A Man Responsible for Many Deaths Comes to Town; More Measles in SoCal–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Feb. 2, 2026

Indy Digest: Feb. 2, 2026

You may have seen media coverage over the weekend of the Starry Starry Night Gala, an event on Saturday at Chaparral Country Club in Palm Desert to benefit breast-cancer research at the Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego.

A worthy cause, no doubt, and I hope the benefit raised a ton of money. However, one of the attendees has no business being anywhere near a serious health-related event, despite his lofty title—Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Yep, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was in town, and he even spoke at the gala.

The Desert Sun did a fantastic job of covering the event, asking the infamous vaccine-denier some tough questions and pointing out the twisted irony of RFK Jr. being a speaker at a benefit for cancer research:

As of November 2025, the (National Institutes of Health) had seen roughly $2.3 billion in unspent funds across nearly 2,500 grants frozen or terminated, including for cancer research, according to a report from Science News.

In August 2025, the health department began to shut down federally funded mRNA vaccine development, drawing criticism from scientists who saw the technology as a potential avenue for cancer and HIV vaccines, according to ABC News. Kennedy has been critical of the technology, which was used for COVID-19 vaccines.

Andi and Bernie Skoboloff, longtime residents of the country club, attended the protest after hearing about the event from local Democrats just days before.

They expressed concerns about his stances on vaccines, noting a recent measles outbreak in the U.S. and connecting it to rising vaccine skepticism. Bernie Skoboloff recalled “what a mess it was” before polio vaccines were commonplace.

Asked by The Desert Sun about the protest during a brief interview on the gala’s red carpet, Kennedy responded: “I think they’re criticizing some things that never happened, that they’ve been told.” He stated there’ve been “no research cuts to NIH” and that its budget is the same this year as last year.

A total of 5,844 NIH grants were cancelled or suspended over the course of 2025, though courts have ordered that some of those be reinstated, according to a recent article in Nature, a scientific journal. Some of those grants are for clinical trials, as well as cancer centers and related infrastructure.

The Trump administration also proposed cutting roughly $18 billion, or around 40% of the total, from the NIH budget in 2026, but legislation in Congress instead provides a 2% increase for the agency, according to Nature’s reporting.

Unfortunately, some other local media sources didn’t ask any tough questions, nor did they report on any of Kennedy’s anti-science efforts, and instead treated RFK Jr. like a regular big-name gala attendee.

For those media sources’ benefit—in case they somehow didn’t realize how objectively terrible his actions have been over the years—here are some news stories about RFK Jr.

First, here’s an August 2025 piece from BBC News pointing out the damage he’d already done in his first several months as the HHS secretary:

More than 750 current and former employees of the US health department have published a letter rebuking Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, saying his “dangerous and deceitful statements” contributed to recent violence at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters.

Officials say the man who fired hundreds of rounds at the CDC this month, killing a police officer, had expressed distrust in the Covid-19 vaccine.

In their letter, the staff said the attack came as “politicized rhetoric” drives mistrust in institutions.

They also said Kennedy had put Americans’ health in danger and hurt the country’s ability to respond to public health emergencies.

“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information,” they wrote in a letter addressed to both Congress and Kennedy and published on a site called Save HHS.

Here’s a Pulitzer Center-funded Atlanta News First piece from earlier this year discussing RFK Jr.’s role in a measles outbreak in Samoa:

Thirty-three days after two Samoan children died in 2019 from a deadly mix of the MMR vaccine and muscle relaxant, an organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the future secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—paid Facebook to post multiple ads sowing doubt about the vaccines.

One ad, funded by Children’s Health Defense, claimed measles vaccines were linked to chronic illnesses and autism, claims widely debunked by scientific research.

About a year later, a measles outbreak ravaged the island nation. More than 5,700 were infected. Eighty-three people died, most of them children.

The organization’s ads—before, during and after the outbreak—reached up to 110,000 people on Facebook and were specifically targeted to female users, according to research conducted by George Washington University shared exclusively with Atlanta News First Investigates. Most of the ads cost between $100 and $499 each.

“From my standpoint, [Kennedy] should rot in hell for this because he knew he was taking advantage of vulnerable people,” said Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, who led a medical response team to Samoa in 2019 to inoculate thousands of people during a mass vaccination campaign to stop the outbreak. Green was Hawaii’s lieutenant governor at the time.

About six months before the outbreak, Kennedy visited Samoa in person. At the time of his visit, Kennedy was an attorney and was active in the Children’s Defense Fund.

While on the island, he posed with Taylor Winterstein, a Samoan social media influencer well-known for her anti-vaxxer messaging in Australia.

And here’s a 2023 piece from The New York Times showing how RFK Jr. has profited handsomely from his deadly anti-vaccine nonsense:

In 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earned more than $500,000 as the chairman and top lawyer at Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit organization that he has helped build into a leading spreader of anti-vaccine falsehoods and a platform for launching his independent bid for the White House.

The compensation was almost three times as high as the amount paid to the organization’s president, but it was not Mr. Kennedy’s biggest source of income. Neither was his family’s fabled wealth. Instead, most of his earnings around the same time came from law firms—a total of $7 million for lending them his name, connections and expertise to sue major companies.

