Friday, February 06, 2026
Newly revealed emails undermine RFK Jr testimony about 2019 Samoa trip ahead of measles outbreak
Newly revealed emails undermine RFK Jr testimony about 2019 Samoa trip ahead of measles outbreak
“Newly revealed emails suggest that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2019 trip to Samoa, which preceded a devastating measles outbreak, was motivated by concerns about vaccine safety. The documents, obtained through a lawsuit, show that a US embassy employee helped arrange Kennedy’s visit and connect him with Samoan officials. Kennedy has denied that his trip was related to vaccines, claiming it was to introduce a medical data system.
Kennedy later said the purpose of his trip had nothing to do with vaccines. US embassy and UN staff at the time said otherwise, emails show
Over two days of questioning during his Senate confirmation hearings last year, Robert F Kennedy Jr repeated the same answer.
He said the closely scrutinized trip he took to Samoa in 2019, which came ahead of a devastating measles outbreak, had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
Documents obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press undermine that testimony. Emails sent by staff at the US embassy and the United Nations provide, for the first time, an inside look at how Kennedy’s trip came about and include contemporaneous accounts suggesting his concerns about vaccine safety motivated the visit.
The documents have prompted concerns from at least one US senator that the lawyer and activist now leading America’s health policy lied to Congress over the visit. Samoan officials later said Kennedy’s trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists ahead of the measles outbreak that sickened thousands and killed 83 people, mostly children under age five.
The revelations, which come as measles outbreaks erupt across the US, build on previous criticism that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine record makes him unfit to serve as health secretary, a role in which he has worked to radically reshape immunization policy and public perceptions of vaccines.
The newly disclosed documents also reveal previously unknown details of the trip, including that a US embassy employee helped Kennedy’s team connect with Samoan officials. Kennedy, then running his anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, did not publicly discuss the trip at the time, but has since said his “purpose” for going there was not related to vaccines and that “I ended up having conversations with people, some of whom I never intended to meet.”
In addition to meeting with anti-vaccine activists, Kennedy met with Samoan officials, including the health minister at the time, who told NBC News that Kennedy shared his view that vaccines were not safe. Kennedy has said he went there to introduce a medical data system.
The US Department of State turned over the emails – many of which are heavily redacted – as a result of an open records lawsuit brought with the assistance of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
These disclosures come at a time when Kennedy, as Donald Trump’s health secretary, has used his power and enormous public influence to overhaul federal immunization guidance and raise suspicion about the safety and importance of vaccines, including the measles vaccine. Meanwhile, measles outbreaks in multiple US states have rolled back decades of success in eliminating the highly contagious disease, putting the country on the verge of losing its elimination status. The latest figures show over 875 people in South Carolina have been infected.
Kennedy addressed questions about his trip to Samoa during two Senate confirmation hearings for his appointment as health secretary.
“My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines,” he said under questioning by Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts in his 30 January 2025 hearing.
“Did the trip have nothing to do with vaccines as you told my colleagues in Senate finance yesterday?” Markey asked later.
“Nothing to do with vaccines,” Kennedy replied.
One of the senators who questioned Kennedy about Samoa during his confirmation hearings, Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, responded to the new records by saying “Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda is directly responsible for the deaths of innocent children.”
“Lying to Congress about his role in the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa only underscores the danger he now poses to families across America,” Wyden said in an email. “He and his allies will be held responsible.”
Taylor Harvey, a spokesman for Wyden and other Democrats on the Senate finance committee, said it is a crime to make a false statement to Congress and “casual, false denials to Congress will not be swept under the rug”.
A spokesman for the US Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions sent by email and text message.
Kennedy has said his visit did not influence people’s decisions on whether to get themselves or their children immunized.
“I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never told anybody not to vaccinate,” he told the 2023 documentary Shot in the Arm. “I didn’t, you know, go there for any reason to do with that.”
Anti-vaccine activists in the United States became interested in Samoa in July 2018, when two babies died after being injected with a tainted measles, mumps and rubella vaccine that had been improperly prepared. The government halted the vaccine program for 10 months, until the following April. Vaccination rates plummeted.
The new records show that during the time when no vaccines were being administered, Kennedy’s group, Children’s Health Defense, was trying to connect Kennedy with Samoa’s prime minister. A January 2019 email from the group’s then-president, Lyn Redwood, to Samoan activist Edwin Tamasese, asked him to “please share this letter with the Honorable Prime Minister Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi for Robert Kennedy, Jr.”
About two months later, Tamasese wrote back to Redwood, with a cc: to Kennedy and others.
