Forbes Staff.
Mary Roeloffs is a Forbes breaking news reporter covering pop culture.
Topline
A newly published letter sent from health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy to the prime minister of Samoa before his ill-fated trip to the nation in 2019 shows he did intend to meddle in the country’s use of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, despite telling Congress during congressional hearings last year the visit had “nothing to do with vaccines.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., during his confirmation hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Jan. 29, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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Key Facts
The trip, one of RFK Jr.’s most well-known controversies, has been linked to a measles outbreak that sickened more than 5,700 people and killed 83 in the span of three and a half months and Kennedy has been accused of bolstering Samoa’s anti-vaccine activists at the time.
He repeatedly testified under oath during confirmation hearings that his trip was unrelated to vaccines, but the new letter explicitly states he wanted to study the use of the MMR vaccine in the Pacific island nation and uses the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times.
In the letter, RFK Jr. told the prime minister he wanted to study adverse health effects on Samoans he believed were caused by a defective batch of the MMR vaccine.
The correspondence directly contradicts Kennedy’s testimony to Congress that the trip was “to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”
He also denied influencing vaccine hesitancy in the nation, which Samoa’s top health official later said was a “total fabrication.”
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“Anti-vaxxers from New Zealand came to be with him here,” Samoa Director-General of Health Dr. Alec Ekeroma said of the trip. “That’s how I know that his influence can be far-reaching.”
key background
Kennedy visited Samoa in 2019, about a year after two infants died soon after receiving the MMR vaccine. It was later determined they died from severe medical malpractice, rather than a defect in the vaccine itself, after two nurses incorrectly mixed the dry MMR vaccine powder with an expired liquid muscle relaxant instead of sterile water. They were each sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter. Despite knowing human error was the cause of the deaths, Kennedy visited the country to meet with government officials and participated in what Ekeroma told the Guardian was a “significant disinformation campaign” about vaccines. Four months after his visit, a measles outbreak sickened more than 5,700 people and killed 83. While Samoa’s vaccination rate had been dropping before Kennedy’s visit—by the time of the outbreak, it was 31%, down from 84% four years previously—Brian Deer, author of “The Doctor Who Fooled the World,” said in a New York Times op-ed said Kennedy and his friends helped fuel the vaccine skepticism. The trip was organized by a Samoan anti-vaccine influencer, according to a 2021 blog post by Kennedy, and anti-vaccine advocates posed for photos with Kennedy during his trip. Kennedy said his words “had nothing to do with vaccine uptake in Samoa or with the 2019 epidemic,” but Ekeroma said he emboldened anti-vaxxers and fueled disinformation.
TANGENT
As health secretary, Kennedy has advocated for broad changes to federal vaccine policy and oversight. Since his nomination, Kennedy has directed the CDC to alter its official website to remove the blanket statement, “Vaccines do not cause autism,” replacing it with text stating that the claim is “not evidence-based” and that research has not definitively ruled out infant vaccines as a contributing factor. Kennedy has appeared alongside President Donald Trump in public press briefings, supporting White House-driven efforts to reassess the U.S. childhood immunization schedule and study environmental factors, including childhood shots, as causes of autism. Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order calling to reduce the number of universally recommended childhood disease immunizations from 17 to 11. He also directed the health department to explore splitting the combined MMR vaccine into three separate shots and recommended administering childhood vaccines at separate, spaced-out appointments rather than bundled visits.
BIG NUMBER
92.4%. That’s the national MMR vaccination rate among incoming kindergartners for the 2025–26 school year, down from 95.2% in 2019–20 and well below the 95% threshold public health officials cite as necessary to maintain herd immunity. The drop in coverage has directly coincided with a historic spike in measles cases—the U.S. has recorded more than 2,700 confirmed cases in 2026, the highest multi-year caseload seen in the U.S. in over 30 years.
further reading
ForbesMeasles Cases This Year Are Outpacing 2025 — The Worst Recent Year On RecordBy Antonio Pequeño IVForbesRFK Jr. Says Americans Shouldn’t Take Medical Advice From HimBy Molly BohannonForbesA Doctor Fact-Checks HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s CNN InterviewBy Omer Awan
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