Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that the current bird flu outbreak among cows in the United States may be related to nearly a decade of controversial gain-of-function experiments on viruses, citing the financial windfall public health agencies and the pharmaceutical industry stand to gain from mRNA vaccines against the virus.

“With so much money on the table, is it conceivable that someone might deliberately release a bioengineered bird flu? When this kind of gain-of-function research is going on, accidental or deliberate leaks are inevitable,” Kennedy wrote in an X article.