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.
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.