarthy told reporters within the Capitol.

The House Judiciary’s select subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has invited Kennedy to testify at a Thursday hearing on the subject of “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans.”

Kennedy has promoted Covid antivaccine conspiracy theories for years, garnering attention amongst a small slice of voters on the fringes of the left and right.

Because of this, Kennedy’s announcement in April that he would challenge Biden for the Democratic nomination was initially dismissed by political strategists.

Yet recent polls have consistently shown Kennedy’s support amongst Democratic primary voters to be within the double digits, a level that threatens to undermine party unity ahead of the 2024 presidential election.