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.
Never. That’s the difference between murder and manslaughter, it’s literally the definition.
In your example you’d just have a very hard time convincing a jury that anyone is really stupid enough to believe bullets aren’t deadly, whereas I already believe that people are serious about measles and whooping cough being fine. Diseases like measles, while dealt, generally are not as deadly as bullets - risk of death is about 0.3% Vs about 20% from what I found. That makes it much easier to believe that someone has got it wrong.
So if he gave his family polio it would be equivalent to shooting himself and wife, and hitting his kids in the face with a shovel. Manslaughter you say
Given polio’s deadliness it would be much easier to get a murder conviction in that situation, sure. You’d still have to prove it was intentional though, because that is still the definition of murder. If a defence case is that the accused is not guilty of murder because they didn’t intend to kill the victim, and the jury isn’t sure that’s not true, they mustn’t convict.
You mentioned “negligence” in your comment above. If you’re claiming negligence, that is going to, by definition, fall under manslaughter laws. In some jurisdictions there is even the charge of “gross negligence manslaughter” which this would probably fall under.
Even the treatments in the past are surreal if you haven’t seen them.