Speaker 1: I'm Robert F.
Speaker 2: Kennedy Junior.
Speaker 3: I'm a Robert F.
Speaker 4: Kennedy Jr.
Speaker 1: Who said, swear to solid waste, bear that I will
Speaker 1: support an event that I will support and defend constitution.
Speaker 5: When Robert F.
Speaker 6: Kennedy Junior was sworn in as Health and Human Services Secretary,
Speaker 6: it made official one of President Trump's most controversial appointments.
Speaker 6: His confirmation came off the back of a fiery questioning
Speaker 6: from Democrats and Republicans alike that RFK Junior's record on vaccines.
Speaker 7: Kennedy, you have spent years pushing conflicting stories about vaccines.
Speaker 5: And under oath, RFK denied he was against them.
Speaker 8: We need to move.
Speaker 1: I support the measles vaccine. I support the polly of vaccine.
Speaker 1: I will do nothing as AHH as secretary that makes
Speaker 1: them difficult or discourages people from taking any Anybody who.
Speaker 6: But watching the hearings close was investigative journalist Brian Dear.
Speaker 3: People sometimes debate as to whether mister Kennedy is a
Speaker 3: vaccine skeptic.
Speaker 6: For more than two decades, Brian Deer has been investigating
Speaker 6: the anti vaccine movement and tracking RFK Junior's involvement in it.
Speaker 3: He is an out now anti vaccine campaigner and has
Speaker 3: been for twenty years, and he is the most prominent
Speaker 3: anti vaccine campaigner in the whole world.
Speaker 5: From Schwartz Media, I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven.
Speaker 6: AM Today journalist Brian Dear on Robert F. Kennedy Junior's
Speaker 6: real beliefs and the impact his campaigning had on a
Speaker 6: deadly measles outbreak in the Pacific. It's Thursday, February twenty so, Brian,
Speaker 6: for many of us, the first time that we heard
Speaker 6: of RFK was his failed presidential run, and then of
Speaker 6: course last year he was chosen as Trump's pick for
Speaker 6: Health secretary. But you have been reporting on the anti
Speaker 6: vaccine movement for more than two decades. So when did
Speaker 6: you first become aware of him?
Speaker 3: Well, I first got wise to him twenty years ago
Speaker 3: this July coming up, when he suddenly popped up in
Speaker 3: American magazines trying to demonstrate the link between vaccines and autism.
Speaker 3: So he's been at it now for twenty years. Solid
Speaker 3: He's not a particularly good campaigner, but he's got that
Speaker 3: magical name Kennedy, which plays so well in the United States.
Speaker 3: With his help, many causes have been brought to the
Speaker 3: forefront of public awens, and his family's connections mean he
Speaker 3: has access to the highest levels of US government. So,
Speaker 3: mister Kennedy, he's a product liability lawyer. What he tries
Speaker 3: to do is to get lawsuits going.
Speaker 9: Kennedy made millions of dollars, so if it was from
Speaker 9: his own law firm, he made about nine million dollars there.
Speaker 9: He also made money off book publishing.
Speaker 3: People would be attracted by the campaigner and then moved
Speaker 3: over to the product liability lawsuits.
Speaker 9: He gets these referral fees, sending essentially plaintiffs people families
Speaker 9: to other law firms, and he refers them so that
Speaker 9: they can sue on the grounds of say a vaccine lawsuit.
Speaker 3: That's what he does. He sues people because one of
Speaker 3: the things about vaccine scares that people probably don't realize
Speaker 3: is that they begin as lawsuits and they're very, very
Speaker 3: lucrative for the lawyers who drive them.
Speaker 6: So he's experienced it campaigning against vaccines, and in twenty
Speaker 6: nineteen that took him and you to the Pacific island
Speaker 6: of Samoa. Can you tell me what the situation was
Speaker 6: like there when you arrived.
Speaker 3: Well, I arrived in December twenty nineteen in the middle
Speaker 3: of an outbreak of measles which was absolutely appalling in
Speaker 3: its extent. Eighty three people died, overwhelmingly children. In fact,
Speaker 3: on the day I arrived, the tally was forty eight
Speaker 3: children dead. That was children aged four or under, and
Speaker 3: it was raging through the island and stopped.
Speaker 4: The streets of Samoa eerily quiet as the country deals
Speaker 4: with the fall out of an outbreak of measles that
Speaker 4: has claimed the lives of dozens.
Speaker 3: Arriving at the airport, there were emergency supplies being brought.
