A second video getting a lot of attention shows Kennedy making wild claims about the beginnings of the AIDS crisis, blaming it on gay men and the use of poppers, an inhalant that relaxes muscles and generates a brief headrush and sensation of euphoria.

“There’s a lot of people that said it is not a virus,” Kennedy said. “The virus is a passenger virus, and these people are dying mainly because of poppers. A hundred percent of the people who died in the first thousand [with] AIDS were people who were addicted to poppers, which are known to cause Kaposi sarcoma in rats. And they were people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.”

He claimed that many were injecting drugs.

"There were poppers on sale everywhere at the gay bars,” he said. “And there were a number of people in the [National Institutes of Health] who said, this is not a viral disease, but it’s a disease that is environmental and is being caused to people who are getting autoimmunity from doing these toxins.”

Kennedy claimed, “But for Tony Fauci, it was really important to call it a virus because that made it an infectious disease, and it allowed him to take control of it.”