RFK Jr. suggests COVID-19 could have been 'ethnically targeted' to spare Jews

Anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made another eye-popping statement this week, and this time it was about the origins of the novel coronavirus.

The New York Post reports that Kennedy floated his new conspiracy theory about COVID-19 during a meet-and-greet with voters at a New York restaurant.

"There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted," Kennedy said of the virus, according to the Post. "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."

Kennedy added that "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."

Kennedy also claimed without evidence that “we do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons."

While it's true that Black Americans had worse survival odds after catching COVID-19 than other groups of Americans, scientists have attributed this to the fact that Black Americans on average are more likely to have a preexisting health problem that would make them vulnerable to the virus's most severe side effects.

Additionally, researchers have said that Black Americans are more likely to face discrimination in the health care system that would give them less access to top quality care.

There is no evidence at all to suggest that the virus was deliberately engineered to "target" certain ethnic groups.