GB News presenter Beverley Turner. Photo: Screenshot

False claims about the COVID-19 virus sparing certain ethnicities, among them Jews, continued to spread on Tuesday after they were initially articulated by Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the weekend.

Last Saturday, the New York Post reported that Kennedy had stated that “COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately” during remarks at a dinner in Manhattan.

“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he said, according to amateur video of his speech. He also claimed that the “Caucasians” and “Black people” were particularly vulnerable to the virus during a discussion of “ethnically-targeted microbes.”

Kennedy’s comments were widely condemned as antisemitic and racist. “The assertion that COVID was genetically engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people is deeply offensive, and incredibly dangerous. Every aspect of these comments reflect some of the most abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history and contributes to today’s dangerous rise of antisemitism,”  White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday.

However, his remarks have been endorsed by some media personalities, among them Beverley Turner, an anchor for the right-wing British news channel GB News.

In a now-deleted tweet, Turner cited a controversial study and said that the virus was “looking increasingly like a bioweapon to destroy the West”. Turner also asked: “Why is this not on the front pages of every paper?”

Turner also invoked the name of the former Chief Medical Advisor to President Trump, Antony Fauci, writing “Fauci anyone?” after her reference to Ashkenazi Jews, despite Fauci being of Italian descent. Other users copied on her tweet included former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Turner was roundly condemned by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), which told the London-based Jewish Chronicle in a statement that “stating that COVID-19 poses less of a risk to Ashkenazi Jews would be stupid enough, but simultaneously suggesting that the virus is a ‘bioweapon to destroy the west’ implies that Jews collaborated in creating the pandemic and feeds a classic trope that Jews spread disease to harm others”.

The group called Turner’s statement “dangerous nonsense” and said it was “astonishing” that she could continue to be a host on GB News.

Turner has made controversial comments about the virus before, comparing COVID-19 lockdown regulations with “apartheid.” She is also a climate change skeptic, railing against what she called “weather-fear porn.”