New Details Emerge on How RFK Jr. Helped Cause a Measles Outbreak

While he was in the process of being confirmed to run America’s public health policy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. swore several times over that his heavily scrutinized 2019 visit to Samoa, and the island’s subsequent measles outbreak, had “nothing to do” with his vaccine skepticism.

Newly revealed emails, obtained by The Guardian and the Associated Press, indicate that was not the case.

Emails sent at the time between a U.S. Embassy official and a United Nations staffer illustrate that the true intention of Kennedy’s trip was always about vaccines.

“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,” wrote Sheldon Yett, then a UNICEF representative to the Pacific Islands, in an email dated May 22, 2019.

Two days later, senior U.S. Embassy official Antone Greubel wrote to Scott Brown, who was at the time Donald Trump’s U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, about Kennedy’s planned trip.

“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),” Greubel wrote in an email dated May 24, 2019.

Greubel noted in the email that an employee at the U.S. Embassy in Samoa, Benjamin Harding, had “played some role in a personal capacity” to bring Kennedy to Samoa. Greubel communicated that he had told Harding to “cease and desist from any further involvement” with Kennedy’s travel.

Measles had not been a serious problem in Samoa until 2018, when two infants died shortly after receiving an improperly prepared version of the measles vaccine. In an attempt to understand what happened, the nation suspended use of the measles vaccine—but even after it was approved to reenter the market, the jab had lost trust with the Samoan public. As a result, the island’s vaccination rate plummeted from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones.

But within the folds of the vaccine pare-down, Kennedy and his anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense saw an opportunity: a chance to “measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the respite from vaccines,” according to one of Kennedy’s 2021 blog posts.

After Kennedy’s visit, a massive measles outbreak hit the island.

Doctors from around the world traveled to Samoa to treat the virus surge, which resulted in 5,707 cases of measles. Ultimately, the widespread disease resulted in 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

Samoan officials would later blame the epidemic on Kennedy and his affiliates, arguing that his virulent vaccine skepticism had fueled the disease’s spread by empowering the voices and credibility of local anti-vaccine activists.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, told NBC News in January 2025 that he couldn’t imagine anything “less ethical or more cruel” than Kennedy’s plan to put children at risk of death in order to gather data for an unfounded study.

But Kennedy, nonetheless, played dumb before the U.S. Senate in January 2025 as he sat on the cusp of monumental power, claiming that it wasn’t clear if measles had even been the cause of death among Samoans that year.

“We don’t know what was killing them,” the soon-to-be health secretary asserted at the time.

Samoans didn’t agree.

“It’s a total fabrication,” Samoa’s director-general of health Dr. Alec Ekeroma told the Associated Press in February 2025, adding that Kennedy’s comments to U.S. senators were “a complete lie.”

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture—which for a long time included measles—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running DHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—instead, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked.

TrumpRx, the website launched by the Trump administration Thursday to sell discounted prescription drugs directly to consumers, is offering a whole lot less than advertised. 

The drugs offered on the site are all from brand-name manufacturers, making them more expensive than generic brands. Almost all of the drugs are also covered through insurance already. The product pages on the website even say, “If you have insurance, check your co-pay first—it may be even lower.”

One X user fact-checked Trump’s claim Thursday that TrumpRx will lower the cost of inhalers from $458 to $51. In reality, clicking on the link on TrumpRx redirects the user to the manufacturer’s website to see if the buyer qualifies for hardship discounts. As the user pointed out, these discounts are available regardless of whether TrumpRx is involved. 

Another X user pointed out that the lack of generic drugs on TrumpRx makes prices higher than on prescription comparison sites such as GoodRx.  

“There may be patients who think this is a good deal and then end up financially worse off,” Rachel Sachs, a law professor studying drug pricing at Washington University in St. Louis who advised the Biden administration on drug policy, told The New York Times. 

“TrumpRx is a sideshow,” said Sean D. Sullivan, a health economist at the University of Washington. “I consider it not a real, serious effort in service to lowering prescription drug prices for Americans.”

Donald Trump has deleted a post from his Truth Social account that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

An unnamed source told Politico that “President Trump didn’t see the video (legitimately didn’t), a staffer posted it.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to downplay the video Friday morning, saying, “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

There’s only one primate in The Lion King, and that’s Rafiki, who is a mandrill. The clip is clearly not from the Disney film, either.

The video, which Trump posted Thursday night, drew backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike, including Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is the longest-serving Black senator in U.S. history. He said on X, “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican who represents a swing district in New York, said, “The President’s post is wrong and incredibly offensive—whether intentional or a mistake—and should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”

Trump has a history of racism, especially regarding President Obama. Long before being elected president, Trump pushed the birther conspiracy that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., and has said, “Laziness is a trait in Blacks.” Did a staffer really post the video without Trump seeing it?

College professors are facing censorship and self-censorship as Donald Trump’s administration emboldens state lawmakers to increase scrutiny and surveillance on college campuses, The New York Times reported.

