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.