Over espresso at a Starbucks simply exterior Austin, Texas, Del Bigtree informed me he desires his teenage son to catch polio. Measles, too. He’s thought-about driving his unvaccinated household to South Carolina, which is within the midst of a historic outbreak, in order that they will all be uncovered. He prefers pertussis—whooping cough—to the pertussis vaccine, which he later described to me as a “crime in opposition to youngsters.” It’s not the illnesses that Individuals must be afraid of, Bigtree insists: It’s the pictures that cease them.
Spreading that message is Bigtree’s lifework. He produced Vaxxed: From Cowl-As much as Disastera 2016 documentary that helped mainstream the trendy anti-vaccine motion by alleging—spuriously—that the CDC suppressed proof of vaccine harms. His weekly web present, The HighWire With Del Bigtreelargely targets the pharmaceutical trade and has helped elevate tens of millions for his nonprofit, the Knowledgeable Consent Motion Community, which recordsdata lawsuits to overturn college vaccine mandates across the nation. He’s been an in depth adviser to Well being Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and served as communications director for Kennedy’s 2024 presidential marketing campaign.
For years, Bigtree and Kennedy echoed one another’s positions, first on childhood vaccination and, later, on COVID. They’ve each argued that vaccines trigger autism, that the CDC is corrupt, and that Anthony Fauci has dedicated crimes. Kennedy—who, like Bigtree, has no formal medical coaching—has questioned the concept that the polio vaccine worn out polio in the USA and, in 2024, stated that if he had younger youngsters, he wouldn’t give them the MMR vaccine. Such views may be lethal; final yr, two unvaccinated youngsters in West Texas died of measles.
Today, Kennedy chooses his phrases extra rigorously, whereas Bigtree has remained simply as proudly dedicated to discouraging Individuals from getting vaccinated. If Kennedy is the face of the motion, Bigtree is extra like its id—loud, unfiltered, and theatrically aggrieved.
He was additionally, for some time, a fellow dad at my son’s Waldorf college in Austin. Waldorf faculties have a tendency to draw mother and father who don’t need their youngsters to eat junk meals or play Fortnite; in addition they draw a good quantity who skip vaccines. Throughout the pandemic, I started to listen to appreciable chatter concerning the anti-vaccine celeb in our midst. Some mother and father I knew rolled their eyes at Bigtree’s on-line antics, which on the time included entertaining the concept that the pandemic was a hoax or maybe a plot to depopulate the Earth. However when he and his spouse pulled their two youngsters from the college and began a parent-run competitor with out COVID restrictions, a number of households I knew—fed up with distant courses and masks guidelines—adopted go well with and enrolled their youngsters. The college, Raphael Springs Academy, nonetheless exists, although the Bigtrees now not run it.
COVID expanded Bigtree’s attain and gave him a brand new illness to downplay. In June 2020, Bigtree stated on his present that everybody besides the very sickest Individuals ought to “really catch what’s only a widespread chilly.” COVID had already killed greater than 100,000 Individuals by then. (Right now, the World Well being Group counts greater than 7 million COVID-19 deaths globally, which incorporates greater than 1 million Individuals.) One other episode presupposed to show that masks are poisonous for youngsters. He speculated concerning the origin of the coronavirus, suggesting, variously, that it could be a bioweapon or a vaccine experiment gone awry. His viewers greater than tripled in just some months. (In July 2020, YouTube eliminated Bigtree’s channel for violating its phrases of service, so he decamped for the extra permissive video platform Rumble, which nonetheless hosts his present at this time.)
I used to be a kind of new viewers. Bigtree’s views had been harmful, significantly within the midst of a pandemic, however I used to be curious to study what my buddies noticed in him. I bear in mind being bowled over by his reckless recommendation however intrigued by his broadcast persona. Bigtree, who’s in his mid-50s, has swept-back silver hair and a penchant for button-down vests and rolled-up sleeves. On the air, his demeanor veers from folksy and affable to Alex Jones–lite. In Might 2020, throughout a joint tv look with Kennedy on Daystar, an evangelical Christian community, Bigtree warned {that a} doable COVID vaccine could be another step in pharmaceutical firms’ “try and take over the governments of the world.” He stated he so distrusted the vaccine that, when he grew to become severely anemic in 2021, he flew to a clinic in Cancún in order that he might get a transfusion of unvaccinated blood.
Bigtree makes two core claims about vaccination, each of that are demonstrably false. The primary is one which different anti-vaxxers, together with Kennedy, have been making for many years: that the obvious rise in autism circumstances within the U.S. because the Nineteen Nineties may be blamed on immunizations, reasonably than, as is the consensus amongst consultants, largely on broader diagnostic standards and higher surveillance. Bigtree believes that the handfuls of research which have discovered no proof of a connection between autism and vaccines are flawed, and that immunizations have by no means been correctly examined for security. “Why can’t we discover a double-blind placebo trial in any of the childhood vaccines?” he requested me. Actually, many early variations of vaccines, like ones for polio and measles, had been examined in opposition to unvaccinated teams or a placebo. (Bigtree and others within the anti-vaccine motion object to trials that didn’t use a saline-only placebo, or weren’t double-blind.) New vaccines, nonetheless, are often in contrast with older vaccines as a result of it’s thought-about unethical, to not point out unwise, to place youngsters liable to contracting a vaccine-preventable illness.
