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.
For years, Bigtree and Kennedy echoed each other’s positions, first on childhood vaccination and, later, on COVID. They’ve both argued that vaccines cause autism, that the CDC is corrupt, and that Anthony Fauci has committed crimes. Kennedy—who, like Bigtree, has no formal medical training—has questioned the idea that the polio vaccine wiped out polio in the United States and, in 2024, said that if he had young kids, he wouldn’t give them the MMR vaccine. Such views can be deadly; last year, two unvaccinated children in West Texas died of measles.
These days, Kennedy chooses his words more carefully, whereas Bigtree has remained just as proudly committed to discouraging Americans from getting vaccinated. If Kennedy is the face of the movement, Bigtree is more like its id—loud, unfiltered, and theatrically aggrieved.
He was also, for a while, a fellow dad at my son’s Waldorf school in Austin. Waldorf schools tend to attract parents who don’t want their kids to eat junk food or play Fortnite; they also draw a fair number who skip vaccines. During the pandemic, I began to hear considerable chatter about the anti-vaccine celebrity in our midst. Some parents I knew rolled their eyes at Bigtree’s online antics, which at the time included entertaining the idea that the pandemic was a hoax or perhaps a plot to depopulate the Earth. But when he and his wife pulled their two kids from the school and started a parent-run competitor without COVID restrictions, several families I knew—fed up with remote classes and mask rules—followed suit and enrolled their children. The school, Raphael Springs Academy, still exists, though the Bigtrees no longer run it.
COVID expanded Bigtree’s reach and gave him a new disease to downplay. In June 2020, Bigtree said on his show that everyone except the very sickest Americans should “actually catch what is just a common cold.” COVID had already killed more than 100,000 Americans by then. (Today, the World Health Organization counts more than 7 million COVID-19 deaths globally, which includes more than 1 million Americans.) Another episode purported to prove that masks are toxic for children. He speculated about the origin of the coronavirus, suggesting, variously, that it might be a bioweapon or a vaccine experiment gone awry. His audience more than tripled in just a few months. (In July 2020, YouTube removed Bigtree’s channel for violating its terms of service, so he decamped for the more permissive video platform Rumble, which still hosts his show today.)
I was one of those new viewers. Bigtree’s views were dangerous, particularly in the midst of a pandemic, but I was curious to learn what my friends saw in him. I remember being taken aback by his reckless advice but 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 May 2020, during a joint television appearance with Kennedy on Daystar, an evangelical Christian network, Bigtree warned that a possible COVID vaccine would be one more step in pharmaceutical companies’ “attempt to take over the governments of the world.” He said he so distrusted the vaccine that, when he became severely anemic in 2021, he flew to a clinic in Cancún so that he could get a transfusion of unvaccinated blood.
Bigtree makes two core claims about vaccination, both of which are demonstrably false. The first is one that other anti-vaxxers, including Kennedy, have been making for decades: that the apparent rise in autism cases in the U.S. since the 1990s can be blamed on immunizations, rather than, as is the consensus among experts, largely on broader diagnostic criteria and better surveillance. Bigtree believes that the dozens of studies that have found no evidence of a connection between autism and vaccines are flawed, and that immunizations have never been properly tested for safety. “Why can’t we find a double-blind placebo trial in any of the childhood vaccines?” he asked me. In fact, many early versions of vaccines, like ones for polio and measles, were tested against unvaccinated groups or a placebo. (Bigtree and others in the anti-vaccine movement object to trials that didn’t use a saline-only placebo, or weren’t double-blind.) New vaccines, however, are usually compared with older vaccines because it’s considered unethical, not to mention unwise, to put children at risk of contracting a vaccine-preventable disease.
That brings us to Bigtree’s second, arguably more outrageous claim: Vaccine-preventable illnesses simply aren’t so bad. He wants children, including his own, to get infected so that they can avoid the dangers of vaccination and develop more robust immunity. They will have, as he put it, the “Ferrari of immunity,” while the rest of us will be driving around in Ford Pintos. He told me he would prefer to live in an entirely unvaccinated country, one where the diseases that sickened millions in the first half of the 20th century could spread freely. That’s a frankly ridiculous notion, as I told him later. But Bigtree is committed to it. “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,” he said.
