Well, I’m back. I realize that it’s been a month and a half since the last time I wrote anything here. I also realize that I said I’d try to resurrect this blog from its state of hibernation. Obviously, I failed, at least until now. In fairness, there were significant technical difficulties with the back end of the blog that took some effort to resolve, although it has been a couple of weeks since I finally resolved them. Excuses aside, leave it to longtime antivax propagandist Del Bigtree to—shall we say?—motivate me crack open my laptop, given the stories about him and his MAHA Institute over the weekend reporting under headlines like: Emboldened, Kennedy Allies Embrace a Label They Once Rejected: ‘Anti-Vax’, ‘God is an anti-vaxxer’: Inside the conference celebrating RFK Jr.’s rise, and The anti-vaccine movement isn’t satisfied with winning over the GOP.
Unsurprisingly, that “God is an antivaxxer” quote comes from—you guessed it!—an old “friend” of the blog, Del Bigtree. From the NYT:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to say that he is not anti-vaccine, he is “pro-safety.” But when 1,000 of his supporters gathered in Austin, Texas, last weekend for a celebratory conference to chart the future of their movement, they embraced a term — “anti-vax” — some once regarded as a slur.
“God is an anti-vaxxer, and he needs you to speak up,” declared Del Bigtree, a close ally of Mr. Kennedy who served as his communications director during his presidential campaign. Mr. Bigtree spoke during a session that looked back on his 2016 documentary asserting that there was a cover-up of a link between vaccines and autism.
That 2016 film was a propaganda pseudodocumentary disguised as a documentary, VAXXED, which rehashed the 2014 CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that the CDC had “covered up” results of a 2004 study supposedly showing an increased risk of autism in African-American boys vaccinated with the MMR. Del Bigtree produced the film, with which the godfather of the 21st century iteration of the antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield, made his directing review.
As has happened over the last decade or so, what was once fringe is mainstream, and now, with RFK Jr. in charge of HHS, his old org is no longer antivax enough, at least not according to the man who leads the MAHA Institute:
“I’ve come to this anti-vax conference with a message that we need to be more boldly anti-vax,” said Mark Gorton, the president of the MAHA Institute, a group that works to advance Mr. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Mr. Gorton assailed the website of Mr. Kennedy’s former nonprofit as “some pretty weak anti-vaxxery.”
Children’s Health Defense, “some pretty weak antivaxxery”? I laughed out loud reading that. CHD is and has been about as antivax as it gets. I found it very telling that someone like Gorton would have the cojones say something like this about CHD at a “make America healthy again” (MAHA) conference, that was organized by CHD. It suggests to me that CHD is the past and that more radical antivax groups are the present and the future, which is profoundly depressing to think about.
Also note that, whenever RFK Jr. says that he’s “not antivax” (something he has loved to do ever since he “came out” as antivax in 2005), his declaration is obviously a lie, a self-delusion, or a combination of the two, as I have documented time and time again. As I like to say, RFK Jr, is not a “vaccine skeptic.” He is antivax. Full stop. He is, however, also savvy enough to know that openly embracing the label of “antivax” is, even now, still toxic and that he needs to convince the rubes that he is actually just “skeptical” of “conventional medicine’s” narrative about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
Of course, RFK Jr. is so “skeptical” of vaccines that he doesn’t believe that a safe and effective vaccine actually exists and has bragged about having accosted young parents whom he encountered to warn them about the dangers of vaccines., all of which to me is the very definition of being antivax. Sadly, though, his denials of being antivax fooled enough Senators—or at least gave them sufficient plausible deniability—to allow them to tell themselves that they were not confirming a nominee for HHS Secretary who would immediately start dismantling US federal health and vaccination programs, which is exactly what RFK Jr. immediately proceeded to do after being confirmed as HHS Secretary, almost exactly as I’d predicted that he would. (Yes, I’m talking, in particular, to you, Sen. Bill Cassidy, who betrayed his Hippocratic Oath by being the deciding vote to send RFK Jr.’s nomination out of committee to a full vote by the Senate, where he voted to confirm RFK Jr.)
