AUSTIN, Texas — The anti-vaccine movement once led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is making a play for the mainstream.
More Republicans are embracing it as part of the GOP coalition. But the ambitions of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group Kennedy founded, are much larger. The nonprofit imagines an America in which everyone realizes the danger they see in vaccination.
And now with one of their own in charge of vaccine policy, they finally see that vision taking shape.
Kennedy “is moving the culture of this nation,” Del Bigtree, a longtime anti-vaccine activist who served as spokesperson for Kennedy’s presidential bid in 2024, told POLITICO at the nonprofit’s third conference in Austin, Texas. Kennedy’s “certainly not a Republican,” Bigtree added, and can draw support from both parties.
Bigtree and other jubilant attendees, basking in their new proximity to power at the sold-out gathering, said their goal is to convince people to stop taking vaccines they believe are unsafe.
They’re succeeding little by little. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July reported that a post-pandemic trend of declining vaccination continues. Measles vaccination is now below the 95 percent level thought to provide herd immunity.
The Children’s Health Defense conference drew about 1,000 participants, significantly more than the group’s first two conferences, and for the first time GOP politicians addressed the group, reflecting the alliance Kennedy formed with President Donald Trump in the waning days of the 2024 campaign. After Kennedy dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump, Trump said he’d let Kennedy “go wild” on health if he won.
Speaking remotely due to the shutdown, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky called into question parts of the childhood vaccine schedule, while Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson nodded to the scientifically refuted theory that vaccines cause autism.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who is leading an effort to roll back vaccine mandates for school entry in his state, was in Austin, lambasting the mainstream media in his remarks.
Mark Blaxill, a longtime proponent of a vaccine-autism link who was recently hired as a senior adviser to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a walking embodiment of the movement’s new influence. He attended events with a “Champion” badge on his lapel indicating he paid extra for an “all-access” pass.
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.
Participants and speakers often affectionately referred to Kennedy as “Bobby.” His acolytes nodded to the symbiotic relationship their movement currently has with the Republican Party and the importance of the midterm elections.
Andrew Wakefield, the British former doctor whose discredited research suggested the MMR shot causes autism, suggested that Republican losses could change the balance in Congress and threaten Kennedy’s agenda.
“Bobby has to be given the time to execute the plans that he has, and that needs to be taken into account,” Wakefield said.
Voters need to be reminded that MAHA is why Trump won “and that your senators and your assemblymembers want to hold on to that power,” said Bigtree.
In conference sessions, participants focused on that message and Children’s Health Defense’s underlying mission rather than speculating about Kennedy’s moves after HHS.
Gavin de Becker and Mark Gorton, two major financial backers of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign, had speaking slots at the conference but didn’t address the secretary’s future political ambitions. Kennedy has pushed back on speculation that he may run in 2028.
For added insurance in the event the Republicans lose the White House in 2028, the nonprofit and its allies want to see Kennedy cement policy changes that could last beyond the current administration. While the secretary didn’t attend, they seemed to expect him to hear their messages.
Former GOP Rep. Dave Weldon, Kennedy’s first pick to lead the CDC whose nomination was pulled in March because some Republican senators blanched at his vaccine skepticism, called on Kennedy to spin off its Immunization Safety Office.
“The only way you’re ever going to get to the answers to some of these [safety] questions is, you need an independent agency studying these vaccines, answerable to Secretary Kennedy and answerable to the president,” he said, noting the agency’s broader mandate to promote vaccination.
Weldon later told reporters that his remarks were a message to Kennedy.
“The reason I brought it up is, I want Bobby to do it,” he said, pointing to concerns that Republicans may lose their House majority in the 2026 midterm elections.
One of Children’s Health Defense’s main policy priorities — eliminating vaccine mandates — is largely in the domain of state and local legislators, meaning Kennedy has limited power to effect change beyond altering the childhood vaccine schedule upon which most states base their school-entry requirements.
“No federal appointment can change that in the states,” Rebecca Hardy, president of Texans for Vaccine Choice, said of those mandates.
Still, she added, “to have this potential of a federal government that’s going to be working cooperatively — or at least not against us — is a new world.”
Bigtree said that medical freedom activists need to be patient because the types of vaccine studies that Kennedy wants to see “have never been done.”
Public health scientists say those types of studies — comparing vaccinated children to the unvaccinated and requiring vaccines to be tested against saline placebos — would be unethical for subjecting control groups to infectious disease when existing data demonstrates favorable risk-benefit profiles for the immunizations on the schedule.
Bigtree said he isn’t worried about whether Trump stands behind Kennedy’s efforts on vaccines. He pointed to the president’s September press conference positing a link between Tylenol use during pregnancy — as well as the number of shots given during early childhood — and autism as a coup for the movement.
“This isn’t just a slogan,” Bigtree said. “He actually believes and wants to see science around this issue, which I think makes us all confident that Robert Kennedy Jr. is here to stay and that this work is going to get done.”
