A world-leading anti-vaccine advocate says he believes the Prime Minister had doubts about the safety of vaccinations months before a measles outbreak claimed 83 mostly infant lives.  

Robert F. Kennedy Junior, who this month was permanently removed from the social media website Instagram for, the company alleged, "repeatedly sharing debunked claims” about vaccine safety, visited Samoa in June 2019. 

In an interview with the Samoa Observer on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy, whose 2019 visit was to observe national independence day celebrations, said he spent extensive time with Prime Minister Tuilaepa Dr. Sailele Malielegaoi. 

"Everybody was nice to us, the Prime Minister was a joy to be with, he spent a lot of time with us. We met many health officials," Mr. Kennedy said of a visit that he said included a meeting with the health Minister. 

Those interactions, Mr. Kennedy said, included visits to the Prime Minister's home, meetings in his office, and being feted as an honoured guest at cultural events. 

Mr. Kennedy told the Samoa Observer that he had personally concluded that the Prime Minister had doubts about a national immunisation programme after seeing what he believed was an adverse medical reaction to a vaccination

"He was in a very difficult position," he said.

"He felt he had witnessed what he thought was vaccine injury and yet he was surrounded by people who were telling him it’s not. 

"He was trying to be a good leader and make a good decision for his people and it’s very confusing."

Mr. Kennedy's visit came nearly a year after a national vaccine campaign was stopped after two infants in Savai’i died minutes after receiving a routine measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

Shortly after that fatal incident at Safotu Hospital Tuilaepa released a statement revealing what he said was his family's own brush with an adverse reaction to a vaccine. 

"As a grandfather and father, I can relate to the grief by the families for their loss," he said in a statement. 

"I also almost lost one of my grandsons several years ago under similar circumstances. But with the Grace of our Father in Heaven, my grandson survived with the proper treatment. But he will never be the same as he has lost the ability to speak."

But Mr. Kennedy said that he and Tuilaepa only talked “a limited amount” about vaccines, but mostly discussed whether Mr. Kennedy’s charity the Children’s Health Defense could help improve Samoa’s health system. 

The charity is well known for producing anti-vaccination material, including that vaccines cause autism - a claim debunked extensively by medical authorities. Mr. Kennedy has also lobbied politicians in the United States of America to review vaccine policy.

Mr. Kennedy said he was proposing that Samoa adopt a medical tracking system which he claimed would be able to track the administration of drugs to hospital patients and to monitor their health afterward. 

“We had intended to present it as a gift to Samoa,” Mr. Kennedy said.

“Unfortunately, it did not come to pass. I think there was some institutional resistance and the measles epidemic occurred and kind of everything shut down in Samoa.”

During their time together, Mr. Kennedy said he saw Tuilaepa struggling over vaccinations.

In a post published to his personal website following his interview with the Samoa Observer, he claimed the Prime Minister was "curious to measure health outcomes following the 'natural experiment'."

“Samoa’s choice had infuriated the ‘Global Medical Cartel’,” he wrote.

Mr. Kennedy is the son of former U.S. Attorney-General Robert Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.

The Children’s Health Fund spent large sums of money buying Facebook advertisements during 2018 and 2019 which questioned the safety of vaccinations as a global measles outbreak was making its way around the world. 

When Mr. Kennedy visited Samoa, the national vaccine program was making a slow return to normal after a suspension in 2018. Two infants had died immediately after receiving their measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) shots.

A criminal case sentenced two nurses from the Safotu Hospital to five years in jail for negligence causing manslaughter after mixing the vaccine administered to the children with a fatal dose of anaesthetic. 

The example was seized upon globally by anti-vaccine activists who claimed that the infants’ deaths were proof that vaccines were unsafe. 

Mr. Kennedy insists there has never been a proper investigation into the incident, nor into the epidemic that followed, which claimed 83 mostly infant lives across Samoa’s overwhelmingly unvaccinated population of children. 

“It’s taken me 20 years to learn this issue. And it takes decades to learn it with enough confidence to stand up to people in white lab coats who are telling you they are the experts, the authority, do what we say, and if you don’t do what we say people are going to die,” Mr. Kennedy said.

“[Tuilaepa] didn’t become Prime Minister by studying medicine, he relies on people around him. I think he was in a position where he was trying to protect his people as best he could. Listen, I really believe everybody in Samoa was trying to do the right thing in the end.”

