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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    21 hours ago

    Sounds like a job for child protective services. A father wants to intentionally infect his children with known fatal diseases, call CPS today!

  • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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    23 hours ago

    I think the fact that we pretty much crushed so many diseases via vaccines and other care in the 20th century that many forgot what it was like to live in the shadow of those diseases all the time. That lack of familiarity (the one thay spurred the acceptance of vaccines and treatment) is what is fueling this shit today.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      This is my conclusion too. It takes roughly 2 generations for all lessons to be forgotten. Add in a lack of empathy or critical thinking and here we are.

      • Paragone@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        I think you only hit the point on the 2nd-part:

        some people are incapable of empathy OR/AND correct-reasoning, & that supplants ALL arguments.

        Don’t need to have the population forget what it really means: the “Israelis” who push evil in Palestine, blatently, are what they are, in spite of their-ancestors claiming Jeremiah & Isaiah as their justifications…

        & remap that into Russia/Ukraina, & you get the same thing.

        & remap that into what Canada did to the Indigenous people, & you still get the same thing.

        I think that sociopathy ( induced ) & psychopathy ( intrinsic ) is, when selected-for, MUCH more significant than people are assuming, in controlling Earth’s history.

        _ /\ _

    • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      You’re not wrong, but it’s not as long ago as you might have been led to believe.

      Boomers and older GenXers are very familiar with polio, for example, because the Salk and Sabin vaccines did not come out until right around 1960. We all knew someone who’d had it, maybe even still had the evidence of it in a limp or a cane, or had died of it. Polio wasn’t the only disease, either: the 1968 influenza carried off a father of one of my friends, and he was only in his thirties. As a child I personally almost died from a reaction to the smallpox vaccine, and I still have a huge scar from it (way better than getting smallpox, though).

      The Silent Generation had far worse than we did, and they’re not all dead yet.

      So from where I’m sitting it’s not so much lack of personal familiarity as a willful forgetting aided by the skillful use of propaganda.

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Here’s a ruthless, objectively-convincing, cure, that in saner times would be outright-immoral, but when millions-of-lives-are-on-the-line, then morality becomes greyed ( same as intentionally assassinating Hitler before he highjacked Germany becomes morally-greyed, once one knows what he was doing later )…

    Infect this guy with rabies, & then refuse to let him use vaccines to survive it.


    WHEN humankind begins fighting-for-its-survival-itself, THEN this kind of ruthless-pragmatism will become actual, exactly as killing White-Blue-Red Russians is now a national-survival-requirement for Ukrainians.

    So long as humankind continues holding its head “in the sand” ( as ostrichs do not do: they aren’t intentionally-stupid the way we are ), then protecting pathogen-incarnate human action will continue, & the consequences will continue wiping-out entire-populations’ viability.

    ( I’m only pointing this perspective/point out: MY plan is to remove ME from this world, not to fight-for your-race’s survival: your-race won’t, so be silenced from universe, then. That is “valid”, obviously. )

    _ /\ _

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      12 hours ago

      rabies kill too fast, give him HIV, he is not allowed to anti-retroviral meds. so he can have immunocompromised related diseases and infections.

  • TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Its completely insane this isnt legally child abuse. These people are allowed to try and kill their children for a cult.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Except the supreme court has said there needs to be a religious exemption to these things. So then it becomes voluntary. Then there’s some kind of cultural association attached to it (MAGA, for instance.)

      Imo, other parents should be able to sue you/fine you if your kid gets the disease and your kid wasn’t vaccinated. Its a type of reckless behavior like speeding in a school zone or shitting on a sidewalk in front of a public toilet.

    • Chaotic_Altruist@lemmy.zip
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      21 hours 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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        15 hours 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 )

        _ /\ _

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    15 hours ago

    Every time I hear about Robert F Kennedy all I can think is fancy being a disappointment to the Kennedy name.

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The main reason lifespans were so short in the past was because so many kids died of disease that it pushed the avg lifespan down with it. I used to work to restore old cemeteries with my local historical society. I’d find family plots that would have 3-4 kids all dying within a few months of each other.

    • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      I’d find family plots that would have 3-4 kids all dying within a few months of each other.

      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:

      When rural Rhode Islanders moved west into Connecticut, locals perceived them as “uneducated” and “vicious”, which was partially due to the Rhode Islanders’ beliefs in vampirism. Newspapers were also sceptical, calling belief in vampirism an “old superstition” and a “curious idea”.

      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.

    • HubertManne@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      Im starting to feel these fools think they have the good genes that will throw off the disease and its those other undesirables that will die.

    • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
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      21 hours ago

      while i’m sure it contributed, I was under the impression that it was largely the transition to hospital births that increased life expectancy.

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    & Peter Thiel is pushing that the woke are the anti-christ.

    Why be surprised by evil’s reversal-of-frame-of-reference?

    https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/

    Simply scrolling down that page, reading the section-headlines, provides enough…

    I think he’s got a number of things wrong, like the mortal-head-wound NOT being the missed rifleshot, but instead being the stroke, MRI, & whatever else’s involved in his current, temporary, dementia, & obviously I hold that the miracle-cure will happen, in our soon-future ( 2026-02-25 as I’m writing this ).

    But overall that page is spot-on, at-least in identifying which of the Christian prophecies need be considered, for matches, in the present unfolding…

    Pushing lies is their-religion: pushing that the woke are anti-christ contradicts their own bible, but it is their-religion, not their-bible, which they hold holy…

    The anti-women’s-validity/rights movement which gaslights about “protecting” women…

    The fact that the one they claim as their LORD was an exorcist & healer, but they push evil & harm…

    Welcome to humankind’s setting-up of global tantrum/pogrom/deathmatch!

