Samoa, 2019: eighty-three deaths, and what the movement was worth
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the United States Senate that his 2019 visit to Samoa had nothing to do with vaccines. Documents obtained in August 2026 show he had written to the Prime Minister five months earlier asking to study the country's MMR vaccine, using the word vaccine eight times. Six months after he left, a measles epidemic killed eighty-three people, most of them children under five.
What this page claims, and what it does not
No investigation has found that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. caused the Samoan epidemic, and this page does not assert it. Vaccination in Samoa had already collapsed before he arrived, for reasons that began with a genuine and terrible medical accident.
The episode had already followed him. On the morning of his first confirmation hearing in January 2025, simulated gravestones memorialising the Samoan children were set up outside the United States Capitol.
What the record does establish is a sequence: an organisation he chaired bought advertising exploiting that accident; he wrote to the head of government asking to study the vaccine; he travelled there and met the Prime Minister and local anti-vaccine activists; and when the epidemic came, he wrote again suggesting the vaccine itself might be the cause. Then he told the Senate the trip had nothing to do with vaccines. Every step is documented. The last one is the one now under scrutiny.
How Samoan vaccination collapsed
In July 2018 two Samoan infants died shortly after receiving MMR vaccine. The cause was established quickly and it was not the vaccine: nurses had reconstituted the powder with an expired muscle relaxant instead of water. Two nurses were charged and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
The Samoan government suspended its MMR programme. The suspension lasted about ten months, until April 2019. Coverage, already imperfect, fell sharply — leaving a large cohort of infants and toddlers unprotected. This is the single most important fact on the page, and it is not attributable to any foreign activist. It was a national response to a domestic tragedy.
What happened next is where the outside interest begins.
The sequence, in order
natural experimentcreated by the national respite from vaccines — attributing the interest to them rather than to himself.
nothing to do with vaccinesand that he had gone to introduce a medical informatics system to digitalise Samoan health records and make care delivery more efficient. Asked again the next day by Senator Edward Markey, he repeated that his purpose had nothing to do with vaccines, adding that he ended up in conversations with people he had never intended to meet. He was confirmed 52–48.
The fair reading
Samoa's vaccination rate collapsed because of a domestic medical accident and a government suspension, not because of anything said by a foreign visitor. Anyone claiming Kennedy caused eighty-three deaths is overstating the record, and this site will not do it.
But the reverse claim — that the visit had nothing to do with vaccines — is now contradicted by a letter in his own name that is about nothing else. Samoan officials have said the visit lent credibility to local anti-vaccine campaigners at the moment when the unvaccinated cohort was at its largest. Between "he caused it" and "it had nothing to do with him" lies the documented record, and the documented record is not neutral.
The defence and the contradiction are the same sentence
This is the part that repays slow reading, and it is why the August 2026 disclosure mattered.
Kennedy's answer to the Senate was not a flat denial that he had gone to do anything. It was a specific alternative account: he went to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitise Samoan health records and make health delivery more efficient. Informatics, not vaccines. That is a coherent defence, and it has the considerable advantage of being partly true — his travelling colleague really was a health informatics architect of international standing.
The letter of 20 January 2019 uses the same vocabulary. Kennedy proposed that his team conduct a detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what had happened with the country's MMR vaccines. He wrote that he believed investigating adverse health events associated with vaccines was difficult and slow in most of the world, because health information systems are seldom built to examine links between diagnoses and specific vaccination events quickly. He suggested the two deaths might trace to manufacturing problems affecting particular vaccine lots.
So the informatics was the vaccine study. It was not a separate project that vaccines happened to come up in; the whole proposal was an instrument for examining vaccine injury, and the letter says so. The sentence Kennedy gave the Senate as his alibi describes, accurately, the vehicle — and omits what it was built to carry.
Kennedy also offered senators a second line of defence, of a different kind. He told them he had never made any public statement about vaccines in Samoa, and challenged anyone to find a single Samoan who would say they went unvaccinated because of him. That is not a claim that can be checked, and it is not the claim at issue. Nobody has alleged he stood in a Samoan street telling parents to refuse the vaccine. What the documents address is why he went.