The Samoa Observer understands Mr. Kennedy was introduced to the Prime Minister by Edwin Tamasese.

In December 2019, Mr. Tamasese was alleged to have posted ominous warnings online about the ongoing mass vaccination campaign, saying: “I’ll be here to mop up your mess. Enjoy your killing spree.” 

For these allegations, he was charged with one count of undermining a Government state of emergency order, but last December his case was dismissed.

Mr. Kennedy, from America, was part of an online campaign to secure Mr. Tamasese's release. 

While in Samoa, Mr. Kennedy said he spent extensive time with Mr. Tamasese who introduced him to local families who were sympathetic to anti-vaccine messages.

“He’s like St. Francis of Assisi. He’s a deep, profound, very holy person and he is very honest,” Mr. Kennedy said.

“He is one of the most kind, and honest men I have ever met, I really, really love him. He is really an extraordinary human being.”

But Mr. Kennedy denied that his trip had any impact on the Samoan public’s confidence in vaccinations or was intended to campaign against vaccines. 

(World Health Organisation figures show that in 2013 some 90 per cent of Samoan infants had received their routine first measles, mumps and rubella vaccination. By 2018 this had fallen to fewer than one-third - a factor widely understood to have caused the extensive infant deaths Samoa's 2019 outbreak). 

“I am sensing that you are sort of saying to me that maybe I was responsible for the low vaccination rates in Samoa. If that is what you are saying, that is an impossibility. When I was in Samoa, I wasn’t talking to people about vaccines, I didn’t make any public appearances, I wasn’t campaigning,” he said.

“I was only in your country for five or six days and I never spoke to anybody. I wasn’t giving speeches to rallies, which I never do – I never tell people don’t get vaccinated. I never do that, ever. I can tell you if there are two vaccines that do the same thing I can tell you which one I would rather take. 

“I never talked to crowds, I wasn’t preaching to people, I was there talking to a few select people who were very sophisticated, not people saying ‘I am not gonna have a vaccine because Bobby Kennedy told me not to.’

“I was talking to people with a high level of sophistication about areas and honestly how to improve the health of Samoans and how to measure that improvement accurately.”

But, in November, near the peak of the outbreak, the Washington Post reported that Mr. Kennedy wrote to the Prime Minister asking questions about whether the vaccine itself was the cause of the country's extensive deaths. 

"It is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine," the letter, dated 19 November, read.

Mr. Kennedy has denied the anti-vaccination campaign label which is widely attached to his name. 

“I am not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines with robust safety testing," he told the New York Times in 2019. 

But in the same year Mr. Kennedy's brother, sister and niece jointly authored a piece for the Politico website in which they described his public messages on vaccinations as "tragic".

"His and others’ work against vaccines is having heartbreaking consequences," his family members wrote in the piece dated 8 May.

"He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."

Last week the Sunday Samoan revealed the Government had been recommended in two independent reports to roll out a mass vaccination campaign in early 2019.

In one report by the Ministry of Health, the author pleaded with the Government to address the country’s low vaccination rate which was putting children at risk. 

A March 2019  report by a Commission of Inquiry established following the deaths of the infants at Safotu Hospital, said Samoa’s children were significantly unprotected from a global outbreak of measles that had been making its way around the world. 

The commissioners urged the Government to establish a mass vaccination campaign to ensure the health of the nation’s children. 

But it was only in December when the country was shut down for two days, that a mass vaccination campaign was conducted. By that time more than 60 lives had already been claimed by the measles virus. 

The Prime Minister; the Health Minister, Faimalotoa Kika Stowers; and the Director-General of the Ministry of Health, Leausa Dr. Take Naseri, were each contacted on Thursday seeking comment. As of press-time on Sunday none had arrived. 

Faimalotoa Kika-Stowers-Ah Kau's office told the Samoa Observer that the Minister was too busy to respond because of her Parliament schedule, but that the Samoa Observer's questions had been added to her many correspondences.

Director-General Leausa Dr. Take Naseri declined to speak with the Samoa Observer in person earlier this week and has not acknowledged this newspaper's emailed questions or phone calls.

Tuilaepa's press secretary Nanai Laveitiga Tuiletufuga said there would be a response “anytime soon" to questions about the recommendations to undergo a mass vaccination campaign but has as yet not acknowledged questions about Mr. Kennedy's visit. 

The Commission of Inquiry r... by Sapeer Mayron