After state health officials in Pennsylvania announced that two unvaccinated people died from measles this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced a new round of unwelcome scrutiny and fresh calls for his resignation.

But as it turns out, this was soon followed by an entirely different problem for the longtime conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist. The Associated Press reported:

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation last year that a 2019 visit to Samoa before a deadly measles outbreak had “nothing to do with vaccines.” New documents obtained by The Associated Press and The Guardian refute that testimony.

Kennedy, then a prominent anti-vaccine activist, preceded the visit with a letter to the Samoan prime minister requesting to study the Pacific island nation’s measles, mumps and rubella vaccines after the deaths of two children who had received them. In the letter, he used the words vaccine or vaccination eight times.

If the underlying controversy sounds at all familiar, there’s a good reason for that. As MS NOW has previously reported, there have long been difficult and painful questions surrounding Kennedy’s efforts in Samoa years before he became a powerful White House Cabinet secretary. In fact, early last year, Hawaii’s Democratic governor, Josh Green, a former emergency medical physician, said he’d treated Samoan measles patients in 2019, and he blamed Kennedy personally for preventable deaths.

What’s new, however, is the emergence of written correspondence RFK Jr. sent ahead of his visit.

When senators were considering Kennedy’s highly controversial nomination last year, he more than once assured lawmakers, during his testimony, that when he traveled to the Pacific island country, it had “nothing to do with vaccines.”

Letters obtained by the AP and The Guardian, which the news organizations released to the public, indicate that Kennedy’s principal and explicitly stated goal had everything to do with the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. After suggesting two Samoan children died as a result of vaccine manufacturing issues, Kennedy wrote, “I would propose my team conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines.”

Despite this, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which Kennedy ostensibly leads, again said the Samoa visit “was unrelated to vaccines.”

“Any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory,” the department said in a statement.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, came to a very different conclusion, and said he wants to see the matter referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. “RFK’s platform is built on lies and grifts that leave a trail of dead children in their wake,” the senator said. “There are consequences for lying to Congress.”

It’s difficult to even fathom Donald Trump’s Justice Department handling a case involving one of the president’s Cabinet secretaries in an evenhanded way, so Kennedy’s critics should probably temper their expectations.

That said, if there are Democratic majorities in either or both chambers of Congress next year, it’s very likely the hapless health secretary will face intense scrutiny on this and other matters. Watch this space.

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