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.
Worse still, in places like New England, when one family member would die right after another – after another – after another – they’d attribute this to vampires, burning the bodies of the recently deceased to ensure they could not come back, and on occasion using some of the burnt bits as a “preventative” for the living to consume so as to not be taken themselves. It didn’t work.
It wasn’t until the late 19th century they finally figured out that tuberculosis (aka “consumption”) is a bacterial disease that is extremely communicable in tight quarters, and that the living who nursed the recently dead would naturally be next because it’s a disease they caught from nursing their own sick.
And even then a number of them held on to old beliefs, long after others had figured it out:
The only reason we are not now dealing with tuberculosis on a wide scale is because of – anti-vaxxers cover your eyes – vaccines, though it too is now coming back, and in drug-resistant forms.
I’m sure you already know all this working in old cemeteries, but I thought I’d mention it: superstition to fill in the blanks and address fear goes back as far as time immemorial.