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Newly released emails show that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. openly lied during multiple Senate confirmation hearings last year when discussing his 2019 visit to Samoa, after which a horrific measles outbreak killed dozens of young children.
Kennedy visited Samoa in June 2019, during a time of high interest in the country for anti-vaccine activists. Two babies died in 2018 in the country after they were injected with a tainted vaccine, which investigators found was not related to the vaccine itself, but the nurses’ faulty administration.
Afterward, however, the government suspended the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccination program for 10 months — the period during which Kennedy visited and met with top government officials. Tragically, later in 2019, there was a measles outbreak in Samoa that led to the deaths of 74 people, over 60 of them under 4 years old.
An email recently released by the State Department, sent by U.S. embassy official Antone Greubel in Samoa before Kennedy’s visit, asserted: “The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view).”
Gruebel’s email was in response to a message from a UNICEF representative who tipped embassy officials off about the trip. That email, from UNICEF’s Sheldon Yett, said: “We now understand that the Prime Minister has invited Robert Kennedy and his team to come to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine.”
Yett’s email also noted that one of the U.S. embassy’s own employees, Benjamin Harding, had played a role in helping to facilitate Kennedy’s visit, which was done in collaboration with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense. In Greubel’s response, he said that he had told Harding to end his involvement with Kennedy’s travel.
These emails sharply contradict Kennedy’s sworn testimony during his confirmation hearings last year, in which he repeatedly asserted that his visit “had nothing to do with vaccines.” They were reported by The Guardian and The Associated Press, who obtained the emails via an open records lawsuit.
In Kennedy’s Senate confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in January 2025, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) asked Kennedy about the visit. Kennedy said “my purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines,” despite having written a blog post discussing his anti-vaccine activism in relation to the visit in 2021.
Kennedy answered similarly during questioning by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) before the Senate Finance Committee the previous day.
Democrats have noted numerous other lies that Kennedy told during his testimonies, including his pledge that he would not make changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s federal vaccine advisory committee.
Wyden condemned Kennedy over the latest email release.
“Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda is directly responsible for the deaths of innocent children,” Wyden said in a statement to The Guardian and AP.
“Lying to Congress about his role in the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa only underscores the danger he now poses to families across America,” Wyden went on. “He and his allies will be held responsible.”
The consequences of lying to Congress, even under oath, are highly subject to the desires of the party in charge. However, the latest revelations may add to a litany of other offenses that lawmakers have said are impeachable — including the simple fact that Kennedy’s vaccine lies are putting the health of the entire country at risk, with, among other issues, a measles outbreak now rapidly spreading across the U.S.
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