Indeed, since taking over the reins of HHS, RFK Jr. has weaponized a funhouse version of the evidence-based medicine (EBM) paradigm against vaccines, misrepresented medical ethics to attack vaccines, dismantled the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), replacing the experts with antivaxxers, who immediately turned the committee into a clown car barreling through the vaccine schedule. There is no doubt in my mind that RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines as he remakes the FDA and CDC, continues to stack ACIP with antivaxxers, and demonizes vaccine adjuvants based on pseudoscience and hires formerly washed-up antivax activists like David Geier and Mark Blaxill. And don’t even get me on the people he’s hired to run FDA, like Dr. Marty Makary, and the NIH, like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a useful idiot for MAHA and antivaxxers. I’ve referred to MAHA as “soft eugenics,” and basically the entire MAHA ethos is now in charge of all nonmilitary medical, public health, and biomedical research programs in the US. It is just that bad.
One amusing thing about antivaxxers is that, even when it would be better to keep their mouths shut about their true intentions, they can’t help themselves. They have to brag about what they’re really up to, and Bigtree is one of the most notorious examples of this. In an interview with POLITICO before the MAHA conference, he was quite open about the strategy behind MAHA. (Hint: It really is largely about getting rid of vaccines.)
From POLITICO:
Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, which has targeted ultraprocessed food and chemicals along with vaccine safety, is both bold and strategic because it offers something to both progressives and conservatives, said Bigtree.
“It’s very intelligent to start with food and moving chemical petroleum dyes out of our food supply, getting lead and arsenic out of baby food, saying that you care about doing studies for safety,” Bigtree told POLITICO at the event. “All of those things, I think, are making people realize on the liberal side, ‘This isn’t the person that I expected. Oh, he’s not eradicating the vaccine program. He just wants safety testing.’”
Moving public opinion is key, he and others said, and in that sense sowing doubt among Americans about the safety of vaccines is an accomplishment on its own.
I’ve written about how, after RFK Jr. had first launched his MAHA movement through an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, many antivaxxers, seeing through the bait-and-switch, were very impatient and unhappy with him for having downplayed the antivax aspect of MAHA, which, try as RFK Jr. might to hide it, is clearly central to MAHA. It was always very obvious to me that all the MAHA rhetoric not related to vaccines is not where RFK Jr.’s heart really is. Sure, it’s a great grift, but more importantly it’s a great distraction from vaccines to go on and on about beef tallow, chemical food dyes, and the like. Come to think of it, it’s also a great distraction from policies that would really “make America healthy again,” such as a universal health insurance program, be it single payer or another system, even as President Trump, the Republican Congress, and RFK Jr. (as well as Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was also at this conference)
Over the last two decades, I have written about many antivax conferences and confabs. They’re all too common, unfortunately, and the messages are generally very similar, as is the bad science, misrepresented science, and pseudoscience presented to portray vaccines as dangerous and ineffective. What was different about this conference, entitled “The Moment of Truth” was that now the antivax pseudoscience, misinformation, and conspiracy theories are official US federal government policy and all the cranks now have the ears of high government officials.
As the NYT put it:
For the activists, homeopaths, physicians, lawyers and vaccine-wary parents who attended, it amounted to what Rebecca Hardy, co-founder of the advocacy group Texans for Vaccine Choice, called “a family reunion.”
And:
Mr. Kennedy, the nation’s most prominent vaccine critic, did not attend, but his presence was everywhere. In the conference exhibit hall, MAHA hoodies were on sale for $60 and glass ornaments featuring the health secretary’s likeness were priced at $15. Now that he holds clout in Washington, his backers are reveling in their newfound power.
“We were persona non grata absolutely wherever we went,” Brian Hooker, the chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense, told the crowd, recalling his early advocacy with Mr. Kennedy. He added, “That man personally went through the valley of the shadow of death for our kids, and to see him in this particular position, we all couldn’t be happier.”
The mood of the conference was one of passion and anger. Numerous large-scale studies have failed to demonstrate a link between vaccines and autism. But many of the conference attendees, especially parents of children with autism, do not accept those findings.
