New Reporting Raises Fresh Red Flags About RFK, Jr.’s Vaccine Lies

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

RFK’s Anti-Vaccine Crusade is Worse Than We Knew

New reporting published yesterday adds to the already damning assessment of a story that’s been unfolding for months: Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. brazenly asserted in his confirmation hearings that he would not undermine vaccines, and, once confirmed, promptly proceeded to do just that.

First, The Guardian reports that newly-obtained documents show that, contrary to what Kennedy claimed in his confirmation hearing last year, he did travel to Samoa in 2019, when he was chair of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group, in order to study the health of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Kennedy has denied that the trip was for the purpose of comparing children who had and had not been vaccinated against measles — reportedly a longtime goal of Kennedy’s in order to establish that vaccines were not necessary by using unvaccinated children as guinea pigs. 

 Kennedy’s trip took place in the aftermath of a decline in vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) in Samoa, following the 2018 deaths of two infants who had received tainted vaccines. The Samoan government then temporarily halted the MMR vaccine. Even though it had resumed the vaccination program by the time Kennedy arrived in 2019, officials said his visit boosted anti-vaccine sentiment there. A measles outbreak followed his visit, resulting in 83 deaths, mostly of children. The new documents The Guardian obtained show that, contrary to Kennedy’s repeated claim to the Senate that his trip “had nothing to do with vaccines,” his colleague, Michael Graven, who died in 2022, told Samoan officials during trip planning that he would “evaluate outcomes associated with the recent discontinuity in vaccinations.” After the trip, Kennedy continued to push for such comparative studies, and, as HHS secretary, has pushed the agency to conduct them. (According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “When a safe, effective vaccine already exists against a disease, giving children in the placebo group no protection against that disease is unethical.”)

The New York Times raises additional red flags about whether Kennedy and his aides deliberately hid his anti-vaccine efforts from senators prior to their vote to confirm him. Democrats on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) this week obtained and released a tranche of internal emails from Dr. Debra Houry, who was at the time the chief medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control. Houry told the Times that early in Trump’s term, numerous HHS websites were taken down following Trump’s directive to purge any information he considered to be “DEI.” But before the Senate had confirmed Kennedy, his hand-picked aides at the agency “feared that removing vaccine-related pages might endanger Mr. Kennedy’s chances of being confirmed,” and ordered most of them restored. 

After his confirmation, though, according a memo prepared by HELP Committee Democratic staff, Kennedy tried to end public information campaigns about vaccines, “wasted agency resources to obtain data to demonstrate the long-unproven link between vaccines and autism,” including directing agency employees to improperly obtain data without following privacy and ethics protocols, and explored removing vaccines from the CDC’s Vaccines for Children program. As the memo notes, Kennedy had said under oath at his confirmation hearing, “I will do nothing as HHS Secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking vaccines” — which was, he has clearly demonstrated, not true.

Since Kennedy took over as HHS secretary, the U.S. has seen its biggest measles outbreaks in decades, racking up numbers that imperil our measles elimination status. But some MAGA media figures have other priorities. They are pushing Kennedy to have HHS to declare “Trump Derangement Syndrome” a “diagnosable mental illness.”

Before Flu Outbreak, Military Leaders Pressed Hegseth to Reverse His Anti-Vaccine Order

Even before the flu outbreak at basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio this month, leaders in the Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy pressed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for a reversal of his April decision to end required flu shots for trainees, who “are particularly susceptible to the flu because they sleep in bunk beds in open bays and share meals at large communal tables,” the New York Times reports. After initially only granting exemptions to the non-mandate, the Pentagon confirmed this week that despite Hegseth having described the vaccine mandate as “absurd” and “overreaching,” it was once again requiring the vaccine for all basic training recruits.

After Venezuela’s Devastating Earthquakes, Where Is Trump, Who Claimed To Be Running the Country?

At The Intercept, Nick Turse reports that following the U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, President Donald Trump declared that America would “run” the country, saying that “we’re in charge.” After a pair of devastating earthquakes hit several Venezuelan cities on Wednesday, killing at least 230, injuring thousands, and trapping an unknown number in the rubble of buildings, Trump jauntily announced on Truth Social that “We will be there for our new and great friends.” But a U.S. official tells Turse that since Trump has essentially declared Venezuela a vassal state, he owes the country far more than just friendship. What’s more, according to Turse’s reporting, Trump claimed recently that the U.S. seizure of Venezuela’s oil industry has reaped more than $5 billion in proceeds; advocates are pressing the administration to provide not just humanitarian and search and rescue aid to earthquake victims but to lift sanctions and release oil revenues being held in U.S. accounts to address the massive destruction of the country’s infrastructure.

Russell Vought’s Path to Destruction 

Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation about Russell Vought’s new quest, laid out in his proposed rulemaking, to politicize every federal expenditure of money, from food aid to scientific research, wresting control from subject matter experts and placing it in the hands of political cronies. “If you thought Elon Musk and DOGE were bad (and they were and are responsible for the deaths of many just by dismantling USAID alone), Vought is 100 times worse,” Gonsalves writes. “This rule is codifying the work of DOGE and taking it to a whole other level.”

Reagan-Appointed Judge in Texas Rejects State Officials’ Sharia Panic

In a very, very Texas story, the state funeral regulator tried to shut down an Islamic center’s ability to perform funeral rites, based on the state GOP’s outlandish conspiracy theories about a Muslim takeover of America and Texas, in particular. The Islamic center sued, citing a violation of its religious freedom, and this week a Reagan-appointed judge denied the state’s motion to dismiss the case. The ruling, reports Texas Monthly, “is a firm rebuke of the anti-Muslim political hysteria fueled by [Texas Governor Greg] Abbott and his team of advisers.” 

Why Did Tiffany Trump’s Husband Join Marco Rubio for a Meeting with the UAE President?

The Secretary of State has struggled to answer the question, beyond saying that he and the U.S. president’s son-in-law, Michael Boulos, are “good friends,” which … doesn’t make it seem any better?

Court Orders Blanche To Produce Documents Under the Epstein Files Transparency Act

The journalist Katie Phang sued Acting Attorney General Blanche, and yesterday U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered him to produce documents that the Department of Justice has withheld, noting that Blanche had “conceded” he was in violation of the law. 

What High-Profile GOP Departures Mean

Geoffrey Kabaservice, a historian of the American right, assesses the impact of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene leaving the Republican Party. 

Trump To Speak to Christian Right Group Today

Trump will speak to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference in Washington today. Although much attention is paid to how Trump courts and manipulates the support of online influencers, he knows that veteran operative Ralph Reed’s group is where the action is for getting out the evangelical vote for the midterms.