“Is RFK Jr. the best qualified person in the United States of America to lead us forward as we grapple with an enormous amount of health challenges in this country? The answer is clearly he is not,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said.
Appearing in Shot in the Arm, a 2023 documentary about vaccine opposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked about the deadly measles outbreak that occurred in Samoa in 2019 and claimed the lives of 83 people, mostly children. Kennedy, a leading anti-vaxxer who had visited the Pacific island nation a few months before the outbreak, replied, “I’m aware there was a measles outbreak…I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never told anybody not to vaccinate. I didn’t go there with any reason to do with that.”
Kennedy was being disingenuous, sidestepping his connection to that tragedy. Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit anti-vax outfit he led until becoming a presidential candidate, had helped spread misinformation that contributed to the decline in measles vaccination that preceded the lethal eruption. And during his trip to Samoa, Kennedy had publicly supported leading vaccination opponents there, lending credibility to anti-vaxxers who were succeeding in increasing vaccine hesitation among Samoans. Moreover, in early 2021, Kennedy, in a little-noticed blog post, hailed one of those vaccination foes as a “hero.”
In the interview for this film, Kennedy, as he has frequently done, was downplaying his actions as one of the most prominent anti-vax conspiracy theorist in the world who has worked with and bolstered anti-vaxxers around the globe.
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Kennedy, as he claimed in the interview for Shot in the Arm, may not have publicly urged Samoans to refuse the measles vaccine. But he encouraged those who did, and the group he led helped spread misinformation to discredit vaccinations there. After the tragedy was over, he dismissed the outbreak as not serious and extolled the anti-vaxxers who helped bring it about. The Samoa chapter provides a clear case study of how Kennedy threatens public health and slyly sidesteps responsibility for that.
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