RFK Jr misled on measles deaths: Samoa health chief

Samoa's top health official has denounced as "a complete lie" remarks that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made during his bid to become US health secretary, rejecting his claim that some who died in the Pacific nation's 2019 measles epidemic didn't have the disease.

"We don't know what was killing them," Kennedy said during tense US Senate hearings on January 29, suggesting that the cause of the 83 deaths was unclear.

"It's a total fabrication," Samoa Director-General of Health Dr Alec Ekeroma told The Associated Press of Kennedy's comments.

US senators grilled Kennedy last week over his 2019 Samoa trip, accusing him of downplaying his role in the epidemic.

The outbreak devastated the Pacific island nation in 2019, killing 83 people in a population of 200,000.

Vaccination rates were historically low because of poor public health management and the 2018 deaths of two babies whose vaccines were incorrectly prepared, prompting fears that the MMR immunisation was unsafe before the nature of the error was discovered.

The government suspended vaccinations for 10 months before the outbreak - the period when Kennedy visited. His trip was organised by a Samoan anti-vaccine influencer, according to a 2021 blog post by Kennedy.

Kennedy denied that his visit had fuelled anti-vaccine sentiment. A spokesperson didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Anti-vaxxers from New Zealand came to be with him here," Ekeroma said. "That's how I know that his influence can be far-reaching."

What did Kennedy say about the deaths?

"When the tissue samples were sent to New Zealand, most of those people did not have measles," Kennedy told US senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.

Ekeroma, a medical doctor who also holds a doctorate in health, said the claim was a "huge denial" of the fact that doctors from several countries travelled to Samoa to treat measles patients.

The Samoan official wasn't the health chief during the outbreak, but confirmed key details with his predecessor, he said.

Blood samples from living patients were sent to Australia and New Zealand, where the public health agency said testing had confirmed the same strain of measles circulating in NZ at the time.

Why did Kennedy travel to Samoa?

"I went there - nothing to do with vaccines," Kennedy said. "I went there to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalise records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient."

Did Kennedy's visit have any sway?

"My words had nothing to do with vaccine uptake in Samoa or with the 2019 epidemic," he said in written responses.

But Kennedy emboldened anti-vaccine contacts in Samoa, Ekeroma said, and the epidemic was fuelled by disinformation in social media posts in the island nation and abroad.

If Kennedy is affirmed as the top US health official this week, it would be "a danger to us, a danger to everyone," Ekeroma said.

Kennedy would control US funding for vaccination initiatives and could make affordable vaccines harder for small nations like Samoa to access, the official said.