The Prime Minister's reply a month later understood it as a vaccine assessment, because that is what it was. He wrote that Samoa would benefit from an independent assessment of its MMR vaccines and said he would welcome the proposed visit. He copied a representative of the United States Embassy on his response.
Two qualifications, in fairness
Kennedy was not under oath at his confirmation hearing. Knowingly giving materially false testimony to Congress is nonetheless an offence carrying a possible prison sentence whether or not the witness is sworn, though prosecution is rare. The Department of Health and Human Services maintains the visit was unrelated to vaccines and has called any insinuation that he lied to Congress false and defamatory.
And the documents themselves were not leaked. They were obtained through a lawsuit against the State Department, brought with the assistance of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and reported by the Associated Press and The Guardian. Officials at the State Department and UNICEF had privately discussed at the time that the trip was about vaccines.
The senator who supplied the deciding vote
Kennedy was confirmed 52–48. The vote that carried him came from Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate health committee and has been a strong advocate of vaccination. Cassidy said he voted yes because he had received commitments — among them, that Kennedy would leave the federal vaccine advisory committee without changes.
In June 2025 Kennedy removed all seventeen members of that committee. Speaking on television afterwards, Cassidy said the commitments made to him had been violated.
That sequence is the reason this page exists in the form it does. The assurance, the vote, the reversal and the acknowledgement are all on the public record, and they took eighteen months.
What Dr Graven told the Samoans
The sharpest evidence is not Kennedy's letter. It is his colleague's email traffic, reviewed by The Guardian and reported in Samoa in July 2026.
In an email dated 8 March 2019, Michael Graven told Samoan officials he would accompany Kennedy as the health informatician performing the statistical investigations, and noted he was writing after discussion with Kennedy. He described the visit, more than once, as a mission.
In May 2019 he set out the work plan: a health informatics evaluation drawing on medical record data from every hospital and clinic in Samoa, to evaluate outcomes associated with the recent discontinuity in vaccinations. He said the team would visit hospitals and clinics across the country to collect and analyse the data, and that the work would be carried out without bias.
The discontinuity in vaccinations was the ten-month suspension. What the team proposed to study was what had happened to Samoan children during it.
It did not happen. Graven's emails describe a plan to spend weeks gathering data across the country's hospitals and clinics. In the event the two men left Samoa a few days after arriving, and no such study was ever produced.
Put the two accounts side by side
Kennedy, to the Senate: the trip was to attend Independence Day and to introduce a state-of-the-art medical informatics system that would digitise Samoan health records, funded by his organisation.
Graven, to Samoan officials at the time, after discussing it with Kennedy: a statistical investigation of medical records from every hospital and clinic in the country, evaluating outcomes associated with the recent discontinuity in vaccinations.
Both descriptions are of the same trip and both use the language of health informatics. Only one of them says what was being measured.
What the Samoans say
Samoan voices have been largely absent from the American coverage. They are worth setting out, because they cut in more than one direction.
The Prime Minister who received him. Speaking to the Samoa Observer in 2025, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi said Kennedy had been invited for cultural and tourism reasons and because of interest in the Kennedy family name, and that he saw the visit as a way of raising Samoa's international profile. He said the invitation was not about Kennedy's views on vaccines, and denied that his government adopted them, saying medical decisions were made by local experts.
That is the answer to the obvious question, from the person best placed to give it. He was receiving a Kennedy.
The current government. Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata'afa has rejected the claim that vaccines caused the 2018 infant deaths, attributing the epidemic to the sharp fall in immunisation. The Director General of Health, Aiono Dr Alec Ekeroma, has said Kennedy's suggestions of uncertainty about the measles deaths are false and that the outbreak was clinically confirmed.
And an assessment that cuts the other way. Antone Greubel, a United States State Department employee stationed in Samoa, wrote to colleagues on 4 June 2019 that, based on conversations with his contacts, Kennedy and Graven had fallen far short of their goal of influencing Samoan government vaccination policy.
That email deserves its place here as much as any other document. It is a contemporaneous judgement by an American official that the mission did not achieve what it set out to achieve. It also, in passing, confirms what the mission's goal was understood to be.
Why would a Prime Minister receive an environmental lawyer?
