Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied to the Senate about his 2019 trip to Samoa.
During two separate confirmation hearings last year, America’s foremost anti-vaccine activist claimed that his trek to the Polynesian island country had “nothing to do with vaccines.” Fact check: it did.
Letters obtained by The Guardian and the Associated Press, published Thursday, reveal that Kennedy explicitly informed the Samoan prime minister ahead of his trip of his intention to study the efficacy of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
In one such letter dated January 20, 2019, Kennedy unambiguously argued that he believed two recent infant deaths on the island were “temporally associated with MMR vaccines.”
“For most of the world, investigation of adverse health events associated with vaccines—or any pharmaceutical for that matter—is both difficult and time consuming,” Kennedy wrote. “Health information systems are rarely designed to support rapid study of associations between diagnoses and specific vaccination events.”
“It is, however, known that vaccines vary both lot-to-lot from specific manufacturers, and between manufacturers for a single vaccine type,” he continued. “This makes the likelihood of adverse lot and manufacturer specific effects higher for smaller nations where all vaccines can be from a few or a single lot and manufacturer.”
Kennedy’s visit preceded a deadly measles outbreak on the island in 2019. At the time, Kennedy’s anti-vaxx nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout Samoa, tanking the nation’s vaccination rate from a 60-70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones.
Up until that point, Samoa had not experienced a severe measles outbreak since 1985, when 1,095 confirmed cases were reported to the World Health Organization. But in 2019, after Kennedy’s visit, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.
During his confirmation hearings in February 2025, Kennedy repeatedly told skeptical lawmakers that his visit had “nothing to do with vaccines,” and was actually focused on implementing public health systems that would digitize Samoan health records.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told The Guardian in a statement that “Secretary Kennedy’s visit to Samoa in 2019 was unrelated to vaccines.”
The spokesperson added that “any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory,” despite the fact that Kennedy was not sworn in under oath before his congressional hearings.
However, that didn’t grant Kennedy the ability and free license to lie to America’s lawmakers: it’s a felony to make false statements to or conceal facts from the federal government, as detailed by U.S. Code.
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