Universities in several states, including Texas, Ohio, and Florida, have adopted new rules requiring professors to share their syllabi in publicly searchable databases. While those guidelines have been celebrated by administrators and conservative activists for increasing transparency, they have also gifted online trolls with easy targets for their vitriol—particularly in departments that trigger conservatives, such as gender studies and Middle Eastern studies.

The recent surge in surveillance was born from the work of groups such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, said Dr. Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College in Connecticut. TPUSA has spent over a decade developing a “watch list” directing angry mobs at professors who used the wrong words in class.

“Everybody is walking on eggshells,” Dr. Kamola told the Times. “Faculty are walking on eggshells. Administrators are walking on eggshells. Students are walking on eggshells. And what you get is the opposite of free speech.”

At an annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Dr. Dan Royles, a historian, advised “minimum compliance” with new rules. Royles and his panel discussed how to signal to LGBTQ+ students that their classes would cover topics pertaining to queer history without using keywords conservatives might use to target them.

“None of this is happening in good faith and we shouldn’t treat it as such,” Royles said.

Emboldened by Trump’s anti-woke crusade against higher education, conservative lawmakers are hoping to crack down on universities’ liberal tilt—or what others might call free speech.

PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman told the Times that while the new rules may seem innocent enough, “publishing syllabi when it is coupled with this McCarthyist environment is really dangerous.”

While Friedman acknowledged that conservative professors had faced social and career backlash from the left in recent years, “nowhere in that was a serious effort to use the power of government,” he said.

“The stakes of this are simply much higher,” he added.

After a student complained that their professor, Dr. Benjamin Robinson, had shared pro-Palestinian views and criticized the university, administrators at Indiana University cited a law meant to promote “intellectual diversity” to reprimand Robinson.

Robinson told the Times that the law’s vagueness was “utterly chilling,” and established a “hostile, suspicious relationship between faculty members and their students.”

January 6 insurrectionist, far-right activist, and Republican Senate candidate Jake Lang was arrested in Minneapolis after destroying a “PROSECUTE ICE” ice sculpture that was outside the Minnesota state Capitol on Thursday.

“President Trump, we support you. We support ICE. Our country was made for Americans, not for Somalis,” Lang says in a video he posted to social media, before awkwardly kicking some of the ice blocks down to spell a new message. “Pro-ICE baby! America first, America only! We’ll see ya here, February 7th, Saturday, 12 noon, outside the Minnesota state Capitol!”

Lang was later arrested by local police.

“They are charging me with a felony for $6000 in damage I’m being taken to Ramsey County Jail in Minnesota,” he wrote on X.

This arrest is yet another hurdle for Lang, as the prominent far-right influencer was booed and jeered out of his own event last month in Minneapolis. Lang has a history of antagonistic and confrontational action, hence his participation in the January 6 riot. Now it seems like he may actually face some repercussions.

Lang, a white supremacist who is particularly focused on the so-called “great replacement theory,” is running to replace Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Florida. He was accused of assaulting law enforcement with a deadly weapon and engaging in physical violence on restricted grounds at the Capitol on January 6, before President Trump pardoned him.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deposition in the Epstein probe will remain outside of the public eye, thanks to the machinations of House Oversight Chair James Comer.

Comer refused to grant Clinton a public hearing Thursday, claiming that open committee meetings are “more for entertainment than substance.”

“She has moved the goalposts millions of times throughout the entire process, then fires out an email attacking me today, accusing me of moving the goalposts, and she’s the one trying to move the goalposts again,” the Kentucky Republican told Fox News.

Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, agreed to a closed-door deposition earlier this week after their names and images were featured prominently in the Justice Department’s latest Epstein files document dump, though the couple has since insisted that the hearing be made public.

“For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee wrote on X Thursday. “They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction.

“So let’s stop the games,” she continued. “If you want this fight, [Representative James Comer], let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Responding to Clinton, Comer told Fox that the closed-door deposition had already been agreed to, and that the video, audio, and transcript of the deposition would be made available to the public afterward.

“The deposition is for substance. This is a serious investigation. The purpose of the investigation is to get justice for the victims, and why the government failed the victims, and who the bad guys were and if they can be held accountable,” Comer said. “The Clintons are trying to play the victim card. The victims of Epstein are the victims, not the Clintons.”

But Comer’s vehement defense for Donald Trump—who, like Clinton, was prominently named and photographed with Epstein—practically gave the forty-second president and his wife an out.

During an earlier interview Thursday with podcaster Benny Johnson, Comer claimed that photos of the president with Epstein, his entourage, and his victims did not amount to wrongdoing.

Military lawyers have taken over prosecutorial duties in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis due to mass resignations by protesting lawyers who represented the bureau.

Judge Advocate General Corps attorneys replaced civilian prosecutors as criminal and immigration cases surge in light of increased ICE activity in Minnesota, Politico reported Friday.

The move was first announced last month, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the military to identify a pool of 40 judge advocate general officers, 25 of whom he said would serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys in Minneapolis.

“Ideally have significant experience in criminal prosecution, civil litigation, administrative law, immigration law, general litigation, or other related fields,” reads the email request, obtained by CNN.

