RFK Jr established his antisemitism by saying Ann Frank had it easy compared to Americans suffering under anti-COVID measures. Now he claims that there are Jew-sparing, lab-created COVID viruses. The New York Post reported today that during, as the paper described it, the question-and-answer portion of raucous alcohol-fueled and fart-filled dinner at Tony’s Di Napoli in Manhattan last Tuesday, Kennedy offered this howler:
“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
We should not be surprised. For all his environmental work, Kennedy is nothing but a science-denying, pro-Putin MAGA in Democratic clothing. And his logic is that of a zealot, not a rational thinker. He offers this sophistry to support his claim.
“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,”
What are these “papers out there”? We do not know. He does not say. However, I will take a guess. Epidemiologists have broken down COVID, by infection, hospitalization, intubation, and fatality rates across different demographic groups. And their research showed some people were more likely to suffer worse consequences from the pandemic than others.
Trump voters had worse outcomes than Democrats. COVID affected the obese and those with other co-morbidities harder than the average citizen. Vaccine deniers were exponentially more likely to die. At the onset of the pandemic, Blacks suffered worse than whites. But then increasing acceptance of vaccines in minority communities closed the gap. (Not that Kennedy will ever mention anything positive about vaccination.)
Bearing this information in mind, let us consider Kennedy’s paranoid ramblings. Jews tend to be more liberal and better educated than the general population. It is reasonable to believe they have higher rates of vaccination. Interestingly circumstances provided a control group. Among Hassidic Jews, a fundamentalist religious community with high vaccine resistance, COVID rates were higher than in other Jews.
As Hassids are Ashkenazi Jews, RFK’s claim that somebody designed COVID to spare Jewish communities is unmitigated bullshit. (I repeat, Kennedy will never give vaccination the high credit it deserves.)
RFK is equally repugnant with his anti-Chinese bigotry. Asian Americans, in total, had lower hospitalization/fatality rates from COVID — not just the Chinese. I do not know why. But Asians have a far lower obesity rate, so that may have played a part.
According to RFK, the worst is yet to come. With assurance, he warned of more dire biological weapons in the pipeline. Ones with a “50% infection fatality rate” that would make COVID-19 “look like a walk in the park.” He added,
“We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”
”We” do know this? How? If Kennedy has evidence of Chinese perfidy, he should give it to the House Republicans — those people will believe anything, no matter how fact-free, that hurts Biden and the Democrats. The fact that even those fantasists have not had Kennedy speak to one of their Soviet-style disinformation committees speaks to the insanity of his claims.
Even people who believe the government overreacted to COVID think Kennedy is crazy. Dr. Monica Gandhi, Professor of Medicine and Infectious Disease at UCSF and a longtime critic of pandemic-related school closures, offered this rejection.
“No no no no no. I don’t see any evidence that there was any design or bioterrorism that anyone tried to design something to knock off certain groups.”
Morton Klein, President of the right-leaning Zionist Organization of America, called Kenndy nuts.
“This is crazy. It makes no sense that they would do that. I read everything. I was totally against the vaccine. . . I wanted to convince myself it was correct not to take it. I have never seen anything like this.”
It is not the first time RFK has raced down the rabbit hole. In 2015, on the 20th anniversary of the Nation of Islam’s ‘Million Man March, Louis Farrakhan's protege, Tony Muhammad, said that Kennedy had told him:
“The senior lead scientist at the CDC has admitted that the MMR vaccine and many of the vaccine shots have been modified to attack Black and Latino boys.”
Kennedy is a dangerous and irresponsible man who thinks nothing of trading on his family name to spread medical nonsense that injures and potentially kills people. We laugh at MT Greene and her antisemitic “Jewish space lasers,” but that insanity does not kill people. Kennedy, on the other hand, is casting doubt on one of the most effective medical breakthroughs in human history.
It is despicable.
*The picture at the top is from a diary written by DK contributor DowneastDem. RFK Jr. is suing Downeast for a diary they wrote in 2020. Anyone on this site contemplating a vote for RFK Jr. should ask themselves if this nasty bully is who they want in charge. And anyone else who is thinking of voting for RFK to send Democrats a message, should just be honest and vote Republican.
