United States Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has sparked uproar with comments he has made denying Arab contributions to mathematics, science and literature.

In a high-voltage rant on Monday, the US health secretary said, “There’s five hundred 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.”

RFK Jr, who has been involved in anti-vaccine campaigns and has promoted a debunked theory linking vaccines to autism, made the comments during a US election campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan while supporting Republican nominee Mike Rogers, who is up against Arab-American Democrat nominee Abdul El-Sayed, in a tightly contested battle for Michigan’s Senate seat in next week’s midterm elections.

Critics said the comments were racist, Islamophobic and factually inaccurate, pointing to modern and historic Arab innovation in multiple fields.

Here’s how Arabs have made…