RFK Jr. saw an opportunity in Samoa's measles vaccine crisis

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health secretary, sought to use Samoa’s measles vaccine pause as a "natural experiment" months before a deadly outbreak.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited in June 2019, Samoa was on the brink of crisis.

The government had suspended measles vaccinations the year before after an improperly prepared vaccine killed two babies. Though the vaccinations resumed months later, many parents weren’t convinced that the shots were safe, leaving thousands of their smallest children unprotected against a highly contagious disease as it was resurging across the globe. 

With fewer than a third of Samoa’s babies vaccinated, experts and officials feared for the Pacific Island nation. But Kennedy saw an opportunity.

Kennedy, then chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit, later recounted online that Samoan “government officials, including the Prime Minister were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the respite from vaccines.” Wherever the idea originated, Kennedy was quick to offer them a way to do it.

It’s a milder version of an idea he has long championed at home — that the safety of vaccines, well established by scientific consensus, needs to be studied further in the kind of trials that would depend on a large group of children going without them. With a renowned health informatics expert in tow, Kennedy visited Samoa in 2019, to pitch the prime minister and ministry of health on an information system that would track the impact of medical interventions, including vaccines, on the nation’s 200,000 citizens. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rfk-jr-samoa-measles-vaccine-crisis-rcna187787

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