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submitted 3 days ago by breakfastmtn@piefed.ca to c/news@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 24 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] stoly@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago

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.

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[-] ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world 24 points 2 days ago

Its completely insane this isnt legally child abuse. These people are allowed to try and kill their children for a cult.

[-] Fedizen@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] Chaotic_Altruist@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago

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.

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[-] dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 173 points 3 days ago

This man is out there trying to murder his living family.

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[-] fartographer@lemmy.world 31 points 3 days ago

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?

[-] Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] fartographer@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] Chaotic_Altruist@lemmy.zip 16 points 2 days ago

Sounds like a job for child protective services. A father wants to intentionally infect his children with known fatal diseases, call CPS today!

[-] mcv@lemmy.zip 26 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] ameancow@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] ChadGPT2@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

Nurgle grants eternal life, after a fashion. Easier for me to understand than these IRL death cultists…

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[-] Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 17 points 2 days ago

So unbelievably stupid.

[-] luthis@lemmy.nz 73 points 3 days ago

The amount of absolute stupidity these days is shocking.

[-] SnotFlickerman 38 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

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[-] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

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[-] aeiou@piefed.social 12 points 3 days ago

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.

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[-] hanrahan@slrpnk.net 50 points 3 days ago

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

[-] axx@slrpnk.net 13 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] ecvanalog@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

People need to start murdering these people. We are out of peaceful options.

[-] DCErik@lemmy.zip 47 points 3 days ago

Normal people: I need to have a medical procedure.

Republicants: I need for you to not have a medical procedure.

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[-] Jumbie@lemmy.zip 9 points 2 days ago

He hit all the stupid branches on the way down that Bigtree.

[-] Reygle@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

“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.

[-] santa@sh.itjust.works 36 points 3 days ago

I Genuinely Am Upset That Your Kids Are Vaccinated

That’s a you problem.

[-] Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world 29 points 3 days ago

I hope he dies of a horrible and preventable disease then

[-] SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

H5N1 is going to be a worldwide pandemic. The only postindustrial nation that won't have the vaccine, is the United States. Millions will die.

[-] Paragone@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

After the removal of USAID, you can put money on ebola going global, sooner-or-later.

The Canadians had a vaccine for it, developed at a university ?in BC?, but they sold that to big-pharma, so it wouldn't be used the way our world needed it to be used, for a little money.

Humankind isn't viable, with that kind of "managing" being normal.

The Great Filter will extinguish or nearly-extinguish our intentionally-ignorant kind, late this century.

"you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them drink",

"you can bring a world-species to uprightness/accountable-responsibility, but you can't make them embody it".

Ebola'll happen.

Don't know when, but it'll happen.

Marburg nearly happened, last-year, iirc.. ( 50% lethality, normally? 80%? it was caught in the EU, in people who had traveled. )

_ /\ _

[-] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 32 points 3 days ago

this guy belongs in some sort of highly controlled environment. Either prison or a secure psychiatric facility. I'm not sure which.

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[-] DarkFuture@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

Sorry. I prefer my children alive.

[-] Chaotic_Altruist@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 19 points 3 days ago

Please be The Onion. Please be The Onion.

Fucking damnit

[-] Paragone@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Here's a ruthless, objectively-convincing, cure, that in saner times would be outright-immoral, but when millions-of-lives-are-on-the-line, then morality becomes greyed ( same as intentionally assassinating Hitler before he highjacked Germany becomes morally-greyed, once one knows what he was doing later )..

Infect this guy with rabies, & then refuse to let him use vaccines to survive it.


WHEN humankind begins fighting-for-its-survival-itself, THEN this kind of ruthless-pragmatism will become actual, exactly as killing White-Blue-Red Russians is now a national-survival-requirement for Ukrainians.

So long as humankind continues holding its head "in the sand" ( as ostrichs do not do: they aren't intentionally-stupid the way we are ), then protecting pathogen-incarnate human action will continue, & the consequences will continue wiping-out entire-populations' viability.

