I'm Robert F.
Kennedy Junior.
I'm a Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.
Who said, swear to solid waste, bear that I will support an event that I will support and defend constitution.
When Robert F.
Kennedy Junior was sworn in as Health and Human Services Secretary, it made official one of President Trump's most controversial appointments. His confirmation came off the back of a fiery questioning from Democrats and Republicans alike that RFK Junior's record on vaccines.
Kennedy, you have spent years pushing conflicting stories about vaccines.
And under oath, RFK denied he was against them.
We need to move.
I support the measles vaccine. I support the polly of vaccine. I will do nothing as AHH as secretary that makes them difficult or discourages people from taking any Anybody who.
But watching the hearings close was investigative journalist Brian Dear.
People sometimes debate as to whether mister Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic.
For more than two decades, Brian Deer has been investigating the anti vaccine movement and tracking RFK Junior's involvement in it.
He is an out now anti vaccine campaigner and has been for twenty years, and he is the most prominent anti vaccine campaigner in the whole world.
From Schwartz Media, I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven.
AM Today journalist Brian Dear on Robert F. Kennedy Junior's real beliefs and the impact his campaigning had on a deadly measles outbreak in the Pacific. It's Thursday, February twenty so, Brian, for many of us, the first time that we heard of RFK was his failed presidential run, and then of course last year he was chosen as Trump's pick for Health secretary. But you have been reporting on the anti vaccine movement for more than two decades. So when did you first become aware of him?
Well, I first got wise to him twenty years ago this July coming up, when he suddenly popped up in American magazines trying to demonstrate the link between vaccines and autism. So he's been at it now for twenty years. Solid He's not a particularly good campaigner, but he's got that magical name Kennedy, which plays so well in the United States. With his help, many causes have been brought to the forefront of public awens, and his family's connections mean he
has access to the highest levels of US government. So, mister Kennedy, he's a product liability lawyer. What he tries to do is to get lawsuits going.
Kennedy made millions of dollars, so if it was from his own law firm, he made about nine million dollars there. He also made money off book publishing.
People would be attracted by the campaigner and then moved over to the product liability lawsuits.
He gets these referral fees, sending essentially plaintiffs people families to other law firms, and he refers them so that they can sue on the grounds of say a vaccine lawsuit.
That's what he does. He sues people because one of the things about vaccine scares that people probably don't realize is that they begin as lawsuits and they're very, very lucrative for the lawyers who drive them.
So he's experienced it campaigning against vaccines, and in twenty nineteen that took him and you to the Pacific island of Samoa. Can you tell me what the situation was like there when you arrived.
Well, I arrived in December twenty nineteen in the middle of an outbreak of measles which was absolutely appalling in its extent. Eighty three people died, overwhelmingly children. In fact, on the day I arrived, the tally was forty eight children dead. That was children aged four or under, and it was raging through the island and stopped.
The streets of Samoa eerily quiet as the country deals with the fall out of an outbreak of measles that has claimed the lives of dozens.
Arriving at the airport, there were emergency supplies being brought. In ventilators because you need special small sized ventilators for children, were being hauled in from different parts of the world, and I set off talking to mothers who'd lost their children, and it was a really, really, quite a striking experience,
I can tell you. I remember it was in the wet season and there was rain just hammering on the roof in open fronted housing, and the mother took me through how she had been finally told that her daughter had died. She was under two years old. The body was presented to her in a blanket and they took her home in the back of the car. And dug a hole by the kitchen door and buried her there and put concrete over. And it was almost Christmas and they put fairy lights up. One mother she lost three
children to me, three children. Even there, it comes back to me like these years later, I mean to experience that where they were holding group funerals, they were ordering special small sized coffins, and they were having funerals going on, big traditional funerals going on every day of the week during that period.
Okay, that must have been very confronting.
Can you explain a bit about the community there was so vulnerable to this outbreak and how rfk JR was connected.
What had happened was the year before, two nurses on one of the islands, in a remote hospital had wrongly mixed a muscle relaxed and into the measles much robella MMR vaccine. It was a terrible mistake and within a matter of hours they killed two children by accident. As a result of the incident with the nurses, vaccination rates had fallen to a very low level. So you had a very very vulnerable community, and so anti vaccine campaigners
kind of turned up, almost like tornado chasers. They kind of wanted to be in on the action.
Communication minister, who's also the government spokesman of a massaga Rico two Pints, says that the work of anti vaxxes is hampering their efforts to have everyone immunized.
Conspiracy theorists online were trying to suggest there was something wrong with MMR and we're campaigning.
Unfortunately this anti vax people all leave overseas, but they're using social media.
To influence the community and influence our population us.
What can government do?
Then, mister Kennedy had turned up, so he turned up in Somewhae.
He was actually there.
He actually turned up on the islands, Yeah, and met with anti vaccine campaigners and was photographed with them.
One News has learned of a high level anti vax meeting organized in Somemore in June, just before this deadly measles outbreak. A US embassy staff member facilitated a meeting between vaccination critic Robert Kennedy Junior and Australian anti vax blogger Taylor Winterstein.
