Part V More to follow . . .
More on Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s battle against vaccines -- and against the institutions that promote them -- goes back to at least the mid-2000s, as we explain in the first article of this series. But the arrival of COVID-19 gave the environmental attorney fresh grounds to intensify his attacks and a...
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Kennedy’s Attack on Pandemic Policies
During his campaign, Kennedy has repeatedly associated pre-vaccine public health measures to control the pandemic, such as business closures and stay-at-home orders, with what he calls an “attack” on the middle class.
“There’s been a systematic attack on our middle class, and the coup de grâce was a lockdown,” he says in an eight-minute campaign
video.
The
“lockdowns,
“ Kennedy
told Michael Smerconish during a town hall in Pennsylvania in June, were a “16 trillion dollar expense for which we got nothing.”
“Lockdowns robbed four trillion [dollars] from the middle class and the poor in this country and transferred it to the super rich. We created five hundred new billionaires—a billionaire a day, every day,” he also
told the New Yorker.
As
we’ve written, several studies have found the restrictions imposed by the government in an effort to reduce the spread of the coronavirus did reduce COVID-19 cases and/or deaths. (What many people have called “lockdowns” in the U.S. were not true lockdowns, such as the ones seen in China. Stay-at-home orders, for example, limited daily movement to essential activities and were
loosely enforced.)
Kennedy did not respond to our requests asking for the source of his figures, but $16 trillion appears in a
viewpoint article published by two Harvard economists in JAMA in October 2020. The early estimate, however, isn’t specific to the cost of “lockdowns,” but rather, covers the total cost of the pandemic. It considered all economic losses, including premature deaths and long-term health impairment, and assumed that the pandemic would be “substantially contained by the fall of 2021.”
The 500 new billionaires number likely comes from
Forbes, which in 2021 reported a record 493 people joined its “World’s Billionaires” list during the pandemic, “meaning the world on average gained a new billionaire every 17 hours” since March 18, 2020. But contrary to Kennedy’s suggestion that the billionaires are all in the U.S., the number is for the entire globe. China alone had 205 new billionaires, while the U.S. had 98.
The $4 trillion figure could come from a 2022 Oxfam
analysis, which found that the net worth of billionaires across the globe increased by $3.8 trillion during the pandemic (a
newer Oxfam analysis says billionaires increased their wealth by $5 trillion during the pandemic). But again, the figure isn’t specific to the U.S.
Or, Kennedy could be referring to an approximate figure for the federal response to the coronavirus, which totaled
$4.6 trillion as of Jan. 31, 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office. While some of the funds were
stolen, wasted or misspent, a good portion of the money went to programs to help lower and middle class people,
including unemployment insurance and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.