New Documents Contradict RFK Jr.'s Vaccine Testimony as He Disputes Pennsylvania Measles Deaths

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is fighting two separate battles over his vaccine record this week, and both raise the same question: does what he says match what actually happened.

The Samoa Letter

Documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Guardian show that before Kennedy's 2019 trip to Samoa, he wrote to the country's prime minister asking to study the nation's measles, mumps and rubella vaccine program, following the deaths of two children who had recently been vaccinated. The letter used the word "vaccine" or "vaccination" eight times, according to the AP.

Kennedy told lawmakers during his 2025 confirmation hearings that the trip "had nothing to do with vaccines." The Department of Health and Human Services told the AP the visit "was unrelated to vaccines" and called any suggestion Kennedy lied to Congress "not only false but outright defamatory." Kennedy was not under oath during that hearing. Knowingly giving false material testimony to Congress is a separate crime that does not require an oath, though the AP notes it is rarely prosecuted, and Senate lawyers say any follow-up action is unlikely under the current Republican-controlled Congress.

Samoa went on to experience a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, mostly children under 5, after Kennedy's visit. Critics have long argued the trip emboldened anti-vaccine activists there. HHS did not make Kennedy available for an interview, and the Samoan prime minister's office did not respond to AP's requests for comment.

The Pennsylvania Fight

At nearly the same time, Kennedy was publicly clashing with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro over two measles-associated deaths, the state's first in 35 years. The Pennsylvania Department of Health, led by Secretary Dr. Debra Bogen, said an infant and one other person in Lancaster County tested positive for measles and died, and that its epidemiology team verified both cases, according to MedPage Today.

Kennedy posted on X that the deaths "may even have been altogether fabricated," and told reporters in Tampa, according to Delaware Public Media, "We're trying to figure out whether... those deaths were real." Per Forbes, he later said he'd spoken to a Lancaster County official who told him there were no measles deaths.

The actual coroner's account, reported by Forbes and MedPage Today, is more nuanced than either side's talking points suggest. The Lancaster County coroner said the infant's immediate cause of death was a ruptured spleen and internal hemorrhage, but that measles was detected in lung tissue and listed as a contributing condition on the death certificate, because measles is known to make the spleen more vulnerable to rupture. The state calls that a measles-associated death. The coroner's finding doesn't erase the measles link; it describes the medical chain that produced it. Whether that death should count as "caused by measles" for public accounting purposes is where the two sides split, and Shapiro's office has declined to release further case details, citing patient privacy, which Forbes reports has fueled Kennedy's skepticism.

Kennedy also told Shapiro during a call, according to Shapiro's own account relayed to MedPage Today, that it would be better if the country went back to "natural measles," and raised claims about fetal tissue in the MMR vaccine. The American Academy of Pediatrics says flatly there is no fetal tissue in the vaccine. Some vaccines are grown in cell lines originally derived from two aborted fetuses in the 1960s, but purification removes all fetal tissue before the vaccine reaches a patient. That is an established scientific fact, not a matter of political framing.

The CDC, for its part, said in a statement cited by MedPage Today that Pennsylvania's governor's office "has not provided CDC with information relevant to the outbreak and has declined our offers of assistance," a detail that complicates a clean narrative of federal obstruction.

The Politics Underneath

National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya defended Kennedy on Fox News, telling the network, as reported by Forbes, that Shapiro was "playing this out over the airwaves for political purposes, just like what happened during COVID." Former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took the opposite view, telling NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin that Kennedy's choice to spend the week discussing regenerative farming and school lunches instead of the outbreak was "a very intentional refusal to confront" both rising measles cases and the value of vaccination.

There's a real fairness point buried in the Republican side of this fight, separate from Kennedy's own conduct. The Daily Wire found that Pennsylvania's own MMR kindergarten vaccination data, provided by the state health department, shows rates fell from 96.4% in the 2019-2020 school year to 93.7% in 2024-2025, with most of that decline happening during the Biden administration, before Kennedy ever took office. Dr. Bogen herself acknowledged a "3% decline over the past five years" at an October 2025 press conference. That undercuts Shapiro's claim, at that same event, that vaccination rates are falling specifically because of the current administration.

Polling from KFF conducted in April shows why none of this settles anything politically. Only 38% of voters overall approve of the Trump administration's handling of vaccine policy, but 79% of Republicans do, according to Axios. Half of self-identified MAHA supporters say reevaluating vaccine safety should be a top priority, and 40% more call it important. Axios's reporting notes Kennedy's actual policy changes have been less sweeping than his critics feared, but concludes his suspicion of the medical establishment is now baked into a segment of the GOP base regardless of what happens to his own career.

The measles death that started this fight remains formally under investigation. Whether the CDC gets the case data it says Pennsylvania has withheld, and whether Congress does anything with the Samoa documents, are both open questions with no clear timeline attached.