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Newly obtained emails are raising fresh questions about what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told U.S. senators about a 2019 trip to Samoa before a later measles outbreak there, as Kennedy leads federal health policy with President Donald Trump’s administration. In the Senate confirmation process for his appointment as health secretary, Kennedy repeatedly gave the same answer when asked whether the trip was tied to vaccines.
During two rounds of questioning at his hearings, Kennedy said his “purpose” for going to Samoa had nothing to do with vaccines. “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines,” Kennedy said when questioned by Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts on Jan. 30, 2025, the Associated Press reported. Markey later asked whether the trip had “nothing to do with vaccines” after Kennedy had told senators in a different setting that it did not relate to vaccines, and Kennedy replied, “Nothing to do with vaccines.”
The new disclosures, reported jointly by The Guardian and The Associated Press, include emails exchanged among staffers at the U.S. Embassy and the United Nations that provide an inside account of how Kennedy’s trip came about. The records include contemporaneous accounts suggesting his concerns about vaccine safety motivated the visit, the report said, and they undermine the testimony Kennedy gave during the confirmation hearings.
The Associated Press report said the emails prompted at least one senator to raise concerns about whether Kennedy misled Congress about his role in the Samoa outbreak context. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who questioned Kennedy about Samoa during the confirmation process, responded to the records by saying Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda is directly responsible for the deaths of innocent children. Wyden also said in an email that “Lying to Congress about his role in the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa only underscores the danger he now poses to families across America,” and that “He and his allies will be held responsible,” according to the report.
The newly disclosed messages also shed additional details about the logistics of the trip. They include emails in which a U.S. Embassy employee, Benjamin Harding, was connected to arrangements for Kennedy’s team to meet Samoan government officials. The report said the Embassy staffers also received a tip about Harding’s involvement from Sheldon Yett, then UNICEF’s representative for Pacific island countries, and that Yett wrote that the prime minister had invited Kennedy’s team to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine.
Kennedy ultimately visited Samoa in June 2019, meeting with Samoan government health officials and with figures who have cast doubt on vaccines, according to the report. The Associated Press and The Guardian reported they found no public record of Kennedy discussing the trip’s purpose until after measles struck, and they said Kennedy later described his goal as discussing the “introduction of a medical informatics system” to track drug safety. Kennedy has also said that his reasons for going to Samoa were not related to vaccines, and that he did not influence decisions about whether people would immunize themselves or their children, the report said.
The report provided background on how the outbreak followed a period in which Samoa halted vaccination. Anti-vaccine activists in the United States became interested in Samoa in July 2018, after two babies died following injections with a tainted measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, and the government halted the vaccine program for 10 months until the following April. During the time when vaccines were not being administered, the records described in the report say Children’s Health Defense worked to connect Kennedy with Samoan political leadership, including outreach to Edwin Tamasese, who wrote back about organizing logistics with the prime minister’s office and copied Kennedy on the message chain.
Samoa’s measles outbreak later sickened thousands and killed 83 people, mostly children under age 5, according to the Associated Press report. The disclosures arrive as measles outbreaks spread across multiple U.S. states and have put the country’s measles elimination status at risk, the report said, while Kennedy, now health secretary, has used public influence to overhaul federal immunization guidance and raise suspicion about vaccine safety, including the measles vaccine.
The Associated Press report said the U.S. State Department provided the emails, many heavily redacted, in response to an open records lawsuit brought with assistance from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions, according to the report.