New York: After the Democratic presidential candidate was caught on camera making the untrue claim that COVID-19 may have been "ethnically targeted" to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, a Democratic watchdog group demanded that a US House committee revoke its invitation to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
After the candidate's remarks at a dinner in New York City last week sparked widespread accusations of antisemitism and racism, Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, wrote to Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, asking him to disinvite Kennedy from a hearing scheduled for Thursday.
Jordan will continue with the hearing on Thursday, according to a spokesperson for him, despite his disagreement with Kennedy's remarks.
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The New York Post first reported Kennedy's videotaped comments in which she claimed "there is an argument" that COVID-19 "is ethnically targeted" and "attacks certain races disproportionately."
"The COVID-19 virus targets Black and Caucasian people. Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are the most immune, he continued. "There are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential of impact for that," the researcher said. "We don't know whether it was deliberately targeted at that or not."
Following the release of the video, Kennedy claimed his words had been misinterpreted and refuted any claims that COVID-19 was designed specifically to spare Jews. He demanded that the Post's article be retracted after asserting without providing any evidence that bioweapons were being developed to target specific racial groups.
The claim was refuted by academics and medical professionals, including immunologist and doctor Michael Mina.
Beyond the absurdity, Mina stated on Twitter that it would be impossible to create a virus that only affects particular ethnic groups. As the son of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, Kennedy comes from one of the most well-known political families in the nation, and his remarks were swiftly denounced by Democrats and anti-hate organizations.
Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, tweeted on Saturday, "These are deeply troubling comments and I want to make clear that they do not represent the views of the Democratic Party."
US Representative Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement on Sunday that RFK Jr. "made reprehensible anti-semitic and anti-Asian comments last week aimed at perpetuating harmful and debunked racist tropes." Such harmful racism and hate have no place in America, make him unfit for office, and need to be denounced as strongly as possible.
On Monday, when asked about the video, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre referred to Kennedy's claims as "vile," "false," and "putting our fellow Americans in danger."
In a statement in response to the remarks, the Anti-Defamation League referred to Kennedy's assertion as "deeply offensive" and said it "feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years."
Additionally, Stop Antisemitism, another anti-hate organization, tweeted: "We have no words for this man's lunacy.
Kerry Kennedy said in a statement on Monday that she "strongly condemns" her brother's "deplorable and untruthful remarks" from the previous week regarding Covid being used for racial profiling, and that they "do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stands for." She is the organization's president for human rights.
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Kennedy will testify before a House subcommittee led by the GOP on Thursday during a hearing to look into "the federal government's role in censoring Americans."
He has long railed against social media companies and the government, claiming they conspired to silence him when he was suspended from several platforms for spreading false information about vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kennedy was described as "a total whack job" in Herrig's letter to Jordan, "whose views and conspiracy theories would be completely ignored but for his last name." It requested that the candidate not be allowed to attend the hearing on Thursday due to "video evidence of his horrific antisemitic and xenophobic views, which are simply beyond the pale."
On Monday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy rejected the notion of forbidding the presumptive nominee from testifying before Congress.
He said, "I disagree with everything he said," McCarthy said. "This week's hearing is focused on censorship. I don't believe that censoring someone will actually solve this problem. If you're going to examine censorship in America, I believe that starting with censorship may contribute to some of our issues.
Kennedy has a history of making comparisons between vaccines, which are widely acknowledged to have saved millions of lives, and the Holocaust-era genocide committed by Nazi Germany, for which he has occasionally expressed regret.
His initial apology for making such a comparison occurred in 2015, after he used the word "holocaust" to describe the harm that he thought vaccines had caused to young children.
But he persisted in saying things like that, intensifying them during the COVID-19 pandemic. An AP investigation described how Kennedy frequently used the Holocaust and the Nazis in his writing to cast doubt on vaccines and stir up opposition to public health initiatives to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, like mandating masks or vaccines.
He released a video in December 2021 of infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci sporting a mustache reminiscent of Adolf Hitler. He made an indirect comparison between global public health initiatives implemented by governments and Nazi propaganda intended to frighten people into giving up critical thinking in an October 2021 speech to the Ron Paul Institute.
Kennedy claimed that the public health measures implemented to lessen the number of people affected and killed by COVID-19 were violating people's rights in January 2022 at a Washington rally hosted by his anti-vaccine organization Children's Health Defense.
"You could travel to Switzerland over the Alps even in Hitler's Germany. Like Anne Frank, you could take refuge in an attic, he suggested.
The head of the Anti-Defamation League criticized the remark as "deeply inaccurate, deeply offensive, and deeply troubling." It "denigrates the memory of its victims and survivors," in addition to others, according to Yad Vashem of the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
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Kennedy eventually issued an apology after initially standing by his comments, tweeting, "I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the horrors of the Holocaust."
Days later, in April, he announced he was running for president. At that point, he wrote on Twitter that "the onslaught of relentless media indignation finally compelled me to apologize for a statement I never made in order to protect my family."