The Guardian reported Thursday that it obtained emails from the U.S. State Department showing that Dr. Michael Graven, then chief information officer of Kennedy’s nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, told Samoan officials in advance of the May 2019 trip that he and Kennedy would be “of service to the people of Samoa with our mission.”
In an email dated May 13, 2019, Graven wrote that “the mission involves health informatics evaluation from medical record data from all hospitals and clinics in Samoa to evaluate outcomes associated with the recent discontinuity in vaccinations.” He described the trip several times as a “mission” and said Kennedy asked him to join because he had “performed health informatics initiatives in 48 other countries over 40 years.”
Kennedy has repeatedly denied that the visit was related to vaccines. During his Senate confirmation hearing in 2025, he told senators: “I went there, nothing to do with vaccines. I went there to introduce a medical informatics system with digitalized records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.” Under separate questioning from Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Kennedy again said, “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.”
At the time, Kennedy was chairman and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, a group known for its anti-vaccine activism. Graven, a pediatrician who died in 2022, described his plan to collect data from all hospitals and clinics in Samoa, conduct statistical analysis, and do so “without bias.”
The emails provide the most detailed view yet of Kennedy’s activities in Samoa, a trip that has drawn intense scrutiny because of the measles outbreak that began later that year. Anti-vaccine activists in the United States had become interested in Samoa after two infants died in 2018 after receiving a tainted measles, mumps and rubella vaccine that was improperly prepared. The government halted all vaccinations for 10 months, and vaccination rates plummeted. Children’s Health Defense had begun reaching out to Samoan officials during that pause, according to earlier emails obtained by The Guardian and The Associated Press.
Earlier this year, those same news organizations reported on government and Unicef emails that had already undermined Kennedy’s account of why he traveled to Samoa. The State Department has been turning over emails in batches since January as part of an open-records lawsuit brought with assistance from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Kennedy has previously said the purpose of the trip was to introduce a “state-of-the-art” medical informatics system. In a 2021 blog post, he wrote that Samoan officials “were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines.”
A State Department email from June 4, 2019, written by an official stationed in Samoa, observed that Kennedy and Graven “fell far short of their goal to influence Samoan government vaccination policy.” The official, Antone Greubel, wrote that the two left the island a few days after arriving.
Samoan officials have said Kennedy’s visit bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists in the country, according to previous reports. The measles outbreak that followed sickened thousands and killed 83 people, most of them children under five.
Kenndy’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment on the new emails.
Wyden said in a statement that the findings “offer more proof that Robert Kennedy is a liar on a mission to take vaccines away from kids who need them.” He added that “Republicans have turned a blind eye to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade and abdicated their responsibility to hold those who lie to Congress accountable.”
Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy led before his appointment, did not respond to a request for comment.