A member of the Kennedy family is opening up about his time on Jared Kushner‘s coronavirus task force in the early days of the pandemic’s insurgence in the United States.
Max Kennedy Jr., a grandson of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, said that at one point, he was asked to distort a model of the Covid-19 pandemic in an effort to downplay its expected impact, the 26-year-old revealed to the New Yorker on Monday.
“I was torn, to some extent,” said Kennedy, who is a Democrat and was looking to put political differences aside for the greater good. “But it was such an unprecedented time. It didn’t seem political — it seemed larger than the administration.”
Kennedy said that the majority of the team’s volunteers had no relevant experience and were told to prioritize allies of Donald Trump, such as the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who he said was “particularly aggressive” and demanded that masks be sent only to a certain hospital, despite a nationwide shortage. He said he believes that the Trump administration decided to use volunteers so it could bypass its own experts and “control the narrative.”
The former volunteer not only left the task force to pursue work on Democratic campaigns but took it upon himself to act as an anonymous whistleblower to Congress in April, despite it being a violation of a nondisclosure agreement.
“I just couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was so distressed and disturbed by what I’d seen.
Kennedy said that he was asked by Brad Smith, one of the task force’s directors, to create a rival model predicting the number of fatalities, which would show a high of only 100,000 deaths in the United States. That is drastically lower than the 200,000 Americans who have died from the virus to date.
“I don’t know the first thing about disease modeling,” Kennedy said of the assignment, which he declined. However, A spokesman for Smith told The New Yorker that Smith doesn’t remember the conversation.
Representatives for Kushner have not commented on Kennedy’s claims.
