Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, once suggested that the COVID pandemic was planned.
In August 2020, Kennedy said, “A lot of it feels very planned to me” about the disease outbreak that killed more than 1.2 million Americans.
It was at that time that Kennedy appeared at a press conference in Germany boosting a recently created European chapter of his anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense.
“Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme. I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me,” he said at the time, according to The Bulwark.
“I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them,” he added.
Kennedy also suggested that attempts to fight the pandemic were akin to the Nazis testing “vaccines on Gypsies and Jews.”
He also argued that the efforts to combat COVID was “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.”
Kennedy has been an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist for years, and he criticized the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic. The 70-year-old suggested in the 2020 remarks that the department he’s set to lead could have conducted a “sinister” plot to “enslave” Americans, according to The Bulwark. The bizarre suggestion is that this would have occurred during Trump’s first stint in the White House.
Pediatrician and virologist Paul Offit at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who sits on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, told the outlet that Kennedy is a “conspiracy theorist who has no evidence for his conspiracies other than the fact that he believes them.”
The claim that the pandemic was a government plot began to be spread not long after the virus started to grind the world to a halt. Days into a March 2020 lockdown, claims were being spread that put the blame on billionaires such as Bill Gates and other “global elites.”
The claims were supercharged when the film Plandemic was released. The film pushed several baseless claims, such as that hospitals were diagnosing too many patients with Covid to commit Medicare fraud and that wearing a face mask made it more likely that someone would catch it. The film argued that Gates had schemed to get a global pandemic underway to take control of the global health system and make money off of the subsequent vaccinations.
Kennedy was a Democrat at the time. He claimed that the government was not being truthful about the virus, how successful the efforts to combat the pandemic were, and later about the efficacy of the vaccines.
He accused Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of attempting to profit off the fear connected to COVID.
“My dream is one day I’m gonna be sitting across the table from Bill Gates with a sworn deposition,” he said in a separate speech, according to The Bulwark.
Kennedy once referred to the COVID vaccine as the “deadliest vaccine ever made” and last year, he compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany, and during this year’s election campaign, the New York Post found that Kennedy appeared to be open to the notion that the virus was “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and black people” even as immunity was handed to “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
