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 in danger.”
“If you think about the racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories that come out of saying those types of things … it’s an attack on our fellow citizens, our fellow Americans,” Jean-Pierre told reporters at a briefing.
She spoke as Democrats and Republicans rushed to condemn Kennedy’s conspiracy theories that were made at a campaign press dinner on July 11 and captured on video by a reporter for the New York Post.
Kennedy is challenging President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
In the video, Kennedy answers a question about alleged Covid-19 “bioweapons” by suggesting that the virus is “ethnically targeted” to disproportionally affect some races more than others, and to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not,” Kennedy said. He then claims that the United States and China are “developing ethnic bioweapons …. so we can target people by race.”
Kennedy later contended that his comments were not antisemitic, and he did not retract them.
“I accurately pointed out — 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, instead saying the nature of his remarks demanded a response.
“Every aspect of these comments reflect some of the most abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history and contributes to today’s dangerous rise of antisemitism,” she said. “So this is something … this president and this whole administration is going to stand against.”
Kennedy’s remarks drew an immediate backlash from members of Congress, as well as 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 a statement 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 question about Kennedy on Monday by saying, “I disagree with everything he said.”
Yet McCarthy refused to say that a House committee scheduled to hear testimony from Kennedy later this week should disinvite him in the wake of the false claims.
“The hearing that we have this week is about censorship, I don’t think censoring somebody is actually the answer here,” McCarthy told reporters in 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 topic of “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans.”
Kennedy has promoted Covid antivaccine conspiracy theories for years, garnering attention among a small slice of voters on the fringes of the left and right.
For this reason, 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 among Democratic primary voters to be in the double digits, a level that threatens to undermine party unity ahead of the 2024 presidential election.