Kerry Kennedy slammed brother Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. for his shocking statements that COVID-19 may have been created to target and kill people of certain ethnicities.
The 63-year-old shared a statement via Twitter on Monday, July 17, in an effort to distance herself and her nonprofit from the harmful claims.
"I strongly condemn my brother's deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting," she wrote. "His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stand for, with our 50+-year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination."
Political analyst and The Kennedy Half-Century author Larry Sabato praised Kerry for standing up for her beliefs in the comments section. "Thank you for doing this," he penned. "It can't be easy but it is essential. Perhaps other family members will join in."
Joe Kennedy III also shared his own statement on the afternoon of July 17, tweeting: "My uncle’s comments were hurtful and wrong. I unequivocally condemn what he said."
This comes after reports surfaced that R.F.K. Jr. had made a number of controversial comments regarding the COVID-19 pandemic while at a private event in New York City earlier this month.
"There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately," the presidential hopeful told others at the event. "COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."
"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," he added, before further warning attendees about the new alleged biological warfare threats to come.
"We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons," he insisted. "They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race."
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Following the event, the Anti-Defamation League spoke out against R.F.K. Jr.'s remarks.
"The claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive," the statement read, further noting that it "feeds into Sinophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years."
