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.
I wonder if a big part of his psychology here is that by being the contrarian and going against X you create the illusion that you are wiser that others. The hipster effect.
On the plus side people like this weed themselves out of the gene pool. Too bad he is taking his kids down with him.
hipster effect, that’s a good one. every hipster i know is a raging insufferable hypocrite who rallies against ‘the man’. meanwhile endlessly chasing after ‘alt’ versions of the same shit everyone else is chasing after to prove how successful and superior they are. they will hate on Brooks Brothers wearing people, but they are willing to spend $100 for one ironic T shirt…
all image, no substance.
Taking his kids down with him is kinda necessary to be removed from the gene pool.