Senators demand Kennedy's resignation or criminal investigation over Samoa vaccine lies

Senators are renewing calls for anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to step down or be ousted—and at least one is calling for a criminal investigation—amid the release of documents they say prove Kennedy lied to them during his confirmation hearings last year.

“This is a pattern, not a slip,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “RFK Jr. has lied to the Senate, lied to the American people, and jeopardized the health of children to advance his anti-vaccine agenda.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a social media post Friday that the documents were “Proof we got RFK lying on the record during his confirmation hearing (a crime).” He called for the matter to be referred to the US Department of Justice for a criminal investigation. In a separate statement to The Guardian, Wyden added that “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.”

New documents

During Kennedy’s reality-bending confirmation hearings in January 2025, multiple senators raised concern about a trip Kennedy took to Samoa in 2019. At the time, Kennedy was a prominent anti-vaccine activist leading the rabidly anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD). Just months after he visited the island nation, Samoa suffered a massive measles outbreak in which 83 people died, mostly children under the age of 5. The outbreak was largely fueled by a swell of vaccine hesitancy, drummed up by anti-vaccine activists. Vaccination rates had cratered to as low as 31 percent.

While the senators linked Kennedy’s anti-vaccine work to that deadly measles outbreak, Kennedy denied any connection during the confirmation hearings. In an exchange with Wyden, Kennedy claimed: “I went there, [it had] 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.”

In an exchange with Markey, he said: “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.”

On Thursday, the Associated Press and The Guardian jointly released newly obtained documents that directly contradict Kennedy’s statements. One of the documents is a letter Kennedy sent to Samoa’s prime minister in January 2019, in which Kennedy falsely suggested “deaths associated recently with MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccines” were due to a bad lot of vaccinations from the manufacturer. Kennedy proposed letting him and his “team” from CHD investigate the country’s MMR vaccines. In all, Kennedy used the words ‘vaccination’ and ‘vaccine’ eight times in the letter proposing his visit.

The prime minister responded with a letter in February saying he welcomed Kennedy and his “team’s independent health assessment of our MMR vaccines.” He requested Kennedy coordinate a visit with him.

What happened in Samoa

As Ars Technica reported in 2019, the deaths Kennedy was likely referring to in his letter were those of two infants, who died shortly after receiving MMR shots in July 2018. Officials determined that two nurses had mixed the vaccine with a lethal dose of muscle relaxant. One of the nurses tried to cover up the error by fishing the empty bottle of the muscle relaxant out of the garbage and taking it home. The two ultimately faced manslaughter charges and were both sentenced to five years in prison in August 2019.

In the meantime, CHD and other anti-vaccine activists pounced on the tragedy, claiming that the MMR vaccine was to blame. CHD spent months highlighting the deaths in Facebook posts and questioning the safety of MMR vaccines. They never updated the posts to include information about the nurses’ fatal errors.

It was in this context that Kennedy visited Samoa in May and June of 2019, bringing a CHD member and his wife, actor Cheryl Hines, along with him. During the visit he was pictured with local anti-vaccine activists and staff members of the US embassy.

Samoa’s deadly measles outbreak began in October. In November, an official with the World Health Organization directly tied to the outbreak to an anti-vaccine group stoking fear on social media, without directly naming CHD. The official said that the impact of the group “now being measured in the lives of children who have died in the course of this outbreak.” Also in November, Kennedy sent the prime minister a four-page letter falsely claiming that the measles vaccine was to blame for the outbreak, writing erroneously that the MMR vaccine could spur “the evolution of more virulent measles strains.”

With the release of the new letters yesterday, more lawmakers are speaking out against Kennedy and his anti-vaccine agenda. The documents land as the US itself is grappling with slipping vaccination rates and unbridled measles outbreaks, which have killed two people, including a newborn, this year. Kennedy has responded by spreading misinformation and downplaying the threat, as he has in the past.

Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) said Kennedy “must resign or be fired immediately.” Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a doctor who responded to Samoa’s measles outbreak, also renewed his call for Kennedy to immediately resign.