New emails show that a colleague of Robert F Kennedy Jr told Samoan officials the pair were travelling to the Pacific island nation as part of a vaccine-related “mission” to study medical records after a “discontinuity in vaccinations” – directly contradicting the US health secretary’s repeated insistence that his 2019 trip had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
New emails reveal ‘mission’
The correspondence, obtained by the Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press on behalf of the Associated Press, was sent by Dr Michael Graven, then chief information officer of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense (CHD). Graven, a paediatrician who died in 2022, had previously completed nine missions for the World Health Organization and worked in 44 countries.
In an email dated 8 March 2019, Graven told Samoan officials he would “be with Mr Kennedy as the Health Informatician who will be performing the statistical investigations”. Two months later, on 13 May, he went further, writing that he was sending the message “after discussion with” Kennedy and repeatedly described the trip as a “mission”.
“The mission involves health informatics evaluation from medical record data from all hospitals and clinics in Samoa to evaluate outcomes associated with the recent discontinuity in vaccinations,” Graven wrote. “Mr Kennedy asked me to join this mission as I have performed health informatics initiatives in 48 other countries over 40 years.”
Graven outlined plans to collect data and conduct statistical analysis, saying he intended to travel to every hospital and clinic in the country. He described the mission as one conducted “without bias”, adding that he had witnessed the harmful effects of vaccine-preventable illness and had previously served countries where “bad vaccine lots” had been discovered.
The emails provide the most detailed view yet of what Kennedy and his team intended to do in Samoa. Kennedy was at the time serving as chair and chief legal counsel of CHD, a non-profit group known for its anti-vaccine activism. Graven’s description of their work stands in stark contrast to the account Kennedy later gave under oath.
Despite Graven’s plan to spend weeks visiting sites and analysing data, an email sent on 4 June from Antone Greubel, a US state department employee stationed in Samoa, noted that Graven left with Kennedy only a few days after arriving. Greubel wrote: “Based on conversations with my contacts RFK and Dr [Graven] fell far short of their goal to influence Samoan government vaccination policy.” Another US embassy official had earlier suggested the “real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view)”. A UNICEF representative indicated that the Samoan prime minister had invited Kennedy’s team to “investigate the safety of the vaccine”.
Kennedy’s denials under scrutiny
During his Senate confirmation hearing last year, Kennedy repeatedly denied that his visit to Samoa had anything to do with vaccines. Under questioning from Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, he said: “I went there, nothing to do with vaccines. I went there to introduce a medical informatics system with digitalized records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.” The following day, pressed by Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Kennedy said: “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.” He added: “You cannot find a single Samoan who will say I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.”
Kennedy told the Senate that CHD had a $6m grant “to digitalize the health records of Samoa … and to bring in a state-of-the-art medical informatic system”, which he said was the purpose of his trip. Yet the newly released emails show Graven explicitly linking the mission to the “discontinuity in vaccinations” and a plan to evaluate health outcomes from that disruption.
Senator Wyden said in response to the latest findings: “These new emails offer more proof that Robert Kennedy is a liar on a mission to take vaccines away from kids who need them.” Senator Markey called Kennedy a liar regarding his Samoa testimony. Governor Josh Green of Hawaii, a medical doctor who responded to the epidemic, said the revelations showed Kennedy had misled the Senate and should step down, accusing him of taking advantage of vulnerable people.
Kennedy has continued to defend himself, claiming in a 2021 blog post that he went to Samoa to discuss “the introduction of a medical informatics system” to track drug safety, and suggesting that Samoan officials “were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines”.
Samoa outbreak context
Anti-vaccine activists in the United States first became interested in Samoa after two infants died in 2018 following injections with a tainted measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The deaths were later found to have been caused by nurses improperly mixing the vaccine with an expired muscle relaxant instead of sterile water – a preparation error, not a defect in the vaccine itself. Nevertheless, the Samoan government suspended all vaccinations for ten months, until April 2019, causing vaccination rates to plummet.
During that pause, CHD began reaching out to the Samoan government. CHD paid Facebook to run advertisements questioning the safety of MMR vaccines after the infant deaths. Kennedy’s group also connected with Edwin Tamasese, a Samoan vaccine critic and traditional healer who was later arrested and charged with “incitement against a government order” during the mass vaccination campaign. Kennedy referred to Tamasese as a “medical freedom hero”.
By the time Kennedy arrived on 30 May 2019, accompanied by his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, vaccinations had resumed but rates remained very low. A few months later, in September 2019, a devastating measles outbreak tore through the island nation. It sickened more than 5,700 people and killed 83 – the vast majority of them children under five years old. The outbreak prompted a state of emergency, mandatory vaccinations, and a mass campaign that eventually reached an estimated 94% of the eligible population by December 2019.
Samoan officials later stated that Kennedy’s visit had bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists. Kennedy has long called for scientific studies that compare the health of vaccinated children against unvaccinated children – a position he laid out in his 2023 book Vax-UnVax: Let the Science Speak. The New York Times reported this month that in his role as health secretary, Kennedy has asked government scientists to undertake such studies, which he believes will prove vaccines are harmful. Last year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention granted funding to a study that would have compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children in Guinea-Bissau; it was deemed unethical by the head of the World Health Organization and others and was paused.
The state department has been turning over the emails – many heavily redacted – in batches since January as a result of the open records lawsuit. Spokespeople for Kennedy at the US Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to messages seeking comment. CHD also did not respond to a request for comment.