NEW YORK (AP) – A Democratic watchdog group has asked a U.S. House committee to rescind an invitation to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after the Democratic presidential candidate was falsely filmed suggesting that COVID-19 may have been “ethnically targeted” to save Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese.
Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, sent a letter a Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordanchairman of the House Select Subcommittee on Federal Armaments, asking him to disinvite Kennedy from a hearing scheduled for Thursday after the candidate’s comments at a dinner in New York City last week sparked widespread accusations of anti-Semitism and racism.
A spokesman for Jordan said he plans to move forward with the hearing Thursday despite disagreeing with the comments Kennedy made.
In filmed comments first published by The New York PostKennedy said “there is an argument” that COVID-19 is “ethnically targeted” and that it “disproportionally attacks certain races.”
“Covid-19 targets Caucasians and blacks. The most immune people are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he added. “We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are articles that show the racial or ethnic differential in impact because of it.”
After the video was made public, Kennedy tweeted that his words were distorted and denied ever suggesting that COVID-19 was deliberately engineered to save Jews. He claimed without evidence that biological weapons are being developed to target certain ethnic groups and called for the Post’s article to be retracted.
Researchers and doctors rejected the claim, including Michael Mina, a physician and immunologist.
“Beyond the absurdity, the biological knowledge is simply not there to make a virus that targets only certain ethnicities,” Mina. he wrote on Twitter.
Democrats and anti-hate groups quickly condemned the comments by Kennedy, who comes from one of the country’s most famous political families as the son of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy.
“These are deeply troubling comments and I want to make it clear that they do not represent the views of the Democratic Party,” read a tweet Saturday from Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
“Last week, RFK Jr. made objectionable anti-Semitic and anti-Asian comments intended to perpetuate harmful and rejected racist tropes,” U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Sunday in a communicated “Such dangerous racism and hatred have no place in America, demonstrate that he is unfit for public office, and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.”
Asked about the video on Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Kennedy’s claims were false and “vile” and “endangered our fellow Americans.”
The Anti-Defamation League also responded to the comments with a statement saying Kennedy’s claim is “deeply offensive and feeds into the anti-Sinophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the past three years.”
And another hate watchdog, Stop Antisemitism, tweeted: “We have no words for this man’s madness.”
On Monday, Kerry Kennedy issued one statement saying: “I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and false statements last week about Covid being designed for ethnic targeting,” adding that the comments do not represent “what I believe or what human rights stand for by Robert F. Kennedy.” She is president of the human rights organization.
Kennedy will address the GOP-led House subcommittee during a hearing Thursday to examine “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans.”
He has long criticized social media companies and the government, accusing them of complicity in censoring his speech during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was suspended from multiple platforms for spread misinformation about vaccines.
Herrig’s letter to Jordan said Kennedy was “a total piece of work whose views and conspiracy theories would be completely ignored if it weren’t for his last name.”
He called on the president to disinvite the candidate from Thursday’s hearing because of “video evidence of his horrific anti-Semitic and xenophobic views that are simply beyond the pale.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy threw cold water Monday on the idea of disinviting the presidential candidate from testifying before Congress.
“I don’t agree with everything he said,” McCarthy said. “The hearing we have this week is about censorship. I don’t think censoring someone is really the answer here. I think if you look at censorship in America, your first action to censor probably influences some of the problems we have.”
Kennedy has a history of comparing vaccines, widely credited with saving millions of lives, to the genocide of the Holocaust during Nazi Germany, comments for which he has sometimes apologized.
Your first apology for this comparison came in 2015after using the word “holocaust” to describe the children he believes were injured by vaccines.
But he continued to make these observations, escalating during the COVID-19 pandemic. An AP investigation has been detailed as Kennedy has often invoked the specter of Nazis and the Holocaust in their work to sow doubt about vaccines and agitate against public health efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic, such as requiring masks or vaccine mandates.
In December 2021, he posted a video showing infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci sporting a mustache reminiscent of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. In an October 2021 speech at the Ron Paul Institute, he obliquely compared public health measures put in place by governments around the world to Nazi propaganda designed to scare people into abandoning critical thinking.
In January 2022, at a rally in Washington organized by his anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that people’s rights were being violated by public health measures that had been taken to reduce the number of sick people and killed by COVID-19.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You can hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he said.
The head of the Anti-Defamation League condemned the comment as “deeply inaccurate, deeply offensive and deeply concerning”. Yad Vashem, of the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, said it “denigrates the memory of its victims and survivors” as well as others.
After initially following his comments, Kennedy he finally apologizedtweeting: “I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to the families who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust.”
Then, days after launching his presidential campaign this April, he wrote on Twitter that “the onslaught of relentless media outrage finally forced me to apologize for a statement I never made to protect my family.”
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Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri and Chris Megerian in Washington and Michelle R. Smith in Providence, Rhode Island contributed to this report.
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