Since announcing his presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has at times tried to downplay his history as an anti-vaccine activist. Last year, the Democrat-turned-independent candidate told NBC News that he wasn’t “leading” with the issue. So why did he just appoint a prominent anti-vaxxer as his new communications director?
The hiring of Del Bigtree — a man with exceptionally paranoid, conspiratorial views of the medical establishment — signals that going forward Kennedy will likely lean into extremist stances in his insurgent campaign. It also suggests that he sees his campaign as dependent on a niche movement, which could in turn limit his general election appeal.
Bigtree describes his new boss not as a politician with compelling views on a wide variety of issues, but as a warrior for his extremist movement.
Since 2016, Bigtree has run the Informed Consent Action Network, the second-best-funded anti-vaccine organization in the country. In a letter announcing his new job, he boasts about growing up as an unvaccinated child who only consulted chiropractors for medical needs. He co-produced the 2016 documentary “Vaxxed,” which made the widely debunked claim that childhood vaccines have caused an autism epidemic that was subsequently covered up by the government. Bigtree has offensively compared vaccine mandates to Nazism, wearing a yellow Star of David at anti-vaxxer rallies and promising to hold Nuremberg trial-esque proceedings for Covid policy architects.
In discussing his new gig with Kennedy, Bigtree describes his new boss not as a politician with compelling views on a wide variety of issues, but as a warrior for his extremist movement. His letter announcing his new campaign role, addressed to the “medical freedom community,” overflows with Covid misinformation and characterizes Kennedy’s candidacy as a “miracle” that has the power to “stop the globalist’s New World Order.” The world’s Covid response, Bigtree writes, was “the greatest psychological operation the world has ever experienced” on behalf of “the dark forces of medical tyranny.” Bigtree promises that Kennedy’s campaign means that “our days of coerced compliance are coming to an end.” He ends the letter by promising campaign donors who give $1,000 special access to himself and to policy brainstorming sessions, presenting Kennedy’s candidacy as a vehicle for activist goals.
Bigtree is a communications director, not a campaign manager — formally speaking his title means he’s not meant to be calling the shots for overall campaign strategy. But it’s an influential position, and Bigtree’s devotion to a very specific cause could tilt and shape Kennedy’s messaging both on health issues and on his overall pitch to voters.
Kennedy’s attitude towards anti-vaccine rhetoric seems ambivalent; at times he’s downplayed his past views, but then he’ll make unhinged, bigoted statements about vaccines being “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people and refuse to back down from the claim. He certainly hasn’t shied away from making policy statements tied to his public health hobbyhorse — as NBC reports, he’s promised to “halt research into infectious diseases and use the power of the attorney general to threaten editors of medical journals over publishing research on Covid treatments and vaccines.” Bigtree’s appointment could suggest Kennedy is open to taking louder positions on these issues in the coming months.
Kennedy is pulling in remarkably high numbers in general election polls at the moment — recently he's been garnering over 15% support in polls measuring hypothetical three-way matchups between President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and Kennedy. But in previous presidential elections, support for other popular third-party candidates has fallen off steeply before Election Day. Kennedy’s vaccine views are not widely shared by the public, and the more salient those views become, the more likely it is that he will alienate a chunk of voters who might otherwise be drawn to him based on a combination of his surname and disenchantment with the two likely general election candidates.
Just because Kennedy’s support is likely to decline, though, doesn’t mean he won’t influence the final outcome. Late last year, I wrote that “Trump may be at slightly greater risk than Biden in terms of losing voters to Kennedy.” If Kennedy goes all-in on waging war against the medical establishment, it would play better with Trump-friendly voters than Biden-friendly ones, since vaccine hesitation is higher among conservatives than liberals. One hopes, at least, given what’s at stake in the election.