Editor’s note: This article is part of a series of articles by The Defender responding to the latest media coverage of vaccines, triggered by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responsible for an autumn 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 children?
As the U.S. Senate prepares to hold confirmation hearings for Kennedy — nominated to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — multiple media outlets have tried to discredit Kennedy by alleging he played a key role in the tragedy in Samoa.
Some media reports suggested that if Kennedy wins the appointment for HHS secretary, outbreaks like the one in Samoa will likely occur in the U.S.
“It was a disaster and it was caused in large part by RFK Jr.,” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green told MSNBC news anchor Jonathan Capehart. “If he becomes our lead health official, you are going to see outbreaks like this in rural communities and cities across America. Children will die or have severe disabilities.”
However, a brief look into the timeline alone of events in Samoa shows that it “absolutely does not make sense” to blame the measles outbreak on Kennedy, according to Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
“This narrative around Samoa falls apart on first glance,” Prasad said in a YouTube video posted Tuesday.
Instead, Prasad said, the multifaceted causes of the Samoan measles outbreak were all linked to a limited public health infrastructure — not to the “anti-vax” sentiment propagated by Kennedy and others.
Prasad wrote on his Substack:
“The Samoan measles outbreak occurred because of a constellation of factors including a impoverished population, a recent history (in historical terms) of having measles, longstanding poor vaccination rates, the manslaughter of two children, a cover up, poor health literacy, poor health infrastructure, poor government messaging, suspending MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccination by the government, and a country drawn to traditional ideas of health and medicine.”
Prasad reviewed the outbreak timeline, which he said began in July 2018. That’s when two nurses killed two infants with the MMR shot after mistakenly mixing it with a paralytic rather than a saline solution.
Instead of admitting their mistake, the nurses hid the vials and tried to cover up the infants’ cause of death.
When the cover-up came to light and the public learned what really caused the deaths of the two infants, the revelations sparked a public outcry. The nurses were convicted of manslaughter — and the Samoan government — not Kennedy — paused Samoa’s MMR vaccine program for 10 months.
Vaccination rates dropped from 75% to 30%, Prasad said.
Prasad said Samoa’s low vaccination rates — which he blamed on public mistrust of Western medicine and the Samoan government — were partly responsible for the outbreak.
Kennedy visited the island in June 2019, almost a year after the two infants died, triggering the government’s 10-month pause in MMR vaccines and the sharp decline in vaccination rates.
Two or three months later, a visitor from New Zealand introduced the illness and an outbreak followed. The government responded by launching a mass vaccination campaign.
The Samoan measles outbreak had a particularly high case fatality rate because children either didn’t seek medical treatment in Samoa’s broken healthcare system or because doctors used ineffective treatments.
The idea that Kennedy’s visit led to nationally low vaccination rates that then led to infant deaths a few months later doesn’t make sense, Prasad said. “He couldn’t have caused it, because the damage was already done.”
Yet multiple media outlets — including The Washington Post and The New York Times — published articles claiming Kennedy was to blame.
Prasad also said that when public figures take vocal positions on controversial issues, it doesn’t drive public health policy in the way the media often asserts.
He gave the example of Dr. Anthony Fauci who is “a central player in the government response to COVID-19,” and therefore has a much larger role in public health policy than someone like Joe Rogan, who “is just a third-party commenter.” Even though the media often ascribes responsibility to people like Rogan and, in the case of Samoa, Kennedy, third-party commenters don’t drive policy.
Prasad suggested that if people think “vaccine hesitancy” is a problem, they should look to issues such as the lack of randomized clinical trials, or to the fact that even randomized trials such as those for the maternal RSV vaccine don’t study whether the vaccine reduces the target virus.
He said there ought to be a robust public system for monitoring vaccine injuries, and public health officials should acknowledge when they occur rather than covering them up.
Investigative reporter David Marks reported in Brownstone that at the time of the measles outbreak, Kennedy wrote a letter to the Samoan prime minister presenting possible reasons for the outbreak.
Writing in his former role as chairman of Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy suggested the government look into the possibility that Merck’s MMR vaccines were failing. If they were, Kennedy said, it could mean that vaccinated mothers were not passing protection on to their infants, that the vaccine didn’t protect against the circulating strain of measles, or that administration of a live virus led to the circulation of a vaccine strain of measles.
Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's from the University of Texas at Austin.
