Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/del-bigtree-pro-infection-polio-measles/686092/

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

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

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.

The amount of absolute stupidity these days is shocking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Normal people: I need to have a medical procedure.

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

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.

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.

I Genuinely Am Upset That Your Kids Are Vaccinated

That’s a you problem.

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.

I say, let him infect his whole family if he wants to. Go ahead...show us all the benefits of being infected with easily preventable diseases. Put your money where your mouth is, otherwise we'll all know you're just a con artist making bank off gullible people.

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.

It's been child abuse.

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

What an idiot.

I'm not sure I'd be too keen on letting a parent infect their (innocent) children. I recognize he's a stupid ass, but that doesn't mean he should maim or kill his children with his stupid ass

You misspelled 'republicunts'

his children.

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.

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.

Recent studies suggrst our brains have shrunk:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1191274/full

I hope he dies of a horrible and preventable disease then

So ... he wants his family to get all those diseases because he thinks they don't exist, or because he agrees that a sufficient prompt to the immune system will prevent future infection?

This idiot probably wouldn’t be above taking his infectious child out into public to deliberately spread disease, too.

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?

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

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.

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.

He’s so close…

That’s insulting to rocks.

The Salem witch trials were just land thefts

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

AFTER his family dies one by one.

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.

No? Don’t punish the children for their fathers idiocy.

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.

The very minute they choose not to vax - that's child abuse.

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).

Please be The Onion. Please be The Onion.

Fucking damnit

If only there was a way to exercise the immune system in a safe, controlled manner. It would be truly groundbreaking and save untold numbers of lives.

Leaded gasoline really did a number on us not gonna lie.

I mean, nothing is completely safe, but I bet something like that would be safer than, say, getting polio.

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