Sadly, neither does RFK Jr., as I’ve discussed more times than I can remember. Two of the usual Congressional suspects were in attendance, as well, namely Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson. Speaking by video, Sen. Paul “questioned” parts of the childhood vaccination schedule and gave a talk entitled “Why Isn’t Tony Fauci in Prison?” For his part Sen. Johnson, not unexpectedly, let his antivax freak flag flight high:
“There are doctors recommending injecting little babies. They don’t want to admit something they’ve done caused autism,” Johnson said to a standing ovation, urging attendees to “talk against the orthodoxy. Tell people the truth.”
The senator’s sentiments echo remarks from Kennedy in the years before Trump named him secretary. Amid his long history of disparaging vaccinations, he has claimed immunizations “poisoned an entire generation of American children” and that doctors have “butchered all these children” by administering shots recommended by federal authorities. Health officials and vaccine experts have said Kennedy’s rhetoric is contributing to lower vaccine rates and disease outbreaks.
Same as it ever was, just on steroids and in charge of the government, along with the quacks, including homeopaths, those pushing facilitated communication, and all manner of “autism biomed.”
Amusingly, there was one prominent attendee who was not entirely on board with being loud and proud antivax and letting MAHA’s antivax freak flag fly super high. Even more amusingly, it was Brian Hooker, the chemical engineering professor turned incompetent epidemiologist and statistician in the service of “reanalyzing” datasets to torture them until they confess that vaccines cause autism. Hooker happens to be the chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense.
“I’m a scientist,” he said. “I want to be more demure about the whole thing and a little bit more circumspect.” He added that if a “broad, sweeping epidemic” emerged, “and I was thoroughly convinced that the only way out of it was to immunize, I’d be for it.”
Splitter!
Or maybe I should say:
Maybe this is what Gortman meant when he said CHD was now ““some pretty weak anti-vaxxery.” Maybe Hooker is behind the times. He still deludes himself into thinking that he’s not antivax. He probably even still thinks that he’s an actual scientist with respect to autism and vaccines.
Another CHD luminary is in the same boat:
The head of Children’s Health Defense, CEO Mary Holland, said interest in the conference is “a catalyst for further development of the movement that I think will continue to grow.”
At the same time, Holland attempted to position the anti-vaccine movement in a broader frame: “CHD is not anti-vax. We’re pro-informed consent,” she told The Post in an interview. “We’re not interested in people not having vaccines if they want it, but we think that, for the most part, truthful information isn’t provided, and everybody should have a choice.”
No, Holland is as antivax as Hooker. She’s only deluding herself that she isn’t antivax but rather “pro-informed consent.” (In actuality, she’s advocating misinformed refusal.) Either that, or she’s lying. Take your pick.
For his part, Bigtree told reporters, “I think it’s like anything else that’s using a pejorative long enough. You just decide you’re either going to fight it or embrace it.” No, “antivax” as applied to people like Del Bigtree is not just a pejorative—and never has been just a pejorative. It’s an accurate description of such people, including Brian Hooker, RFK Jr., Del Bigtree, and the vast majority of MAHA. Sadly, antivax activists are in power at HHS, and they are definitely coming for your vaccines. I hope you’re up to date.
42 replies on “MAHA: The “we’re not antivax” mask has been dropped”
I have to ask again. If this people – say, Mary Holland – really think, as she says, that vaccines cause autism, kill children, have little or no benefits and cause extensive harms, why isn’t she – aren’t they – anti-vaccine? If I believed this pile of nonsense, I would be anti-vaccine, because any other position is psychopathic.
So either, as you suggest (and I agree) she’s lying about not being anti-vaccine, or she’s lying when she tries to say vaccines have high risks, or something is deeply wrong with her.
Deeply wrong, but not uncommon.
A similar analysis has been applied to pro-lifers: if they really believed abortions murder millions of innocent babies they would have to join the Army of God or at Operation Rescue. So either they don’t really believe abortion is murder, and they’re lying, or they too are amoral. Or something like that.
But these arguments assume false premises. They divide statements into a binary opposition between truths and lies, beliefs into a binary of acceptance or rejection, behavior into a binary of consistent with or contradictory to belief.
