On Thursday 27 August 2026, The Associated Press and The Guardian put a 2019 letter next to a 2025 Senate answer and asked readers to look at both. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then a private advocate and now the United States health secretary, had told the senators who controlled his confirmation that a visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines.” The letter, written on Children’s Health Defense stationery and dated 20 January 2019, asked Samoa’s then prime minister for leave to study the country’s measles, mumps and rubella vaccines. AP and the Guardian counted the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times in that one page.
The Department of Health and Human Services, answering the Associated Press, said the Samoa visit “was unrelated to vaccines.” Any suggestion, the department added, that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is “not only false but outright defamatory.” He was not under oath. Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, the ranking member on Senate Finance, said he will still press the Republican majority for a criminal referral to the Justice Department. This piece is about that collision — testimony, documents, a denial, and a demand for a prosecutor. It is not health advice. It is not an argument about whether children should be immunised.
The letter that went to the prime minister first
In 2019 Kennedy was chair and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense. In July 2018 two young children in Samoa died after an MMR dose that had been mixed wrongly. The nurses involved were charged the next month and later pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Apia halted vaccinations for ten months, until April 2019. Coverage fell hard. During that pause, CHD began writing to Samoan officials. Those earlier emails came out of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department, brought with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The January 2019 letter is a later piece of the same haul.
Kennedy addressed then prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. He said he hoped his group might be “helpful to the people of your great nation,” and he floated the idea that the two deaths might have come from manufacturing trouble, or from different vaccine lots. He proposed that his team run a “detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines.” He wrote that most of the world finds it slow and hard to look at “adverse health events associated with vaccines,” because record systems are rarely built to join a diagnosis to a particular shot. The letter, the reporting notes, did not advertise an anti-vaccine campaign. It did ask, in plain language, to look at MMR.
A month later Tuilaepa wrote back. An independent health assessment of Samoa’s MMR vaccines would be “beneficial,” he said, and he would welcome the team’s visit “with much anticipation.” A United States embassy official was copied on that reply. In a separate May 2019 email, CHD colleague Michael Graven told Samoan officials the travelling party was coming as part of a vaccine-related “mission.” Kennedy, Graven and Kennedy’s wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, were in Samoa in May and June. By then shots had restarted. Samoa’s senior health official had already said the children’s deaths were human error, not a product fault. While on the islands, Kennedy met anti-vaccine campaigners, including one who had helped arrange the visit with an embassy employee — a fact AP and the Guardian reported in earlier stories from the same lawsuit.
Months later, with coverage still low, measles moved through the country. Thousands of people got sick. Eighty-three died, most of them children under five. Public-health workers have said their outbreak response was slowed by local anti-vaccine activists, some of whom they argue were buoyed by Kennedy’s presence. That sequence is why the trip has sat in his confirmation file ever since. It is why Wyden and Massachusetts senator Edward Markey asked him, on camera, what he was doing there. The new letter does not retry the outbreak. It does show what Kennedy asked for before he flew.
The answers he gave Wyden, then Markey
The Samoa questions were not colour. At the start of Donald Trump’s second term, Kennedy needed sceptical Republicans as well as the White House. Members of both parties had already gone after his record on immunisation. Over two confirmation hearings he told the Senate he supported childhood vaccination, that his Samoa stop had not changed anyone’s decision to get a shot, and — more than once — that vaccines were not why he went.
When Wyden raised the trip, Kennedy said: “I went there, 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.” The next day Markey came back to it. “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines,” Kennedy said. Pressed again, he repeated the denial, then added that he had ended up talking to people “some of whom I never intended to meet.” He also told senators he had made no public statement about vaccines in Samoa, and that they would not find a Samoan who skipped a shot because of “Bobby Kennedy.”
A 2021 post on the Children’s Health Defense site, cited by the Guardian, had already described the journey as an Independence Day visit plus a talk about a medical informatics system to track drug safety. That post said Samoan officials were interested in measuring health after the “natural experiment” of a national pause in vaccinations. The January 2019 letter is older than that blog, and narrower. It is a request, on letterhead, to study MMR.
Kennedy was not sworn. Confirmation witnesses often are not. Knowingly giving material false testimony to Congress is still a federal crime, with a possible prison term, whether or not a Bible is in the room. Cases are rare. Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz told the Guardian that lying to Congress is a crime either way, but that it would take the executive branch to charge, and that Trump’s Justice Department is unlikely to do it. Wyden’s staff made the same point about the oath: it is not a shield. The statute of limitations is five years. A different Justice Department after the 2028 election could, in theory, still open a file.
HHS calls the charge defamatory — and skips the text
HHS, in the statement given to AP, did not walk through the letter line by line. It asserted that Secretary Kennedy’s 2019 visit “was unrelated to vaccines,” and it treated a lying allegation as both false and defamatory. The Guardian asked the department to explain the clash between that claim and the MMR language Kennedy sent the prime minister. It got no answer to that question. HHS would not put Kennedy up for an interview. The White House did not comment. Neither the current Samoan prime minister’s office nor Tuilaepa replied. Children’s Health Defense did not comment either.
