Letters contradict Kennedy’s statements about Samoa visit — The Guardian
Letters obtained by The Guardian and the Associated Press contradict statements made by US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his Senate confirmation hearings. He repeatedly claimed at the time that his 2019 trip to Samoa was not related to vaccines.
In a January 20, 2019, letter to Samoa’s then-prime minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, Kennedy wrote that he wanted to study the country’s use of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The document, sent on Children’s Health Defense letterhead, used the word “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times.
Correspondence on vaccines
Kennedy suggested that the deaths of two children in Samoa after receiving the MMR vaccine could have been linked to issues with specific vaccine batches. He proposed that his team conduct a detailed assessment in Samoa of medical information concerning what happened with the MMR vaccines.
A month later, the prime minister replied that Samoa could benefit from an independent assessment of the MMR vaccines and welcomed a possible visit by the team. In a separate email, Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense colleague Michael Graven described the trip in May 2019 as a vaccine-related mission.
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Kennedy, his wife Cheryl Hines and Graven visited Samoa in May and June 2019. By then, vaccinations, which the country’s government had suspended for 10 months, had already resumed. Samoa’s top health official publicly stated that human error, rather than a problem with the vaccine, had caused the children’s deaths.
Statements in the Senate
Several months after the visit, Samoa experienced a measles outbreak: thousands of people fell ill and 83 people died in total, mostly children under the age of five. Public health experts said that efforts to combat the outbreak were complicated by the activity of anti-vaccination opponents, some of whom may have been encouraged by Kennedy’s trip, they said.
At the Senate hearings, Kennedy explained that he had gone to implement a medical informatics system to digitize records and improve the efficiency of healthcare services. In response to questions from Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey, he said that the purpose of the trip did not concern vaccination.
A spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services said Kennedy’s 2019 visit to Samoa was not related to vaccines, and called claims that he had made false statements before Congress false and defamatory. Kennedy was not sworn in during the two confirmation hearings, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