“Hope all is well, organizing logistics with the PMs office and wanted to confirm how many people are coming? Also just wanted to confirm costs etc for the visit and how this will be handled,” he wrote.
Tamasese immediately forwarded the chain of messages to both the personal and government email accounts of Benjamin Harding, at the time an employee of the US embassy in Apia, Samoa.
“just sent this. expecting an answer tomorrow as I think it is Sunday there. your letter looks good,” Tamasese told Harding.
While the US embassy in the past has acknowledged that an unnamed staffer attended an event with Kennedy and anti-vaccine activists while he was in Samoa, the new records show that Harding wasn’t a passive attendee: he helped arrange Kennedy’s visit and connected Kennedy’s delegation with Samoan government officials.
In a 23 May 2019 email to Harding’s personal email address, a staffer for the Samoan ministry of foreign affairs and trade wrote: “Hi Benj, Currently awaiting the official bio-notes for Mr Kennedy and Dr Graven to convey to the Hon. Prime Minister and Hon. Minister of Health for their reference. Please note, that this needs to be sent with our official letter when requesting an appointment.”
Harding forwarded the ministry’s request to Dr Michael Graven, then the chief information officer at Children’s Health Defense.
Harding did not respond to messages seeking comment sent to several listed email addresses, social media accounts, a phone number listed to his parents and a general mailbox at a company he lists as a current workplace on his LinkedIn profile.
Embassy staff got a tip about Harding’s involvement in the trip from Sheldon Yett, then the representative for Pacific island countries at Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund.
“We now understand that the Prime Minister has invited Robert Kennedy and his team to come to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine,” Yett wrote in a 22 May 2019 email to an embassy staffer based in New Zealand. “The staff member in question seems to have had a role in facilitating this.”
Two days later, a top embassy staff member in Apia wrote to Scott Brown, then Trump’s US ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, alerting him to Kennedy’s trip and Harding’s involvement.
“The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view),” the embassy official, Antone Greubel, wrote. “It turns out our very own Benjamin Harding played some role in a personal capacity to bring him here.” Greubel wrote that he told Harding to “cease and desist from any further involvement with this travel,” though the rest of the sentence is redacted.
Yett did not respond to questions, though said in an email, “that was a very grim time in Samoa.”
Brown, who is running for Senate in New Hampshire, declined to comment. Greubel referred questions to a press office at the state department. A state department spokesperson would not answer questions about the records, saying that as a general practice, they do not comment on personnel matters.
Harding left the embassy in July 2020, though he remains in Samoa, according to his LinkedIn account.
Kennedy ultimately visited in June 2019. While there, he and his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, were photographed greeting the prime minister during an Independence Day celebration. He also met with government health officials as well as a group of figures who have cast doubt on vaccines, including Tamasese.
The Guardian and the AP could find no record of Kennedy publicly discussing the purpose of his trip until after measles struck. In 2021, he wrote that he went there to discuss “the introduction of a medical informatics system” to track drug safety. He said Samoan officials “were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines”.
Since then, he has said his reason for going to Samoa was not related to vaccines.
Redwood, the former Children’s Health Defense president who made early outreach to Samoa, is now an employee at HHS, reportedly working on vaccine safety.
During the measles outbreak, Kennedy wrote a four-page letter to Samoa’s prime minister suggesting without evidence that the measles infections were due to a defective vaccine and floating other unfounded theories.
This story was jointly reported and published by the Guardian and the Associated Press“
Trump’s Immigration Policy Is 100 Years Old
Trump’s Immigration Policy Is 100 Years Old
“The Trump administration’s immigration policy, influenced by advisor Stephen Miller, aims to reverse the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the 1924 racial quotas. This 1924 law, driven by fears of foreigners and eugenic thinking, severely limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and banned it from Asia and Africa, aiming to preserve a white, Christian America. The 1965 Act, championed by figures like John F. Kennedy, embraced a more inclusive vision, recognizing immigrants as integral to American identity.
The White House seems to be mining the Coolidge era for inspiration. But America is not the country it was in 1924.
Jia Lynn Yang is the author of the book “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965.”
The American public is now finding out what Donald Trump and his team really meant when they promised mass deportations — the upending of communities in a ferocious effort to ferret out every last undocumented person in the country, terrifying people of legal status along the way.
This audacious agenda is proving less popular by the day. When asked about Trump’s handling of immigration in a recent poll by The New York Times/Siena, he received a net negative approval rating on what used to be one of his strongest issues. Sixty-one percent said they thought the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had “gone too far” with its tactics. This was before federal agents shot and killed a second U.S. citizen in the streets of Minneapolis.
