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.
This man is out there trying to murder his living family.
his children.
he wants to bring back the hermain cain awards.
It’ll be manslaughter, unless they find evidence that he knew he was a shill.
Though, I wonder if this sort of admission is anything welfare services can work with.
It’s illegal to intentionally infect another person with a disease, no matter what your beliefs are
It’s also illegal to rape kids, but here we are in 2026.
Manslaughter is illegal ya silly
Wait, a man’s laughter is illegal? I THOUGHT THEY MADE COMEDY LEGAL AGAIN
Well, there used to be a thing where you would put your child in the way of mumps because a child getting mumps is much less severe than an adult. There may have been other such diseases that it was better to have as a child than as an adult.
This was before vaccines which basically does the same thing.
At what point does negligence/stupidity outweigh intent. If you go on YouTube and say you don’t believe bullets kill people, and that’s all a sham brought about by gun companies, “it’s very clear people like 50 cent have been shot numerous times and it hardly effected him.”. Then go and push someone in front of a shooter at a gun range, I can’t imagine any judge would side with, well fuck he’s just stupid enough to believe bullets don’t kill people and call it manslaughter. Seems like premeditated murder attempts to me.
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. The “Iron Lung”
I saw people older than me in the 70s with limps, dead arms, braces and the reason was always polio.
But then God intervened and stopped it that same summer as the Salk vaccine was used.
I think using ignorance as a defense is beyond time to end. It’s so easy in this day to look things up. The American education system has intentionally made people less clever, but at some point it’s your fault for never looking into anything. This guy needs to be arrested for threatening violence on his children. It’s no different than if a parent said they wanted to put their child in a fight with a dog with the excuse of toughening them up.
It’ll be manslaughter, unless they find evidence that he knew he was a shill.
and if they do find evidence he was a shill, it’s 1st degree murder.
Though, I wonder if this sort of admission is anything welfare services can work with.
In the current environment, I’m not sure any agency can work with it, unless it’s advancing some hidden corrupt agenda.
Sorry. I prefer my children alive.
Del Bigtree does not. He is a danger to children and should have his taken from him. Worthless fathers are much better than he, they don’t intentionally harm children.
I think the fact that we pretty much crushed so many diseases via vaccines and other care in the 20th century that many forgot what it was like to live in the shadow of those diseases all the time. That lack of familiarity (the one thay spurred the acceptance of vaccines and treatment) is what is fueling this shit today.
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.
This is my conclusion too. It takes roughly 2 generations for all lessons to be forgotten. Add in a lack of empathy or critical thinking and here we are.
I think you only hit the point on the 2nd-part:
some people are incapable of empathy OR/AND correct-reasoning, & that supplants ALL arguments.
Don’t need to have the population forget what it really means: the “Israelis” who push evil in Palestine, blatently, are what they are, in spite of their-ancestors claiming Jeremiah & Isaiah as their justifications…
& remap that into Russia/Ukraina, & you get the same thing.
& remap that into what Canada did to the Indigenous people, & you still get the same thing.
I think that sociopathy ( induced ) & psychopathy ( intrinsic ) is, when selected-for, MUCH more significant than people are assuming, in controlling Earth’s history.
_ /\ _
In a sane world his children would be taken from him and he would be jailed for reckless child endangerment.
Can’t let your kid walk to school but can do this ? Fuck that
You actually have a point, the guy is openly discussing ways to harm his kids and is in all evidence not a safe person for them to be with.
Good. I hope he gets so mad from people getting vaccinated that he just explodes.
Its completely insane this isnt legally child abuse. These people are allowed to try and kill their children for a cult.
It would be different if he was just against vaccination. He wants to infect his children with polio. This is cruel and unusual punishment and mistreatment of children. Minimum he should be limiting exposure, this is an intentionally harmful parent.
No: this is actually an opportunity to gamble with his life:
infect him, 1st.
IF it causes significant harm, AND he still wants to do that to his children, THEN CPS takes his children from him.
IF it doesn’t cause harm, THEN keep getting him with other things that people vaccinate against, until finally he experiences WHY vaccinations are used.
THEN if he still wants that harm on his own children, take them away from him.
corner them between correct-logic, actual-evidence, & their-own-ideology, & use the resultant-leverage against their ideological machiavellianisms.
( this would be better than the appeasement that is normal, nowadays, anyways, for our world’s viability )
_ /\ _
Except the supreme court has said there needs to be a religious exemption to these things. So then it becomes voluntary. Then there’s some kind of cultural association attached to it (MAGA, for instance.)
