U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the senators who held his nomination in their hands that a 2019 trip to Samoa, taken months before a measles outbreak swept the Pacific island nation and killed 83 people, had nothing to do with vaccines. A letter he sent to Samoa’s prime minister on January 20, 2019, tells a different story. In it, Kennedy — then a prominent anti-vaccine activist — proposed studying what had gone wrong with the country’s measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines after two children died, and he used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times.
The letter surfaced on August 27, 2026, among newly obtained documents that contradict what Kennedy told Congress during a bruising confirmation battle, a stretch when he needed skeptical Republicans to move his nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) forward. They came out of a freedom-of-information lawsuit against the State Department, filed in July 2025, that has been producing records in monthly batches.
Two senators pressed Kennedy on the same point on consecutive days. He told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., at the Senate Finance Committee on January 29, 2025, that the purpose of the journey was to bring a medical informatics system to Samoa, one that would put health records into digital form and make care more efficient. “I went there, nothing to do with vaccines,” he said. When Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., returned to the subject the next day before the Senate health committee, Kennedy said, “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.”
The Letter He Sent to Samoa
Kennedy’s letter to then-Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi left little doubt about what he wanted to look into. In its opening lines he expressed hope that his team might be of use to Samoans, and he suggested that flaws in how the vaccine was manufactured might explain the deaths of the two children. “I would propose my team conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines,” he wrote to Tuilaepa. Tuilaepa wrote back on February 25, 2019, welcoming an assessment of the country’s MMR vaccines.
At the time, Kennedy was chair and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine group that had turned its attention to Samoa in July 2018 and began contacting the government there while the country’s immunization program was suspended.
What Happened in Samoa
The crisis began with a medical error. In July 2018, two young children died after receiving an MMR vaccine whose powder had been mixed with an expired muscle relaxant instead of diluent. Prosecutors charged the two nurses responsible about a month later, and both pleaded guilty; one was sentenced to five years and six months, the other to five years. Samoa’s government then froze every vaccination program for 10 months — a suspension that ran until April 2019 — and immunization rates collapsed.
Kennedy traveled to the country in May and June 2019, accompanied by his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, and CHD colleague Michael Graven. On June 1, 2019, he shook hands with Tuilaepa at the 57th Independence Celebration in Mulinu’u. Samoa declared a measles outbreak that October and a state of emergency in November. It killed 83 people, 87 percent of them children younger than five. Critics said the visit emboldened anti-vaccine activists in Samoa. Kennedy told senators his trip did not influence anyone’s decision about whether to vaccinate, and said he ended up in conversations with people he had never intended to meet.
The Response From Kennedy’s Department
A spokesperson for HHS said the 2019 visit was unrelated to vaccines. “Any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory,” the department said.
Kennedy was not under oath during either of his two confirmation hearings. That distinction matters less than it might seem: under 18 U.S.C. 1001, knowingly making a materially false statement to Congress carries a possible five-year prison sentence whether or not a witness has been sworn in, though such cases are rarely prosecuted.
Democrats Want a Criminal Referral
Markey answered the same day the documents surfaced. “New documents confirm what we already knew: RFK Jr. lied to Congress,” he said in a statement. “He told us his Samoa trip had nothing to do with vaccines — now this letter shows that was false, just like it was false when he denied his role in the deadly outbreak that followed. This is a pattern, not a slip.” Kennedy, he said, “should never have been confirmed.”
Wyden went further the following day, saying he would press the Senate’s Republican majority to issue a criminal referral to the Justice Department. “There are consequences for lying to Congress,” he said. The watchdog group American Oversight asked Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to open an investigation, citing the same statute.
Nothing has come of it. Lawyers who specialize in Senate procedure said lawmakers could treat Kennedy’s statements as grounds for hearings, an impeachment inquiry or other roadblocks, but described that outcome as improbable in a Republican-led Congress aligned with President Donald Trump’s administration. No Republican has taken up Wyden’s request, and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the physician whose vote Kennedy worked hardest to win, has said nothing about the letter. If Democrats capture the House or the Senate in November’s elections, those attorneys said, the documents could become the foundation for exactly that kind of scrutiny.
The letter also lands on a broader question that trailed Kennedy through his confirmation: whether his assurances matched his intentions. He pledged during that process to preserve existing vaccine policies. Once in office, he moved to change them, cutting the list of universally recommended childhood immunizations in January and winning an executive order in August that directs his department to offer core childhood vaccines as single shots rather than combination products and to reconsider the timing of the whole schedule.