Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is again facing calls to resign or be removed from office, with at least one senator seeking a criminal investigation. The renewed pressure follows the release of documents that lawmakers say prove Kennedy misled the Senate during his confirmation hearings last year.
Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said the behavior reflected a broader pattern. “This is a pattern, not a slip,” Markey 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.) went further, arguing in a Friday social media post that the documents amount to “Proof we got RFK lying on the record during his confirmation hearing (a crime).” Wyden called for the matter to be referred to the US Department of Justice. In a separate statement, he said, “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.”
The documents at the center of the dispute
During Kennedy’s January 2025 confirmation hearings, several senators questioned him about a 2019 trip to Samoa. At the time, Kennedy was a prominent anti-vaccine activist leading the organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD). Months after his visit, Samoa suffered a major measles outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them children under the age of 5. The crisis was driven largely by vaccine hesitancy, with vaccination rates falling to as low as 31 percent.
Kennedy denied any connection to the outbreak. In an exchange with Wyden, he said, “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.” He told Markey his purpose “had nothing to do with vaccines.”
Newly obtained documents contradict those statements. In a January 2019 letter to Samoa’s prime minister, Kennedy falsely suggested that “deaths associated recently with MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccines” stemmed from a defective batch from the manufacturer. He proposed that he and his CHD “team” investigate the country’s MMR vaccines. The words “vaccination” and “vaccine” appear eight times in the letter. The prime minister replied in February, welcoming Kennedy’s “team’s independent health assessment of our MMR vaccines” and asking him to coordinate a visit.
What actually happened in Samoa
The deaths Kennedy referenced were those of two infants who died shortly after receiving MMR shots in July 2018. Investigators determined that two nurses had mixed the vaccine with a lethal dose of muscle relaxant. One of the nurses attempted to conceal the error by removing the empty muscle relaxant bottle from the trash. The tragedy became a focal point for vaccine skepticism in the country, contributing to the collapse in immunization rates that preceded the deadly outbreak.
The documents were released jointly by the Associated Press and The Guardian, and lawmakers say they directly contradict the sworn statements Kennedy gave to the Senate during his confirmation process.
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Image: arstechnica.com
