White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemned Democratic presidential challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday, calling his alleged comments about the coronavirus “vile,” “racist,” and “antisemitic.”

Kennedy spoke informally to a group of journalists at a dinner last week in New York. A partial video of his remarks, published several days later by Jonathan Levine of the New York Post, shows Kennedy talking about the danger of bioweapons. Kennedy cited research showing that the coronavirus hit some population groups more than others, adding that he did not know if it had been designed to do so, but that it was a future risk.

He said:

And we need to talk about bioweapons. I know a lot now about bioweapons, because I’ve been doing a book on it for the past two and-a-half years. And you know, what we’ve — the technology that we now have, to develop these microbes — we’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes. The Chinese have done the same thing. In fact, COVID-19 — there’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacked certain races disproportionately. The races that are most immune to COVID-19, because of the structure of the, the genetic structure, genetic differentials among different races, of the receptors, of the ACE2 receptor, COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. And — but we don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential impact of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons. And we are developing ethnic bioweapns. That’s where all those labs in the Ukraine are about — they’re collecting Russian DNA, they’re collecting Chinese DNA so that we can target people by race.

Levine reported that Kennedy “claim[ed] coronavirus was an ‘ethnically targeted’ bioweapon designed to be more deadly for caucasians and blacks — and spare Jews and Chinese.”

Kennedy did not, in fact, say that COVID was designed to “spare Jews and Chinese.” He later clarified his remarks and included a link to a study showing different responses to the coronavirus by ethnic group.

Nevertheless, the story was picked up across the media, and seized upon by many liberal Jewish groups and Democratic leaders, who condemned Kennedy as an antisemite, despite his public support for Jews and Israel.

A reporter at Monday’s White House press briefing asked Jean-Pierre to respond. While claiming that she had to be careful in her remarks, given the Hatch Act (which she has been found to violate in the past), she said:

“The claims made on that tape is [sic] false. It is vile. And they put our fellow Americans in danger, if you think about the racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories that come out from saying those types of things. It’s an attack on our fellow citizens, our fellow Americans.” She cited a statement by the American Jewish Committee condemning “the assertion that COVID was genetically engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people.”

Jean-Pierre has herself been accused of bigotry after defending Democrats who boycotted the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in 2019, calling the organization “severely racist,” without any evidence.