U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the senators who held his nomination in their hands, at his confirmation hearing on January 30, 2025, 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 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.
At the Capitol Hill confirmation hearing on January 30, 2025, two senators pressed Kennedy on the same point. He told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., 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. When Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., returned to the subject, Kennedy said, “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.”
The Letter He Sent to Samoa
Kennedy’s letter to 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.
At the time, Kennedy was a prominent anti-vaccine activist who chaired Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and acted as its top lawyer, 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, an MMR vaccine that had been mixed incorrectly killed two young children in Samoa. Prosecutors filed criminal charges against the two nurses responsible a month after the children died, and both women eventually admitted guilt to manslaughter. 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. Months later, measles tore through the islands, killing 83 people, most 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 outbreak shadowed his path to the Cabinet. On January 29, 2025, the day before he testified, simulated gravestones memorializing the 2019 measles victims were arranged outside the U.S. Capitol.
The Response From Kennedy’s Department
A spokesperson for HHS said the 2019 visit was unrelated to vaccines and called any claim or insinuation drawn from the letters that Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress both false and defamatory. The department did not respond to a request to explain the contradiction between that position and the language of the letter, and it declined to make Kennedy available for an interview. Requests for comment sent to the White House went unanswered, as did inquiries to the office of Samoa’s prime minister and to the former prime minister who exchanged letters with Kennedy.
Kennedy was not under oath during 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
Lawyers who specialize in Senate procedure said lawmakers could treat Kennedy’s statements as grounds for hearings, an impeachment inquiry or other roadblocks. But they described that outcome as improbable in a Republican-led Congress aligned with President Donald Trump’s administration. 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. Lawmakers in both parties had criticized his anti-vaccine rhetoric, and he spent the hearings working to convince them he supported childhood vaccination. Among those he won over was Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician. Kennedy pledged during that process to preserve existing vaccine policies. Once in office, he moved to change them.