Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited in Samoa in 2019. While there, he proselytized on the dangers of vaccines. After he left, the number of people getting vaccines declined. 83 people died of measles, many of them children. They were not vaccinated. RFK is not merely a “vaccine skeptic,” he’s an opponent of vaccines.
Health officials around the world are alarmed over the likely impact of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime vaccine skeptic who was tapped for the health secretary role this week — on global health. Experts from Samoa have been particularly vocal in sounding the alarm, citing the destructive impact of Kennedy’s rhetoric on the tiny Polynesian island nation.
Warning that Kennedy will empower the global anti-vaccine movement and may advocate for reduced funding for international agencies, Aiono Prof Alec Ekeroma, the director general of health for Samoa’s Health Ministry told The Washington Post that Kennedy “will be directly responsible for killing thousands of children around the world by allowing preventable infectious diseases to run rampant.”
“I don’t think it’s a legacy that should be associated with the Kennedy name,” Ekeroma said in an email Friday.
Ekeroma recalled a disastrous epidemic in 2019, when measles spread rapidly across the small Pacific Ocean country. Of Samoa’s population of 200,000, more than 5,700 were infected and 83 died, many of them young children. Hospitals were overrun, and the nation declared a state of emergency. To stop the outbreak, Samoa launched a massive vaccination campaign, and unvaccinated families were asked to hang red flags outside their homes.
The island nation already had a lagging measles vaccination rate of only about a third of infants, plummeting from 90 percent in 2013. Health experts attributed that drop in part to a public health scandal in which two nurses improperly mixed the measles vaccine with the wrong liquid, resulting in the deaths of two infants. Both nurses were sentenced to five years in prison, and the vaccination program was temporarily suspended — but the accident also opened the door to a wave of vaccine misinformation, including from Kennedy and his anti-vaccine nonprofit.
Kennedy had visited Samoa only four months before the outbreak and met with anti-vaccine advocates. He later characterized the outbreak in Samoa as “mild.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The White Man Privilege script that plays out in this story. Is so REAL, so Physical, so Destructive and so Dismissive. It is Somoa. They are Brown. I don’t know them. They live faraway. I am not related to them. They are objects. They don’t count. Their disease & death count is to be categorized as “MILD.” More chilling and Deliberate is that he went there to converse/collaborate/convert a crowd of anti-vax villains. Good Job Mr K. And we sure can’t chalk this one up to the 18th Century.
He lost no sleep 🛌 over what he did. His absence of conscience came in quite handy. His success encouraged him to seek additional “conquests.” And now he has all of North America to focus on. His pathology requires him to seek power & prestige at absolutely any expense.
LikeLike
Kennedy is a vaccination skeptic. He has also said he will not prohibit people from getting vaccines, but people should have access to information about them in order to make an informed decision. He does plan to cause a shake up at the FDA and the NIH, and he plans to fire some of the bureaucrats that work in these agencies. He claims that the FDA has suppressed information on alternative treatments for certain medical conditions. He believes the FDA generally promotes medications available from big pharmaceutical companies. Kennedy also has expressed concerns about the number of unhealthy additives in our food supply that the EU has rejected. Kennedy also questions the safety of fluoride in the water supply. The biggest threat is if large numbers of people are convinced vaccines are unsafe and they refuse to get them, another deadly outbreak could result widespread illness and death. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gx3kkz8z3o
LikeLike
Retired teacher,
I don’t call RFK “a vaccine skeptic.” I’d call him an opponent of vaccines. Many people will die if vaccines become optional.
LikeLike
Think of the babies in daycare who are too young for vaccination being exposed to children who are not vaccinated. I worried about my youngest grandson. it seems like he or his “big” brother are always sick. I do not miss those years at all.
LikeLike
It is important to note that anti-vax sentiment is fueled by the tendency to downplay failures and inaccurate information that makes someone wealthy or famous. When big pharmaceutical companies makes a mistake, it goes into cya mode, which creates a toxic culture relative to all of science. When anti-vax activists make unscientific claims and are proven wrong, they do the same to save face and influence.
The only way out of this is honesty, a thing in short supply these days. Science is generally honest when no one stands to gain or lose a lot of money or influence. This needs to be a part of the system.
LikeLike
Today on Morning Joe somebody made the offhand comment that “Science has become politicized.” Infuriatingly wrong! Science is, as it has mostly been, apolitical. However, anti-science is very much politicized.
LikeLike
I agree. Science is, by definition, honest, true and factual. It is the pursuit of truth, otherwise it is not science. Of course charlatans and demagogues will often misuse science and cherry pick facts or distort the truth for their malicious ends.
LikeLike
William–yes; there is nothing that any person can think, do, or say that has no political (or social, moral, or theological) implications. The writer of such drivel (in your quote) does not understand, however, that those implications are not necessarily or singularly motivational, a point that is disregarded (or ignorantly misunderstood) by the charge that “science has become politicized.”
For instance, Scientists are of many political (etc.) persuasions but still can and do, in their reflective choices, collaborate under and abide by scientific principles, especially in their professions, which is what it means to be a-political.
It is a tensional existence we live in, but living in a secular political culture especially, we choose to live in and mediate those tensions every day of our lives.
Scientists, for example, also have to ask themselves questions that are governed by ethical and political principles. So that just because a scientist CAN experiment on X and follow the science of it, does not mean they SHOULD experiment on X, or that what one does would or would not be good for anyone, including themselves. (These kinds of questions are often tacit/covert, but still operative in all of us.)
A scientist can set aside political, ethical, etc., principles (a-political) but only after they have accepted or responded to those other more foundational life concerns that are always there for human beings–but then that’s the tension that even the ignorant live in, and even if they have no understanding of it. CBK
LikeLike
When millions are dying needless deaths in the United States, the only winner is Putin.
LikeLike