Speaker 3: In ventilators because you need special small sized ventilators for children,
Speaker 3: were being hauled in from different parts of the world,
Speaker 3: and I set off talking to mothers who'd lost their children,
Speaker 3: and it was a really, really, quite a striking experience,
Speaker 3: I can tell you. I remember it was in the
Speaker 3: wet season and there was rain just hammering on the
Speaker 3: roof in open fronted housing, and the mother took me
Speaker 3: through how she had been finally told that her daughter
Speaker 3: had died. She was under two years old. The body
Speaker 3: was presented to her in a blanket and they took
Speaker 3: her home in the back of the car. And dug
Speaker 3: a hole by the kitchen door and buried her there
Speaker 3: and put concrete over. And it was almost Christmas and
Speaker 3: they put fairy lights up. One mother she lost three
Speaker 3: children to me, three children. Even there, it comes back
Speaker 3: to me like these years later, I mean to experience
Speaker 3: that where they were holding group funerals, they were ordering
Speaker 3: special small sized coffins, and they were having funerals going on,
Speaker 3: big traditional funerals going on every day of the week
Speaker 3: during that period.
Speaker 5: Okay, that must have been very confronting.
Speaker 6: Can you explain a bit about the community there was
Speaker 6: so vulnerable to this outbreak and how rfk JR was connected.
Speaker 3: What had happened was the year before, two nurses on
Speaker 3: one of the islands, in a remote hospital had wrongly
Speaker 3: mixed a muscle relaxed and into the measles much robella
Speaker 3: MMR vaccine. It was a terrible mistake and within a
Speaker 3: matter of hours they killed two children by accident. As
Speaker 3: a result of the incident with the nurses, vaccination rates
Speaker 3: had fallen to a very low level. So you had
Speaker 3: a very very vulnerable community, and so anti vaccine campaigners
Speaker 3: kind of turned up, almost like tornado chasers. They kind
Speaker 3: of wanted to be in on the action.
Speaker 2: Communication minister, who's also the government spokesman of a massaga
Speaker 2: Rico two Pints, says that the work of anti vaxxes
Speaker 2: is hampering their efforts to have everyone immunized.
Speaker 3: Conspiracy theorists online were trying to suggest there was something
Speaker 3: wrong with MMR and we're campaigning.
Speaker 8: Unfortunately this anti vax people all leave overseas, but they're
Speaker 8: using social media.
Speaker 5: To influence the community and influence our population us.
Speaker 8: What can government do?
Speaker 3: Then, mister Kennedy had turned up, so he turned up
Speaker 3: in Somewhae.
Speaker 5: He was actually there.
Speaker 3: He actually turned up on the islands, Yeah, and met
Speaker 3: with anti vaccine campaigners and was photographed with them.
Speaker 4: One News has learned of a high level anti vax
Speaker 4: meeting organized in Somemore in June, just before this deadly
Speaker 4: measles outbreak. A US embassy staff member facilitated a meeting
Speaker 4: between vaccination critic Robert Kennedy Junior and Australian anti vax
Speaker 4: blogger Taylor Winterstein.
Speaker 5: She'd been forced again.
Speaker 3: So it's important to recognize that Somewhare is a small community.
Speaker 3: There's two hundred thousand people. That's not a lot. So
Speaker 3: when something appears on Facebook, an awful lot of people's
Speaker 3: see it, and mister Kennedy appears on Facebook suggesting that
Speaker 3: vaccines are an issue, and the Prime Minister he kind
Speaker 3: of got drawn into it because he had a close
Speaker 3: family member who had some kind of developmental issue, and
Speaker 3: I think he'd been led to believe that it might
Speaker 3: have been caused by a vaccine. So he would have
Speaker 3: been very easy prey really for someone turning up from
Speaker 3: the United States apparently authoritatively telling him, oh, yes, well,
Speaker 3: that could be a vaccine side effect.
Speaker 10: A prominent American anti vax activist would later tell us
Speaker 10: someone a newspaper that he had the prime minister's air
Speaker 10: on the issue and that the island nation's leader had
Speaker 10: privately shared his doubts about the safety of immunizing the public.
Speaker 10: That activist quote unquote, yes, that's Robert F.
Speaker 8: Kennedy Junior.
Speaker 3: He was trying to muscle his way into the thing,
Speaker 3: and so mister Kennedy's appearance there was a news event,
Speaker 3: and so that helped fuel the problem that they all
Speaker 3: already had.
Speaker 5: After the break.
Speaker 6: What RFK Junior says about his role in the outbreak
Speaker 6: and how he stands to profit from making America healthy again. Brian,
Speaker 6: we're talking about rfk's anti vaccine campaigning in Samoa in
Speaker 6: twenty nineteen, which contributed to low rates of vaccination in
Speaker 6: the country and eighty three people, most of them babies, died.
Speaker 6: RFK was meeting with the Prime Minister of Samoa to
Speaker 6: tell him that vaccines had caused the outbreak. So tell
Speaker 6: me where this outbreak actually originated.
Speaker 3: What we know is that the virus came from New Zealand.
Speaker 3: Auckland that year was going through the biggest outbreak of
Speaker 3: measles that it had in decades, and it was particularly
Speaker 3: concentrated on the south side of Auckland, which has as
Speaker 3: a substantial Marian Pacific Islander community, where vaccination rates had
Speaker 3: fallen to very low levels. And goes back to the
Speaker 3: appearance in Australia and New Zealand in twenty seventeen of
Speaker 3: anti vaccine campaigners trying to promote a film by a
Speaker 3: disgraced British doctor named Andrew Wakefield.
