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Ben Curtis/AP
During his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, glossed over key details about his involvement in the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, most of whom were unvaccinated children.
Under oath, Kennedy claimed that his trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines,” and that the purpose of his trip had been “to introduce a medical informatics system” and to “digitize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”
In the past, Kennedy has acknowledged opposition to vaccines factored into the trip.
But that’s not exactly true. Recent reporting from NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny shows that Kennedy traveled to Samoa on behalf of the anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded, Children’s Health Defense; in the past, he has acknowledged that his opposition to vaccines factored into the trip, claiming that he’d gone because “government officials, including the Prime Minister were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the respite from vaccines.”
The “respite,” as Kennedy’s put it, occurred at a moment of distrust in Samoa’s vaccine system: two children in Samoa had died in 2018 after a nurse accidentally mixed expired muscle relaxant into their shots instead of sterile water, after which the country briefly placed its vaccine program on hold. Even after it resumed, measles vaccination rates plummeted, leaving the island’s children unprotected when the outbreak began in September 2019.
It’s long been public knowledge that Kennedy spent time in Samoa visiting two prominent anti-vaccine activists. The first was Samoan Edwin Tamasese, who was subsequently arrested during the outbreak for speaking out against the government’s vaccination campaign, and, according to the BBC, promoting fake measles cures, including papaya leaf extract and vitamin C. (The charges were dismissed in 2020.) The second was Samoan-Australian influencer Taylor Winterstein, who had planned to present a workshop about making “informed choices” on vaccines. While she was prevented from doing so by the Samoan government, she still traveled to the country and met with Kennedy. Just after the visit, she wrote on Instagram that their meeting has been “divinely timed” and that she would cherish their conversation.
Since Kennedy began his 2024 presidential run and later, as he transitioned to an effort to win the top job at HHS, he and Children’s Health Defense have tried to offer an alternate and misleading picture of his visit to Samoa.
The effort flies in the face of Kennedy’s past words. For example, in 2021, Kennedy wrote an article for Childrens’ Health Defense that called Tamasese a “medical freedom hero” and acknowledged that the anti-vaccine activist had arranged his visit to Samoa. While the article mentions the goal of introducing “a medical informatics system,” it also suggests that vaccines, not measles, were responsible for the deaths; advances the debunked link between vaccines and autism; and attacks the “Global Medical Cartel” for its support of vaccines.
In 2021, Kennedy admitted that during his visit, he’d talked “a limited amount” about vaccines to Prime Minister Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi. And after the outbreak began, he wrote a letter to the prime minister suggesting, without any evidence, that it could have been caused by a “vaccine strain” or an ineffective vaccine.