Those individuals have largely been tasked with prosecuting some 16 protesters charged with resisting and impeding federal agents enacting Donald Trump’s immigration agenda in the area, officially referred to as Operation Metro Surge.

Further still, the military has involved itself in offering replacements among America’s judiciary, reported Reuters. On Thursday, the Justice Department swore in 33 new immigration judges, many of them temporary installments with military backgrounds, in order to catch up on work left behind by a slew of judges fired by the administration.

At least 14 staff members at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis quit their posts in protest after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old local mother Renee Nicole Good in early January. In the weeks since, employees at the state legal office have claimed that they are overwhelmed by the legal challenges to Operation Metro Surge, and that fruitless attempts to get ICE to comply with the law and court orders have pushed them to a breaking point.

As a result, workloads have piled up and cases have been backlogged. The overwhelming stress leaked through the cracks Tuesday, when a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”

“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Le has since been removed from the temporary position and has gone back to her normal job with ICE.

Republican Senator Tim Scott says the AI-generated clip President Trump posted depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as monkeys is “the most racist thing” he’s seen from the administration.

“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” said Scott, the longest-serving Black senator in U.S. history and perhaps the most prominent Black conservative—and Black Trump supporter—in all of Congress. “The President should remove it.”

It is not fake, and Trump has yet to remove it as of this writing. Trump initially posted an election-denialism MAGA brainrot video on Truth Social late Thursday. At around the 59 second mark of the video, a short clip of the Obamas’ heads superimposed on chimp bodies appears, mouths agape while the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. The clip has a watermark from the same account that made the AI-generated video of Trump dropping shit on No Kings protesters from a fighter jet.

The White House too has acknowledged the clip and insisted that it couldn’t have been racist because the full clip depicts multiple Democrats as animals from the Lion King movie—never mind that the Obamas are the monkeys.

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Is that supposed to make this better? The current president of the United States—who spent years falsely claiming the first Black president was not an American—posted a clip that is so absurdly, undeniably racist that it really doesn’t matter what’s in the rest of the clip. The outrage isn’t fake; Trump has just done so many casually reprehensible things that this is just another day for him.

After releasing 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from immigration detention, the Department of Homeland Security is now trying to deport his family as fast as possible.

The agency filed a motion Wednesday to end asylum claims and expedite deportation proceedings for Liam’s family, immigration lawyer Danielle Molliver told MPR News. She described the DHS’s latest motion as “retaliatory.”

Last month, federal immigration agents used Liam as bait to try to arrest someone in the child’s house. They detained both Liam and his father, who had been bringing him home from school. While images of Liam surrounded by masked federal agents ignited a national firestorm, the father and son were moved to a processing facility in Texas for deportation. A federal judge ordered them to be freed, finding that there wasn’t enough probable cause to detain them. The family had entered the U.S. legally and applied for asylum upon arrival.

“It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It’s not very common,” Molliver said. A hearing for Liam’s case is scheduled for Friday, but Molliver has requested more time to respond.

There have been mounting reports that asylum cases are being routinely dismissed by immigration judges, and lawful asylum-seekers are being taken into ICE custody for expedited removal.

ICE attorneys at immigration hearings are increasingly asking judges to dismiss asylum cases, and the Trump administration has instructed judges to grant quick dismissals. At the same time, the Trump administration has purged dozens of immigration judges and sought to recruit so-called “deportation judges” to help ramp up the government’s soft ethnic cleansing.

Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told MPR News that the family still lives in fear of being deported. “The government is moving many pieces, it’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so that they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear too,” Conejo Arias said during an interview conducted in Spanish and translated by MPR News.

Progressive Analilia Mejia is on the verge of a huge upset win in a special election in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district to replace Mikie Sherill, elected governor of the state last year.

Meijia, who helped run Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, is leading Tom Malinowski in the Democratic primary by less than 500 votes as of this writing, upending a race in which the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent tons of money. AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, dumped $2.3 million into the race to attack the early frontrunner Malinowski, an odd course of action considering that it had supported Malinowski in the past.

Malinowski’s crime in AIPAC’s eyes was supporting conditions on aid to Israel, a position that is gaining traction among House Democrats as public polling shows increasing numbers of Democrats and Americans opposing Israel’s massacre of Gaza. Mejia, endorsed by leading progressives including Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is on the verge of capitalizing on AIPAC’s gamble.

Mejia’s stance on Israel goes even further than Malinowski, as she has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide and pledged not to make any visits to Israel on AIPAC’s dime. Three days after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Mejia said, “Every fiber of my being is horrified beyond words at what is furthering in Gaza. Yet again we see how oppression & dehumanization leads to despair & unthinkable destruction.”

Two weeks later, Mejia called for a ceasefire in Gaza, well before many other Democrats. But Israel and Gaza wasn’t even a central issue in her campaign, taking a backseat to cost-of-living issues. That’s not unlike New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign last year. He too ran a campaign centered around affordability, and his pro-Palestinian stance resulted in millions of dollars spent against him to no avail.

Will Mejia eke out an upset win over Malinowski? If so, it would show that AIPAC, long feared on Capitol Hill, is losing its touch.