RFK Jr. pushes back on report he said Covid-19 was ethnically targeted to spare Jews

Longshot Democratic presidential candidate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Saturday morning disputed a report that quoted him saying Covid-19 was "targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people" and that Jewish people are most immune.

In a report by the New York Post titled "RFK Jr. says COVID was 'ethnically targeted' to spare Jews," video appears to show Kennedy speaking at a dinner in Manhattan.

In a discussion on bioweapons and "ethnically targeted microbes," Kennedy claimed that "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," he said, according to the video published by the Post. "We don't know whether it was deliberately targeted that or not." An overwhelming portion of American Jews are Ashkenazi Jews, who are descended from Jews who lived in Central and Eastern Europe.

NBC News has not verified the video. In a statement posted to Twitter later in the day, Kennedy defended his remarks, saying they were not anti-Semitic.

"The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews," Kennedy wrote on Twitter.

"I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered," he continued.

Kennedy said that "during an off-the-record conversation" he had claimed "that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons," and then he mentioned "a 2021 study of the Covid-19 virus shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races."

In January 2022, Kennedy was condemned for implying that Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager who hid from the Nazis and eventually died in a concentration camp, had more freedom than people living under vaccine mandates.

Kennedy apologized and said he was "deeply sorry" for those remarks.