New documents contradict RFK Jr.'s sworn account of 2019 Samoa trip before measles outbreak

Newly disclosed State Department records show that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the prime minister of Samoa, in writing, that he wanted to study the country's measles, mumps and rubella vaccine before a 2019 trip that preceded one of the deadliest measles outbreaks in decades. The documents, obtained by The Associated Press and The Guardian through litigation against the State Department, contradict sworn assurances Kennedy gave senators during his 2025 confirmation hearings that the visit "had nothing to do with vaccines."

In a letter dated January 20, 2019, addressed to then-Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, Kennedy wrote that he wanted his team to "conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines," and speculated that two infant deaths that had rattled the country might have been caused by a bad vaccine lot. The letter uses the words "vaccine" or "vaccination" eight times. Months later, during his January 2025 nomination hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Kennedy told Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon: "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 numbers

Samoa's measles outbreak, declared in October 2019, killed 83 people, 87 percent of them children under five, out of a population of roughly 200,000. National vaccination coverage among one-year-olds had fallen from 74 percent in 2017 to about 31 percent in 2018, after two infants died in July 2018 when nurses mistakenly mixed their MMR doses with an expired muscle relaxant rather than the correct diluent, prompting Samoa to suspend its immunization program for nine months. Kennedy, accompanied by his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, and Children's Health Defense colleague Michael Graven, traveled to Samoa in May and June of 2019 — after the immunization program had resumed but months before the outbreak began — and met while there with local anti-vaccine activists. The documents recently produced were among more than 1,000 pages the State Department identified as responsive to a 2023 records request from AP reporter Michelle Smith, a request the agency sat on for roughly two years before Smith, represented by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, sued to force disclosure; the government has since released records in monthly batches.

How the confirmation testimony came under scrutiny

Kennedy's Samoa trip was a flashpoint well before this week. During his January 2025 hearing before the Senate HELP Committee, Democratic senators pressed him on reports that Samoan officials and international health workers had privately described his visit as an anti-vaccine campaign timed to the outbreak. Kennedy repeatedly denied any connection to vaccines, telling the committee his purpose was limited to a medical records digitization project. The newly surfaced letter to the Samoan prime minister undercuts that account by documenting, in Kennedy's own words and before the trip took place, an explicit request to investigate the MMR vaccine's role in the earlier infant deaths. Senator Wyden, now the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, has since entered the AP and Guardian reporting into the committee record, and Senator Ben Ray Luján's office separately released a summary detailing what it calls a pattern of misrepresentations by Kennedy before Congress.

The immediate political exposure falls on Kennedy and, by extension, an administration that has already faced sustained criticism over vaccine policy changes at HHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this year. Beyond Washington, the disclosure reopens scrutiny of the public-health toll in Samoa, where the 2019 outbreak remains a defining trauma; survivors and the families of the 83 people who died are again the subject of international reporting that ties the outbreak, at least in part, to the erosion of vaccine confidence that preceded it. Career State Department employees and diplomats stationed in Apia at the time, whose internal communications describing concern about Kennedy's visit have previously surfaced in AP and Guardian reporting, are also implicated by the broader documentary record, though none has been named as a subject of any misconduct inquiry.

Reaction

HHS did not dispute the authenticity of the letter but rejected the characterization that Kennedy misled Congress. A department statement said the Samoa visit "was unrelated to vaccines" and that "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 confirmation hearing, a distinction that affects any potential criminal exposure for false statements to Congress.

"RFK's platform is built on lies and grifts that leave a trail of dead children in their wake. There are consequences for lying to Congress," Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement responding to the disclosure.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the HELP Committee's ranking Democrat during Kennedy's confirmation, has previously argued that Kennedy needed little more than a public platform in Samoa to sway local sentiment against vaccination. Republican members of the committees that vetted Kennedy had not issued public statements on the new documents as of Thursday, and HHS's defense of the trip as a records-digitization mission was the only rebuttal offered on the record.

What happens next

With Republicans controlling both chambers, Kennedy faces no imminent risk of a forced congressional response, and Wyden's committee has no power to compel one unilaterally. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has said the State Department continues to release records from the underlying FOIA lawsuit on a rolling monthly basis, meaning additional documents bearing on the trip could surface in the coming months. Kennedy remains in his post at HHS, where he continues to face separate congressional scrutiny over vaccine-injury compensation policy and childhood immunization schedules, and the Samoa letter is likely to be raised again the next time he appears before the Finance or HELP committees.