New Yorker: In 2018, two children in Samoa died after receiving measles vaccines, because the nurses who administered them had mistakenly mixed the vaccine powder with a muscle relaxant. Local vaccine skeptics seized on the tragedy, and the government temporarily suspended its immunization program.

Nobody knew at the time about the cause of death of the two infants. Parental mistrust after the infant deaths, especially over the weekend when news began to spread, was warranted. The deaths of two infants from the same vial of the MMR vaccine understandably raised alarms among parents. The two infant deaths occurred on July 6, 2018. It wasn’t until June 6, 2019 — 11 months after the deaths — that the Samoan Director General of Health announced that a nursing error caused the deaths. Two days after the infant deaths, the Samoan government recalled the MMR vaccine, suspended the vaccine program, and called for a full investigation. A Commission of Inquiry (COI) was established to investigate the deaths. Nearly nine months later, the COI completed their investigation, delivering their final report to the Samoan government on March 29, 2019. On April 2, the Director of Health announced that the investigations showed no evidence that the MMR vaccine caused the deaths. The MMR vaccination program resumed on April 14, 2019. On June 6, the Director of Health announced that a nursing error caused the infant deaths.

New Yorker: Children’s Health Defense, an organization chaired by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., posted about the events on Facebook, where the group was one of the largest purchasers of anti-vaccine advertisements. The Samoan government reinstated the program, following an investigation. But immunization rates remained perilously low, with less than a third of infants getting vaccinated, and, a few months later, the country experienced a devastating measles outbreak.

“Less than a third of infants getting vaccinated” refers to the vaccine coverage rate of 31% in 2018, as reported by WHO and UNICEF. It is inaccurate to imply that this same coverage rate applies to the proportion of infants vaccinated after the suspension in April 2019 and before the outbreak was declared in October 2019. The UNICEF article is addressed here.

Annual MMR vaccine coverage fell to 31% in 2018 due to the suspension of the MMR vaccination program from July 9, 2018, to April 14, 2019. If RFK Jr was questioning vaccine safety related to the infant deaths on Facebook, it was after the program’s suspension. The level of distrust among parents about the MMR vaccine cannot be a factor in the 2018 decline in MMR vaccination rates because deciding whether to vaccinate their children was taken out of their hands. RFK Jr visited Samoa in June of 2019. Vaccination rates cannot fall in 2018 due to his 2019 visit.