RFK Jr. Said the Government May Have Planned COVID
RFK Jr. Said the Government May Have Planned COVID
In previously unreported remarks, Trump’s HHS nominee said he found the "plandemic" conspiracy persuasive.
THE MAN DONALD TRUMP HAS ENTRUSTED to run America’s health agencies previously expressed his belief that the U.S. government planned the COVID pandemic that killed more than 1.2 million of its citizens.
In an August 2020 speech, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was open to the possibility that the pandemic was, in fact, a “plandemic”—an infectious disease outbreak orchestrated by government officials to effectively subdue the populace.
“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,” Kennedy said at a press conference to mark a newly formed European chapter of his group, Children’s Health Defense. “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.”
Kennedy, in those same remarks, went on to compare efforts to combat COVID to the Nazis testing “vaccines on Gypsies and Jews.” He called the public health efforts “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.”
Kennedy has long been an anti-vaccination activist and, in recent years, an outspoken critic of how the U.S. government handled the COVID pandemic. But the previously unreported remarks he delivered in Germany in 2020—unearthed by The Bulwark in a search of video archives—suggest an altogether different type of fringe view, one in which the pandemic wasn’t just the product of government missteps but outright malevolence.
Kennedy’s statements also raise the remarkable specter that the man who could soon lead the Department of Health and Human Services believes that the department may have carried out a “sinister” scheme to “enslave” its own citizens—and that this scheme was implemented under the leadership of Donald Trump, the very person who has now chosen Kennedy for the HHS post.
A request for comment made to Kennedy’s spokesperson was not returned. But scientists and physicians with expertise in epidemiology and immunology, asked by The Bulwark about Kennedy’s 2020 remarks, said they showed a severe lack of understanding about coronaviruses and zoonotic diseases. These experts described it as deeply problematic for someone so ignorant to be a Senate confirmation away from heading the agencies in charge with pandemic response.
“He’s a conspiracy theorist. He’s a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist who believes that there are evil forces working behind the scenes who mean to do us harm,” said Paul Offit, a pediatrician and virologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who serves on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee. “He just thinks that there’s undue influence by the pharmaceutical industry to give us products that are harmful, including vaccines. I think he’s a conspiracy theorist who has no evidence for his conspiracies other than the fact that he believes them.”
THE ALLEGATION THAT COVID WAS deliberately unleashed as part of a nefarious government plot began circulating online not long after the virus itself emerged. Just days after the United States entered lockdown in March 2020, conspiracy theorists were spreading claims that blame lay with figures like billionaire Bill Gates and other shadowy “global elites.”
But the conspiracy theories truly grabbed mainstream attention when a short documentary called Plandemic went ultraviral online. The video, an interview with discredited scientist and antivax activist Judy Mikovits, repeated a number of falsehoods, including that hospitals were overdiagnosing COVID to commit Medicare fraud and that wearing face masks actually increased a person’s risk of contracting COVID. It suggested that Gates had plotted to spark a global pandemic so as to seize control of the global health system and profit off the vaccines deployed to fight it.
As the pandemic grew more politicized, these claims were tweaked to sow doubts about any and all “elites” involved in the response. Prominent individuals from government, medicine, and business, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, figured prominently in “plandemic” discourse.
While the Republican party—and some Democrats too—gradually grew more skeptical about how public health officials were handling the pandemic, the criticisms largely centered on school and business closures, masking policies, and the push among corporations and governments to get people vaccinated.
Kennedy, then a Democrat, took a different tack. He argued that the government was lying about the virus, the success of its mitigation measures, and eventually the efficacy of the vaccines. He also accused both Fauci and Gates of trying to profit off of pandemic-related fear. In a separate speech uncovered by The Bulwark, he detailed what his version of Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech would look like: “My dream is one day I’m gonna be sitting across the table from Bill Gates with a sworn deposition.”
Such comments, as well as his well known history of anti-vaccine activism, placed Kennedy on the political fringe. And he was largely shunned as he sought a long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this cycle.
Eventually, however, he found common ground with Trump, whom he endorsed shortly after the Democratic convention this summer. The ex-president began spotlighting Kennedy’s health agenda while strategically sidestepping Kennedy’s criticism of how his administration had handled the COVID pandemic.
The marriage worked. Trump won the election while pledging to elevate Kennedy in his White House. Days later, he tapped Kennedy to serve as the next secretary of health and human services.
But Kennedy’s confirmation is not a lock, in part because of the wild claims he made during the COVID pandemic. In addition to expressing openness to the “plandemic” theory, Kennedy once called the COVID vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” In 2023, he compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany, though adding that in the latter, “you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” During the 2024 campaign, he was captured on videotape by the New York Post expressing openness to the idea that COVID was “ethnically targeted” so as to “attack Caucasians and black people” while providing the most immunity to “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Other COVID conspiracy theorists have argued the pandemic started because the government engaged in careless bioweaponry. And while there is a growing belief that COVID-19 itself originated from a lab accident (most scientists continue to believe humans contracted the virus through zoonosis), what’s distinct about Kennedy’s view is that he doesn’t just believe society has irresponsibly pushed the boundaries of scientific research, but that governments have actively used infectious disease as a means of expanding power.
“It is not surprising that he would veer towards this whole plandemic concept. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. never misses an opportunity to embrace a conspiracy theory,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “Now more than ever we need some really smart people that are going to be at HHS and heading the agencies. And if you put someone who is so easily susceptible to conspiracy theories in charge, it can only spell disaster for the American people.”
In another set of remarks unearthed by The Bulwark, Kennedy outlined a wide-ranging theory that the U.S. government has fostered bioterrorism to implement “social controls” and “totalitarian rule.” Speaking at a gathering in Huntington Beach, California in June 2021, Kennedy suggested that the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 occurred because “a cohort of people,” wanted to ensure that the money that had been previously spent on the Cold War, continued to “keep building the weaponry.” Funds continued “pouring into that space,” he added, after the second World Trade Center attack in 2001.
But terrorism as a rationale for military spending had its shortcomings, Kennedy added. “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.”
Kennedy would go on to say that the 2001 anthrax attacks, in which letters containing spores of the deadly bacteria were mailed to members of the news media and offices on Capitol Hill—resulting in the death of five people—was used by the government to both launch the Iraq War and to continue high levels of biosecurity spending.
He drew a line to COVID.
We do lockdowns, we do masking, we do social distancing, we put the entire globe under house arrest. We create a—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.