But parents weren’t rushing to get in line. Edwin Tamasese, a sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, emerged as a voice for their skepticism and would come to be known internationally as the face of vaccine resistance in Samoa. Tamasese was generally critical of Western medicine; what the immune system couldn’t manage on its own could be treated with vitamins A and C, and for more serious illnesses, he turned to herbal remedies like papaya leaf extract sourced from his own farm. He shared these thoughts, and others, on Facebook, alongside anti-vaccine content, including articles and videos from Children’s Health Defense on the dangers of vaccines. Tamasese sparred with American users on pro-vaccine pages, but he was far from a major influencer — until the deaths of the two babies.
“Vaccines for my little country have been the subject of a bit of international media lately and because of this I have looked a bit deeper into it,” he posted to one Facebook forum in 2018, along with a photo of his 6-month-old daughter’s vaccination record, empty aside from a Hepatitis B vaccine given at birth that he said he would have liked to prevent. “Are we missing out on opportunities to explore alternative options to vaccines that could be safer and more effective?”
In April the next year, Tamasese participated in a professional exchange program run by the U.S. State Department, and at a government function, met Malielegaoi, then the Samoan prime minister. According to Malielegaoi, who replied to questions over email this month, Tamasese talked to him about Children’s Health Defense and floated the idea that Kennedy could come to Samoa and discuss “the deeper issues on vaccines.” It’s unclear whether or how Tamasese knew Kennedy at the time.
Kennedy accepted the invitation, and on June 1, he and his wife, actor Cheryl Hines, attended an official Independence Day celebration. The rest of Kennedy’s trip was less public. Photos posted to his Instagram account at the time show Kennedy visiting churches, playing on the beach with a group of kids, and catching starfish in the ocean.
According to Naseri, the director general of health, government officials arranged a dinner for Kennedy at a resort. Naseri said that he spoke briefly to Kennedy there and that Kennedy shared his view that vaccines weren’t safe. Naseri said he told Kennedy that vaccines solved most of the country’s infectious disease problems, “and we don’t want to stop that.”
Kennedy wasn’t alone at the dinner. He brought the Children’s Health Defense’s new chief information officer, Dr. Michael Graven, a lauded neonatologist known for creating information systems that tracked and improved health outcomes in the world’s poorest countries.
In 2012, Graven co-wrote a letter arguing for integrated health systems to better assess vaccine impacts, adverse events and safety monitoring.
In 2019, Graven was analyzing the data for a study that would be published in 2020 by two prominent anti-vaccine activists, scientist James Lyons-Weiler and Oregon pediatrician Paul Thomas, whose license would be suspended the same year — in part for his failure to adequately vaccinate patients — and then voluntarily relinquished two years later.
Comparing health outcomes of Thomas’ patients, the study concluded that unvaccinated children in his practice were healthier than vaccinated ones. It was retracted a year later following an investigation that “raised several methodological issues and confirmed that the conclusions were not supported by strong scientific data.”
Kennedy, like Thomas and other vaccine skeptics, has roundly rejected the body of scientific studies that show childhood vaccines are safe. Instead, he has embraced the unscientific theory that some ingredient or mechanism in childhood vaccines must be the culprit for chronic illnesses in children, from allergies to autism.
Kennedy published a book on the topic in 2023, “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,” in which he argues that vaccinated children are less healthy than unvaccinated ones, relying on studies, like the 2020 one, that have been criticized by scientists as methodologically flawed or in some cases retracted.
It’s not clear how Graven, who died in 2022, became acquainted with Children’s Health Defense, or why he left after only a year. He was not against vaccines, according to his widow, his brother and a colleague interviewed by NBC News. His brother, Kendall Graven, who is also a doctor, said Graven hoped to teach Kennedy about how data is often misinterpreted by anti-vaccine supporters. Kennedy “was only mildly open to the concept of safe vaccines, in spite of Mike’s efforts,” Kendall Graven said, adding that “the Samoa catastrophe was nothing he discussed with us, other than to say it was a vaccine-preventable tragedy.”
Children’s Health Defense didn’t ultimately build a health information system for Samoa. Former Prime Minister Malielegaoi said he had not been swayed by Kennedy’s visit. “I was not interested in his ideas — he was not a medical doctor,” he told NBC News. “Our medical experts are more credible to me.”
Mary Holland, the president of Children’s Health Defense, declined an interview request. She replied to a list of questions with a link to an article disputing news reports that blamed Kennedy for Samoa’s low vaccine coverage.
Tamasese declined to be interviewed for this article, saying in a Facebook post that NBC News would “obviously twist whatever I say to try to prevent RFKj heading NIH in the US.” In a Facebook direct message, Tamasese said that Naseri had declined Children’s Health Defense’s offer of a data system. Naseri said he doesn’t remember such a proposal.
“I think there was some institutional resistance,” Kennedy told the Samoa Observer in 2021. “The measles epidemic occurred and kind of everything shut down in Samoa.”
The first case of measles was reported in September 2019, likely brought by a passenger on a flight from Auckland, New Zealand, to the Samoan island of Upolu. In October, it was officially an outbreak, and by November a national state of emergency. Samoa closed its schools, banned children from public spaces and made it illegal to discourage or prevent people from getting vaccinated. Red flags outside homes indicated there were children inside who needed to be vaccinated. Samoan officials said unvaccinated children were accounting for most of the deaths.
On Nov. 19, as the deaths neared 20, Kennedy wrote a letter to Malielegaoi, baselessly suggesting that the crisis was caused not by low vaccination rates but by a hodgepodge of possibilities, including ineffective or defective vaccines and newly vaccinated children “shedding” the virus to unvaccinated ones.
The post RFK Jr. saw an opportunity in Samoa’s measles vaccine crisis appeared first on NBC News.