Throughout his long public life, Mr. Kennedy has cultivated an image as a man committed to a greater good, the blessing and burden of belonging to one of America’s most storied political families. Whether cleaning up rivers as an environmentalist or railing against the purported dangers of inoculations, he has said he is driven by his family’s legacy of civic duty and sacrifice. …

But an examination of Mr. Kennedy’s finances by The New York Times, including public filings and almost two dozen interviews as well as tax returns and other documents not previously made public, showed that while he appears to believe in the causes he champions, they have also had a practical benefit: His crusades, backed by the power of his name, have earned him tens of millions of dollars.

I could post many, many other articles from reliable sources, but the point is made: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s un-scientific crusades have killed a lot people, and are continuing to do so—and local media should acknowledge that.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• This newsletter would have been sent about an hour earlier had I not gotten distracted by doing various local searches in the recently-updated-but-not-updated-enough Epstein files on the Department of Justice website. I have not found anything significantly substantial yet—some mentions of various vacations in Palm Springs and Palm Desert; apparently Epstein used a staffing firm located in Palm Springs, etc.—and if you want to look around, feel free: www.justice.gov/epstein. Holler if you find anything interesting!

• Meanwhile, the Justice Department continues to mess things up right and left as far as the Epstein files are concerned, as evidenced by this Associated Press piece headlined “Victims complain of death threats as government says it’s fixing redactions in Epstein-related files.” Yikes on multiple levels! The lede: “The Justice Department said Monday that it had withdrawn several thousand documents and ‘media’ related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein after lawyers complained to a New York judge that the lives of nearly 100 victims had been ‘turned upside down’ by sloppy redactions in the government’s latest release of records. The exposed materials include nude photos showing the faces of potential victims as well as names, email addresses and other identifying information that was either unredacted or not fully obscured. The department blamed it on ‘technical or human error.’” Wow.

• Measles in SoCal! The Los Angeles Times reports: “The Orange County Health Care Agency confirmed a measles case in an international traveler who arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and then later visited a Disney park. On Wednesday, the infected person visited Goofy’s Kitchen from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at Downtown Disney, the shopping and restaurant district adjacent to the park, and then Disney California Adventure Park from 12:30 p.m. to closing, according to a news release from the Orange County Health Care Agency. … Earlier last week, the OC Healthcare Agency confirmed a measles case in a young adult who recently traveled internationally. The infected person visited a gym in Ladera Ranch on Jan. 23 and an urgent care facility on Jan. 23 and 26.”

• This is a very, very disturbing story from Bloomberg news, headlined “ICE Begins Buying ‘Mega’ Warehouse Detention Centers Across US.” The story says: “Despite protests in small towns and cities across the US, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with the purchase of warehouses it plans to convert into immigration jails in what could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history. The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents in Minneapolis and other cities. Those aggressive enforcement actions have ignited clashes with protesters and led to agents killing two US citizens.”

• In other descent-into-fascism news, here’s an alert from our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (recently) posted a photo of the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of three activists who had entered a St. Paul, Minn. church to confront a pastor who also serves as acting field director of the St Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. A short while later, the White House posted the same photo—except that version had been digitally altered to darken Armstrong’s skin and rearrange her facial features to make it appear she was sobbing or distraught. The Guardian one of many media outlets to report on this image manipulation, created a handy slider graphic to help viewers see clearly how the photo had been changed. This isn’t about ‘owning the libs’—this is the highest office in the nation using technology to lie to the entire world. The New York Times reported it had run the two images through Resemble.AI, an A.I. detection system, which concluded Noem’s image was real but the White House’s version showed signs of manipulation. ‘The Times was able to create images nearly identical to the White House’s version by asking Gemini and Grok — generative A.I. tools from Google and Elon Musk’s xAI start-up—to alter Ms. Noem’s original image.’ Most of us can agree that the government shouldn’t lie to its constituents. We can also agree that good government does not involve emphasizing cruelty or furthering racial biases. But this abuse of technology violates both those norms.”

• The Washington Post looks at the disaster that is the Kennedy Center, especially now that the president has announced plans to close it for a couple of years for renovation: “Within hours, speculation and fear had spread as the center’s staffers, performing artists and patrons began preparing for an uncertain future. The Kennedy Center had already booked a slate of performances after July 4, including shows of touring productions ‘The Outsiders,’ ‘Back to the Future: The Musical’ and ‘Mrs. Doubtfire.’ Listings remained online Monday afternoon. The National Symphony Orchestra, meanwhile, has performed a full season of subscription concerts at the venue since 1971. Questions abounded: Who knew this was happening? What would happen to shows that have already been scheduled? Who could lose their jobs? Will the Kennedy Center Honors and the Mark Twain Prize continue? How do the center’s many unions come into play? What, exactly, is the construction project? … ‘The building is not falling apart or condemnable, there’s no reason “repairs” couldn’t be done while still keeping portions of it open for performances,’ said one staffer, who like others for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for retribution. ‘A two-year shutdown under the guise of “renovations” raises serious questions about motives and whether these decisions are being made in good faith.’”

• And finally … today’s recall news involves … mini beignets! Fox Business says: “Costco announced that one of its products, ‘Mini Beignets filled with Caramel,’ was ‘inadvertently packaged with Mini Beignets filled with Chocolate Hazelnut.’ The company said the mislabeled units contain ‘undeclared Tree Nuts.’ ‘If you are allergic to Hazelnuts/Filberts, do not consume this product. Please return it to Costco for a full refund,’ the company said in a statement. Costco says the warning applies to purchases from Jan. 16-30 (in states including California).”

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