Trump Casually Threatens to Take Over Two More Countries

Kennedy’s visit immediately preceded a deadly measles outbreak on the island. At the time, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout Samoa, tanking the island’s vaccination rate from a 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones.

Up until that point, Samoa had not experienced a severe measles outbreak since 1985, when 1,095 confirmed cases were reported to the World Health Organization. But in 2019, after Kennedy’s visit, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

Unfortunately for the American public, the conspiratorial rhetoric of the anti-vax movement has had similarly deleterious effects on local inoculation rates, spurring a regional measles health crisis that has so far killed two people and infected more than 2,777 people this year alone, far exceeding the tally for 2025 by hundreds of cases.