As such you’re basically creating a simplistic strawman concept of Hollands beliefs, and a naive, superficial understanding of speech to arrive at what amounts to a tautology: antivaxers are antivax.
Which doesn’t get at the real question: Something is wrong with these people, but what?
It’s not like belief in a pile of nonsense is particularly uncommon, and it seems to me there’s plenty of evidence such beliefs function differently than other types of beliefs with different kinds of grounds.
Which is to say what we’re dealing with here is mythology. Which is to say that at root it is figurative, displaced, and generally cannot admit that and remain functional.
The big question about the antivax movement then is more granular: how and why did people come to embrace this particular mythology, and what aspects of actual human experience does it address figuratively?
To back up a bit, your analysis makes what IMHO is the all too common error of viewing human phenomenon primarily through the lens of individual psychology. If Holland believes this but says that she must be a lier or psycho. Which abstracts all of this from the context of socio-cultural subgroups, or more specifically in this case the dynamics of cults, broadly defined.
There’s one idea that I’ve seen elsewhere (over at Fred Clark’s blog Slacktivist being one of the main ones) and that you allude to without quite saying explicitly…
In a lot of these cases, these beliefs are less ‘actionable’ beliefs than they are cultural in-group/out-group markers. Saying that you believe these things marks you as part of the in-group. (It also pisses off the out-group, and ‘own the libs’ is a thing on its own.) These beliefs are treated as emotionally ‘true’ without being literally true. And when someone actually does treat them as literally true by, say, murdering doctors, there’s a whole lot of ‘oh, we’d never really condone that (but he had it coming)’.
Some of it goes back to Sartre’s line about anti-semites: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words…”.
Authoritarians will deliberately attack the concept of truth as an authority by itself, because no other authority can be seen as being higher than the person in charge. There can be no ‘truth’ but Dear Leader’s words.
I feel like you’re missing an obvious and far simpler answer. These people do admit they are anti-vax when they’re in the right audience. When they’re speaking to the right people they will admit it. But when they seek legitimacy among the mainstream all of the sudden they demure.
Let me put it this way. We have a lot of white supremacists that we are having to deal with right now. There are people who will identify as white supremacists, but they will angrily deny it if you suggest they are racist. Do we have to get into a long talk about the complicated nature of belief if we don’t take them at the word for what they say? Of course not. I think their actions show that things are not so complicated.
They don’t like the word. It’s as simple as that. They’ve ended up in a place where they understand that the culture they are in views the word as a bad thing. So the white supremacists say they aren’t racist, they are “race realists”. And anti-vaxxers say they aren’t anti-vax, they are “vaccine skeptics”.
It’s interesting you bring up forced birthers though. Have you ever seen one of them deny that they’re anti-abortion, that they just want to make abortions safer? They don’t feel that they need to. The only thing they sometimes hide is their desire to punish women as well as doctors who perform abortions, and they used to hide their desire to ban birth control but they’re starting to be more open about that.
I feel like you’re trying to create a complicated, deep inner life for these people that they don’t have when simple dishonesty will suffice to explain their behavior. Sometimes when someone claims they believe one thing but shows through their actions that they believe something else, it’s actually fairly simple. They’re just a liar.
If you listen to all their talks at their conferences and podcasts when they think no one but their own crowd is listening (recordings found on sites like Rumble, Bitchute, Brighteon, Telegraph), you will see they are 100% anti-vaccine.
It seems to be the latter.
Corporations which most here at this blog serve, are, for the most part psychopathic. That’s our system. The corporate concept is first and foremost a liability shield for investors. And, of course, many companies go farther than that lobbying for things like virtual immunity to product liability, as is the case with vaccines. So yeah, pro vaxxers don’t care about the minority that are harmed by their products and are in that way psychopathic.
One Homoeopathy skeptic recently wrote, “Vaccines are Homoeopathy done right.” That is to say that vaccines aren’t diluted down to nothing. What are your thoughts on that?
More likely the ‘like cures like’ aspect of vaccines. Small amounts of disease prevent big amounts of disease. However, seems a fairly imprecise use of the concept to me.
