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.
Having delved a little into that lore myself out of the same curiosity I learned that it’s actually a very appealing temptation in the warhammer 40k lore, it’s a promise of painless immortality and a perpetual celebration of the cycle of life and death. You don’t mind that you become a rotten, bloated monster filled with bugs… because you feel great and feel the warm embrace of a divine being that you know you will become a part of one day. It’s like distilled religion, with all the body-horror that goes with religion amped up to eleven.
Also, the people who are convinced to pledge their perpetual loyalty are usually victims of Nurgle’s own plagues and horrific diseases so the people who succumb are a bit “motivated” to make the pain and suffering end.
As with everything in the franchise, there is a direct allegory here to the way religions or imperialist ideologies spread, cause direct, targeted harm to the people, and then forces those people to either be consumed by the movement that is harming them or be killed.