Imo, other parents should be able to sue you/fine you if your kid gets the disease and your kid wasn’t vaccinated. Its a type of reckless behavior like speeding in a school zone or shitting on a sidewalk in front of a public toilet.
The main reason lifespans were so short in the past was because so many kids died of disease that it pushed the avg lifespan down with it. I used to work to restore old cemeteries with my local historical society. I’d find family plots that would have 3-4 kids all dying within a few months of each other.
Im starting to feel these fools think they have the good genes that will throw off the disease and its those other undesirables that will die.
Everyone thinks they have strong immunity and good genes until it hits them in the face.
More like God’s Plan, these fools don’t understand genes, but yeah same outcome.
I’d find family plots that would have 3-4 kids all dying within a few months of each other.
Worse still, in places like New England, when one family member would die right after another – after another – after another – they’d attribute this to vampires, burning the bodies of the recently deceased to ensure they could not come back, and on occasion using some of the burnt bits as a “preventative” for the living to consume so as to not be taken themselves. It didn’t work.
It wasn’t until the late 19th century they finally figured out that tuberculosis (aka “consumption”) is a bacterial disease that is extremely communicable in tight quarters, and that the living who nursed the recently dead would naturally be next because it’s a disease they caught from nursing their own sick.
And even then a number of them held on to old beliefs, long after others had figured it out:
When rural Rhode Islanders moved west into Connecticut, locals perceived them as “uneducated” and “vicious”, which was partially due to the Rhode Islanders’ beliefs in vampirism. Newspapers were also sceptical, calling belief in vampirism an “old superstition” and a “curious idea”.
The only reason we are not now dealing with tuberculosis on a wide scale is because of – anti-vaxxers cover your eyes – vaccines, though it too is now coming back, and in drug-resistant forms.
I’m sure you already know all this working in old cemeteries, but I thought I’d mention it: superstition to fill in the blanks and address fear goes back as far as time immemorial.
This is the problem with vaccines, they’ve been so successful that demagogues and morons exploit the fading memory of diseases to play on people’s ignorance and our fears from not understanding medicine and biology.
deleted by creator
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.
sadly, most human beings trust their own ‘judgement’ of direct and anecdotal experiences far more than they will ever trust the abstractions of science and mathematics that prove them wrong
I prefer letting my kids get hit by cars traveling at 100mph instead of having cars with brakes and speed limits.
JFC, people like this are absolutely infuriating.
I wonder if a big part of his psychology here is that by being the contrarian and going against X you create the illusion that you are wiser that others. The hipster effect.
On the plus side people like this weed themselves out of the gene pool. Too bad he is taking his kids down with him.
Please be The Onion. Please be The Onion.
Fucking damnit
Well how about you die mad you abusive piece of shit?
Did you know that Gandhi was an anti-vaxxer?
Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time. Conscientious objectors should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defence of their conviction.
And
…there is absolutely no need to be afraid of small-pox.
I cannot also help feeling that vaccination is a violation of the dictates of religion and morality.
The vaccine is a filthy substance, and it is foolish to expect that one kind of filth can be removed by another.
Until he wasn’t.
I can’t sleep. These kiddies are fading away like little buds. I feel the weight of their deaths on my shoulders. I prevailed upon their parents not to get them vaccinated. Now the children are passing away. It may be, I am afraid, the result of my ignorance and obstinacy; and so I feel very unhappy.
It turns out that if you expose children, unprotected, to deadly diseases, they die.
I wonder who this fucknut is gonna blame when his kids take an “unexpected” turn for the worse?
Well, seems like he learned his lesson. Would have been better if he had learned it before his bad advice got children killed, but at least he learned instead of doubling down.
Right??? And the thing that stands out to me as full-on banana-pants crazy is how he famously learned his lesson, was humbled by his own platform, and turned it all around; yet, these fuckface anti-vaxxers insist on only publishing what he would have argued to have been the greatest mistake of his life, and use an appeal to celebrity and misinformation by omission to support their repeatedly proven-wrong fetishes. It’s like calling Neil Armstrong a champion for incontinence because he repeatedly peed his pants in space.
To be totally fair to the guy. It looks like he said the first quote around 1906. Peoplr were taking lymph or pus material from diseased individuals and then directly applying them to open scratches/wounds as a form of vaccine.
They were nowhere near the quality of vaccines we have today, and the first deactivated viral vaccine wasn’t created until much later.
I’m genuinely upset that you are a dangerous moron.
