Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker 1:

“I, Robert F Kennedy Jr.”

Audio excerpt — Robert F Kennedy Jr:

“I, Robert F Kennedy Jr.”

Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker 1:

“Do solemnly swear.”

Audio excerpt — Robert F Kennedy Jr:

“Do solemnly swear.”

Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker 1:

“That I will support and defend.”

Audio excerpt — Robert F Kennedy Jr:

“That I will support and defend.”

Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker 1:

“The Constitution of the United States.”

Audio excerpt — Robert F Kennedy Jr:

“The Constitution of the United States.”

RUBY:

When Robert F Kennedy Jr 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 about RFK Jr’s record on vaccines.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker 2:

“Mr Kennedy, you have spent years pushing conflicting stories about vaccines.”

RUBY:

And under oath, RFK denied he was against them.

Audio excerpt — Robert F Kennedy Jr:

“I support the measles vaccine. I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS Secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking either of those vaccines…”

RUBY:

But watching the hearings closely was investigative journalist Brian Deer.

BRIAN:

People sometimes debate as to whether Mr Kennedy is a vaccine sceptic.

RUBY:

For more than two decades, Brian Deer has been investigating the anti-vaccine movement and tracking RFK Jr’s involvement in it.

BRIAN:

He is an out and out anti-vaccine campaigner and has been for 20 years and he is the most prominent anti-vaccine campaigner in the whole world.

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Today journalist Brian Deer, on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s real beliefs and the impact his campaigning had on a deadly measles outbreak in the Pacific.

It’s Thursday, February 20.

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RUBY:

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?

BRIAN:

Well, I first got wise to him 20 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 20 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.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker 3:

“With his help, many causes have been brought to the forefront of public awareness and his family’s connections mean he has access to the highest levels of US government.”

BRIAN:

So Mr Kennedy, he’s a product liability lawyer. What he tries to do is to get lawsuits going.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker 4:

“Kennedy made millions of dollars, most of it was from his own law firm. He made about $9 million dollars there. He also made money off book publishing.”

BRIAN:

People would be attracted by the campaigner and then moved over to the product liability lawsuit.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker 4:

“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.”

BRIAN:

That’s what he does: he sues people. Because one of the things about vaccine scares that people probably don't realise is that they begin as lawsuits. And they are very, very lucrative for the lawyers who drive them.

RUBY:

So he’s experienced at campaigning against vaccines and in 2019, that took him, and you, to the Pacific Island of Samoa. Can you tell me what the situation was like there when you arrived?

BRIAN:

Well, I arrived in December 2019 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 48 children dead. That was children aged four or under and it was raging through the island unstopped.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 1:

“The streets of Samoa are eerily quiet as the country deals with the fallout of an outbreak of measles that has claimed the lives of dozens.”

BRIAN:

Arriving at the airport, there were emergency supplies being brought in, ventilators, because you need special small size 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 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 measles. Three children. Even now it comes back to me 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.

RUBY:

Okay, that must have been very confronting. Can you explain a bit about why the community there was so vulnerable to this outbreak and how RFK Jr was connected?

BRIAN:

What had happened was, the year before two nurses on one of the islands. in a remote hospital. had wrongly mixed a muscle relaxant into the measles, mumps, rubella 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.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 2:

“The communication minister who's also the government's spokesman, Afamasaga Rico Tupa'i, says that the work of anti-vaxxers is hampering their efforts to have everyone immunised.”

BRIAN:

Conspiracy theorists online were trying to suggest there was something wrong with MMR and were campaigning.

Audio excerpt — Samoan man:

“Unfortunately, these anti-vax people all live overseas but they're using social media to influence the community and influence our population.”

BRIAN:

Then Mr Kennedy had turned up.

RUBY:

So he turned up in Samoa? He was actually there?

BRIAN:

He actually turned up on the island, yeah, and met with anti-vaccine campaigners and was photographed with them.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 3:

“1News has learned of a high-level anti-vax meeting organised in Samoa in June, just before this deadly measles outbreak. A US Embassy staff member facilitated a meeting between vaccination critic Robert Kennedy Jr and Australian anti-vax blogger Taylor Winterstein.”

