Del Bigtree, a longtime ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., isn’t just anti-vaccine. He’s pro-infection.

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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  • UnspecificGravity@piefed.socialEnglish
    112·
    15 hours ago

    A reminder that the human brain has not changed since modern humans emerged about 300,000 years ago.

    Think about what that means.

    The people who spent millennia throwing rocks at the moon, drawing stick figures on walls and hunting mammoths with pointy sticks? That’s just us. That is exactly what we would be doing in that time and place. The people that burned witches? That is us too. Those people had the exact same capacity for intelligence, compassion, and reason as we do.

    What I am saying is that the capacity for human stupidity is boundless. It is our intelligence and civilization that defies our nature.

    • paper_moon@lemmy.world
      5·
      15 hours ago

      There’s this weird phenomenon that people tend to think those in the past were less intelligent then now, when really it was history being spin a certain way. For example: the witch burning thing, most people accusing witches, etc didn’t actually beleive that shit. Its coming to light in modern times, that they realized they could grab land and money by accusing vulnerable people, and then just taking their land when they couldn’t defend themselves against a confession under torture.

      Keep in mind all the advancements and process humans have made in mathemathics and sciences over the last few thousand years. Those people weren’t stupid, if they doing stupid things, its probably because they were evil (like burning witches for their own financial gain)

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 hours ago

        For example: the witch burning thing, most people accusing witches, etc didn’t actually believe that shit. Its coming to light in modern times, that they realized they could grab land and money by accusing vulnerable people, and then just taking their land when they couldn’t defend themselves against a confession under torture.

        Sounds like the people running today’s megachurches. They might not actually believe any of what they are spinning, as long as the rubes are giving them enough money to keep them farting through silk and flying around in private jets (and probably some hookers and blow on the DL, I bet, too).

    • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      14 hours ago

      A reminder that the human brain has not changed since modern humans emerged about 300,000 years ago.

      It has changed in shape but not in size. Source

      Always a good thing to check the data before posting.

        • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          12 hours ago

          That theory has been challenged.

          Discussion

          DeSilva et al. (2021) propose that human brain size has decreased, and offer innovative reasons why this may be so, primarily focusing on a model of “group level cognition.” Our analysis of these data fails to find a decrease in human brain size over the last few thousands of years. When the large sample sizes of the most recent human samples are adjusted for, the pattern disappears, and the arguments no longer need to be invoked.

          We argue that, when examining questions of micro-evolutionary change, the analysis and data need to be appropriate for the specific scale of that hypothesis. Further, the data need to be otherwise relevant for the hypothesis being tested (see Houle et al., 2011). Given that the adoption of agriculture and the transition to complex societies occurred in different times at different places, the samples need to be specific enough to test the hypothesis across different times and populations, which does not appear to be the case in this instance.

          https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.963568/full