Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Bioweapon Claims Find Big Audience in China

HONG KONG—As China’s media outlets cover the early stages of the U.S. presidential campaign, much of the Chinese public is getting a vastly different view of the race, one that is filtered through the lens of the Communist Party’s propaganda.

Take, for example, recent comments by long-shot Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claimed the U.S. was collecting Russian and Chinese DNA “so we can target people by race” with “ethnic bioweapons.” He said that Covid-19 had been designed to target Caucasians and Black people and that the people who are “most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.”

Kennedy’s comments were widely criticized as racist and antisemitic in the U.S., including by his fellow Democrats. Scientists dismissed his claims about bioweapons, saying that human genetic variations exist along a continuum and no hard line can be drawn to distinguish one ethnic or population group from another based on DNA.