Robert F. Kennedy Jr. allegedly lied to Congress last year during his confirmation hearings, according to a new report from The Guardian and The Associated Press. Now a senior Democrat is calling for an investigation into the Health and Human Services secretary, whose tenure over the nation’s top health agencies has been marked by scandal, food tainted by “explosive diarrhea” parasites and record-breaking measles outbreaks that continue to spread across the U.S.
It was actually Kennedy’s influence on a measles outbreak in Samoa that hinges on the alleged lie. In 2018, after a bad batch of the MMR vaccine resulted in two children’s deaths in Samoa, the government halted all vaccinations for 10 months. Predictably, measles cases surged in an outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them children under 5. But between both events, Kennedy visited the island, which many saw as an effort to embolden anti-vaccine advocates and influence the government’s response.
