Although in the era of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and his “make America healthy again” (MAHA) quackery and antivax ideology firmly in charge of all non-military federal medical, public health, and biomedical research it might seem like ancient history, there was a time when RFK Jr. actually suffered some pushback for some of his antivax activities. Specifically, in 2019, he famously inserted himself into a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa, which ultimately resulted in nearly 6,000 cases of measles and 83 deaths, after which he repeatedly denied that he had told anyone not to vaccinate or that he had done any fear mongering about vaccines. (He had done both.)
Indeed, so egregious were his actions in helping to fuel what became the Samoan Measles Outbreak that in January 2025, as his confirmation hearings were being scheduled, his stans (like Dr. Vinay Prasad) were furiously gaslighting his role in making a bad situation in Samoa with respect to vaccines even worse. During his confirmation hearings, RFK Jr. even denied that his visit to Samoa had anything to do with vaccines, claiming instead (transcript):
I went there nothing to do with vaccines, I went there to introduce a medical informatics system, 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 will say, “I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.” I went in June of 2019, the measles outbreak started in August. Oh, clearly I had nothing to do with the measles.
Which brings us to a story reported last week by Michelle Smith in The Guardian, RFK Jr lied in Senate confirmation hearings, newly revealed documents indicate:
Newly obtained documents indicate that the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during two congressional hearings last year, when he told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
When I first perused the article, I was a bit puzzled. What was new? I wondered, mistakenly assuming that the letter being referenced was the letter to the Samoan Prime Minister that had been reported in The Washington Post in November 2019 and that I had written about shortly after. Indeed, based on that letter I deconstructed this particular set of lies in response to Dr. Prasad’s gaslighting in January 2025. However, another important part of the story is how in November 2019, one of the two deadliest months of the measles outbreak, RFK Jr. wrote a deceptive letter (PDF) to the Prime Minister of Samoa, Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi.
This letter was a masterpiece of antivaccine dissembling, misinformation, distortion, and lies and appears to have served as a template providing antivaccine talking points to be used by quacks who have been trying to deflect blame for the deadly outbreak from the low vaccine uptake rate in Samoa and their role in discouraging people from vaccinating their children, including an utter falsehood claiming that the outbreak had been due to a “defective” MMR vaccine. The lies and gaslighting of RFK Jr. and his followers also ignores the fact that he met with local antivax activists, some of whom couldn’t help but exult in social media posts about meeting such a famous antivax celebrity, not to mention later reports that RFK Jr.’s antivax organization had funded the majority of antivax ads on Facebook in Samoa prior to the outbreak.
It turns out that, skimming the article, I hadn’t paid close enough attention. Per The Guardian:
Letters obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press contradict that testimony. In one he wrote to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy explicitly said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the Pacific island nation. In it, he used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times.
“I am writing this letter to you in the hope that we might be helpful to the people of your great nation,” he wrote, adding that he believed the deaths of two children there after an MMR vaccine could have resulted from manufacturing issues.
“I would propose my team conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines,” Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy’s Samoa visit – just months before a measles outbreak swept through the island, killing 83 people – has become one of the most controversial events in his career. At the time, he was leading a non-profit known for its anti-vaccine activism. The visit was seen by critics as having emboldened anti-vaccine activists in Samoa.
Here is the full letter:
To be fair, the reason that MMR vaccine uptake in late 2018 plummeted was not RFK Jr.’s fault, although he and his antivax allies certainly did their best to make a bad situation worse. Here’s what I mean. In July 2018, two infants died in Samoa after having received the MMR vaccination. In a bizarre twist, he deaths were eventually demonstrated to have occurred due to the nurses who gave the injections having mixed the vaccine with an expired muscle relaxant, instead of water. Ultimately, the two nurses pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to five years in prison. A more detailed timeline of the tragedy can be found at New Zealand’s Immunisation Advisory Centre, and a detailed account of the trial of the two nurses can be found here. As you might imagine, it was horrible tragedy that did not need to happen, but the vials of saline and the expired muscle relaxant were marked similarly, making such a mistake all too possible.
Unfortunately, as a result of the tragedy, parents in Samoa became understandably very hesitant to vaccinate their children with MMR, and, as a result, vaccination rates plummeted dramatically. It didn’t help that it took two weeks before the medication error was discovered. As I discussed before, although the nurses were charged and criminal proceedings held in the fall of 2018, the nurses were not convicted until 2019, and it definitely appears that the Samoan government took way too long after it had discovered the problem that led to the babies’ deaths after vaccination to inform the public. Indeed, Australian physician Prof. David Isaacs noted in a brief communication to The Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health:
The Government suspended the MMR immunisation programme after the July administrative error. The cause of this vaccine tragedy was not made public for months, even after re-starting MMR vaccine in November 2018. In July 2019, two nurses were sentenced to 5 years’ prison for inadvertently using a curare-like muscle blocking agent instead of water to dilute lyophilised (powder) MMR vaccine. This sort of disaster is not new: 15 infants died in northern Syria in 2014 when atracurium was used as a diluent instead of water.6It is unclear why muscle relaxants were kept in immunisation facilities in Syria or Samoa.
