Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, once pitched the idea to run an experiment on the children of Samoa to see whether vaccines actually work.
Kennedy Jr., who ran the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense (from which he profited greatly), still claims the long-debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and a range of health problems. A report from NBC News published Friday shows that the man who may be in charge of America’s health agencies is more than willing to play games with public safety to test his own conspiracy theories.
In July 2018, Samoa was rocked by the death of two infants, who died after being administered improperly prepared vaccines. The scandal resulted in a 10-month pause in Samoa’s vaccine program. When the program eventually resumed, parents were slow to rejoin the line for vaccines for their children.
Less than a year later, in June 2019, Kennedy Jr. received an invitation to visit Samoa from Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, who had expressed that he’d previously lost a grandchild “under similar circumstances,” which many understood to mean due to complications relating to vaccines. Edwin Tamasese, a local vaccine skeptic, had told Malielegaoi about Children’s Health Defense, and urged him to invite Kennedy Jr. to speak with him.
Kennedy Jr. knew all about the deaths in Samoa, and Children’s Health Defense had been using it to make misinformation materials and escalate its calls for “vaccine safety science,” despite the fact that the deadly error in the case had been a human one.
It was then that Kennedy Jr. pitched his cruel experiment: to use the drop in vaccination rates as an opportunity to see if vaccines actually work (spoiler alert: They do).
He brought with him Dr. Michael Craven, the Children’s Health Defense’s new chief information officer, who could set up an information system to track the effects of vaccines, or lack thereof.
Ultimately, his pitch wasn’t convincing. “I was not interested in his ideas—he was not a medical doctor,” Malielegaoi told NBC News. “Our medical experts are more credible to me.”
But Kennedy Jr. wasn’t far from done trying to intervene. Months later, when a measles outbreak started to spread through Samoa, Kennedy wrote to Malielegaoi suggesting that there was another reason for the spate of deaths. By the end of the year dozens of children were dead.
That’s when Kennedy reached out to Tamasese, the vaccine skeptic. Tamasese said that Kennedy helped assemble a team of doctors who advised him on the real cure, a vitamin C treatment, to save the kids of Samoa from the spread of measles. Meanwhile, one of the doctors on Kennedy’s team asked Tamasese to secure a vial of the measles vaccine and send it to the U.S. for testing.
Eventually, Samoa instituted a vaccine mandate, and the Covid-19 pandemic diverted Kennedy’s efforts in Samoa. Kennedy continues to claim that the measles were not responsible for the deaths of 82 children. “Nobody died in Samoa from measles,” Kennedy said in August. “They were dying from a bad vaccine.”
The post Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Once Pitched a Deadly Human Vaccine Experiment appeared first on New Republic.
