Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited in Samoa in 2019. While there, he proselytized on the dangers of vaccines. After he left, the number of people getting vaccines declined. 83 people died of measles, many of them children. They were not vaccinated. RFK is not merely a “vaccine skeptic,” he’s an opponent of vaccines.
The Washington Post reported:
Health officials around the world are alarmed over the likely impact of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime vaccine skeptic who was tapped for the health secretary role this week — on global health. Experts from Samoa have been particularly vocal in sounding the alarm, citing the destructive impact of Kennedy’s rhetoric on the tiny Polynesian island nation.
Warning that Kennedy will empower the global anti-vaccine movement and may advocate for reduced funding for international agencies, Aiono Prof Alec Ekeroma, the director general of health for Samoa’s Health Ministry told The Washington Post that Kennedy “will be directly responsible for killing thousands of children around the world by allowing preventable infectious diseases to run rampant.”
“I don’t think it’s a legacy that should be associated with the Kennedy name,” Ekeroma said in an email Friday.
Ekeroma recalled a disastrous epidemic in 2019, when measles spread rapidly across the small Pacific Ocean country. Of Samoa’s population of 200,000, more than 5,700 were infected and 83 died, many of them young children. Hospitals were overrun, and the nation declared a state of emergency. To stop the outbreak, Samoa launched a massive vaccination campaign, and unvaccinated families were asked to hang red flags outside their homes.
The island nation already had a lagging measles vaccination rate of only about a third of infants, plummeting from 90 percent in 2013. Health experts attributed that drop in part to a public health scandal in which two nurses improperly mixed the measles vaccine with the wrong liquid, resulting in the deaths of two infants. Both nurses were sentenced to five years in prison, and the vaccination program was temporarily suspended — but the accident also opened the door to a wave of vaccine misinformation, including from Kennedy and his anti-vaccine nonprofit.
Kennedy had visited Samoa only four months before the outbreak and met with anti-vaccine advocates. He later characterized the outbreak in Samoa as “mild.”
