There is a ton of news to get to this evening.

But I want to start by going back to the year 2019 on the Small Island Nation of Samoa.

That year, one year before the global pandemic, Samoa was experiencing its own pandemic.

This is the biggest increase in deaths we've seen since records began.

The figure of 32 dead is up from

25 only yesterday. These hospitals aren't designed to deal with this. And I think the minute you're

getting hospitals running at 2 and 300% capacity, I think that speaks for itself. It's incredibly

serious. The outbreak that doctor was talking about there was measles, a disease for which vaccines

have been available for more than 60 years.

But in 2019, an entirely preventable outbreak on Samoa killed 83 people, most of them children,

under the age of four. Why? Why was a preventable disease spreading like wildfire and killing

so many children? Well, one year prior to

that outbreak, two infants in Samoa died after nurses accidentally mixed their vaccine doses

with another drug. It was a horrible tragedy. And it was one the American anti-vaccination

movement sought to exploit. The anti-vaccine group

Children's Health Defense jumped on the incident to stoke skepticism about vaccines in Samoa. And during

that time, measles vaccination rates for infants in Samoa went from 92% in 2013 to just 40% by 2018.

The man in charge of that anti-vaccination campaign, the leader of children's health

defense, was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He personally traveled to Samoa as an honored guest

of the prime minister. Kennedy told the local papers that

the Samoan prime minister shared Kennedy's concerns about vaccines. And right around that same time,

the prime minister halted the country's infant measles vaccine program. All of that created the

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