Chastened briefly, Trump promised to “de-escalate” in Minnesota. On Wednesday, his border czar, recently dispatched to take control of the operation in Minneapolis, announced that 700 agents would be pulled from the city, though some 2,000 will remain. But however ICE changes its operations, the Trump administration, led by the president’s most influential policy adviser, Stephen Miller, is in pursuit of a radical vision for America. They want the country’s immigration policy blasted back in time — and not just to before the Biden era.
They are channeling an immigration regime instituted in 1924, when strict racial quotas — driven by fears of foreigners and a rise in eugenic thinking — led to a bottoming-out of foreign-born Americans that lasted for decades. The quotas signed into law in 1924 were not about securing the border as we understand it today, but about protecting a white, Christian character for the country.
In the years after the 1924 immigration law was passed, however, a liberal backlash took hold and created a new identity for the United States, internalized by generations of Americans since: We are a nation of immigrants.
Americans are, in fact, widely partial to immigrants — and these days even open to admitting more. Last year, as border crossings sharply fell, the share of people who wanted immigration reduced dropped to 30 percent from 55 percent in 2024, according to Gallup. A record-high 79 percent say immigration is a good thing for the country, including even Republicans, who have become more likely to take this view since Trump took office.
Today many act as if America’s identity as a nation of immigrants was written into the Constitution itself. In reality, it was the product of a political effort less than a century ago — one that was so successful at creating a new national story that it birthed the sheer ethnic diversity in this country that the Trump administration is now determined to undo.
‘Immigrants Were American History’
As recently as 50 years ago, the country’s population was almost entirely descended from people who came from Western Europe. This was by design.
At the turn of the 20th century, enormous numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans, many of them Italian and Jewish, were arriving daily in the United States and transforming the cultural fabric of cities like New York and Boston. At a time when antisemitism was ubiquitous in American life, the sheer volume of these migrants constituted a national emergency for white Protestant Christians. Eugenicists, at the peak of their influence, warned that the foreigners were polluting the nation’s “blood plasma.”
In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed a law imposing strict ethnic quotas, allowing only a trickle of migration from Southern and Eastern Europe and banning it nearly outright from Asia and Africa. Strong preference would be given to immigrants from Western Europe, who could, it was believed, help the country restore its racial roots.
“We no longer are to be a haven, a refuge for oppressed the whole world over,” wrote Representative David A. Reed, who cosponsored the 1924 law in Congress. “We found we could not be, and now we definitely abandon that theory. America will cease to be the ‘melting pot.’” In Germany, Adolf Hitler, still on the political margins, praised America’s new immigration law as offering a bold model for his own country.
The quotas were immediately effective, and merciless. During World War II, the country’s immigration rules were so stringent that Jews fleeing the Holocaust had practically no chance of entering the United States. For more than 40 years after 1924, the number of immigrants in this country dwindled to the point where Americans could barely remember a time when there was mass migration.
But just as the country was approaching its nadir in immigration, a group of liberal leaders began a long-shot campaign to undo the discriminatory 1920s quotas. And they employed a conception of national identity that turned the anti-immigration argument on its head.
Immigrants did not make the country less American, these advocates argued. In fact, their very presence was what made this country American in the first place.
The person most responsible for this narrative was historian Oscar Handlin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. In works of history that became remarkably popular, Handlin chronicled the waves of German and Irish immigrants, then Italian and Jewish ones. “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history,” Handlin wrote in the opening lines of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 book, “The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People.”
This new conception immediately captivated much of the country. It gave the children and grandchildren of the immigrants once derided as outsiders a pride of place. More important, it proved to be just the message that would convince the country that it needed a new system of immigration.
While Handlin himself became involved in the effort to rewrite the laws, Democratic leaders began to adopt his framework. John F. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, was asked by the Anti-Defamation League to write a slim book lauding the country’s many waves of migration. The proposed title: “A Nation of Immigrants.”
This modest project would not be published until October 1964, nearly a year after Kennedy was assassinated. But in a country still in mourning, the first printing sold out. “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies,” read the introduction written by the Kennedy family, perhaps overstating the president’s interest in the issue. Nonetheless, the book positioned itself as a powerful, posthumous plea for overturning the ethnic quotas, spoken from the grave by the country’s first Catholic president and an Irish American icon.
A year later, after a four-decade fight, immigration advocates prevailed. Led in part by Ted Kennedy in the Senate, Democratic lawmakers voted to undo the quotas with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The law, signed by Lyndon Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, codified that immigrants could not be discriminated against based on their race or nationality. Family members would also be prioritized.