Bigtree no doubt wants what’s best for his kids, and he’s not wrong that, for some viruses, including polio and pertussis, the vaccines given in the United States don’t reliably block transmission. But they do, as I pointed out to him, guard against the worst outcomes of those diseases. And although he’s also right that most infected children have only mild symptoms, others are not so lucky. Pertussis killed about 4,000 people each year in the U.S. prior to the vaccine; during major outbreaks, annual polio deaths numbered in the thousands too.
[Read: His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade]
I had wondered, before meeting Bigtree, how sincere the bellowing figure on The HighWire really was. He’s not exactly a disinterested observer: Opposing vaccines has become Bigtree’s livelihood. He realizes, as he told me, that he could never return to his mainstream-television career (he spent years as a producer on The Doctors, a syndicated medical-advice show). But after our conversations and lengthy text exchanges, I don’t doubt that Bigtree is genuinely—if incorrectly—convinced that he’s stumbled onto, as he put it, “the biggest cover-up of all times.”
He was even more explicit, and more heated, in our conversations than he is on his show. He insisted, for instance, that he was less worried about disability and death from infectious disease than he was about vaccines causing profound autism. He told me that he would accept the risks of contracting polio “over a one-in-fucking-12.5” chance—the ratio of boys found to have autism in some regions of California, according to a 2025 CDC study—“of my son having an inability to have a marriage, to have children, to potentially even wipe their own ass, okay? That is what drives me now.” (The CDC study included diagnoses across the autism spectrum; most people diagnosed with autism do not have profound impairment.)
That sort of intensity played a role in his exit from the formal leadership of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. Bigtree was the original CEO of MAHA Action, the nonprofit started in late 2024 to promote Kennedy’s agenda. But last April, during the dramatic measles outbreak in West Texas, Kennedy posted on X—accurately—that “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” Bigtree, in a reply, wrote—inaccurately—that the vaccine was “also one of the most effective ways to cause autism.” Although Kennedy didn’t scold him for the public rebuke, Bigtree decided not long after the exchange that he should step down, he told me. (Neither MAHA Action nor the Department of Health and Human Services responded to a request for comment.)
Kennedy has delivered big wins for the anti-vaccine movement, including moving several vaccines off the CDC’s universally recommended list and undermining the agency’s statement on its website that vaccines don’t cause autism. But Bigtree continues to think the health secretary hasn’t gone far enough in his anti-vaccine agenda. He wants him, for instance, to trash the rest of the CDC’s list of recommended vaccines so that schools can’t mandate them. He also wants the federal law that limits pharmaceutical companies’ liability for vaccine injuries changed. And he wants HHS to conduct a study comparing the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated people. If that study doesn’t happen, Bigtree told me, then Kennedy’s tenure will have been mostly a failure.
[Read: The CDC’s website is anti-vaccine now]
But he still has faith. At a recent taping of The HighWire that I attended—a professional operation involving multiple cameras, a control room with a dozen computers, and several producers scurrying around—Bigtree opened by praising Kennedy’s decision to strike several vaccines from the recommended childhood schedule. “We’re obviously bathing in all the success that we’ve had,” he told viewers.
Although the first year of Kennedy’s tenure amounted to a flurry of anti-vaccine changes at HHS, he has in recent weeks emphasized more popular priorities, such as the new protein-heavy food pyramid. (The New York Times has reported that Kennedy is backing away from vaccines, at least for now, in the lead-up to the midterms.) But creating the MAHA movement was fundamentally a joint effort by Bigtree and Kennedy, and there’s been no indication that Kennedy is abandoning the anti-vaccine cause or disavowing longtime allies like Bigtree. The two had dinner together late last year, Bigtree told me. Last fall, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy founded, featured Bigtree as a speaker for its annual meeting. Bigtree, whose father is a minister, used his speech to embrace the anti-vax label, even calling God an anti-vaxxer.
[Read: RFK Jr.’s cheer squad is getting restless]
After getting to know Bigtree and watching his show, I’m not sure that the label fully captures his philosophy. He’s more than anti-vaccine: He’s pro-infection. And even though Kennedy hasn’t come out so strongly on the side of diseases since becoming health secretary, he has done so previously, suggesting, for example, that contracting measles could bolster the immune system later in life. Bigtree, for one, thinks his former boss shares his views. Kennedy “recognizes the same thing I do,” he told me. “We would be healthier if we were catching these illnesses.”
