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.
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.
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.
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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.
Its completely insane this isnt legally child abuse. These people are allowed to try and kill their children for a cult.
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.
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 )
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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.
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.
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.
More like God’s Plan, these fools don’t understand genes, but yeah same outcome.
Everyone thinks they have strong immunity and good genes until it hits them in the face.
while i’m sure it contributed, I was under the impression that it was largely the transition to hospital births that increased life expectancy.
Sounds like a job for child protective services. A father wants to intentionally infect his children with known fatal diseases, call CPS today!
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.
This man is out there trying to murder his living family.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Manslaughter is illegal ya silly
Wait, a man’s laughter is illegal? I THOUGHT THEY MADE COMEDY LEGAL AGAIN
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.
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.
he wants to bring back the hermain cain awards.
his children.
Of the 4 Chaos gods of Warhammer, I could understand people being tempted by power, sex or violence, but disease never made sense to me. Who would want to be a Nurgle cultist? Now we know.
Having delved a little into that lore myself out of the same curiosity I learned that it’s actually a very appealing temptation in the warhammer 40k lore, it’s a promise of painless immortality and a perpetual celebration of the cycle of life and death. You don’t mind that you become a rotten, bloated monster filled with bugs… because you feel great and feel the warm embrace of a divine being that you know you will become a part of one day. It’s like distilled religion, with all the body-horror that goes with religion amped up to eleven.
Also, the people who are convinced to pledge their perpetual loyalty are usually victims of Nurgle’s own plagues and horrific diseases so the people who succumb are a bit “motivated” to make the pain and suffering end.
As with everything in the franchise, there is a direct allegory here to the way religions or imperialist ideologies spread, cause direct, targeted harm to the people, and then forces those people to either be consumed by the movement that is harming them or be killed.
Edit: I’ll add more, after thinking about this more, and my experience watching a friend fall completely down the evangelical christian whirlpool, and how they now address every issue in the world and society with a weird smile and an incantation how it’s “all part of God’s plan” I think there is a definite, intentional juxtaposition between the peace and divinity that followers of Nurgle feel despite the fact that they are literally rotting, walking death. It reminds me of that weird bliss that Christian converts in particular feel after successfully convincing their own brains that everything positive they feel is a direct result of God, not their own brain just following instructions to make them feel better after meditation/prayer, despite so much wrong with the entire world and their own belief system.
Nurgle grants eternal life, after a fashion. Easier for me to understand than these IRL death cultists…
Because Papa Nurgle loves you!
Worshipping Anthraxus
So unbelievably stupid.
No bro, it’s everyone else who is stupid. Bigtree is the true genius who is fighting back against the conspiracy of vaccines that have been perpetuated by evil powerful people for over a century.
Stop pushing the Qtip when you feel resistance.
Yuck Fou
Oh okay…
RFK jr isn’t powerful or evil at all…
Did you also think the New York real-estate monster was going to drain the swamp?
So stupid.
The amount of absolute stupidity these days is shocking.
It was always there, the internet just gave them leverage to find each other and make professional sounding networks of absolutely rock stupid fucking people.
It’s honestly the biggest downside of the internet.
Because pro-asbestos and anti-seatbelt people existed, but they didn’t have megaphones to reach the whole world.
Yeah you start to see this stupidity increase in size with every major information transmission breakthrough. A lot of these people would probably be hit with a big stick for being stupid and causing problems historically.
Because pro-asbestos and anti-seatbelt people existed, but they didn’t have megaphones to reach the whole world.
Here’s the question: Idiots and wise people both have this megaphone to reach the world. Why do the idiots seem to succeed much more often?
For the same reason people think Kent Hovind and Ben Shapiro are smart, it takes time and energy to explain why someone is wrong whereas the claim that oneself is right takes less energy. Compare say a Miniminuteman or Stefan Milo to the average pseudoscience video, the pseudoscience video can throw out 20 claims in the time it takes for someone to explain something that is actually correct.
Also the natural social defenses against this type of shit are effectively bypassed by the ability for idiots to communicate and propagate their ideas. Historically communities had the learned, the experienced, and the wise who could generally call bullshit or otherwise deal with the problem directly, nowadays shaming, beating, and killing are notable less effective.
Because most people, even including people who aren’t complete idiots, want to be told what they want to hear more than they want to be faced with hard truths. Simple as.
they have done studies.
truth is more cognitively difficult to obtain and it is not emotionally rewarding.
fiction and fantasy is easy to process, and it’s much more emotionally rewarding.
Just like our bodies want to get fat and lazy unless we otherwise force them not to, our brains are the same way.
People can become smarter and value good mental work, just like they can get fitter and start feeling the rewards of fitness. But there is a massive gulf you have to overcome to get there where it is incredibly painful and difficult and most people give up rather than push through the pain and difficulty.
because people find confidence attractive and appealing. for most people, blind faith and never admitting you are wrong is seen as confident.
and wise people don’t seem confident because they acknowledge their limits and that they might be wrong.
human psychology is full of this stuff. it is not optimized to be truth seeking, it’s optimized to look for the easiest explanation and the one that unifies the tribe.
That’s insulting to rocks.
I swear that America - well the world at large, but especially America - has a reality problem.
I see the swell of anti-science anti-intellectual ‘experts’, the aggressive evangelicals beating queerfolk with holy books they haven’t read, the facebook addicts praising pyramid oils and herbs and crystals instead of medicine, the pearl-clutching racists shouting off statistics as justification to expel the ‘others’ … and I just wonder if we’ve collectively lost the ability to think.
because reality is boring and hard.
fantasy is very appealing and fun.
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Leaded gasoline really did a number on us not gonna lie.
Smartphones have been worse for people by a thousand miles.
At least lead can be taken out of the system with enough advocacy and effort. How do you get people to stop wanting to see interesting things? How do you get people to regrow their attention spans?
COVID-MANIA did a number on these people.
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. We can always be dumber. We might not be able to get any smarter.
There’s this weird phenomenon that people tend to think those in the past were less intelligent than now, when really it was history being spun a certain way. 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.
Keep in mind all the advancements and progress humans have made in mathemathics and sciences over the last few thousand years. Those people weren’t stupid, if they were doing stupid things, its probably because they were evil (like burning witches for their own financial gain)
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).
The Salem witch trials were just land thefts
Yup.
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.
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.
Obligatory semi tangential RSA animate post
Recent studies suggrst our brains have shrunk: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1191274/full
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
People need to start murdering these people. We are out of peaceful options.
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.
He hit all the stupid branches on the way down that Bigtree.
“I genuinely am upset that your kids are vaccinated, because it’s keeping my kids from getting chickenpox. It’s keeping my kids from getting measles,” he told me. “I believe their health depends on them catching those live viruses.” I asked him if he wanted his kids to catch all of the illnesses against which American children are routinely vaccinated. “Yes,”
To me that really sounds a whole heck of a lot like an open admittance that he’d like his children to die painfully.
Normal people: I need to have a medical procedure.
Republicants: I need for you to not have a medical procedure.
You misspelled ‘republicunts’
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.