The 1924 quotas had altered the course of the country’s demographics by effectively freezing them in place. The 1965 law unleashed a level of ethnic diversity that not even its proponents could have fathomed. Immigrants soon began arriving from every conceivable corner of the globe, and in growing numbers thanks to the priority given to reuniting families.
After the number of foreign-born residents hit a bottom around 1970, it climbed and climbed until it rebounded to nearly 15 percent, where it had been before the quotas.
Last January, the month Trump was inaugurated, it reached a record 15.8 percent.
Who Is Considered an American?
Without passing a single law through Congress, the Trump administration has revived the 1924 quotas in spirit by halting visas for people from 75 countries, a vast majority of them outside Europe. No credible evidence has been offered for why immigrants from these nations are inherently less worthy of admission than Afrikaners from South Africa, for instance, who have been given expedited refugee status. But on top of Trump’s insults against Haitian, Somali and Mexican immigrants and the Muslim travel ban from his first term, the collective implications of racial selection are clear.
Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, appreciates the history of American immigration policy. We know this because of emails that have been unearthed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in which he admires the 1924 quotas and Coolidge’s anti-immigration legacy.
In one 2015 email, Miller wrote that Immigrant Heritage Month “would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century,” a reference to the restrictive period between 1924 and 1965. He also complained that new museum galleries at Ellis Island would ignore the legacy of the 1924 law. “Something tells me there is not a Calvin Coolidge exhibit.”
In Miller’s eyes, the 1965 law deserves to be known as a key moment for when the country fell from greatness. In other emails, he coached a Breitbart writer to produce a piece called “Ted Kennedy’s Real Legacy: 50 Years of Ruinous Immigration Law,” timed to run on the day that a new center honoring Kennedy was to open in Boston. Miller wrote to the writer after the piece’s publication, “Just let this sink in: Kennedy was honored today, 50 years after pushing through this law, and you’re the only writer in the country who published a piece even mentioning the law and what it did.”
For conservatives like Miller, the idea of “a nation of immigrants” has lured the country into admitting far too many people, without enough vetting. Indeed, during Trump’s first term, the agency responsible for processing citizenship and naturalization removed the phrase from its mission statement.
Trump and Miller learned the last time around, though, how hard it can be to bring down the overall percentage of immigrants in the country, which only grew between 2017 and 2021. This time, their efforts are beginning to yield results: Immigration has dropped by more than 50 percent, and the percentage of foreign-born residentshas fallen for the first time since the 1960s. Theirs is a long-term project, with success measured in decades.
“A nation of immigrants” is an old slogan, but its spirit has proved difficult to dislodge. America today is in many ways a nation remade by the 1965 Immigration Act, with millions of citizens descended from those who came to the country after Coolidge’s quotas were revoked.
Support for carrying out some deportations has been a mainstream political view for decades. But most American voters want to see the highly focused removal of unauthorized immigrants who are violent criminals, according to recent polling. There is far less support for deporting those who are married to U.S. citizens, or who haven’t committed any crimes.
For all the anti-immigrant vitriol from Trump these many years, people in both urban and rural America are by now largely used to living peacefully with immigrants as their neighbors, co-workers and family members. And a large majority, not only in Minneapolis, simply do not want to see their neighbors brutally removed from their homes by men in masks without warrants.
From the start of Trump’s first term, the president’s immigration agenda was always about more than the border. It was a project to rewrite who can be considered American. Because this was not the mandate that most voters gave in 2024, the administration could pay a political price in the midterms in the fall. In the meantime, it can wake up every day and treat the time remaining as a chance to press ahead, by any means and at any cost.
Jia Lynn Yang is a senior Times writer.“
Opinion | In Trump’s America, Are We Losing Our Democracy? - The New York Times
Opinion | In Trump’s America, Are We Losing Our Democracy? - The New York Times
“The United States is not an autocracy but has started down an anti-democratic path. The 12 benchmarks in this editorial offer a way to understand and measure how much further the country will go in the coming years.
The clearest sign that a democracy has died is that a leader and his party make it impossible for their opponents to win an election and hold power. Once that stage is reached, however, the change is extremely difficult to reverse. And aspiring authoritarians use other excesses, like a cowed legislature and judiciary, to lock in their power.
The United States is not an autocracy today. It still has a mostly free press and independent judiciary, and millions of Americans recently attended the “No Kings” protests. But it has started down an anti-democratic path, and many Americans — including people in positions of power — remain far too complacent about the threat.
The 12 benchmarks in this editorial offer a way to understand and measure how much further Mr. Trump goes in the months and years ahead. We plan to update this index in 2026.
