Hawaii Governor Josh Green had a scathing rebuttal to claims made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s during his confirmation hearing Wednesday regarding a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
“He’s a liar, and it’s bulls--t,” Green said of RFK Jr. during an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett on OutFront. Green, who is also a doctor, formed a team that flew to Samoa during the 2019 outbreak to conduct a vaccination mission.
Kennedy, a notorious vaccine skeptic, had also visited the island nation in 2019 at the invitation of the Samoan prime minister and the anti-vaccination activist Edwin Tamasese. Vaccination rates among Samoans had at the time dropped after two nurses mistakenly mixed expired muscle relaxant with doses of the MMR shot in 2018, killing two children and spooking parents.
Kennedy Jr. himself “spread so much misinformation” against what he described as the dangers of vaccines, Green has previously alleged, “that the country stopped vaccinating.”
A year later, an outbreak of measles among unvaccinated people killed 83 and infected over 5,000 more. Samoa subsequently made vaccinations mandatory under law.
But during his damaging Wednesday confirmation hearing, President Donald Trump’s pick for HHS Secretary claimed that his 2019 visit to Samoa was for wholly coincidental reasons.
“Vaccination rates were already below any previous level. I went there, nothing to do with vaccines. I went there to introduce a medical informatics system,” he said. “You cannot find a single Samoan who will say, ‘I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.’”
(In a 2021 post on the Children’s Health Defense website, Kennedy Jr. said he went to Samoa to attend an independence celebration and to discuss with the government “the introduction of a medical informatics system that would allow Samoa’s health officials to assess, in real time, the efficacy and safety of every medical intervention or drug on overall health.”)
During his confirmation hearing, several Democratic senators hammered Kennedy on his questionable claims about his time in Samoa, as well as his views on vaccines and other health issues more broadly.
Gov. Green added his voice to the critical chorus Wednesday night.
“He went there and he met with the anti-vax leader... who was spreading all of this misinformation, and that guy got arrested,” Green said. (Tamasese was arrested and charged with incitement against a government order in 2019.)
Green again accused Kennedy of sowing doubt about vaccinations and further complicating efforts to reach herd immunity, which requires 90% to 95% of a population to be jabbed against a disease.
“He is constantly kind of squirming around the reality, which is, he did not support vaccinations,” the governor said. “And it would be fine if he was a nobody, but he’s Robert Kennedy Jr.”