It’s great that you’re back, Orac. Let me set the record straight, MJD has always been pro-vaccine safety. Although, I just finished a patent draft describing a intratumoral composition to inhibit solid tumors. At this stage, I have not proven that the vaccine concept is safe and effective but am determined to do so. Thanks for your support.
“At this stage, I have not proven that the vaccine concept is safe and effective”
The most asinine thing isn’t that statement by itself, it’s that you might actually think you know enough to do any real science or statistical work.
(Then there’s the fact that you hid your anti-vaccination self with “pro-vaccine safety, just like the clowns discussed in the main post.)
IdW56old writes,
“Then there’s the fact that you hid your anti-vaccination self with “pro-vaccine safety, just like the clowns discussed in the main post.”
MJD says,
I now let the documented health hazards of natural rubber latex (Hevea Brasiliensis) speak for itself…
@ Orac,
If I submit one of my AllergoOncology articles here, can you do a respectful-insolence thingy?
“Dr. Gordon Sussman is recognized for recognizing and reporting the first cases of natural rubber latex allergy in healthcare settings in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
Yes, you’ve been prattling on about something discovered by other people for a long time. My statement above stands.
As our host likes to say “everything old is new again”, so I guess it was inevitable that MJUD would come crawling out of his cesspit to once again claim to be “pro-vaccine safety”, waffle about latex and beg Orac to write about him.
“The vaccine concept?” What the hell does that even mean? ACTUAL VACCINES have been proven safe and effective. Isn’t that enough “proof of concept?”
Yesterday I heard, Canada is no longer free of measles, after almost 30 years. I guess the anti-vaxxers are to blame. Our public news site blames it on the corona pandemic, that made more people distrust vaccines. https://nos.nl/artikel/2589981-mazelen-zijn-helemaal-terug-in-canada-door-dalende-vaccinatiegraad Well, yeah, the pandemic is responsible and anti-vaxxers, spreading doubt about new vaccines have nothing to do with it?
I fear that the US will soon join Canada in losing its measles-free status.
It’s actually surprising it hasn’t yet.
Well, the article mentions that both North- and South-America have lost the status of being measles-free. North-America lost that status because of measles outbreaks in in Mexico and the US. The virus variant seems to be the same as the variant found in Canada. It is also found in Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil.
I think losing that status, i.e. having measles be endemic again, is based on having internally acquired cases for a period of one year. If the cases completely die out before that period (like with the Disneyland outbreak) then we are still rated as non-endemic. We’ll find out next August. But for now, measles continues to circulate.
The COVID era is to blame because pro-vaxers changed the definition of vaccine. The COVID era is to blame because they hid behind that term to mandate a novel therapeutic. The COVID era is to blame because no attention was paid to risk/reward to young people getting the jab. The COVID era is to blame because people got vaccines at pharmacies and in parking lots so they could go to work and no antibody tests were performed. The COVID era is to blame because LNPs were shown to be dangerous in the blood stream long before COVID and no guidance was given on aspiration. The COVID era is to blame because vaccinating for coronavirus was always bound to fail, due to mutation of the virus. The COVID era is to blame because officials lied about the vaccine’s effectiveness and gaslighted the public. The COVID era is to blame because many of us know someone devastatingly injured by the vaccine.
Anti-vax is correct because the medical institution is not deserving of our trust. It’s a shame.
Antivaxers indignantly saying “Don’t call me an antivaxer!” has always stemmed from their (largely correct) assumption that most people look askance at those who are fervently anti-anything. So it’s a political pretense when they do their “I’m pro-vaccine safety” or “I’m an ex-vaxxer” routines.
Kent Heckenlively may have been the first prominent antivaxer to embrace the term. If I remember correctly, he styled himself as the world’s biggest/greatest/most virulent antivaxer.
It’ll be interesting to see how many other AVers follow Del Bigtree and proudly fly their freak flags. The ones I run into on social media continue to reject the term antivaxer. And when as a result they’re asked to name any vaccine they support and recommend people get for themselves and their children (absent any medical contraindication), they continue being evasive.