Methodology: In the scales above, the points on the left indicate roughly where the United States, flawed though it was, had been before Mr. Trump took office. Moving even one notch toward autocracy on these scales is a worrisome sign.“
At a ‘Tea Party’ With Scientists, This Ape Showed Some Imagination
At a ‘Tea Party’ With Scientists, This Ape Showed Some Imagination
“A study published in Science suggests that apes, specifically bonobos, possess the ability to engage in make-believe play, indicating a capacity for imagination. Researchers observed Kanzi, a bonobo, successfully identifying the location of imaginary liquids and grapes in various scenarios, demonstrating his ability to distinguish between real and imaginary situations. This finding challenges the notion that imagination is a uniquely human trait and suggests it may have evolutionary roots shared with apes.
In a playtime experiment, researchers found that our closest living relatives have the capacity for make-believe, too.
Having an imaginary friend, playing house or daydreaming about the future were long considered uniquely human abilities. Now, scientists have conducted the first study indicating that apes have the ability to play pretend as well.
The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that imagination is within the cognitive potential of an ape and can possibly be traced back to our common evolutionary ancestors.
“This is one of those things that we assume is distinct about our species,” said Christopher Krupenye, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study.
“This kind of finding really shows us that there’s much more richness to these animals’ minds than people give them credit for,” he said.
Researchers knew that apes were capable of certain kinds of imagination. If an ape watches someone hide food in a cup, it can imagine that the food is there despite not seeing it. Because that perception is the reality — the food is actually there — it requires the ape to sustain only one view of the world, the one that it knows to be true.
“This kind of work goes beyond it,” Dr. Krupenye said. “Because it suggests that they can, at the same time, consider multiple views of the world and really distinguish what’s real from what’s imaginary.”
Bonobos, an endangered species found only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are difficult to study in the wild. For this research, Dr. Krupenye and Amalia Bastos, a cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews, relied on an organization known as the Ape Initiative to study Kanzi, a male bonobo famous for demonstrating some understanding of spoken English. (Kanzi was an enculturated ape born in captivity; he died last year at age 44.)
The research team created three experimental scenarios for Kanzi that they compared to “tea parties.” The first was modeled after experiments conducted in the 1980s that involved make-believe play with children. As Kanzi watched, a scientist sat at a small table bearing two empty cups and an empty jug. The researcher then “poured” an imaginary juice into each cup, and then poured one of the cups back into the jug.
At that point, if Kanzi was closely tracking the imaginary fluids, he should realize that one cup still held liquid and the other was empty. And in fact, when asked — “Where’s the juice?” — Kanzi pointed to the cup containing imaginary liquid more often than would be expected by chance.
Still, scientists wondered, what if Kanzi was confused? In a second experiment, Kanzi was again presented with two cups: one with real juice and another into which imaginary juice was poured. Asked where the juice was, Kanzi pointed to the cup with actual juice, again more often than mere chance would dictate.
The third experiment replicated the first one, except it involved transferring imaginary grapes into two bowls and then emptying one of them. In more than half of the trial runs, Kanzi successfully identified the location of the imaginary grapes.
“It’s so fascinating to get such clear evidence of imagination,” said Joseph Feldblum, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University who was not involved in the research. “These experiments are able to peel back the layers and understand a lot more about what’s actually going on inside their minds.”
In humans, imagination offers many benefits. Children and adults can rehearse situations that might occur before they actually encounter them, preparing us for real life without the cost of getting something wrong.
Presumably apes, too, could gain from identifying more profitable ways forward. “There are many benefits to not being stuck in the here and now,” Dr. Bastos said, “because you can start thinking about alternative futures.”
Some scientists saw the study as a confirmation of what natural observation had already led them to suspect. Martin Surbeck, a primatologist at Harvard University who was not involved with the research, works with a population of wild bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has seen young female bonobos take a stick and place it on their back, as if they were playing with an infant.
On its own, such behavior in the wild might not necessarily prove that apes have the ability to imagine, Dr. Surbeck said, but this study was “a more rigorous proof of the concept of the existence.”
Many questions remain. Under what circumstances of natural selection did bonobos acquire the ability to play pretend?
“Where does it come from?” Dr. Surbeck said. “How did it evolve? Why do great apes and humans have that, assuming that others don’t?”
As our closest living evolutionary relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees offer clues to the origins of human abilities. The three species shared a common ancestor that lived about seven million years ago; bonobos diverged from chimpanzees one million to two million years ago.
Humans did not fall fully formed out of the sky, Dr. Surbeck noted. “Whatever we are, we come from somewhere,” he said. “And all of our behaviors, they have precursors. And very likely, most of these precursors exist in our closest living relative.”
Alexa Robles-Gil is a science reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.“
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