BRIAN:

So, it's important to recognise that Samoa is a small community. There's 200,000 people. That's not a lot. So when something appears on Facebook, an awful lot of people see it. And Mr 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.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker 5:

“A prominent American anti-vax activist would later tell a Samoan newspaper that he had the prime minister's ear on the issue and that the island nation's leader had privately shared his doubts about the safety of immunising the public. That 'activist', quote unquote, yes that’s Robert F Kennedy Jr.”

BRIAN:

He was just trying to muscle his way into the thing. And so Mr Kennedy's appearance there was a news event and so that helped fuel the problem that they already had.

RUBY:

After the break, what RFK Jr says about his role in the outbreak and how he stands to profit from Making America Healthy Again.

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RUBY:

Brian, we’re talking about RFK’s anti-vaccine campaigning in Samoa in 2019, which contributed to low rates of vaccination in the country and 83 people, most of them babies, died. RFK was meeting with the prime minister of Samoa to tell him vaccines had caused the outbreak. So tell me about where this outbreak actually originated?

BRIAN:

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. It was particularly concentrated on the south side of Auckland, which has a substantial Maori and Pacific Islander community where vaccination rates had fallen to very low levels. And it goes back to the appearance in Australia and New Zealand in 2017 of anti-vaccine campaigners trying to promote a film by a disgraced British doctor named Andrew Wakefield.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 4:

“The film alleges a cover up of the claimed link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Both the link and the film have been widely discredited, of course.”

BRIAN:

They went to Australia and they went to New Zealand with this film advertising these false allegations.

Audio excerpt — News Host:

“Here’s what those attending a screening of Vaxxed in the north land town of Maungaturoto had to say to our reporter Zac Fleming.”

Audio excerpt — Screening attendee:

“I’ve never seen any good science indicating that vaccines are actually beneficial.”

BRIAN:

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.

RUBY:

And so Brian, in the lead up to being confirmed, RFK, he was actually grilled at a Senate hearing in the US and he was asked about his role in the measles outbreak.

Audio excerpt — Senate speaker:

“Mr Kennedy, you have spent years pushing conflicting stories about vaccines…”

RUBY:

Can you tell me about that and what he said?

Audio excerpt — Unidentified speaker in Senate

“So my question here is, Mr Kennedy, is measles deadly? Yes or no?”

Audio excerpt — Robert F Kennedy Jr:

“You cannot find a single Samoan who will say, ‘I didn't get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy’.”

BRIAN:

He just shrugged it off and rejected it, saying that nobody knew what was killing the children.

Audio excerpt — Robert F Kennedy Jr:

“There are 83 people who died. When the tissue samples were sent to New Zealand, most of those people did not have measles. We don't know what was killing them.”

BRIAN:

And I thought, well, 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 Mr Kennedy came to the conclusion that nobody knew what the cause was, I think was a bit extraordinary. But then, he is a great one for saying things that don't check out.

RUBY:

And so, vaccines aside, what do we know about RFK's agenda to Make America Healthy Again? What can we expect?

BRIAN:

Well, Mr 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.

Audio excerpt — Robert F Kennedy Jr:

“President Trump is committed to restoring the American dream and 77 million Americans delivered a mandate to him to do just that, due in part to the embrace and elevation of the Make America Healthy Again movement.”

BRIAN:

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. He can intervene in court cases. He can intervene in the advisory 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 the National Institutes of Health and the Centres 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.

RUBY:

Brian, thank you so much for talking to me.

BRIAN:

Pleasure.

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RUBY:

Also in the news...

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 NSW Hunter candidate Suellen Wrightson.

And,

Whyalla steelworks has been forced into administration.

The decision was made by South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas after an emergency meeting yesterday morning.

The Premier said they no longer had confidence in Whyalla’s owner GFG Group’s ability to secure the funding needed for the steelworks to continue operating.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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