That brings us to Bigtree’s second, arguably extra outrageous declare: Vaccine-preventable sicknesses merely aren’t so dangerous. He desires youngsters, together with his personal, to get contaminated in order that they will keep away from the hazards of vaccination and develop extra sturdy immunity. They may have, as he put it, the “Ferrari of immunity,” whereas the remainder of us shall be driving round in Ford Pintos. He informed me he would favor to reside in a wholly unvaccinated nation, one the place the illnesses that sickened tens of millions within the first half of the twentieth century might unfold freely. That’s a frankly ridiculous notion, as I informed him later. However Bigtree is dedicated to it. “I genuinely am upset that your youngsters are vaccinated, as a result of it’s protecting my youngsters from getting chickenpox. It’s protecting my youngsters from getting measles,” he informed me. “I imagine their well being is dependent upon them catching these reside viruses.” I requested him if he needed his youngsters to catch all the sicknesses in opposition to which American youngsters are routinely vaccinated. “Sure,” he stated.
Bigtree little doubt desires what’s finest for his youngsters, and he’s not fallacious that, for some viruses, together with polio and pertussis, the vaccines given in the USA don’t reliably block transmission. However they do, as I identified to him, guard in opposition to the worst outcomes of these illnesses. And though he’s additionally proper that the majority contaminated youngsters have solely gentle signs, others will not be so fortunate. Pertussis killed about 4,000 individuals every year within the U.S. previous to the vaccine; throughout main outbreaks, annual polio deaths numbered within the 1000’s too.
I had questioned, earlier than assembly Bigtree, how honest the bellowing determine on The HighWire actually was. He’s not precisely a disinterested observer: Opposing vaccines has change into Bigtree’s livelihood. He realizes, as he informed me, that he might by no means return to his mainstream-television profession (he spent years as a producer on The Docsa syndicated medical-advice present). However after our conversations and prolonged textual content exchanges, I don’t doubt that Bigtree is genuinely—if incorrectly—satisfied that he’s stumbled onto, as he put it, “the most important cover-up of all occasions.”
He was much more specific, and extra heated, in our conversations than he’s on his present. He insisted, for example, that he was much less frightened about incapacity and dying from infectious illness than he was about vaccines inflicting profound autism. He informed me that he would settle for the dangers of contracting polio “over a one-in-fucking-12.5” likelihood—the ratio of boys discovered to have autism in some areas of California, in response to a 2025 CDC research—“of my son having an lack of ability to have a wedding, to have youngsters, to probably even wipe their very own ass, okay? That’s what drives me now.” (The CDC research included diagnoses throughout the autism spectrum; most individuals recognized with autism don’t have profound impairment.)
That type of depth performed a job in his exit from the formal management of the “Make America Wholesome Once more” motion. Bigtree was the unique CEO of MAHA Motion, the nonprofit began in late 2024 to advertise Kennedy’s agenda. However final April, through the dramatic measles outbreak in West Texas, Kennedy posted on X—precisely—that “the best strategy to stop the unfold of measles is the MMR vaccine.” Bigtree, in a reply, wrote—inaccurately—that the vaccine was “additionally some of the efficient methods to trigger autism.” Though Kennedy didn’t scold him for the general public rebuke, Bigtree determined not lengthy after the change that he ought to step down, he informed me. (Neither MAHA Motion nor the Division of Well being and Human Providers responded to a request for remark.)
Kennedy has delivered large wins for the anti-vaccine motion, together with shifting a number of vaccines off the CDC’s universally advisable checklist and undermining the company’s assertion on its web site that vaccines don’t trigger autism. However Bigtree continues to assume the well being secretary hasn’t gone far sufficient in his anti-vaccine agenda. He desires him, for example, to trash the remainder of the CDC’s checklist of advisable vaccines in order that faculties can’t mandate them. He additionally desires the federal regulation that limits pharmaceutical firms’ legal responsibility for vaccine accidents modified. And he desires HHS to conduct a research evaluating the well being of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. If that research doesn’t occur, Bigtree informed me, then Kennedy’s tenure can have been largely a failure.
However he nonetheless has religion. At a latest taping of The HighWire that I attended—an expert operation involving a number of cameras, a management room with a dozen computer systems, and several other producers scurrying round—Bigtree opened by praising Kennedy’s resolution to strike a number of vaccines from the advisable childhood schedule. “We’re clearly bathing in all of the success that we’ve had,” he informed viewers.
Though the primary yr of Kennedy’s tenure amounted to a flurry of anti-vaccine modifications at HHS, he has in latest weeks emphasised extra well-liked priorities, corresponding to the brand new protein-heavy meals pyramid. (The New York Instances has reported that Kennedy is backing away from vaccines, a minimum of for now, within the lead-up to the midterms.) However creating the MAHA motion was essentially a joint effort by Bigtree and Kennedy, and there’s been no indication that Kennedy is abandoning the anti-vaccine trigger or disavowing longtime allies like Bigtree. The 2 had dinner collectively late final yr, Bigtree informed me. Final fall, Kids’s Well being Protection, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy based, featured Bigtree as a speaker for its annual assembly. Bigtree, whose father is a minister, used his speech to embrace the anti-vax label, even calling God an anti-vaxxer.
After attending to know Bigtree and watching his present, I’m unsure that the label totally captures his philosophy. He’s greater than anti-vaccine: He’s pro-infection. And despite the fact that Kennedy hasn’t come out so strongly on the aspect of illnesses since changing into well being secretary, he has performed so beforehand, suggesting, for instance, that contracting measles might bolster the immune system later in life. Bigtree, for one, thinks his former boss shares his views. Kennedy “acknowledges the identical factor I do,” he informed me. “We might be more healthy if we had been catching these sicknesses.”
