By ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON NYTimes News Service
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HONOLULU — It was a spasm of tragedy on a remote Pacific island that only a few months later was overshadowed by a pandemic. But to Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii, the measles outbreak on neighboring Samoa that killed 83 people, mostly babies and children, was a preventable catastrophe wrought by the man President Donald Trump now wants to steer U.S. health policy.

In December 2019, Green, an emergency medical physician and Hawaii’s Democratic lieutenant governor at the time, rounded up a medical team and thousands of vaccine doses and flew to Samoa to help. Last month, he flew to Washington aiming to alert lawmakers from both parties about the role Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for health and human services secretary and a longtime vaccine skeptic, played in the Samoa outbreak.

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Kennedy’s confirmation hearings are Wednesday and Thursday before two Senate committees, which will then vote on whether his nomination advances to the full Senate.

Democrats are attempting to leverage Kennedy’s connection to the Samoa outbreak to build opposition to his nomination. Green recently appeared in an ad by a liberal advocacy group, 314 Action, saying, “RFK Jr. had spread so much misinformation that the country stopped vaccinating, and that caused a tragic and fatal spread of the measles.”

In an interview Monday, Green said that based on his conversations so far, if the full Senate vote was taken anonymously, “RFK Jr. would be defeated 70-30 or worse.” At the same time, he said, “the political climate has everyone under great pressure to go with the president or be labeled disloyal.”

A spokesperson for Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday. In the past he has blamed Samoa’s measles outbreak on “an Indian-manufactured MMR vaccine,” referring to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

Samoa’s outbreak had its roots in a tragic error. In 2018, nurses preparing MMR vaccines mixed the doses with a muscle relaxant instead of water. The tainted shots caused the deaths of two infants and ratcheted up parents’ fears about the safety of vaccines.

Vaccination skeptics often wrongly link childhood vaccines to autism, and after the incident Samoa’s prime minister, whose grandson happens to have autism, halted the island nation’s vaccination program.

As a result of the deaths and the ban, fewer than one-third of Samoa’s 1-year-olds received the MMR vaccine in 2018, down from as high as 90% in 2013, according to the World Health Organization. Infections began to surge.

In June 2019, Kennedy and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, traveled to Samoa at the invitation of the prime minister, who treated the couple like visiting royalty. “My husband wants to move here,” a laughing Hines told reporters during the trip.

During the visit, Kennedy posed for a photo with Edwin Tamasese, a coconut farmer whom he has called a “medical freedom hero.” Kennedy later wrote on the Children’s Health Defense website that the trip had been arranged by Tamasese, who was arrested months later for spreading vaccine misinformation and promoting ineffective measles treatments like vitamins and papaya leaf extract.

Kennedy also said on the website that he visited Samoa because health officials and the prime minister “were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines.” Kennedy said he was offering them help in creating a tracking system.