Project
Tragedy in Paradise
Experts show what happens when vaccination misinformation spreads.
Part two of Tragedy in Paradise, an Atlanta News First investigation shedding light on potential consequences of declining vaccination rates.
APIA, SAMOA — Elsie Fa’atauu’u’s cellphone plays a video of her one-year-old daughter cooing and waving. She’s sitting outside her parents’ home near Apia, Samoa, on a hot summer morning. The baby, Noel, was healthy when the video was taken.
A short time later, she died of measles.
“It broke me to a million pieces because she’s my first child,” Fa’atauu’u said.
As a nonprofit journalism organization, we depend on your support to fund more than 170 reporting projects every year on critical global and local issues. Donate any amount today to become a Pulitzer Center Champion and receive exclusive benefits!
Fa’atauu’u is one of dozens of parents in Samoa who lost children during a 2019 measles outbreak that ravaged the country. It killed 83 people, most of them children.
The outbreak began a year after two Samoan infants died from botched MMR vaccine injections. Two nurses were sent to prison for mixing the vaccine with expired muscle relaxant.
After their deaths, fear spread across the island and misinformation flooded social media, eroding public trust. The country also temporarily suspended the MMR vaccines.
Vaccination rates were already low, but Dr. Robert Thomsen, Samoa’s deputy director of public health, said the infants’ deaths made it more difficult to convince families to vaccinate their children. “It really shook the trust of the people,” he said.
Just before the outbreak, thousands of people visited Samoa for a regional sporting event and a religious conference. The influx of visitors, low vaccination coverage, and mistrust in the MMR vaccine created a recipe for disaster.
When the virus arrived — believed to have been introduced by a traveler from New Zealand — it spread like wildfire. More than 5,700 people were infected in about three months.
“I saw what a whole society ravaged by measles will look like, and it’s not pretty,” said Josh Green in 2019, Hawaii’s then-lieutenant governor.
To combat the crisis, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries sent medical teams to vaccinate thousands of people. Green, now Hawaii’s governor, led a team of about 70 doctors and nurses.
Families who needed vaccines placed red pieces of clothing outside their homes. “Those red sashes or the red ties — ribbons on houses everywhere — guided us,” Green said. “People knew they had to somehow defeat what was taking their children.”
Dr. Vija Sehgal, one of the responding pediatricians, said the impact was devastating. “At this point in time, the population is scared and very willing to be immunized,” he said. “It was really all hands on deck and at this point in time, Samoa had shut down already.”
While Samoa’s public health system isn’t as robust as other developed nations, Green and Sehgal say a similar outbreak could happen in the U.S.
“You’re going to see the same thing in rural Georgia and rural Texas and rural Hawaii, New York, anywhere, as you saw in Samoa, as vaccine rates plummet,” Green said. “You will see outbreaks.”
Samoan families traditionally bury their dead on family land, often in front of their homes. For Fa’atauu’u, the pain remains fresh.
Sitting on her daughter’s grave, she pleads: “Please, I’m begging every parent in America. Please, get your child vaccinated.”
