Robert F Kennedy Jr , the US health secretary, faced backlash on Wednesday for a “wildly racist tirade” during a campaign stop in Michigan in which he falsely asserted that Arabs never won leading awards in science or literature.

Kennedy was speaking at the Monday night event in Grand Rapids in support of Mike Rogers, the Republican US Senate candidate trailing his Democratic midterms opponent Abdul El-Sayed , who is Muslim, in polling.

“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the ⁠Nobel prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf prize, they don’t produce literature,” Kennedy said.

A factcheck published on Tuesday by the Associated Press showed that Arabs have won, or been shortlisted, for all those awards in recent years.

The ⁠Council on American-Islamic Relations called Kennedy’s Islamophobic remarks “a ⁠textbook display of ​unvarnished racism and bigotry”, and the US healthcare advocacy organization Protect Our Care condemned his…