Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is raising eyebrows with his claim that both America and Communist China are in an “ethnic bioweapons” arms race.

Fresh off a visit to the “The Joe Rogan Experience,” where the show’s host, Joe Rogan, offered to host a debate on Covid vaccines between Mr. Kennedy and a molecular virologist, Dr. Peter Hotez, Mr. Kennedy stopped at Newsmax on Tuesday evening to make more alarming biological claims.

“We know that the Chinese are developing ethnic bioweapons, bioweapons that are designed to attack people of certain racial types. And we’re doing the same thing,” Mr. Kennedy said. “We’ve been collecting Chinese DNA. We’ve been collecting Russian DNA specifically for that. [This] arms race is a catastrophe.”

The New York Sun talked to a State Department veteran and analyst at the Hudson Institute, David Asher, about these claims. He said that Mr. Kennedy’s assertion, while not true in and of itself, does have a kernel of truth behind it.

“It’s not true,” Mr. Asher tells the Sun. “The U.S. is definitely not engaged, to my knowledge, as a senior person involved in nuclear and biological weapons in the United States, in genetically selective agents.”

However, Mr. Asher did note that “the Chinese have most definitely harbored public ambitions to develop genetically selective agents, which would target specific ethnicities.”

In 2011, members of the Chinese delegation to the Biological Weapons Convention issued a statement that raised alarms at the conference and abroad when they announced an interest in genetically selective agents — what Mr. Kennedy is likely talking about when he says “ethnic bioweapon.”

“Once hostile elements grasp that different ethnic groups harbor intrinsically different genetic susceptibility to particular pathogens, they can put that knowledge into practice and create genetic weapons targeted at a racial group with a particular susceptibility,” a statement submitted by the Chinese delegation at the conference said.

This statement prompted concern because people at the conference took it to mean that “they more or less made it clear that they were reserving the right to develop GSAs,” according to Mr. Asher.

It’s not clear that such genetically selective agents are even possible given currently available technologies or will be possible with future technologies.

“I don’t know that genetically selective agents are actually possible at this stage in a way that’s sufficiently accurate to differentiate between racial types,” Mr. Asher tells the Sun. “Targeting the general Caucasian, African American, or Asian populations is likely not feasible.”

There is, however, some circumstantial evidence that the Chinese government is investigating the possibility, aside from their 2011 announcement. In 2021, CBS reported that the Chinese government was collecting DNA information about Americans as well as personal information about Americans’ lifestyles via hacking campaigns.

While the Chinese government isn’t the only party collecting DNA information — companies like Ancestry and 23andMe collect DNA data as well — CBS reported that there was concern in the intelligence community that the DNA data could be used for developing bioweapons in addition to its official use in medical research.