U.S. senators grilled Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, about his 2019 visit to Samoa and the measles outbreak in its wake.
Prior to Kennedy’s visit, Samoa had been facing low vaccination rates, with only 50 percent of one-year-old Samoan children being fully vaccinated in 2017, with 95% coverage being needed to prevent community spread.
Distrust in vaccines and modern medicine would grow in 2018, when two nurses accidentally mixed an expired muscle relaxant with MMR vaccine doses instead of sterile water, which lead to the deaths of two children. The Samoan government responded by suspending the national vaccine program for 10 months, charging the nurses with manslaughter, and vaccine rates dropped by 31%.
Kennedy visited the island nation in June 2019, when he was serving chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine non-profit, per CBS News. During the hearings, Kennedy said the purpose of his trip was to promote a health surveillance system, and how Samoa’s suspension of its vaccination program was an opportunity to study an unvaccinated population. His trip was coordinated by a local anti-vaxxer who spread medical misinformation online.
In Aug. 2019, an infected traveler from New Zealand arrived in Samoa, sparking a devastating measles epidemic that killed 83 people, most of them being small children. The Samoan government declared an outbreak on Oct. 16 and declared a state of emergency the following month.
During the outbreak, Kennedy wrote a letter to Samoa’s then-prime minister, Tuilaʻepa Saʻilele Malielegaoi, questioning whether a defective vaccine was the cause of the epidemic, a theory that has since been debunked.
As reported on by NBC News, despite debate over Kennedy’s role in the outbreak and the details on his trip, interviews with government officials, public health experts, local anti-vaccine activists, alongside media reports of social media posts, blogs, podcasts, revealed that Kennedy and his nonprofit attempted to exploit the 2018 vaccine accident in order to promote anti-vaccine information.
“If he was any kind of man, which he isn’t, he should go back to Samoa and apologize to every one of the families where a child died,”, said vaccine specialist and rotavirus vaccine co-inventor Dr. Paul Offit in a CBS interview. “He’s a famous man who goes there and meets with anti-vaccine activists. He gives them credence by going there.”.
In an interview with The Guardian, Fiame Naomi Mataʻafa, Samoa’s prime minister not only criticized Kennedy for his views and vaccine misinformation, but was also surprised that he was nominated to begin with. Mataʻafa also refused to believe that the majority of Americans share the same sentiments of Kennedy and Trump.
“The facts remain that the two babies who died [in 2018] were through human error of the nurses. All the different actors, especially anti-vax people, got on board and suggested that the vaccination was the cause, which is complete rubbish,”, said Mata’afa. “We have a track record prior to that of high rates of vaccination for our children, and they were safe. The facts speak for themselves, it was unvaccinated children who died.”
Josh Green, the Governor of Hawaii, also blasted Kennedy after his testimony regarding his actions in Samoa, where he denied any involvement.
“He’s a liar, and it’s bullsh*t”, Green said in a CNN interview. “Because he went there and he met with the anti-vax leader, supported that person who was spreading all of this misinformation, and that guy got arrested.”
As mentioned by Hawaii News Now, Green traveled to Samoa in 2019, when he was serving as Hawaii’s lieutenant governor, to help in vaccination efforts in the aftermath of the measles outbreak.
In December 2019, Samoa would launch a massive, mandatory door-to-door vaccination campaign. Six weeks later, 95% of Samoan children were vaccinated, schools were reopened, and emergency medical teams left.
Kennedy’s stance on Samoa’s outbreak would foreshadow his stance on the COVID-19 outbreak, which was also marred by conspiracy theories, and anti-vaccine misinformation/rhetoric.
AsAmNews is published by the non-profit, Asian American Media Inc.
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