There’s interesting thing to consider that, unfortunately, the article in The Guardian didn’t really touch on, namely the date of the letter: January 20, 2019. Why is this important? I immediately wondered if it had yet been widely reported that the deaths six months earlier had been due not to the MMR vaccines themselves, but to the error made by the nurses mixing up the vaccines for administration. In January 2019, although the nurses had been charged, it was not entirely clear how well known in Samoa, much less outside of Samoa, it was that the two infant deaths had been due to an error in reconstituting the MMR vaccine, not due to the MMR vaccine itself. It’s similarly unclear whether RFK Jr. knew about what had happened. Again, as I discussed before, the Samoan government was not free from culpability, as it did not widely report the results of its investigations for months.
After all, look at what RFK Jr. proposed. He proposed to do a “health informatics assessment” (whatever that means, coming from him and his antivax org Children’s Health Defense). However, that “health informatics assessment” was going to be all about the MMR vaccine, with RFK Jr. stating in the letter that he believed that the “deaths associated recently with the MMR vaccine in the Independent State of Samoa may have been manifestations of these effects”; i.e., manifestations of lot-to-lot variation in MMR vaccines.
This statement suggests one of two things. Either RFK Jr. was ignorant of the fact that the Samoan government knew what had caused the deaths of the two infants, having investigated it and found that the nurses, having realized their error, had taken the vials home and hidden them. Alternatively, RFK Jr. did know and was deceptively offering the Prime Minister his “services,” not to investigate what had actually happened, but as a means of spreading antivax propaganda, as well as fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the MMR vaccine, blaming “bad lots” of the MMR vaccine for the deaths of the two infants.
Unfortunately, the Prime Minister did not exactly cover himself in glory in his response a month later. Instead of telling RFK Jr. that his health ministry already knew what had caused the deaths and that it hadn’t been a “defective” MMR vaccine (as RFK Jr. was implying that it had been), he wrote this utterly useless letter in response:
I mean, WTF? It reads like a form letter: “Thanks for your offer to assess our MMR vaccines. [Insert paragraph about Samoan history here.]” Again, the Prime Minister knew what was going on. He knew the results of the investigation. He knew that it had been a tragic medication error, not any fault of the MMR vaccine, that had caused the deaths of the two infants. Why didn’t he say something along the lines of, “Thanks, but no thanks”? I realize that RFK Jr. is a huge worldwide celebrity and that the Kennedy name still held a lot of cachet in 2019, but come on!
In any event, this letter is yet another indication that, his later recountings of the purpose of his trip and what had happened, for example:
In 2021, Kennedy explained in a blogpost on the CHD website that he went to Samoa to attend an Independence Day celebration and to discuss “the introduction of a medical informatics system” to track drug safety. He said Samoan officials “were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines”.
So, even in his lies that his trip was to introduce a medical informatics system, RFK Jr. obliquely admitted it was about the vaccines. Worst of all, in his testimony before the Senate, RFK Jr. lied like the proverbial rug repeatedly, always claiming that his trip had nothing to do with vaccines. Clearly it did, just on the basis of that January 2019 letter alone.
There’s more than that, though. Later in the article in The Guardian:
Meanwhile, the Samoan government halted all vaccinations for 10 months, until April 2019. Vaccination rates plummeted.
During that time, CHD started contacting the Samoan government, according to emails previously obtained by the Guardian and the AP as the result of a freedom of information lawsuit against the US state department brought with the aid of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The Guardian reported on these emails in early February 2026, but unfortunately by that time it was far too late for them to have potentially derailed RFK Jr.’s nomination. He had already been HHS Secretary for nearly a year. Still, it is of interest to look at this email cited in the story:
It doesn’t get much more damning than this. “Supposedly” RFK Jr. will be there to be a VIP guest at Samoa’s Independence Day events, but: “The real reason Kenedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view).” In other words, Samoan Independence Day is a pretext. He’s really coming to promote antivax disinformation. Moreover, by the time RFK Jr. wrote his four-page letter to the Prime Minister in November 2019, the true cause of the infant deaths was indeed widely known. That’s likely why RFK Jr. pivoted to blaming the measles outbreak that was then raging and killing children on “defective vaccines,” rather than its true cause, the very low MMR uptake rate that had plummeted as a result of the fear caused by the two infants who died after receiving the incorrectly reconstituted MMR vaccines.
I sometimes wonder why I bother to write about just how dishonest RFK Jr. is. Having written about him and his antivax activism for over 21 years, I can say that the one thing I’ve learned about him is simple: He lies. Constantly. I also know that nothing changes his mind. He is utterly convinced that he is correct and that vaccines are both ineffective and dangerous. Nothing, no amount of evidence or science, will change that. That doesn’t mean that a new Congress, should Democrats recapture the majority in the House and possibly even the Senate, shouldn’t try to hold him accountable for his obviously having lied to the Senate about his role in Samoa in 2019.
