RFK Jr. Appears to Have Given False Testimony to Congress During Confirmation Hearing, Letter Shows

AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to have perjured himself during his Senate confirmation hearing, a newly revealed letter shows.

Kennedy was confirmed as HHS head in February 2025 on a narrow 52-48 vote. The confirmation came after a contentious hearing in which senators on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee peppered him with questions about his controversial positions. Multiple senators confronted Kennedy about his baseless assertions that vaccines cause autism. He has also baselessly claimed that Covid vaccines are the “most deadly vaccines in history.”

In his confirmation hearing, Kennedy, who was head of the anti-vax Children’s Health Defense nonprofit from 2015 to 2023, faced questions over a June 2019 trip he took in that capacity to Samoa in the South Pacific. After Kennedy’s departure, the country soon experienced a measles outbreak that, by January 2020, had infected more than 5,700 people and killed 83 of them – most of them children under the age of five. Samoa’s population is roughly just 200,000 people.

In his January 2025 confirmation hearing testimony, Kennedy repeatedly and unequivocally denied that his visit to Samoa pertained to vaccines, as this one exchange with Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) shows:

MARKEY: Yesterday under oath, you told my colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee that when you went to Samoa in June 2019, it, quote, “had nothing to do with vaccines.” Will you confirm again today that the trip had nothing to do with vaccines?

KENNEDY: My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.

MARKEY: Well, I have in my hand a blog post in 2021, in which you say the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which you ran, offered to fund the purpose of the trip to Samoa. And in the same post you state that the trip was ultimately arranged by an anti-vaccine activist. And during the trip you met with an activist who later compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany. And during that trip you also discussed vaccines with the Prime Minister and the director general of health of Samoa. The Director General of Health said you specifically discussed your views on vaccine safety fears. And with unanimous consent, I will submit those blog posts, Mr. Chairman, into the record.

CHAIR: Without objection.

MARKEY: I am going to ask you–I will ask you again. Did the trip have nothing to do with vaccines as you told my colleagues [inaudible]?

KENNEDY: Nothing to do with vaccines. And if you want me to explain, I will.

MARKEY: Did it have anything to do with vaccines?

KENNEDY: No, it did not.

But a January 2019 letter to Samoa’s then-prime minister from Kennedy published by the Associated Press on Thursday shows that Kennedy wanted to visit Samoa specifically because of vaccines. The letter, which is fewer than 300 words long, mentions “vaccine” or a derivative thereof eight times:

I am writing this letter to you in the hope that we might be helpful to the people of your great nation.

For most of the world, investigation of adverse health events associated with vaccines–or any pharmaceutical for that matter–is both difficult and time consuming. Health information systems are rarely designed to support rapid study of associations between diagnoses and specific vaccination events.

It is, however, known that vaccines vary both lot-to-lot from specific manufacturers, and between manufacturers for a single vaccine type. This makes the likelihood of adverse lot and manufacturer specific effects higher for smaller nations where all vaccine can be from few or a single lot and manufacturer.

I believe the deaths associated recently with MMR vaccine in the Independent State of Samoa may have been manifestations these effects.

To evaluate whether or not this has been experienced in Samoa, I would propose my team conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines. My team includes a physician who has performed informatics work for ministries of health in 48 countries over the past 30 years. He believes this work can be completed quickly.

Going forward, Samoa would be well served to expand capacity for quickly performing this class of analysis for all pharmaceuticals prescribed and dispensed. This is invaluable not only for investigation of severe adverse events, but also for the systematic improvement in management of chronic illnesses like essential hypertension and diabetes. It will also be fully consistent with the Samoa Health System Strengthening Program.

I wish to congratulate you and your Minister of Health for your quick attention to the tragic deaths temporally associated with MMR vaccines.

I look forward to your reply to my propsal.

Robert F. Kennedy

A spokesperson for HHS issued a defiant statement to the AP.

“Any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory,” said the spokesperson, who did not specifically address the chasmic discrepancy between the letter and Kennedy’s testimony.

The AP stated that Kennedy was not made available for comment.

“Kennedy was not under oath during his confirmation hearing,” the AP said. “Knowingly giving material false testimony to Congress is a crime that carries a possible prison sentence regardless of whether a person is under oath, though it is rarely prosecuted.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has called for Kennedy to be criminally investigated over the matter.

In July, the U.S. reached a 35-year high in reported measles cases, with five months still left in the year. This week, it was reported that two people in Pennsylvania died from measles, marking the first fatalities from the disease since 1991.

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