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.

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  • Chaotic_Altruist@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    It would be different if he was just against vaccination. He wants to infect his children with polio. This is cruel and unusual punishment and mistreatment of children. Minimum he should be limiting exposure, this is an intentionally harmful parent.

    • Paragone@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      No: this is actually an opportunity to gamble with his life:

      infect him, 1st.

      IF it causes significant harm, AND he still wants to do that to his children, THEN CPS takes his children from him.

      IF it doesn’t cause harm, THEN keep getting him with other things that people vaccinate against, until finally he experiences WHY vaccinations are used.

      THEN if he still wants that harm on his own children, take them away from him.


      corner them between correct-logic, actual-evidence, & their-own-ideology, & use the resultant-leverage against their ideological machiavellianisms.

      ( this would be better than the appeasement that is normal, nowadays, anyways, for our world’s viability )

      _ /\ _