She'd been forced again.
So it's important to recognize that Somewhare is a small community. There's two hundred thousand people. That's not a lot. So when something appears on Facebook, an awful lot of people's see it, and mister Kennedy appears on Facebook suggesting that vaccines are an issue, and the Prime Minister he kind of got drawn into it because he had a close family member who had some kind of developmental issue, and I think he'd been led to believe that it might
have been caused by a vaccine. So he would have been very easy prey really for someone turning up from the United States apparently authoritatively telling him, oh, yes, well, that could be a vaccine side effect.
A prominent American anti vax activist would later tell us someone a newspaper that he had the prime minister's air on the issue and that the island nation's leader had privately shared his doubts about the safety of immunizing the public. That activist quote unquote, yes, that's Robert F.
Kennedy Junior.
He was trying to muscle his way into the thing, and so mister Kennedy's appearance there was a news event, and so that helped fuel the problem that they all already had.
After the break.
What RFK Junior says about his role in the outbreak and how he stands to profit from making America healthy again. Brian, we're talking about rfk's anti vaccine campaigning in Samoa in twenty nineteen, which contributed to low rates of vaccination in the country and eighty three people, most of them babies, died. RFK was meeting with the Prime Minister of Samoa to tell him that vaccines had caused the outbreak. So tell me where this outbreak actually originated.
What we know is that the virus came from New Zealand. Auckland that year was going through the biggest outbreak of measles that it had in decades, and it was particularly concentrated on the south side of Auckland, which has as a substantial Marian Pacific Islander community, where vaccination rates had
fallen to very low levels. And goes back to the appearance in Australia and New Zealand in twenty seventeen of anti vaccine campaigners trying to promote a film by a disgraced British doctor named Andrew Wakefield.
The film alleges a cover up of the claimed link between them vaccine and autism. Both the link and the film have been widely discredited, of course, but the film was playing.
In they went to Australia and they went to New Zealand with this film advertising these false allegations.
Here's what those attending a screening of vexed in the Northland town of Mangitoto.
Last night had to say to our reporter Zach Fleming.
I've never seen any good science indicating that vaccines are actually beneficial.
So there is a connection for the virus to come through from Auckland to the Islands, where it ultimately then erupted in a vulnerable community.
And so Brennan the lead up to being confirmed RFK, he was actually grilded a Senate hearing in the US and he was asked about his role in the measles outbreak.
Mister Kennedy, you have spent years pushing conflicting stories about vaccines.
Can you tell me about that? And what he said?
So my question here is, mister Kennedy, is mevils deadly?
Yes or no?
You cannot find a single Samoan Weill say, I didn't get a vaccident because of Bobby Kennedy. I went to twenty nine.
He just shrugged it off and rejected it, saying that nobody knew of what was killing the chill children.
Eighty three people died when the titious samples were sent to New Zealand. Most of those people did not have measles. We don't know what was going on, And I.
Thought that was a very strange thing to say, because not only had there been samples taken and tested, so they had that information. But when the government had a two day lockdown where everybody was told to stay home and vaccination teams cruised around the islands offering shots to people. When that had all happened, the outbreak went away and the children stopped dying. So how mister Kennedy came to the conclusion that nobody knew what the cause was I
think was a very extraordinary. But then he is a great one for saying things that don't check out, And.
So vaccines aside, what do we know about rfk's agenda to make America healthy again?
What can we expect?
Well, mister Kennedy is talking now about making America healthy again without often revealing that he's actually taken out a registration on that expression, and I think he made an enormous sum of money selling it to the anti vaccine campaigners.
President Trump is committed to restoring the American Dream, and seventy seven nine Americans delivered a mand aid to him to do just that. It in part to the embrace and elevation of the Make America Health and movement.
And he's talking about diabetes, starting wellness farms, getting everybody to lose weight. But behind that is this anti vaccine agenda, which he is not going to give up on, and he will have a very great deal of power to intervene in that area, deciding which vaccine should move from the recommended list to the essential list if you like that.
He can intervene in court cases, he can intervene in theory committees that make vaccine policy, because he actually appoints most of the members of them, and he's already had his recommendations taken up in some of the appointments that have been made to head the federal agencies such as National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and such like. So he's going to have a great deal of power, and the credibility that he will give to avoiding vaccination for reasons that have not been established as valid will lead to a rise in susceptibility to vaccine, preventable illnesses, outbreaks of disease, and it's very difficult to row these things back.
Brian, thank you so much for talking to me.
Pleasure.
Also in the news today, billionaire Clive Palmer has vowed to spend quote whatever is required on his new political party Trumpet of Patriots. At yesterday's launch, Palmer said the party's aim is to make Australia great again by directly importing Trump's policies into Australia. The party will be led by New South Wales Hunter candidate Sewellen Wrightzen and Wylla
Steelworks has been forced into administration. The decision was made by South Australian Premier Peter Melanowskis after an emergency meeting yesterday morning. The Premier said they no longer had confidence in Wyala's owner, GfG Group's ability to secure the funding needed for the steelworks to continue operating.
I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. See tomorrow