What matters most here is not the theatrics of the gathering, but the way health claims move through identity and trust networks. When a message is tied to belonging, celebrity, or political identity, people often evaluate it differently than they would a plain medical fact. That makes vaccine misinformation unusually durable: it can feel like a worldview rather than a claim that can be tested.
The evidence issue is also easy to blur. Anecdotes about “vaccine injury” can be emotionally powerful, but isolated stories do not establish cause. Real-world vaccine safety monitoring is designed to look for patterns across large populations, which is why cherry-picked examples are a weak substitute for systematic evidence. The challenge for readers is to separate lived experience from scientific inference without dismissing either one outright.
There is also a practical public-health trade-off that often gets lost in these debates. Lower confidence in immunization does not only affect the person declining a shot; it can reduce community protection and make outbreaks harder to contain, especially where access, exemptions, and local norms already shape uptake. The key question is less whether people are passionate, and more whether those passions are steering behavior away from interventions with a clear population-level benefit.
For health readers, the useful takeaway is to watch for overconfidence on both sides. Claims that vaccines are broadly harmful are not supported by the same standard of evidence used in medicine, but officials and communicators also lose trust when they respond with slogans rather than careful explanation. In this space, credibility depends on acknowledging uncertainty where it exists while being firm about what the evidence does and does not show.
Anti-vaxxers meet
A group of anti-vaccine influencers and members of the Make America Healthy Again mingled at the Children’s Health Defense conference in Austin this past weekend.
It was the group’s third meeting, and featured presentations on messenger RNA immunizations, vaccine injuries and the potential harms of cell phone radiation.
There were vendors selling “Pharma is not my Mama” baby onesies and MAHA hats and tote bags. People walked around with T-shirts that read “unvaccinated.” The group Texans for Vaccine Choice, which successfully lobbied for easier access to exemptions in the state, handed out pens in the shape of a syringe labeled “I call the shots.” Texas became the epicenter of the US’s largest measles outbreak earlier this year.
But one figure was notably missing from the event — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — though every conversation centered around him.
Kennedy rebranded the World Mercury Project, a nonprofit that pressed to remove mercury from vaccines, into the Children’s Health Defense, which continued anti-immunization efforts as part of its goal to end chronic health conditions in children by “eliminating toxic exposures.”
Since taking over as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has distanced himself from CHD. Still, his name was met with thunderous applause at the sold-out event of about 1,000 attendees.
In RFK Jr.’s place, his celebrity spouse, actress Cheryl Hines, was there promoting her new memoir. She spoke with actor Russell Brand at an invite-only dinner for the highest paying conference attendees. People could bid in a silent auction for a spearfishing weekend with Brand. (Bidding reached $6,500.)
Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul sent video speeches on Covid vaccinations. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who earlier this year began taking steps to remove school vaccine mandates, lamented the media as working towards the “enslavement of humanity.” In a Saturday speech, former congressman and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director nominee Dave Weldon said there was no explanation for autism because “children don’t have political power” in the US.
Andrew Wakefield, a doctor whose medical license was revoked and who is credited with starting the argument that modern vaccines cause autism, appeared on a panel with other creators of the Vaxxed movie, including Del Bigtree, Kennedy’s former communications director during his presidential bid. All were swarmed by attendees for selfies and handshakes.
Weldon said he believes Kennedy was “moving in the right direction” including removing the Covid vaccine requirement for children and firing members of the existing vaccine review panel.
“Bobby has to be given the time to execute the plans that he has and that needs to be taken into account,” Wakefield told attendees.
It was also a moment for CHD to bask in its influence and fully embrace its anti-vaccine mission. MAHA Institute co-president and donor to Kennedy’s CHD, Mark Gorton, presented on why he believes vaccinated kids have higher rates of chronic disease than unvaccinated children.
“The childhood vaccination schedule needs to be eliminated and all vaccines need to be removed from the market until they can be approved both safe and effective,” he said.
And Bigtree, one of the creators of the Vaxxed film that linked immunization to autism, told attendees to not lose sight of the mission after their new-found influence in Washington.
“God is an anti-vaxxer,” he said. — Jessica Nix
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