RFK's allies seek to make a movie even worse than Melania

Could there be a contender to rival Melania for best movie in the inevitable forthcoming FIFA Film Awards? Allies of US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are searching for investors to fund a movie mocking the response to the Covid pandemic in America, including hitting out at lockdowns and social distancing.

Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate in his short-lived 2024 presidential campaign, is leading the fundraising effort for the film loosely based on National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya, who became a hero among Covid-sceptics as co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration which declared the virus should be allowed to spread among healthy people with the aim of achieving herd immunity.

The script for The Rash is by Walter Kirn, who wrote the novel Up in the Air which became an Oscar-nominated movie starring George Clooney. The screenplay stars a “no-nonsense” public health professor at a California university who “speaks out against mass hysteria amid a mysterious outbreak of a contagious skin condition”.

The story of the pandemic is one “of great heroes who stood up and said no” to “dangerous scientific experiments mixed with misleading propaganda, mass psychosis, and outright lies,” says the Brownstone Institute in a recent appeal sent to potential funders of the film. The Brownstone Institute is a right wing think tank opposing Covid restrictions, set up by bow tie-clad “anarcho-capitalist” Jeffrey Tucker.

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Kennedy is a long-time Covid sceptic who promoted multiple conspiracy theories about the illness, Bill Gates and 5G phone technology. He opposed vaccines, telling a speech in Washington in 2022: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did. Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.”

Three pages of the script for The Rash are currently previewed on Brownstone’s website. In one scene, the governor of California and a character named Dr Roman Fox orchestrate a celebrity singalong amid the outbreak. A “succession of celebs sing lines from the song Aquarius by the Fifth Dimension,” the script reads.

Sounds like a right good laugh all round!

Fun fact: in the United States, there were 103,436,829 confirmed cases of Covid with 1,234,749 confirmed deaths, the most of any country, and the 17th highest per capita worldwide.