'I Genuinely Am Upset That Your Kids Are Vaccinated'

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/del-bigtree-pro-infection-polio-measles/686092/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/QZ1DL

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.

For years, Bigtree and Kennedy echoed each other’s positions, first on childhood vaccination and, later, on COVID. They’ve both argued that vaccines cause autism, that the CDC is corrupt, and that Anthony Fauci has committed crimes. Kennedy—who, like Bigtree, has no formal medical training—has questioned the idea that the polio vaccine wiped out polio in the United States and, in 2024, said that if he had young kids, he wouldn’t give them the MMR vaccine. Such views can be deadly; last year, two unvaccinated children in West Texas died of measles.

These days, Kennedy chooses his words more carefully, whereas Bigtree has remained just as proudly committed to discouraging Americans from getting vaccinated. If Kennedy is the face of the movement, Bigtree is more like its id—loud, unfiltered, and theatrically aggrieved.

*snip*

Fucking simpleminded sociopath