Samoa’s top health official on Monday denounced as “a complete lie” remarks that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made during his bid to become U.S. health secretary, rejecting his claim that some who died in the country’s 2019 measles epidemic didn’t have the disease.

“We don’t know what was killing them,” Kennedy said during tense U.S. Senate hearings last week on whether he should oversee the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, suggesting that the cause of the 83 deaths — mostly of children under age 5 — was unclear.