That is the official American position on Friday 28 August 2026: the trip was not about vaccines; the letters do not prove a lie; the secretary is not available to say more. The documents, as published, still contain eight uses of vaccine language, a proposed MMR assessment, a prime minister’s MMR-specific welcome, and a colleague’s “mission” email. A newsroom can hold both things at once. A categorical denial from the department Kennedy now runs. A paper trail written when he had no government title.
Kennedy, who holds a law licence, has shown an appetite for the same statute pointed the other way. The Guardian noted that he recently floated perjury exposure for former health official Anthony Fauci if Fauci is called before a Senate panel on Covid-19. The political rhyme is obvious. The legal fact is smaller. Congress can be lied to without an oath. Charging that lie is a choice for prosecutors Kennedy’s own administration controls.
Wyden’s referral, and the people who want him out
Wyden did not wait for a Republican chairman to volunteer. In a statement to the Guardian he said Kennedy’s platform is “built on lies and grifts that leave a trail of dead children in their wake,” and that “there are consequences for lying to Congress.” He will push GOP colleagues who now run the Senate to send a criminal referral to the Justice Department. If Democrats take the chamber in November, he said, Kennedy will sit at the top of the Finance Committee’s list of Trump officials to hold to account for “endangering American families.”
Markey called the records proof that the “nothing to do with vaccines” line was false. “This is a pattern, not a slip,” he said. He added that Kennedy had lied to the Senate and to the public, should never have been confirmed, and cannot be trusted to run HHS “for even one more day.” Maryland senator Angela Alsobrooks, who sits on the health committee that oversees the department, repeated her demand that Kennedy resign or be dismissed. Hawaii governor Josh Green — a physician who went to Samoa in 2019 to help with the measles response — said Kennedy had misled Congress about his intentions there and about his stance on vaccinations, and should “immediately resign” for “the safety and health of our country.”
On the same Thursday, the watchdog American Oversight wrote to the Justice Department asking it to open an investigation into whether Kennedy broke the law by making false statements to Congress. That letter does not need a Senate vote. It also does not compel a prosecutor. Lawyers who know Senate procedure told AP and the Guardian that a Democratic House or Senate after November could use the testimony as a peg for hearings, an impeachment inquiry, or other procedural friction. They also said none of that is likely while Republicans hold Congress and stay aligned with the president.
So the near-term politics are lopsided. The documents are public. The ranking Democrat on Finance is asking for a DOJ referral. A watchdog has posted a demand at the department’s door. The department Kennedy leads says the accusation is defamatory. The majority that confirmed him 52–48 has no obvious incentive to send their health secretary to a prosecutor.
The Cassidy vote, and the promises that did not hold
Kennedy’s confirmation was never a landslide. The Senate vote was 52 to 48. The swing that mattered was Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate health committee and has been a loud defender of immunisation. Cassidy said he voted yes because Kennedy promised not to rewrite certain vaccine policies and guidance. Announcing that vote, Cassidy said Kennedy had pledged to keep a federal vaccine advisory committee “without changes.” Once in office, Kennedy removed all 17 members and put in his own. In June, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Cassidy said the commitments made to him had been “violated.” His trust, he acknowledged, was broken.
That history belongs in this story because the Samoa answers were part of the same two days of testimony. Kennedy was trying to reassure a chamber that did not fully trust him. Senators who now say he misled them about Samoa are also pointing at a wider pattern: pledges made to get the job, then discarded. This package is not a scorecard of HHS immunisation policy. It is a record of what was said to win a confirmation, what was written in 2019, and how those two texts now sit in the same news cycle.
State Department and UNICEF officials, in earlier AP and Guardian reporting from the same FOIA fight, had already discussed among themselves that the Samoa trip was about vaccines. Democratic senators used that private chatter last year to argue that Kennedy had misled the Senate. The January 2019 letter, and Graven’s “mission” email, are the first time the public has seen Kennedy’s own pre-trip ask in his own words, on his own letterhead, with the prime minister’s MMR-specific welcome attached. That is the new fact. The rest is what Congress chooses to do with it.
Friday’s ledger
As of Friday 28 August 2026, no referral has moved. No Justice Department investigation has been announced. HHS has not explained the letter. Kennedy has not been produced for questions. Samoa’s current and former prime ministers have not spoken. Children’s Health Defense has not spoken. Wyden is working a Republican Senate. American Oversight has left a letter at DOJ. Markey, Alsobrooks and Green want the secretary out. Cassidy has already said, on national television, that the man he confirmed did not keep the bargain.
The measles deaths in Samoa are a matter of public record. They are not a prompt for this newsroom to argue immunology, and they are not a licence to turn a documents story into a quackery fight. The accountability question is smaller, and it is the one the paper actually poses. When a cabinet secretary told the Senate his 2019 trip had nothing to do with vaccines, was that true? AP and the Guardian say the letters refute it. HHS says the insinuation is defamatory. Wyden wants a prosecutor to pick a side.
Syed Aqeel (Founder, CEO, and Developer) — wrote / author this story. Syed Aqeel (Founder, CEO, and Developer) — verified this story.
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