Vaccines had nothing to do with a 2019 trip to Samoa, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. assured the senators who held his nomination in their hands at his confirmation hearing on January 30, 2025 — and that journey came months before a measles outbreak swept the Pacific island nation and killed 83 people. A letter he sent to Samoa’s prime minister on January 20, 2019, tells another story. Then a prominent anti-vaccine activist, Kennedy used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times in the letter, and his proposal was a study of what had gone wrong with the country’s measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines after two children died.
The document turned up in a batch of newly obtained documents that contradict Kennedy’s account to Congress. His confirmation fight was a bruising one, and at that point his nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could move forward only if skeptical Republicans came along.
Two senators pushed him on the trip at the Capitol Hill confirmation hearing on January 30, 2025. His purpose, he told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., had been to deliver a medical informatics system to Samoa, one that would put health records into digital form and make care more efficient. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., circled back to the subject, and Kennedy said, “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.”
The Letter Kennedy Sent to Samoa
His letter to Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi left little doubt about the subject he wanted to examine. His team might be of use to Samoans, Kennedy wrote in his opening lines, and he suggested that manufacturing flaws in the vaccine might explain why the two children had died. “I would propose my team conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines,” he wrote.
Kennedy at that point chaired Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and acted as its top lawyer, and he was a prominent anti-vaccine activist. The anti-vaccine group had turned its attention to Samoa in July 2018, reaching out to the government there while the country’s immunization program was suspended.
What Happened in Samoa
A medical error set the crisis in motion. Two young children in Samoa died in July 2018 after an MMR vaccine was mixed incorrectly. The two nurses responsible faced criminal charges filed by prosecutors a month after the children died, and both women eventually admitted guilt to manslaughter. Every vaccination program was then frozen by Samoa’s government for 10 months, a suspension that ran until April 2019, and immunization rates collapsed.
Kennedy made the trip in May and June 2019, bringing his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, and CHD colleague Michael Graven. He shook hands with Tuilaepa on June 1, 2019, at the 57th Independence Celebration in Mulinu’u. Measles tore through the islands months afterward, killing 83 people, most of them children younger than five. The visit, critics said, emboldened anti-vaccine activists in Samoa. Nobody, Kennedy told senators, made a decision about whether to vaccinate because of his trip, and he described falling into conversations with people he had never intended to meet.
His path to the Cabinet ran under the shadow of the outbreak. Simulated gravestones memorializing the 2019 measles victims stood outside the U.S. Capitol on January 29, 2025, the day before he testified.
The Response From Kennedy’s Department
The 2019 visit was unrelated to vaccines, an HHS spokesperson said, and any claim or insinuation drawn from the letters that Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress was, in the spokesperson’s words, both false and defamatory.
No oath was administered to Kennedy at either of his two confirmation hearings. That distinction matters less than it might seem: knowingly giving materially false testimony to Congress is a crime that can carry a prison sentence whether or not a witness has been sworn in, though such cases are rarely prosecuted.
Why Congress Is Unlikely to Act
Lawmakers could find in Kennedy’s statements grounds for hearings, an impeachment inquiry or other roadblocks, according to lawyers who specialize in Senate procedure. In a Republican-led Congress aligned with President Donald Trump’s administration, though, they described that outcome as improbable. Those attorneys said the documents could instead become the foundation for exactly that kind of scrutiny should Democrats capture the House or the Senate in November’s elections.
A broader question trailed Kennedy through his confirmation — whether his assurances matched his intentions — and the letter feeds it. Lawmakers in both parties had criticized his anti-vaccine rhetoric, and he spent the hearings working to convince them he supported childhood vaccination. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician, was among those he won over. Existing vaccine policies would be preserved, Kennedy pledged during that process. Once in office, he moved to change them.