Unearthed Video Clips Show RFK Jr. Supporting Conspiracies About the Covid-19 Pandemic Being Government-Planned ‘Bioterrorism’

AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voiced his support for conspiracy theories claiming the government intentionally caused the Covid-19 pandemic in video clips unearthed by The Bulwark.

Kennedy, who was nominated by President-elect Donald Trump for Secretary of Health and Human Services, has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation about vaccines and other health topics.

These newly unearthed video clips are far from Kennedy’s first foray into conspiratorial waters.

He has blamed antidepressants for mass shootings, pushed conspiratorial nonsense about chemtrails, and claimed that Covid-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people” and spare people of Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish descent. He’s questioned whether HIV causes AIDS, accusing scientists of suppressing the truth so they could profit from AZT, the first drug approved by the FDA to treat AIDS. In a June 2023 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Kennedy claimed that wifi “does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer” and “leaky brain.” Kennedy been heavily criticized for all these claims and more, but in the vast majority of cases has rebuffed all calls to walk them back — even when there has been a documented death toll, like the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa in the wake of Kennedy visiting the island and meeting with anti-vaccine activists there.

A report published on Tuesday by The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger and Sam Stein includes three video clips of Kennedy talking about the Covid-19 pandemic.

The first clip is from a speech Kennedy gave in Germany in August 2020 at a press conference for a new European chapter of Children’s Health Defense, his anti-vaccine activist origination. The video shows him saying he thought it was possible that Covid-19 was a “plandemic,” using a term coined by conspiracy theorists who insist the government deliberately caused the global viral pandemic to accomplish authoritarian goals.

“Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ and it was planned from the outset, and it’s part of a sinister scheme,” said Kennedy in the clip. “I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. 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.”

According to The Bulwark, in this same speech, Kennedy “went on to compare efforts to combat COVID to the Nazis testing ‘vaccines on Gypsies and Jews’” and disparaged public health efforts to combat the pandemic “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.”

It should be noted that this sort of view is far more extreme than the “lab leak” theory — that the Covid-19 virus originated in a lab and leaked out to the general population by accident — and instead accuses the government of having acted deliberately and intentionally, as The Bulwark put it, “actively us[ing] infectious disease as a means of expanding power.”

In the next two video clips from June 2021, Kennedy is speaking in Huntington Beach, California and digs further into this notion of government-directed bioterrorism in order to impose “social controls” and “totalitarian rule” — but only after indulging in some 9/11 conspiracy-mongering first.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing happened, Kennedy mused, because “a cohort of people” wanted to “keep building the weaponry” and keep the money “pouring into that space” for defense spending like it had during the Cold War, something that was accomplished after the second, far more devastating, attack on the towers on September 11, 2001. He also said that the anthrax letters that were mailed to congressional and media offices on Capitol Hill, killing five people and infecting 17 more, were another secret government plot.

Bioterrorism was the next step for the profiteering war machine, Kennedy continued:

Because after 9/11, on average, Islamic terrorism was killing fewer Americans every year than lightning strikes. And how long can you keep people saying how we’re gonna give 50 percent of our budget to something that now kills fewer Americans than lightning? They needed an enemy that could get into everybody’s home and kill your family. And that was bioterrorism. And that’s when the biosecurity agenda happened.

And the Covid-19 pandemic was the way to impose “totalitarian rule” through “a psychological warfare technique”:

We do lockdowns, we do masking, we do social distancing, we put the entire globe under house arrest. We create an—and all these people who are doing it, in every one of ‘em, there are CIA people who are psychological warfare experts. And they’re using the same techniques that the CIA has been using for 80 years to destroy indigenous cultures by causing social chaos, causing loss of identity, causing loss of income, and coming in with a powerful central government asserting powerful controls.

All of those, that’s what they were drilling. And these were signaling exercises. These were exercises where they were bringing people in who are powerful people—Senators like Sam Nunn, Gary Hart. All of them had CIA officials. They all had NBC, ABC, Forbes Magazine, Bloomberg people participating. And they were all told, “This is how you handle a pandemic. This is the only way to do it: social controls, totalitarian rule, keep everybody under house arrest and in a hostage crisis to inspire, to induce a psychological state that is technically known as Stockholm Syndrome, where the entire nation is rendered helpless, grateful to their captors, believing that the only hope for salvation is through utter obedience.” And that is a psychological warfare technique.

Kennedy has made claims like this before. In 2023 on Russell Brand’s podcast, he said that the Covid-19 pandemic response was “misused,” and blamed the involvement of the CIA, NSA, the Pentagon, and the rest of the U.S. military.

“The public health response was not about public health,” Kennedy said. “It was a militarized and monetized response. It was a pretense for clamping down authoritarian controls.” He cast suspicion on the involvement of government agencies like the NIH in the vaccine development calling it “a military project from the beginning.”

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