( I'm only pointing this perspective/point out: MY plan is to remove ME from this world, not to fight-for your-race's survival: your-race won't, so be silenced from universe, then. That is "valid", obviously. )

_ /\ _

[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 2 days ago

rabies kill too fast, give him HIV, he is not allowed to anti-retroviral meds. so he can have immunocompromised related diseases and infections.

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 2 days ago

Every time I hear about Robert F Kennedy all I can think is fancy being a disappointment to the Kennedy name.

[-] Jaysyn@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

Well how about you die mad you abusive piece of shit?

[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

remember the MAGATS that were posting "plague spreading memes" on thier social media. Its on anti-vaxxers who take advice from a heroin, cocaine, steroid addict.

pertussis , rsv is one of those disease that is the reverse for adults, more severe in children than adults.

[-] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago

We can just call this guy a "virus advocate".

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[-] hperrin@lemmy.ca 18 points 3 days ago

If watching his son either die or become crippled is what he wants, then no, he should not have that. That is completely unfair to his son, and his children should be taken away from him. He’s a menace to both his family and society.

[-] sturmblast@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago

I'm genuinely upset that you are a dangerous moron.

[-] masterofn001@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 days ago

I prefer letting my kids get hit by cars traveling at 100mph instead of having cars with brakes and speed limits.

[-] Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Meanwhile I dream of releasing GMO mosquitoes that detect disease and produce vaccines whether anyone likes it or not.

[-] favoredponcho@lemmy.zip 14 points 3 days ago

At what point is it child abuse

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 24 points 3 days ago

It's been child abuse.

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[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

Platform the anti-vaxxers more, that'll get rid of them!

[-] Paragone@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

& Peter Thiel is pushing that the woke are the anti-christ.

Why be surprised by evil's reversal-of-frame-of-reference?

https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/

Simply scrolling down that page, reading the section-headlines, provides enough..

I think he's got a number of things wrong, like the mortal-head-wound NOT being the missed rifleshot, but instead being the stroke, MRI, & whatever else's involved in his current, temporary, dementia, & obviously I hold that the miracle-cure will happen, in our soon-future ( 2026-02-25 as I'm writing this ).

But overall that page is spot-on, at-least in identifying which of the Christian prophecies need be considered, for matches, in the present unfolding..

Pushing lies is their-religion: pushing that the woke are anti-christ contradicts their own bible, but it is their-religion, not their-bible, which they hold holy..

The anti-women's-validity/rights movement which gaslights about "protecting" women..

The fact that the one they claim as their LORD was an exorcist & healer, but they push evil & harm..

Welcome to humankind's setting-up of global tantrum/pogrom/deathmatch!

Humankind's unconscious ego-myth is MUCH more important than this-world's life, right?


What's really sad/comical about all this, is that it doesn't even matter which "religion" one is in, the unconscious-motivation to enforce ego-myth's apocalypse is unstoppable!

so ALL the Abrahamic religions are working on enforcing it, coherently.

& Modi's Hindutva India's working on enforcing it regionally in Asia, as China's Communist Party's doing, too.

etc.

All the appearances are mere "makeup": the REAL war is underlying that, our unconscious-mind's ego-"godhood" addiction, & if evil's the way to "make that real", then evil's what humankind's enforcing, until something ( consequences ) force-breaks humankind's collective ignorance-ego from this world ( 2080's, at the earliest, IF this world's Great Filter has ANY survivors, at all ).

See it for what it is: unconscious-ignorance "establishing" that its "power" is the ONLY LORD, & no matter what has to be broken to enforce/"prove" it, that'll happen.

All the details are mere "makeup".

This is what happens, at a whole-planet-scale, when an individual addict is fighting for their life against their-own unconscious-mind's addiction, & their unconscious-mind holds that addiction is "greater" than their life.

Same process, just "upscaled" to planet-size, from individual-size, is all.

The unconscious-ignorance-addiction being the true "driver" of the process is identical, in both cases.

Just that we've got entire-classes-of-people in planet-scale, whereas an individual would have only their SurfaceMind fighting against their unconscious-LifeMind, so it'd be more 1-on-1 mind-against-mind, in the individual-case.

Planetscale it's groups-against-groups, obviously.

_ /\ _

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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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