Skip to main content

RFK Jr.’s Nomination for HHS Secretary Puts Lives At Risk

RFK Jr.’s Deadly Trip to Samoa

The Timeline:

2018

  • Two children in Samoa died after receiving their MMR vaccine as a result of nurses improperly mixing the vaccines with a liquid muscle relaxant instead of water. The nurses were sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter.
  • RFK Jr’s Children’s Health Defense posted on Facebook questioning the safety of measles vaccines.
  • The World Health Organization estimated that in 2018, only 31 percent of infants in Samoa received the measles vaccine, a drop from 60 to 70 percent in previous years.
  • RFK Jr’s Children’s Health Defense never updated the public about the true cause of the babies’ deaths.

2019

  • While vaccination rates were dropping, Kennedy traveled to Samoa in June 2019, meeting with the Prime Minister and other government officials. The trip had been arranged by a prominent Samoan anti-vaccine activist, and paid for by Children’s Health Defense. RFK Jr. appeared with government officials and local anti-vaccine activists.
  • The measles outbreak began in September 2019.
  • A state of emergency was declared in November 2019, closing all schools, keeping children under 17 away from public events, and mandating vaccines.
  • The anti-vaccine activists with ties to Kennedy used misinformation and harsh rhetoric to oppose the government’s efforts in containing the outbreak.
  • A compulsory mass vaccination campaign brought rates back up to 95% and the government introduced a new law in December 2019 requiring all children to be fully immunised before starting primary school. The door-to-door vaccination campaign is credited with bringing the months-long tragedy to a close. 

2020

  • By January 22, 2020, 5,707 measles cases and 83 measles-related deaths were reported. 87 percent of the reported deaths were children younger than 5 years.

Kennedy traveled to Samoa in June 2019, meeting with the Prime Minister and other government officials. The trip had been arranged by a prominent Samoan anti-vaccine activist, and paid for by Children’s Health Defense, RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization. RFK Jr. appeared with government officials and local anti-vaccine activists.

The trip had been arranged by a Samoan anti-vaccine activist, a coconut farmer Edwin Tamasese, according to a 2021 blog post on the Children’s Health Defense website. An Instagram photo shows Kennedy embracing another Australian Samoan anti-vaccine activist, Taylor Winterstein, in Samoa on June 4, 2019.

Kennedy and Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi talked “a limited amount” about vaccines during their meeting, according to what he told the Samoa Observer in 2021. During the outbreak, Children’s Health Defense shared a four-page letter offering “assistance” that Kennedy wrote to the Samoan Prime Minister in November 2019, in which he encouraged officials to examine the MMR vaccine itself as a possible cause.

By January 22, 2020, 5,707 measles cases and 83 measles-related deaths were reported. 87 percent of the reported deaths were children younger than 5 years. The vast majority of deaths in the 2019 outbreak were children under 5 years old. Leausa Take Naseri, the Samoan Health Ministry’s director general told reporters in November 2019, “The children are quite ill. Our ICUs have been dominated by these children.” In December 2019, volunteers in Rotura, New Zealand prepared dozens of child-sized caskets to send to Samoa to help deal with the loss of so many infants and toddlers. 

According to aid workers, vaccine hesitancy in Samoa was still strong at the start of the 2019 outbreak, but demand grew as the outbreak mushroomed. A compulsory mass vaccination campaign brought rates back up to 95% and the government introduced a new law in December 2019 requiring all children to be fully immunised before starting primary school. The door-to-door vaccination campaign is credited with bringing the months-long tragedy to a close. 

Download Our Full Report Here

RFK Jr. Is An Anti-Vaccine Extremist

RFK Jr. is a dangerous anti-vaccine activist with a long history of spreading false information, fearmongering, and pushing dangerous conspiracies. His anti-vaccine activism is not a thing of the past, but an ongoing effort. 

RFK Jr.’s opposition to vaccines will lead to a resurgence of childhood illnesses like polio and measles. RFK Jr. has said that “there is no vaccine that is safe or effective,” and he helped fuel a deadly measles outbreak in American Samoa that killed 83 people. 

Kennedy has been spreading disproven conspiracies that vaccines are linked to autism for decades. In 2005, he wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine and Salon.com asserting that the government was conspiring to cover up the connections between autism and vaccines. Salon.com later retracted the article because of factual errors, and Rolling Stone deleted it. RFK Jr. has held steadfast in spreading this lie. As recently as January 2024, Kennedy defended his past writings on autism and vaccines. 

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy ran a hardline anti-vaccine agenda. He petitioned the FDA to revoke Emergency Use Authorizations for existing COVID-19 vaccines and refrain from approving and licensing them. Kennedy claimed that it was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Kennedy’s associates have worked to withdraw authorization for vaccines. In 2022, Kennedy’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, filed a petition with HHS and the FDA, seeking to withdraw approval for the Polio vaccine.

RFK Jr. has spread lies about Lyme disease being a U.S. military bioweapon on his podcast. The American Lyme Disease Foundation clarified that there is ample evidence to indicate that both Ixodes ticks and B. burgdorferi were present in the U.S. well before the Plum Island facility was ever established,” where RFK has speculated that by a man-made strain of bacteria that causes Lyme disease was created. 

Kennedy has made millions of dollars for his work on anti-vaccine lawsuits, particularly targeting the HPV vaccine. According to his ethics disclosure, RFK Jr. could still stand to profit from his anti-vaccine lawsuits even if confirmed. Kennedy and his team have been involved in no fewer than six lawsuits over the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, which is manufactured by Merck. He has spent years attacking Gardasil, even alleging that the vaccine “increas[es] the risk of cervical cancer.” This is a lie. Across the board, research shows that the HPV vaccine has been an essential tool in combating cervical cancer, with one study showing that the vaccine stops 90 percent of cervical cancer cases.

Download Our Full Report Here

RFK Jr. Plans To Gut the National Institute of Health

RFK Jr. said that he “does not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health.” He supports defunding lifesaving research that is used to develop treatments and cures for diseases. 

Kennedy plans to gut funding for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which will halt the progress of essential research on lifesaving drug and vaccine development. He claims to have a list of 600 employees of the NIH that he plans to fire on day one. During a “Make America Healthy Again” event in October 2024, Kennedy also said he would fire every nutritional scientist at the FDA “on day 1,” claiming he would otherwise “ship them to a new HHS headquarters in Guam” if unable to fire them. 

Kennedy said he does “not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health” at a 2023 roundtable. At a June 2024 TikTok town hall meeting, he underscored this point saying, “I’m going to go to NIH my first week and I’m going to call all the division heads and I’m going to call all the bureau chiefs and I’m going to say, we’re going to give drug development and infectious disease a break. A little break, a little bit of a break for about eight years.” He also claimed that “medical research on these diseases and vaccine research has created some of the worst plagues in our history” and baselessly asserted that vaccine research was responsible for the creation of HIV, the Spanish flu, Lyme, and RSV.

Gutting the NIH would be catastrophic, both from a public health standpoint and economically. Researchers across the country received $37.81 billion in NIH awards in FY2023. NIH funding also supports $92.89 billion in state economic activity, reflecting a 2.4x return on investment. NIH grants directly support 412,041 American jobs and nearly 2.3 million people are employed by 150,000 businesses in the American bioscience industry. Thousands of top medical research facilities, including universities , hospitals, institutes, and biopharmaceutical companies, are supported by NIH funding.

Gutting the NIH would also hit the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which advances critical research including the successful development of new vaccines against RSV, an FDA-approved drug that delays the onset of Type 1 Diabetes, developing an mRNA vaccine against HIV, and preventing the transmission of sexually transmitted infections after exposure