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American environmental lawyer and presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, also known as RFK Jr., was slammed online after he allegedly made some controversial remarks stating that Covid-19 was "ethnically targeted" to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews.
According to a report published by The New York Post, the 69-year-old personality, who has been a long-time conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic, appeared at a media event in New York City on July 11. During a Q&A segment at the Upper East Side restaurant Tony's Di Napoli, he said:
"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 don't know whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and impact."
The alleged comments made by RFK Jr did not sit right with several netizens, who slammed the lawyer for making baseless remarks.
RFK Jr tweets at The New York Post to clarify his remarks
On July 15, RFK Jr took to his Twitter handle to point out an alleged mistake made by The New York Post, stating that he "never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews." Clarifying his point, he said:
"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."
He added that the study served as proof of concept for "ethically targetted bioweapons" and concluded his stance by iterating that he does not imply or believe that the "ethnic effect was deliberately engineered." RFK Jr also shared the study in his tweet.
The study titled "New insights into genetic susceptibility of COVID-19: an ACE2 and TMPRSS2 polymorphism analysis" was published on the website of the National Library of Medicine and focuses on the genetic proneness of Covid-19 across different demographics.
However, RFK Jr's remarks sparked backlash online. Several users slammed the lawyer for his remarks, with one of them even calling him a "dangerous idiot." Others said what he had said during the press event was "horrible" and added that they had known Jewish and Chinese people who had died of Covid.
This is not the first time RFK Jr has raised eyebrows with his remarks and theories. Although he had been vocal about his anti-vax stance long before the Covid-19 pandemic, his remarks gained a lot of traction when the world suffered from the virus in 2020.
He has previously been accused of promoting conspiracy theories regarding anti-depressants being responsible for school shootings and WiFi causing cancer.