It is the obvious question. Kennedy holds no medical or scientific qualification. The answer, from the released correspondence, is that the approach was not presented as activism, was not routed as activism, and did not arrive alone.
It was framed as a technical offer
The January 2019 letter, written on Children's Health Defense letterhead, proposed a detailed health informatics assessment. It raised the possibility that the two infant deaths might trace to problems with particular vaccine lots, and argued that health information systems are rarely built to examine links between diagnoses and specific vaccination events quickly. Journalists who have read the letter note that it does not discuss anti-vaccine activism at all.
Consider how that reads to a government whose own immunisation programme had just killed two children and which urgently needed to know why. It reads as expert assistance. The Prime Minister replied a month later saying Samoa could benefit from the assessment.
It arrived through diplomatic channels
The route is documented in the released emails. In January 2019 CHD's then-president wrote to a Samoan activist asking him to place the letter before the Prime Minister. Two months later the activist was arranging logistics with the Prime Minister's office and asking CHD to confirm numbers and costs. He forwarded the whole chain to Benjamin Harding, then an employee of the United States Embassy, at both his personal and his government email addresses.
In May 2019 a staffer at Samoa's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade wrote to Harding asking for the official bio-notes on Kennedy and his colleague, to be conveyed to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health, and noting these were required to accompany the ministry's official letter requesting an appointment.
The US Embassy had previously acknowledged only that a staffer attended an event. The records show Harding helped arrange the visit and connected the delegation with Samoan government officials. So what reached the Prime Minister's office was a formal appointment request, with bio-notes, carrying an American embassy staffer's involvement.
And he brought a physician — with an unusually apt CV
The second name in those bio-notes was Dr Michael A. Graven, MD MSc MPH FRSPH, then Children's Health Defense's chief information officer. Unlike Kennedy, his credentials are real and they are substantial.
Dr Graven died in 2022. He cannot explain or defend his part in any of this, and that should temper how his emails are read. What follows describes what he wrote at the time; it does not attribute motive to him.
By his own published biography, Graven practised for seventeen years as a licensed neonatologist in Canada and the United States. He held faculty appointments at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, in biostatistics at the University of South Florida College of Public Health, and — the detail Canadian readers should note — a joint appointment in the Faculty of Medicine and in Medical Informatics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, from which he retired in 2015. His published research includes work on national screening data in St Lucia and on obstructive sleep apnea in hospitalised Canadian patients.
His specialism is precisely what the letter offered. He described himself as the chief architect of patient-centred national health information systems in five countries, and told Samoan officials he had carried out health informatics work in 48 countries over 40 years; the system he built in Belize was named best of its kind worldwide by the World Health Organization's Health Metrics Network in 2008. In 2005 he was appointed to an Ethiopian national advisory committee overseeing that country's programme to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. He states that he supported initiatives presented at eight international health summits, including CARICOM, the Pan American Health Organization and the African Union, and that he has served as an expert adviser to Canadian provincial and US state regulators, to Health Canada, to the Public Health Agency of Canada, to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to the Veterans Administration and to the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Children's Health Defense published his biography on its website on 4 March 2019 — six weeks after the letter to the Prime Minister, three months before the visit.
This is the part that should hold your attention
A Pacific health ministry receiving a proposal for a national health informatics assessment, from a team including a neonatologist who had built exactly such systems for five countries and advised PAHO, Health Canada and the CDC, was not being approached by cranks. On paper it was a credible offer from a credible specialist, transmitted through an embassy.
That is how this works, and it is the same pattern documented throughout this site. The credential is genuine. The institution is genuine. What is being carried in on the strength of them is the question.
How this came out, and in what order
The record did not arrive at once. The United States State Department released the material, much of it heavily redacted, under an open records lawsuit brought with the assistance of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The Guardian and the Associated Press reported it in three stages:
- February 2026 — emails from United States Embassy and United Nations staffers, giving the first inside account of how the trip was arranged and containing contemporaneous suggestions that vaccine-safety concerns motivated it.
- June 2026 — Dr Graven's own emails to Samoan officials describing the mission and what it would measure.
- August 2026 — Kennedy's letter of 20 January 2019 to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister's reply.
