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.
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.