In the small island country of Samoa, lives have been forever altered by an outbreak of the disease in 2019 that caused at least 83 deaths and 1,867 hospitalisations, mostly of babies and young children. Thousands more fell sick. The preventable illness was able to spread through the small, closely knit population of about 200,000 due to record low vaccination rates " stemming from a medical vaccination error, the Samoan government's public health mismanagement, and fuelled by anti-vaccination sentiment, including by Donald Trump's pick to lead the US health department, Robert F Kennedy Jr. The Samoan incident showed us how disinformation can kill," said American paediatrician Dr Paul Offit, who has followed Kennedy's anti-vaccine activism since 2005. "He sowed further distrust, he jumped all over it " he met with anti-vaxxers in Samoa to promote the notion that it's not measles, it's the vaccine', and immunisation rates dropped."