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Newly obtained documents indicate that the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during two congressional hearings last year, telling lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
Letters obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press contradict that testimony. In one he wrote to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy explicitly said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the Pacific island nation. In it, he used the words vaccine or vaccination eight times.
“I am writing this letter to you in the hope that we might be helpful to the people of your great nation,” he wrote, adding that he believed the deaths of two children there after an MMR vaccine could have resulted from manufacturing issues.
“I would propose my team conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines,” Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy’s Samoa visit – just months before a measles outbreak swept through the island, killing 83 people – has become one of the most controversial events in his career. At the time, he was leading a nonprofit known for its anti-vaccine activism. The visit was seen by critics as having emboldened anti-vaccine activists in Samoa.
Beyond shedding light on the intent of Kennedy’s visit, the letter raises questions about the health secretary’s integrity and how truthful he was in testimony before Congress. During the confirmation process Kennedy also pledged to maintain vaccine policies that, once in office, he moved to change.
Knowingly giving material false testimony to Congress is a crime that carries a possible prison sentence, though it is rarely prosecuted.
Attorneys with expertise in Senate procedure said that if Democrats win control of the House or Senate in November’s elections, they could use Kennedy’s statements as grounds for hearings, an impeachment inquiry or create other obstacles for the Trump administration.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a statement: “Secretary Kennedy’s visit to Samoa in 2019 was unrelated to vaccines. Any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory.”
Kennedy was not under oath during the two confirmation hearings.
The Guardian asked HHS to provide an explanation of the contradiction between Kennedy’s claim that the 2019 trip had nothing to do with vaccines, and his letter to the Samoan prime minister. It did not provide any response to that question.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Kennedy for years was chair and chief legal counsel of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense (CHD). The group turned its attention to Samoa in July 2018, when two young children died after being given an improperly mixed MMR vaccine. The two nurses involved were criminally charged the month after the children died, ultimately pleading guilty to manslaughter.
Meanwhile, the Samoan government halted all vaccinations for 10 months, until April 2019. Vaccination rates plummeted.
During that time, CHD started contacting the Samoan government, according to emails previously obtained by the Guardian and the AP as the result of a freedom of information lawsuit against the US state department brought with the aid of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In the newly obtained letter from Kennedy, dated 20 January 2019, he addressed then Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi and described his desire to study “what happened” with Samoa’s use of the MMR vaccine.
Kennedy speculated that the deaths in Samoa may have been caused by issues with different vaccine lots. Writing on CHD letterhead, he said his team wanted to evaluate whether that was the case through a “detailed health informatics assessment”.
He expressed his belief that it was difficult and time consuming in most of the world to investigate “adverse health events associated with vaccines” and said health information systems are rarely designed to quickly study links “between diagnoses and specific vaccination events”.
The prime minister responded a month later, saying Samoa could benefit from CHD’s assessment of MMR vaccines.
“It is certainly beneficial for Samoa to have the benefit of your Team’s independent health assessment of our MMR Vaccines and I would welcome with much anticipation your Team’s proposed visit to our islands,” he wrote, including a representative from the US embassy on his communication.
In a separate email from Kennedy’s CHD colleague, Dr Michael Graven, to Samoan officials in May 2019, Graven wrote that the team was traveling there as part of a vaccine-related “mission”.
Kennedy, his wife, actor Cheryl Hines, and Graven took their trip to Samoa in May and June of that year. By then, vaccinations had resumed and Samoa’s top health official had publicly announced that human error, not a vaccine issue, was responsible for the child deaths.
While Kennedy was there, he met with anti-vaccine activists, including one who helped arrange the trip with a US embassy employee, the Guardian and AP previously reported.
Months later, with vaccination rates still dangerously low, measles broke out, sickening thousands. In the end, 83 people died, mostly children under five.
Public health experts have said their efforts to address the outbreak were hampered by anti-vaccine activists, some of whom they claim were emboldened by Kennedy’s visit.
Under repeated questioning during his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy insisted vaccines were not the purpose of the trip.
Kennedy also said his visit did not influence people’s decisions on whether to vaccinate, telling senators last year: “I never gave any public statement about vaccines. You cannot find a single Samoan who will say I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.”
Several times, he flatly denied the trip had anything to do with vaccines.
When it came up during questioning by Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, Kennedy replied: “I went there, nothing to do with vaccines. I went there to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”
The following day, when Democratic senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts asked about it, Kennedy said: “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.”
Upon further questioning, Kennedy again denied it had anything to do with vaccines before adding: “My purpose in the trip was not to – I ended up having conversations with people, some of whom I never intended to meet.”
The Senate confirmed Kennedy on a 52-48 vote.
In 2021, Kennedy explained in a blog post on the CHD website that he went to Samoa to attend an Independence Day celebration and to discuss “the introduction of a medical informatics system” to track drug safety. He said Samoan officials “were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines”.
Kennedy, who has a license to practice law, has signaled an appetite for bringing criminal charges against at least one congressional witness. He suggested last month that former health official Dr Anthony Fauci could face perjury charges when called before a Senate committee to testify about Covid-19.
The federal statute of limitations for lying to Congress is five years, meaning a new justice department under the next president in 2029 could theoretically investigate the case.
The Guardian and AP previously reported that officials with the state department and Unicef privately discussed that the trip was about vaccines. In response, some Democratic politicians have said Kennedy lied or misled the Senate, including Wyden and Markey.
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