One thread runs past all of it. The proposition Kennedy put to Samoa in 2019 — that a population which stopped vaccinating offers a natural comparison worth studying — is the same proposition he has pursued since taking office, and the department he now runs has been directed to carry out studies of exactly that kind. Samoa was not an episode he left behind. It was where the idea was first offered to a government.
Did anyone investigate?
The outbreak: extensively. WHO and UNICEF jointly published a numbered series of Pacific Islands Measles Outbreak Situation Reports — at least eleven through January 2020 — recording 5,707 cases in a nation of roughly 195,000, 83 deaths with 87% among children under five, and 1,860 hospital admissions. WHO's Global Health Observatory recorded first-dose measles coverage among one-year-olds at 31% in 2018; WHO and UNICEF estimated the newborn rate fell from 74% in 2017 to 34% in 2018. The likely index case arrived from Auckland in August 2019 on one of the several thousand annual flights between New Zealand and Samoa. The state of emergency was lifted on 29 December 2019.
One finding in that record deserves emphasis: WHO advised against the ten-month suspension of the immunisation programme, and it went ahead anyway.
The two deaths that started it: yes. Samoan authorities investigated and prosecuted. Two nurses pleaded guilty to manslaughter after reconstituting the vaccine with an expired muscle relaxant.
The foreign activism around it: no. No WHO, CDC or other health agency report has examined the role of outside advocates, and it was never their function — they were running an emergency. Everything now known about the letters, the embassy routing and the logistics comes from journalism: the Associated Press and The Guardian, working with records obtained through a lawsuit against the State Department brought with the assistance of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, seven years after the fact.
Whether that gap is ever closed is doubtful, and for a structural reason. In the United States, federal criminal prosecution rests with the executive branch. The person whose testimony is now in question directs a department of it.
Two further points of law were noted in the reporting. The federal statute of limitations for lying to Congress is five years, so a future justice department could in principle examine the matter as late as 2029. And attorneys familiar with Senate procedure observed that a change of control in either chamber at the November elections would open the route of hearings or an impeachment inquiry.
An awkward juxtaposition
In the same period these documents surfaced, Kennedy — a lawyer by training — publicly suggested that Dr Anthony Fauci could face perjury charges over his testimony to a Senate committee. He has meanwhile declined, through his department, to explain the contradiction between what he told the Senate about Samoa and what he wrote to its Prime Minister. Asked directly for that explanation, the Department of Health and Human Services did not answer the question, while calling any insinuation that he lied false and defamatory.
What the movement was worth across the same years
The Samoan epidemic ran from September to December 2019. The table below sets out what Children's Health Defense took in, and what Kennedy personally was paid, in the years on either side of it, through to his resignation from the organisation in December 2024. Except where noted, all figures are taken from the organisation's own Forms 990 as filed with the Internal Revenue Service, together with the financial disclosure Kennedy filed with the US Office of Government Ethics.
| Year | CHD revenue | Kennedy's pay from CHD | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | $13,000 | not yet involved | Still called World Mercury Project, founded 2007 by another activist. This year pre-dates the IRS electronic filings used below; the figure comes from reporting. |
| 2015 | $467,443 | none reported | Revenue rises roughly thirty-six-fold. The officer list on this year's return does not carry Kennedy. |
| 2017 | $727,175 | $131,250 | Figure shown is total executive compensation; the IRS extract carries no officer breakdown for this year. |
| 2018 | $1,082,293 | $184,375 | Renamed Children's Health Defense. The Samoan infants die in July; CHD advertises in August. |
| 2019 | $2,941,894 | $255,000 | The Samoa visit, and the epidemic. Michael Graven, who travelled with Kennedy, is listed on the same return as chief information officer at $125,000. |
| 2020 | $6,834,424 | $345,561 | Revenue roughly doubles as the pandemic begins. |
| 2021 | $15,990,132 | $497,013 | New donors include the technology entrepreneur Mark Gorton, who appears as a director on the 2024 return and whom Kennedy thanked by name from the stage in September 2026. |
| 2022 | $23,541,029 | $510,515 | The organisation's peak. His federal ethics disclosure reports $836,571 gross for the same year. |
| 2023 | $16,146,234 | $326,056 | For roughly fifteen weeks before taking leave in April to run for president — over $20,000 a week. He did not resign: his title became Chairman on Leave. The year closes $3,066,627 down, the first substantial loss in the organisation's history. |
| 2024 | $15,234,096 | $0 | The resignation. The return lists him as Chairman on Leave through 9 December 2024, drawing nothing — nine weeks before his confirmation as HHS Secretary. A second loss, of $683,385. |
Two further figures belong beside these. Kennedy's disclosure ahead of confirmation reported $856,559 in referral fees from the law firm Wisner Baum, which is suing Merck over its HPV vaccine — a suit he promoted through the nonprofit and his own platforms, and in which he was identified on the firm's own website as co-counsel. He stated he would retain an interest in contingency cases not involving the United States after taking office. Separately, roughly $9 million of his recent income came from his own law firm.
