Understanding RFK Jr.’s actions in Samoa explains why American children will soon be at even greater risk.
Submitted by Ed Marcuse
| PAUL OFFITSEP 14 |  |
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on a mission. As described in his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission report, children are suffering more from chronic diseases than ever before. Rates of childhood obesity, diabetes, neurodevelopmental disorders, cancer, mental health problems, allergies, and autoimmune diseases are dramatically greater than in previous decades. The MAHA report states that children are simply receiving too many vaccines too soon, which are weakening, overwhelming, or altering their immune systems, causing an explosion of chronic illnesses. This must stop. And RFK Jr. sees himself as the man who will stop it.
On February 13, 2025, after he had been sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. said, “For 20 years, I’ve gotten up every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I could end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country. On August 23rd of last year, God sent me President Donald Trump.”
RFK Jr.’s belief that vaccines cause chronic illnesses isn’t new. RFK Jr. has said that the polio vaccine causes soft tissue cancers, that the HPV vaccine causes cancer and autoimmune diseases, that several vaccines cause autism, and that his voice disorder, which is genetic, was caused by an influenza vaccine. All these claims were wildly incorrect. Nonetheless, when he sees parents holding a child, he urges them not to vaccinate them; in that way, he believes that he has “saved” that child. He has also said that if he could go back in time, he would pay any amount of money not to have vaccinated his own children.
RFK Jr sees the current outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases as a small price to pay for what he believes will be a long-term reduction in chronic illnesses. And, if you don’t believe that, just look at his actions during a measles outbreak in Samoa between 2019 and 2020 that caused 5,700 cases and 83 deaths in an island nation of only 200,000 people. On June 1, 2019, RFK Jr. visited the Samoan Prime Minister and falsely claimed that the measles outbreak wasn’t caused by measles; it was caused by a defective measles vaccine. While there, RFK Jr. met with prominent local anti-vaccine activists like Taylor Winterstein and Edwin Tamasese to help with their efforts to discourage vaccination during the Prime Minister’s vaccination campaign. RFK Jr. also brought with him a data analyst named Michael Gavin whom he believed could help him compare children who hadn’t been vaccinated with those who had. He saw this as a “window of opportunity” to show that, in the long run, unvaccinated children were better off, even during a massive measles epidemic.
RFK Jr.’s actions in Samoa explains why, despite his role as our nation’s leading public health official, he never encourages vaccination during outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Quite the opposite. In March 2025, a couple of weeks after a child died from measles in West Texas—the first child death from measles in the United States in more than 20 years—RFK Jr. went on national television and claimed that the measles vaccine “causes blindness and deafness,” “causes the same symptoms as measles,” and “kills people every year.” He further claimed that “natural measles infections prevent cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases.” In May 2025, RFK Jr. said that children should no longer receive a COVID vaccine, even though thousands of children had been hospitalized with COVID and more than a hundred had died the previous year. In January 2026, after about 500 children had died from influenza during the previous two years—more childhood deaths from influenza than had been seen since the 2009 swine flu pandemic—RFK Jr. explained on CBS News that children “might be better off if fewer got a flu vaccine.”
For RFK Jr., the United States is the new Samoa. During the next two years, he will continue to discourage vaccination and hold up a series of bogus, poorly constructed, critically flawed studies showing that vaccinated children are at greater risk for chronic diseases than unvaccinated children. He’ll call them “gold-standard” studies. He’s done it before. And it’s the basis of his book, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.
Fortunately for Samoans, their Prime Minister quickly saw RFK Jr. for who he was. “I was not interested in his ideas,” he said. “He was not a medical doctor. Our medical experts are more credible to me.” When will political leaders in our country say the same thing? Because until they do, American children will continue to suffer and die from infections that are entirely preventable.
In November 2023, RFK Jr. said, “let’s give infectious diseases a break for a while.” Sadly, for as long as RFK Jr. is Secretary of Health and Human Services, they won’t be giving us a break.