    Humankind’s unconscious ego-myth is MUCH more important than this-world’s life, right?


    What’s really sad/comical about all this, is that it doesn’t even matter which “religion” one is in, the unconscious-motivation to enforce ego-myth’s apocalypse is unstoppable!

    so ALL the Abrahamic religions are working on enforcing it, coherently.

    & Modi’s Hindutva India’s working on enforcing it regionally in Asia, as China’s Communist Party’s doing, too.

    etc.

    All the appearances are mere “makeup”: the REAL war is underlying that, our unconscious-mind’s ego-“godhood” addiction, & if evil’s the way to “make that real”, then evil’s what humankind’s enforcing, until something ( consequences ) force-breaks humankind’s collective ignorance-ego from this world ( 2080’s, at the earliest, IF this world’s Great Filter has ANY survivors, at all ).

    See it for what it is: unconscious-ignorance “establishing” that its “power” is the ONLY LORD, & no matter what has to be broken to enforce/“prove” it, that’ll happen.

    All the details are mere “makeup”.

    This is what happens, at a whole-planet-scale, when an individual addict is fighting for their life against their-own unconscious-mind’s addiction, & their unconscious-mind holds that addiction is “greater” than their life.

    Same process, just “upscaled” to planet-size, from individual-size, is all.

    The unconscious-ignorance-addiction being the true “driver” of the process is identical, in both cases.

    Just that we’ve got entire-classes-of-people in planet-scale, whereas an individual would have only their SurfaceMind fighting against their unconscious-LifeMind, so it’d be more 1-on-1 mind-against-mind, in the individual-case.

    Planetscale it’s groups-against-groups, obviously.

    _ /\ _

  • fartographer@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Did you know that Gandhi was an anti-vaxxer?

    Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time. Conscientious objectors should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defence of their conviction.

    And

    …there is absolutely no need to be afraid of small-pox.

    I cannot also help feeling that vaccination is a violation of the dictates of religion and morality.

    The vaccine is a filthy substance, and it is foolish to expect that one kind of filth can be removed by another.

    Until he wasn’t.

    I can’t sleep. These kiddies are fading away like little buds. I feel the weight of their deaths on my shoulders. I prevailed upon their parents not to get them vaccinated. Now the children are passing away. It may be, I am afraid, the result of my ignorance and obstinacy; and so I feel very unhappy.

    It turns out that if you expose children, unprotected, to deadly diseases, they die.

    I wonder who this fucknut is gonna blame when his kids take an “unexpected” turn for the worse?

    • Saledovil@sh.itjust.works
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      24 hours ago

      Well, seems like he learned his lesson. Would have been better if he had learned it before his bad advice got children killed, but at least he learned instead of doubling down.

      • fartographer@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        Right??? And the thing that stands out to me as full-on banana-pants crazy is how he famously learned his lesson, was humbled by his own platform, and turned it all around; yet, these fuckface anti-vaxxers insist on only publishing what he would have argued to have been the greatest mistake of his life, and use an appeal to celebrity and misinformation by omission to support their repeatedly proven-wrong fetishes. It’s like calling Neil Armstrong a champion for incontinence because he repeatedly peed his pants in space.

    • BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip
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      21 hours ago

      To be totally fair to the guy. It looks like he said the first quote around 1906. Peoplr were taking lymph or pus material from diseased individuals and then directly applying them to open scratches/wounds as a form of vaccine.

      They were nowhere near the quality of vaccines we have today, and the first deactivated viral vaccine wasn’t created until much later.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      No bro, it’s everyone else who is stupid. Bigtree is the true genius who is fighting back against the conspiracy of vaccines that have been perpetuated by evil powerful people for over a century.

  • Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    He is upset that people don’t give a shit what he thinks. If his fantasies were of any interest to the majority of us they wouldn’t be fantasies.

  • mcv@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    Of the 4 Chaos gods of Warhammer, I could understand people being tempted by power, sex or violence, but disease never made sense to me. Who would want to be a Nurgle cultist? Now we know.

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      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.

      Edit: I’ll add more, after thinking about this more, and my experience watching a friend fall completely down the evangelical christian whirlpool, and how they now address every issue in the world and society with a weird smile and an incantation how it’s “all part of God’s plan” I think there is a definite, intentional juxtaposition between the peace and divinity that followers of Nurgle feel despite the fact that they are literally rotting, walking death. It reminds me of that weird bliss that Christian converts in particular feel after successfully convincing their own brains that everything positive they feel is a direct result of God, not their own brain just following instructions to make them feel better after meditation/prayer, despite so much wrong with the entire world and their own belief system.

    • ChadGPT2@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Nurgle grants eternal life, after a fashion. Easier for me to understand than these IRL death cultists…

  • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Meanwhile I dream of releasing GMO mosquitoes that detect disease and produce vaccines whether anyone likes it or not.

  • SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    H5N1 is going to be a worldwide pandemic. The only postindustrial nation that won’t have the vaccine, is the United States. Millions will die.

    • Paragone@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      After the removal of USAID, you can put money on ebola going global, sooner-or-later.

      The Canadians had a vaccine for it, developed at a university ?in BC?, but they sold that to big-pharma, so it wouldn’t be used the way our world needed it to be used, for a little money.

      Humankind isn’t viable, with that kind of “managing” being normal.

      The Great Filter will extinguish or nearly-extinguish our intentionally-ignorant kind, late this century.

      “you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink”,

      “you can bring a world-species to uprightness/accountable-responsibility, but you can’t make them embody it”.

      Ebola’ll happen.

      Don’t know when, but it’ll happen.

      Marburg nearly happened, last-year, iirc… ( 50% lethality, normally? 80%? it was caught in the EU, in people who had traveled. )

      _ /\ _