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.
Sounds like a job for child protective services. A father wants to intentionally infect his children with known fatal diseases, call CPS today!
Meanwhile I dream of releasing GMO mosquitoes that detect disease and produce vaccines whether anyone likes it or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its completely insane this isnt legally child abuse. These people are allowed to try and kill their children for a cult.
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.
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.
He hit all the stupid branches on the way down that Bigtree.
So unbelievably stupid.
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.
Yuck Fou
Stop pushing the Qtip when you feel resistance.
Oh okay…
RFK jr isn’t powerful or evil at all…
Did you also think the New York real-estate monster was going to drain the swamp?
So stupid.
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.
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.
while i’m sure it contributed, I was under the impression that it was largely the transition to hospital births that increased life expectancy.
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.
Everyone thinks they have strong immunity and good genes until it hits them in the face.
More like God’s Plan, these fools don’t understand genes, but yeah same outcome.
Sorry. I prefer my children alive.
Del Bigtree does not. He is a danger to children and should have his taken from him. Worthless fathers are much better than he, they don’t intentionally harm children.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because Papa Nurgle loves you!
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.
Nurgle grants eternal life, after a fashion. Easier for me to understand than these IRL death cultists…
Worshipping Anthraxus
“I genuinely am upset that your kids are vaccinated, because it’s keeping my kids from getting chickenpox. It’s keeping my kids from getting measles,” he told me. “I believe their health depends on them catching those live viruses.” I asked him if he wanted his kids to catch all of the illnesses against which American children are routinely vaccinated. “Yes,”
To me that really sounds a whole heck of a lot like an open admittance that he’d like his children to die painfully.
This is the problem with vaccines, they’ve been so successful that demagogues and morons exploit the fading memory of diseases to play on people’s ignorance and our fears from not understanding medicine and biology.
Same reason the US could bring back fascism. It’s easy for people who’ve never been touched by disease/war etc to believe it’s just always been like this. They don’t see the lives lost, the knowledge gained, or the lessons learned that gave them their privileges.
True, but as an older person who was growing up in the March of Dimes era (60s and 70s) when vaccines were considered a miracle of modern science and people were stopping Salk and Sabin in the streets, literally dropping to their knees on the sidewalk to thank them for their work on the polio vaccines (I’m not exaggerating), and we ALL personally knew either directly or indirectly someone with a cane or a limp or someone who had died of it, and were not at all distant from the recent springs and summers where one young person and then a couple others and then a few more would suddenly be sick before nightfall out of nowhere, and the still common long recoveries and iron lungs and the overwhelming dread of it all, where the fuck is my generation’s collective memory?
Hell, even Chuck McConnell is a walking polio survivor (as much as I hate to even think his name) and his own generation is not all dead yet. Where the fuck is their collective memory?
What you say is quite true, and I can even understand the ignorance of fascism to a degree from people far too young to remember or understand WWII, but not vaccines, not from my own generation and older.
sadly, most human beings trust their own ‘judgement’ of direct and anecdotal experiences far more than they will ever trust the abstractions of science and mathematics that prove them wrong
Well how about you die mad you abusive piece of shit?
