WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Samoa’s top health official on Monday denounced as “a complete lie” remarks that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made during his bid to become U.S. health secretary, rejecting his claim that some who died in the country's 2019 measles epidemic didn't have the disease.
"We don’t know what was killing them," Kennedy said during tense U.S. Senate hearings last week on whether he should oversee the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, suggesting that the cause of the 83 deaths — mostly of children under age 5 — was unclear.
"It's a total fabrication,” Samoa Director-General of Health Dr. Alec Ekeroma told The Associated Press of Kennedy's comments.
U.S. senators grilled Kennedy last week over his 2019 Samoa trip, accusing him of downplaying his role in the epidemic.
What happened in Samoa?
The outbreak devastated the Pacific island nation in 2019, killing 83 people in a population of 200,000. Vaccination rates were historically low because of poor public health management and the 2018 deaths of two babies whose vaccines were incorrectly prepared, prompting fears that the MMR immunization was unsafe before the nature of the error was discovered.
The government suspended vaccinations for 10 months before the outbreak — the period when Kennedy visited. His trip was organized by a Samoan anti-vaccine influencer, according to a 2021 blog post by Kennedy.
On Wednesday, Kennedy denied that his visit had fueled anti-vaccine sentiment. A spokesperson didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
“Anti-vaxxers from New Zealand came to be with him here,” Ekeroma said. “That's how I know that his influence can be far-reaching.”
What did Kennedy say about the deaths?
“When the tissue samples were sent to New Zealand, most of those people did not have measles,” Kennedy told U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.
Ekeroma, a medical doctor who also holds a doctorate in health, said that the claim was a “huge denial” of the fact that doctors from several countries traveled to Samoa to treat measles patients.
The Samoan official wasn't the health chief during the outbreak, but confirmed key details with his predecessor, he said. Only one autopsy was carried out and no postmortem tissue samples were sent abroad, which was not unusual because measles is a simple disease to diagnose, said Ekeroma.
Blood samples from living patients were sent to Australia and New Zealand, where the public health agency said Monday that testing had confirmed the same strain of measles circulating in New Zealand at the time.
Why did Kennedy travel to Samoa?
“I went there – nothing to do with vaccines,” Kennedy said Wednesday. “I went there to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”
Ekeroma rejected that assertion, referring to social media posts by anti-vaccine advocates who posed for photos with Kennedy during his trip. One later wrote on the blog of Kennedy's then nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense — which has decried MMR vaccines as unsafe — that during the outbreak he received advice from people assembled by Kennedy encouraging the alternative treatments he was supplying to Samoan families.
In the same blog post, Kennedy recalled meeting Samoa's then prime minister, who he said was “curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines.”
In late 2019, Kennedy wrote to the leader, saying that the deaths could have been caused by a measles vaccine — statements he repeated in written responses to senators' questions following the hearing. He urged the Samoan leader to approach a particular laboratory to investigate the source of the outbreak.
Did Kennedy's visit have any sway?
“My words had nothing to do with vaccine uptake in Samoa or with the 2019 epidemic,” Kennedy said in his written responses.
But Kennedy emboldened anti-vaccine contacts in Samoa, Ekeroma said, and the epidemic was fueled by disinformation in social media posts in the island nation and abroad.
Moelagi Leilani Jackson, a Samoan nurse who worked on the vaccination campaign, told the AP in 2023 that anti-vaccine campaigners “got louder” after Kennedy’s visit.
“I feel like they felt they had the support of Kennedy,” she said.
However, Ekeroma said that Kennedy's overtures weren't heeded by the nation’s leaders. A vaccination campaign resumed in 2019 and measles vaccines are now compulsory for Samoan children.
Would Kennedy's appointment impact the Pacific?
If Kennedy is affirmed as the top U.S. health official this week, it would be “a danger to us, a danger to everyone,” Ekeroma said. Kennedy would control U.S. funding for vaccination initiatives and could make affordable vaccines harder for small nations like Samoa to access, the official said.
“If he’s going to be appointed, then we will have to actually discuss around the Pacific as to how we’re going to try to neutralize his influence in the region,” he added.
___
Amanda Seitz contributed to this report from Washington.
Charlotte Graham-mclay, The Associated Press
