Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeated the same answer during two days of questions during his Senate confirmation hearings last year.
He said his travels to Samoa in 2019, where there was a devastating measles outbreak, came under scrutiny and “had nothing to do with the vaccine”.
Documents obtained by The Guardian and The Associated Press undermine that testimony. Emails sent by U.S. embassy and U.N. staff provide the first inside look at Kennedy’s trip and include contemporaneous reports suggesting his concerns about vaccine safety prompted the visit.
The documents have raised concerns among at least one U.S. senator that the lawyer and activist, who currently leads U.S. health policy, lied to Congress about the trip. Samoan officials later said Kennedy’s trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccination activists ahead of an outbreak of measles that sickened thousands and killed 83, mostly children under 5 years old.
The revelations come amid a measles outbreak in the United States and follow criticism that Kennedy’s anti-vaccination record makes him unfit to serve as health secretary at a time when he has worked to fundamentally reshape immunization policy and public opinion about vaccines.
The newly disclosed documents also reveal previously unknown details about the trip, including that a U.S. embassy employee helped Kennedy’s team get in touch with Samoan officials. Kennedy, who was leading his anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense at the time, did not publicly discuss the trip at the time, but he later said his “purpose” for going there had nothing to do with vaccines and “I ended up talking to people, some of whom I never intended to meet.” In addition to meeting with anti-vaccine activists, Kennedy also met with Samoan officials, including the then-health minister, who told NBC News that Kennedy agreed with him that the vaccines were unsafe. Kennedy said he was there to introduce a medical data system.
The State Department turned over the emails, many of which were heavily redacted, as a result of an open-records lawsuit filed with assistance from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The disclosures come as Kennedy has used his power and immense public influence as President Donald Trump’s health secretary to overhaul federal immunization guidance and raise doubts about the safety and importance of vaccines, including the measles shot. Meanwhile, measles outbreaks in multiple U.S. states have reversed decades of success in eliminating the highly contagious disease and brought the country to the brink of losing its elimination status. The latest data shows that more than 875 people have been infected in South Carolina.
‘It has nothing to do with vaccines’
Kennedy answered questions about his trip to Samoa during two Senate confirmation hearings for his appointment as health secretary.
“I went there for a purpose that had nothing to do with the vaccine,” he said during a hearing on January 30, 2025, when questioned by Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass.
“As you told my Senate finance colleagues yesterday, this trip has nothing to do with the vaccine?” Markey later asked.
“It has nothing to do with the vaccine,” Kennedy responded.
One of the senators who asked Kennedy about Samoa during his confirmation hearing, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, responded to the transcript by saying, “Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda is directly responsible for the deaths of innocent children.”
“Lying to Congress about his role in Samoa’s deadly measles outbreak only underscores the danger he now poses to families across America,” Wyden said in an email. “He and his allies will be held accountable.”
Tyler Harvey, a spokesman for Wyden and other Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, said making false statements to Congress is a crime and “casual, false denials to Congress will not be swept under the rug.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions sent via email and text message.
Kennedy said his visit did not influence people’s decisions about whether to vaccinate themselves or their children.
“It has nothing to do with me that people in Samoa don’t take the vaccine. I’ve never told anyone not to take the vaccine,” he said in the 2023 documentary Shot in the Arm. “You know, I didn’t go there for any reason.”
Vaccination program on hold
Anti-vaccination activists in the United States became interested in Samoa in July 2018, when two babies died after being injected with an improperly prepared, contaminated measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The government suspended the vaccine program for 10 months, until April of the following year. Vaccination rates plummeted.
Records show that during a period without vaccinations, JFK’s Children’s Health Defense Organization attempted to connect JFK with Samoa’s prime minister. In January 2019, the organization’s then-president, Lyn Redwood, sent an email to Samoan activist Edwin Tamasese asking him to “please forward this letter to the Honorable Prime Minister Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegoi on behalf of Robert Kennedy, Jr. letter.”
About two months later, Tamases wrote back to Redwood, copying Kennedy and others.
“Hope all goes well, are organizing logistics with the Prime Minister’s Office and wanted to confirm how many people are coming? Also just wanted to confirm the cost of the visit etc and how it will be handled,” he wrote.
Tamases immediately forwarded the series of messages to the personal and government email accounts of Benjamin Harding, then an employee of the U.S. Embassy in Apia, Samoa.
“Just sent this. Looking forward to a reply tomorrow because I think that’s Sunday. Your letter looks good,” Tamases told Harding.
While the U.S. Embassy has acknowledged in the past that an unnamed staff member attended events with Kennedy and anti-vaccine activists while Kennedy was in Samoa, records show that Harding was no passive participant: He helped arrange Kennedy’s visit and connected the Kennedy delegation with Samoan government officials.
In an email sent to Harding’s personal email address on 23 May 2019, a staff member from Samoa’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade wrote: “Hello Benji, We are currently waiting for the official CVs of Mr Kennedy and Dr Graven to be forwarded to the Honorable Prime Minister and the Honorable Minister of Health for their reference. Please note that this needs to be sent with our official letter when requesting an appointment.”
Harding forwarded the department’s request to Dr. Michael Graven, then chief information officer for Children’s Health Advocates.
Harding did not respond to messages seeking comment sent to several listed email addresses, social media accounts, a phone number listed for his parents and a general email address for the company he lists as his current workplace on his LinkedIn profile.
Embassy staff learned of Harding’s involvement in the trip from Sheldon Yetter, then UNICEF’s Pacific Islands representative.
“We now understand that the Prime Minister has invited Robert F. Kennedy and his team to come to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine,” Yetter wrote in a May 22, 2019 email to embassy staff in New Zealand. “The staff involved appear to have played a role in facilitating this.”
Two days later, a senior staff member at the Apia embassy wrote to Scott Brown, then the Republican US president’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, reminding him of Kennedy’s trip and Harding’s involvement.
“The real reason Kennedy came was to raise awareness about vaccinations and more specifically some of the health issues associated with vaccinations (from his perspective),” wrote embassy official Antone Greubel. “It turns out that our own Benjamin Harding played some role in his personal capacity in bringing him here,” Grubel wrote, telling Harding to “cease and desist from further involvement in this trip,” although the rest of the sentence has been redacted.
Yetter did not answer questions, but said in an email that “it was a very serious time in Samoa.”
Brown, who is running for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, declined to comment. Grubel referred questions to the State Council Information Office. A State Department spokesman would not answer questions about the records, saying that as a rule they do not comment on personnel matters.
According to Harding’s LinkedIn account, he left the embassy in July 2020 but remains in Samoa.
Kennedy finally visited in June 2019. There, he and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, were photographed greeting the prime minister during Independence Day celebrations. He also met with government health officials and some vaccine skeptics, including Tamasees.
The Guardian and the Associated Press could find no record of Kennedy publicly discussing the purpose of the trip before the measles outbreak. In 2021, he wrote that he went there to discuss “the introduction of a medical informatics system” to track drug safety. He said Samoan officials were “keen to measure the health outcomes of the ‘natural experiment’ that followed the national pause on vaccinations.”
He has since said the reason for traveling to Samoa had nothing to do with the vaccine.
Redwood, the former president of Children’s Health Advocates and an early advocate for Samoa, is now an employee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reportedly working on vaccine safety.
During the measles outbreak, Kennedy wrote a four-page letter to the Prime Minister of Samoa, suggesting without evidence that measles infections were caused by a defective vaccine and advancing other baseless theories.
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This story was reported and published by The Guardian and The Associated Press.