Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s picked to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, faced tough questioning from Democrats on Wednesday over his criticism of vaccines and his role in stopping measles vaccinations in Samoa, which led to the infection of 57,000 Samoans, dozens of whom died.
“In 2021, in a book called ‘The Measles Book,’ you wrote that parents had been ‘mislead into believing measles is a deadly disease and that measles vaccines are necessary, safe and effective,'” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said at the hearing. “The reality is that measles are in fact deadly and highly contagious, something that you should have learned after your lies contributed to the deaths of 83 people, most of them children, in a measles outbreak in Samoa.”
After two Samoan children died in 2018 from vaccines that nurses accidentally infused with muscle relaxant, the Samoan government suspended its vaccination program. By the time it restarted the program 10 months later, health officials admitted that there was a lot of “catching up” to do, and a surge in anti-vaccine sentiment dissuaded thousands of people from getting their shots.
Kennedy told Wyden that because the suspension was imposed before he set foot on the island, he couldn’t be held responsible for the outbreak.
“I arrived a year later [in June 2019] when vaccination rates were already below any previous level. I went there — nothing to do with vaccines — I went there to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient … I never gave any public statement about vaccines. You cannot find a single Samoan who said I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy,” he claimed.
While Kennedy may not have visited Samoa or directly contacted the Samoan government before June 2019, his anti-vaccine nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, made several Facebook posts that used the deaths of two Samoan children to launch a broader attack on vaccines in general. When the government debated and ultimately lifted the suspension, local anti-vaccine activists like Edwin Tamanese cited posts and statements by Kennedy and Children’s Health Defense to discourage the use of vaccines among the population.
In 2021, Kennedy would recall in an article that, during his June 2019 visit to Samoa, he offered advice to the prime minister about measuring health outcomes “following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines” — a different story from the one he told Wednesday. He said in the article that the trip was arranged by Tamanese and reprimanded the “Global Medical Cartel” for using a “mild measles outbreak” to scapegoat his Samoan friend.
Just months later, as measles raged across Samoa in the fall of 2019, Kennedy wrote in a four-page letter to the prime minister that the measles vaccine itself might have created a new strain that caused the outbreak.
“I was dismayed — but not surprised — to see media reports that linked the current measles outbreak to the so-called ‘anti-vaccine’ movement,” he wrote. “To safeguard public health during the current infection in and in the future [sic], it is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine.”
Even as Kennedy continued to offer counsel to the Samoan government, he has steadfastly denied any culpability in the 2019 measles outbreak, sometimes claiming that the disaster happened in spite of his advice rather than because of it, while at other times downplaying his role completely.
“I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I didn’t tell anybody not to vaccinate,” he said while being interviewed for “A Shot in the Arm,” a documentary that covered the outbreak.