Speaker 8: The film alleges a cover up of the claimed link
Speaker 8: between them vaccine and autism. Both the link and the
Speaker 8: film have been widely discredited, of course, but the film
Speaker 8: was playing.
Speaker 3: In they went to Australia and they went to New
Speaker 3: Zealand with this film advertising these false allegations.
Speaker 4: Here's what those attending a screening of vexed in the
Speaker 4: Northland town of Mangitoto.
Speaker 5: Last night had to say to our reporter Zach Fleming.
Speaker 1: I've never seen any good science indicating that vaccines are
Speaker 1: actually beneficial.
Speaker 3: So there is a connection for the virus to come
Speaker 3: through from Auckland to the Islands, where it ultimately then
Speaker 3: erupted in a vulnerable community.
Speaker 6: And so Brennan the lead up to being confirmed RFK,
Speaker 6: he was actually grilded a Senate hearing in the US
Speaker 6: and he was asked about his role in the measles outbreak.
Speaker 7: Mister Kennedy, you have spent years pushing conflicting stories about vaccines.
Speaker 5: Can you tell me about that? And what he said?
Speaker 7: So my question here is, mister Kennedy, is mevils deadly?
Speaker 6: Yes or no?
Speaker 1: You cannot find a single Samoan Weill say, I didn't
Speaker 1: get a vaccident because of Bobby Kennedy. I went to
Speaker 1: twenty nine.
Speaker 3: He just shrugged it off and rejected it, saying that
Speaker 3: nobody knew of what was killing the chill children.
Speaker 1: Eighty three people died when the titious samples were sent
Speaker 1: to New Zealand. Most of those people did not have measles.
Speaker 1: We don't know what was going on, And I.
Speaker 3: Thought that was a very strange thing to say, because
Speaker 3: not only had there been samples taken and tested, so
Speaker 3: they had that information. But when the government had a
Speaker 3: two day lockdown where everybody was told to stay home
Speaker 3: and vaccination teams cruised around the islands offering shots to people.
Speaker 3: When that had all happened, the outbreak went away and
Speaker 3: the children stopped dying. So how mister Kennedy came to
Speaker 3: the conclusion that nobody knew what the cause was I
Speaker 3: think was a very extraordinary. But then he is a
Speaker 3: great one for saying things that don't check out, And.
Speaker 6: So vaccines aside, what do we know about rfk's agenda
Speaker 6: to make America healthy again?
Speaker 5: What can we expect?
Speaker 3: Well, mister Kennedy is talking now about making America healthy
Speaker 3: again without often revealing that he's actually taken out a
Speaker 3: registration on that expression, and I think he made an
Speaker 3: enormous sum of money selling it to the anti vaccine campaigners.
Speaker 1: President Trump is committed to restoring the American Dream, and
Speaker 1: seventy seven nine Americans delivered a mand aid to him
Speaker 1: to do just that. It in part to the embrace
Speaker 1: and elevation of the Make America Health and movement.
Speaker 3: And he's talking about diabetes, starting wellness farms, getting everybody
Speaker 3: to lose weight. But behind that is this anti vaccine agenda,
Speaker 3: which he is not going to give up on, and
Speaker 3: he will have a very great deal of power to
Speaker 3: intervene in that area, deciding which vaccine should move from
Speaker 3: the recommended list to the essential list if you like that.
Speaker 3: He can intervene in court cases, he can intervene in
Speaker 3: theory committees that make vaccine policy, because he actually appoints
Speaker 3: most of the members of them, and he's already had
Speaker 3: his recommendations taken up in some of the appointments that
Speaker 3: have been made to head the federal agencies such as
Speaker 3: National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control
Speaker 3: and Prevention and such like. So he's going to have
Speaker 3: a great deal of power, and the credibility that he
Speaker 3: will give to avoiding vaccination for reasons that have not
Speaker 3: been established as valid will lead to a rise in
Speaker 3: susceptibility to vaccine, preventable illnesses, outbreaks of disease, and it's
Speaker 3: very difficult to row these things back.
Speaker 5: Brian, thank you so much for talking to me.
Speaker 3: Pleasure.
Speaker 6: Also in the news today, billionaire Clive Palmer has vowed
Speaker 6: to spend quote whatever is required on his new political
Speaker 6: party Trumpet of Patriots. At yesterday's launch, Palmer said the
Speaker 6: party's aim is to make Australia great again by directly
Speaker 6: importing Trump's policies into Australia. The party will be led
Speaker 6: by New South Wales Hunter candidate Sewellen Wrightzen and Wylla
Speaker 6: Steelworks has been forced into administration. The decision was made
Speaker 6: by South Australian Premier Peter Melanowskis after an emergency meeting
Speaker 6: yesterday morning. The Premier said they no longer had confidence
Speaker 6: in Wyala's owner, GfG Group's ability to secure the funding
Speaker 6: needed for the steelworks to continue operating.
Speaker 5: I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. See tomorrow