Del Bigtree, a longtime ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., isn’t just anti-vaccine. He’s pro-infection.
Over coffee at a Starbucks just outside Austin, Texas, Del Bigtree told me he wants his teenage son to catch polio. Measles, too. He’s considered driving his unvaccinated family to South Carolina, which is in the midst of a historic outbreak, so that they can all be exposed. He prefers pertussis—whooping cough—to the pertussis vaccine, which he later described to me as a “crime against children.” It’s not the diseases that Americans should be afraid of, Bigtree insists: It’s the shots that stop them.
Spreading that message is Bigtree’s lifework. He produced Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, a 2016 documentary that helped mainstream the modern anti-vaccine movement by alleging—spuriously—that the CDC suppressed evidence of vaccine harms. His weekly internet show, The HighWire With Del Bigtree, mostly targets the pharmaceutical industry and has helped raise millions for his nonprofit, the Informed Consent Action Network, which files lawsuits to overturn school vaccine mandates around the country. He’s been a close adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and served as communications director for Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign.
It’ll be manslaughter, unless they find evidence that he knew he was a shill.
Though, I wonder if this sort of admission is anything welfare services can work with.
I think using ignorance as a defense is beyond time to end. It’s so easy in this day to look things up. The American education system has intentionally made people less clever, but at some point it’s your fault for never looking into anything. This guy needs to be arrested for threatening violence on his children. It’s no different than if a parent said they wanted to put their child in a fight with a dog with the excuse of toughening them up.
At what point does negligence/stupidity outweigh intent. If you go on YouTube and say you don’t believe bullets kill people, and that’s all a sham brought about by gun companies, “it’s very clear people like 50 cent have been shot numerous times and it hardly effected him.”. Then go and push someone in front of a shooter at a gun range, I can’t imagine any judge would side with, well fuck he’s just stupid enough to believe bullets don’t kill people and call it manslaughter. Seems like premeditated murder attempts to me.
Never. That’s the difference between murder and manslaughter, it’s literally the definition.
In your example you’d just have a very hard time convincing a jury that anyone is really stupid enough to believe bullets aren’t deadly, whereas I already believe that people are serious about measles and whooping cough being fine. Diseases like measles, while dealt, generally are not as deadly as bullets - risk of death is about 0.3% Vs about 20% from what I found. That makes it much easier to believe that someone has got it wrong.
So if he gave his family polio it would be equivalent to shooting himself and wife, and hitting his kids in the face with a shovel. Manslaughter you say
Given polio’s deadliness it would be much easier to get a murder conviction in that situation, sure. You’d still have to prove it was intentional though, because that is still the definition of murder. If a defence case is that the accused is not guilty of murder because they didn’t intend to kill the victim, and the jury isn’t sure that’s not true, they mustn’t convict.
You mentioned “negligence” in your comment above. If you’re claiming negligence, that is going to, by definition, fall under manslaughter laws. In some jurisdictions there is even the charge of “gross negligence manslaughter” which this would probably fall under.
Even the treatments in the past are surreal if you haven’t seen them. The “Iron Lung”
I saw people older than me in the 70s with limps, dead arms, braces and the reason was always polio.
But then God intervened and stopped it that same summer as the Salk vaccine was used.
It’s illegal to intentionally infect another person with a disease, no matter what your beliefs are
It’s also illegal to rape kids, but here we are in 2026.
Well, there used to be a thing where you would put your child in the way of mumps because a child getting mumps is much less severe than an adult. There may have been other such diseases that it was better to have as a child than as an adult.
This was before vaccines which basically does the same thing.
Manslaughter is illegal ya silly
Wait, a man’s laughter is illegal? I THOUGHT THEY MADE COMEDY LEGAL AGAIN
In the current environment, I’m not sure any agency can work with it, unless it’s advancing some hidden corrupt agenda.
and if they do find evidence he was a shill, it’s 1st degree murder.