What the arithmetic does and does not show
Nothing here suggests anyone profited from Samoan deaths. The revenue growth from 2020 onward is plainly a pandemic effect, and it would have happened had Samoa never occurred.
What the figures do establish is scale and direction. An organisation worth thirteen thousand dollars a year became one worth twenty-three and a half million. Its chairman's pay rose from $131,250 to more than $836,000. He was simultaneously drawing referral fees from litigation against a vaccine manufacturer while chairing a charity that campaigned against that manufacturer's product. That is the structure — advocacy, litigation and personal fees running through the same person — and it is the reason a page like this one records the money at all.
Why this belongs on a Canadian site
Because Samoa is the closest thing that exists to a controlled demonstration of what this movement costs, and because the Canadian numbers are moving the same way.
Samoa's collapse was fast, total, and small enough to measure. A ten-month suspension produced a cohort of unprotected children, and within eighteen months eighty-three of them were dead. Canada's decline has been slower and is therefore easier to ignore: MMR coverage at age two fell from 89.5% in 2019 to 80.4% in 2024, Canada lost its measles elimination status in November 2025, and two infants died. Nobody suspended anything. It simply eroded.
The other reason is the one documented on the running file: the man at the centre of the Samoan record now directs the health policy of the United States, and the Canadian chapter of the organisation he chaired was incorporated here in 2021 with a Toronto lawyer among its directors.
Sources. On Samoa: Associated Press and The Guardian, August 2026, on the January 2019 letter and the embassy correspondence, as carried by CNN, PBS NewsHour and Newsweek; earlier AP reporting on the 2019 visit; the Pulitzer Center and Atlanta News First investigation Tragedy in Paradise on the August 2018 Facebook advertising and on the response of Samoan health workers; contemporaneous reporting on the outbreak, the state of emergency and the manslaughter convictions. Michelle R. Smith, The Guardian, 27 August 2026. On the disclosure sequence and Dr Graven's emails: Michelle R. Smith (The Guardian) and Ali Swenson (Associated Press), February, June and August 2026, as carried by PBS NewsHour and other outlets. On the Samoan response: Tautua Vaa, Samoa Observer, 2 July 2026, reporting on emails reviewed by The Guardian, and the Samoa Observer's 2025 interview with former Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. On the testimony, the letters and the Prime Minister's reply: Ali Swenson, Associated Press, 27 August 2026, as carried by PBS NewsHour; and Michelle R. Smith (The Guardian) with Ali Swenson (AP) on the embassy correspondence. On WHO and UNICEF: the Joint WHO/UNICEF Pacific Islands Measles Outbreak Situation Reports Nos. 8–11 (December 2019 – January 2020), the joint WHO-UNICEF statement of 20 January 2020 issued from Suva, and the WHO Global Health Observatory coverage data. On Dr Graven: his biography as published by Children's Health Defense on 4 March 2019, his alumni profile published by Pacific Lutheran University in 2017, and his listed publications. On the finances: Children's Health Defense federal tax filings as reported by STAT (December 2024) and NBC News; Kennedy's financial disclosure filed with the US Office of Government Ethics, as reported by NPR and CBS News, January 2025. On Canadian coverage figures: the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Pan American Health Organization.
Corrections are welcome and will be posted. QuackeryWatch is a non-commercial consumer information site.