U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat before the senators holding his nomination in their hands on January 30, 2025, and said vaccines had nothing to do with his 2019 trip to Samoa, a journey he made months before measles swept the Pacific island nation and 83 people died.
A letter he addressed to Samoa’s prime minister on January 20, 2019, contradicts him. Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine activist at the time, used it to propose an examination of what had gone wrong with the country’s measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines after two children died. The words “vaccine” or “vaccination” appear eight times.
That letter turned up among newly obtained documents that contradict what Kennedy told Congress while a bruising confirmation battle was under way. The Associated Press and The Guardian obtained and reported them on August 27, 2026, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department brought with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The release included the prime minister’s reply. Writing a month later, Tuilaepa welcomed the offer: “It is certainly beneficial for Samoa to have the benefit of your Team’s independent health assessment of our MMR Vaccines and I would welcome with much anticipation your Team’s proposed visit to our islands.” During that stretch, his nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could advance only if skeptical Republicans moved it forward.
Two senators pushed him on the point across his back-to-back confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill. At the January 29 hearing before the Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., heard from Kennedy that the journey had been undertaken 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,” Kennedy said. The next day, before the health committee, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., returned to the subject, and Kennedy said, “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.”
Inside the Letter to Samoa
What Kennedy wanted to examine is spelled out plainly in the letter he addressed to Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. He opened by voicing hope that his team could be of use to Samoans, then 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.
Kennedy chaired Children’s Health Defense (CHD) at the time and acted as its top lawyer. Samoa drew the anti-vaccine group’s attention in July 2018, and its representatives began contacting the government there during the suspension of the country’s immunization program.
How the Samoa Crisis Unfolded
A medical error set the crisis in motion. Two young children in Samoa died in July 2018 after nurses mixed the MMR powder with an expired muscle relaxant instead of the sterile-water diluent. The two nurses responsible were charged criminally a month after the children died, and both pleaded guilty. On August 2, 2019, Luse Emo Tauvale was sentenced to five years and six months for two counts of manslaughter and one of obstruction, and Leutogi Te’o to five years for one count of manslaughter. Samoa’s government responded by freezing every vaccination program. The suspension ran from July 2018 until April 15, 2019 — the Associated Press describes it as 10 months — and immunization rates collapsed.
Kennedy made the trip in May and June 2019, bringing along his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, and Dr. Michael Graven, then Children’s Health Defense’s chief information officer. He was photographed greeting Tuilaepa on June 1, 2019, at the 57th Independence Celebration in Mulinu’u. Measles tore through the islands months afterward. The World Health Organization and UNICEF recorded 83 measles-related deaths, 87 percent of them children younger than five. Anti-vaccine activists in Samoa had been emboldened by the visit, critics said. Kennedy told the senators his visit did not influence people’s decisions about whether to vaccinate. On the meetings, his words were: “My purpose in the trip was not to — I ended up having conversations with people, some of whom I never intended to meet.” He put the denial more flatly to the 2023 documentary “Shot in the Arm”: “I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never told anybody not to vaccinate.”
How Kennedy’s Department Responded
The department said in a statement that the 2019 visit “was unrelated to vaccines,” and added: “Any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory.” It did not put the statement in the name of any official, and it did not make Kennedy available.
Whether Kennedy was under oath is itself disputed — Markey’s office says he questioned the nominee under oath, and other accounts say confirmation witnesses at those hearings were not sworn. The distinction carries less weight than it appears to. A witness who knowingly gives materially false testimony to Congress commits a crime punishable by prison, sworn in or not, although prosecutors rarely bring such cases. American Oversight asked Attorney General Todd Blanche and the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, on August 27 to investigate under the federal false-statements statute, Section 1001, which reaches statements made to Congress whether or not they were sworn. “Congress relies on truthful testimony to do its job, particularly on matters as consequential as public health,” the group’s executive director, Chioma Chukwu, said.
Why Congress Is Unlikely to Act
Lawmakers could seize on Kennedy’s statements to justify hearings, an impeachment inquiry or other roadblocks, according to lawyers who specialize in Senate procedure. They described that outcome as improbable, though, in a Republican-led Congress aligned with President Donald Trump’s administration. Democrats who retake the Senate in the fall elections could build exactly that kind of scrutiny on the documents, those attorneys said. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, has said he will press Republicans to refer the case to the Justice Department. “There are consequences for lying to Congress,” Wyden said, adding that if Democrats retake the majority, Kennedy “will be at the top of the list of Trump officials the Finance Committee will hold accountable.” Markey said the documents confirmed that Kennedy “lied to Congress” and that he “cannot be trusted to run HHS for even one more day.” A group of Democratic senators called for an investigation on August 28. The Justice Department has not said whether it will act, and Kennedy has not commented personally.
A broader question that trailed Kennedy through his confirmation also draws fuel from the letter: whether his assurances matched his intentions. His anti-vaccine rhetoric had drawn criticism from lawmakers in both parties, and he spent the hearings working to convince them he supported childhood vaccination.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician who chairs the Senate health committee, was among those he won over; the Senate confirmed Kennedy 52-48. Cassidy said he voted yes because Kennedy had pledged to keep the government’s vaccine advisory committee “without changes.”
In office, Kennedy removed all 17 sitting members of that committee in June 2025 and named his own. In September 2025 the panel moved the COVID-19 recommendation for adults and children to shared clinical decision-making and advised that children under four receive separate measles-mumps-rubella and varicella shots rather than the combined vaccine. On December 4 it voted 8-3 to recommend the hepatitis B birth dose only for infants of mothers who test positive or whose status is unknown, ending more than 30 years of universal coverage.
Cassidy said on June 25, 2026, that the commitments made to him “have been violated,” accusing Kennedy of building public health “upon a foundation of lies.”