If they take away vaccines, they won’t be able to hide behind and of their lame vaccine safety arguments as hospitalization and death counts for unvaccicnated children from vaccine-preventable infections soars.
RFK Jr wasn’t at the conference but Cheryl was!
Seriously, the list of speakers included newer cranks like Substackers Steve Kirsch and Jessica Rose but others sounded like the familiar cast of characters from days of old.
A political website ( I forget which because I’m reading lots) stated 57% disapproval of RFK Jr’s “work”. Similar to DJT’s . GOOD
These “vaccine skeptics” claim to want “informed” consent , but aren’t they seeking misinformed consent?
I call it misinformed refusal, not informed consent.
Why isn’t every vaccine evaluated for cost/benefit. All vaccines have risks. Why didn’t they test people for COVID antibodies prior to mandating the COVID vax? This is done for other vaccines on the schedule. Why didn’t they aspirate as a precaution for a new therapy leveraging LNPs? The pro-vax side is not scientific and is not sufficiently cautious. It runs on fear, just like the rabid anti-vax side does.
COVID-19 vaccines were authorized after large clinical trials with tens of thousands of people and a risk/benefit analysis.
Didn’t your leaders tell you that? See, e.g.: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
There have always been studies on cost/risks/benefits of immunization programs. Like this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16330737/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=vaccine+economics
I am pretty much sure that Bobby Jr. is going to suppress anything that shows vaccines save money and cause adults (because kids become adults if they do not die from a vaccine preventable disease)
“Why didn’t they test people for COVID antibodies prior to mandating the COVID vax?”
Do you read what you write? In order to get antibodies, without a vaccine, you have to catch the wild infection. With all the attendant risk. A vaccine risk/benefit analysis will include risk of disease vs risk of vaccine vs cost and effectiveness of vaccine etc. It’s not a personalised process you dingbat. Its cheaper and faster to vaccinate everyone than it is to test everyone and then vaccinate. If there is no risk to vaccinating when antibodies already exist then save the money and the time.
Still waiting for all those mass die offs by the way.
ORAC has made that point a few times (in case you’re new here).
Hooker is merely playing “good cop” right now. In late Octoabe at a MAHA meeting he stated:
“It’s time we lock up the Scientists and Officials who lied about vaccines and injured our children. They knowingly killed and maimed a generation of children. Jail time is as good as it gets…” ( https://x.com/liz_churchill10/status/1981077731694588168 )
Hooker has stated there are no safe or effective vaccines. He helped fuel the distrust in the West Texas measles outbreak that killed two unvaccinated girls and he doesn’t care, instead blaming the PICUs that tried to save them.
They all want vaccines gone. It was never about health freedom.
I very much agree: when they talk to their followers- not the more sane outsider audience- their true beliefs emerge.
All of the alt med/ anti-vax/ contrarians- many on Substack- I follow despise vaccines and seek retribution for “damages” by SBM.
[…] Respectful Insolence: MAHA: The “we’re not antivax” mask has been dropped […]
Actual racists say much the same thing: “We’re not anti-Black, we’re pro-SAFE-Black! We have nothing against Black people, we’re just not 100.000% sure it’s safe to let our precious children go near them! We can’t afford to experiment with our own children!”
Everyone who reads this attempted analogy is dumber for having done so.
Hmmm… I guess I need to be resurrected as well. It’s been a while! Let the games begin!
Sorry I didn’t approve your comment until now. I just missed it.
Mike Adams, today, NN, 25 minutes, addresses doctors about their future and he isn’t shy. Although you can probably guess his position, I think you might relish his creatively appalling use of AI imagery to portray doctors.
Pro-vax side is a dogma. So much a dogma that they will change the name of a treatment to enforce adherence. Pretending g the people questioning the dogma are in the cult is big-medicine’s greatest trick.
Your comments seem to follow a single trend: bold assertions with zero evidence to support them. Do you form them after reading bumper stickers?
Oddly enough, much of the news about RFK Jr lately has nothing to do with vaccines but involves warring ‘journalists’, book launches, cringe poetry, sexting, drug use and endless laughs for me.