Jen Golbeck/SOPA/Zuma
The elites of the anti-vaccine, “medical freedom” world saw the presidential election unfold at a hotel watch party in West Palm Beach, with a giddy, rising sense of what was unfolding.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most famous anti-vaccine activist turned presidential candidate turned Trump booster, turned up at the event before heading to Mar a Lago; at the hotel, he sat alongside Del Bigtree, his campaign’s communications manager and the founder of Informed Consent Action Network, another major anti-vax group. They were joined by people like Aaron Siri, a prominent litigator who focuses on vaccine injury cases, educators who advocate for “vaccine choice” in schools, and others who have devoted their adult lives to opposing a basic tenet of public health.
“This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in medical freedom.”
The group watched on screen as President-elect Donald Trump praised Kennedy, their longtime friend and fellow traveler. “He’s going to make America healthy again,” a glistening, freshly bronzed Trump promised in his victory remarks. From the crowd, a chorus broke out chanting: “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!”
Trump smiled. “Go have fun, Bobby,” he said.
These are heady times for Kennedy and his anti-vaccine allies. While his own presidential campaign failed spectacularly, his choice to suspend it and endorse Trump’s has resulted in a promise from the soon-to-be-president that Kennedy will serve some role in the second Trump administration relevant to what Kennedy has called his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
Kennedy is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the largest such group in the nation. While he’s currently described by the organization as its “chairman on leave,” its staff have spent the time since Trump’s win discussing their hopes for what Kennedy will do for the cause in Washington.
The day after the election, in a morning show on CHD’s web-only TV channel, a group of people affiliated with the organization celebrated their surreal good fortune. The show was hosted by Mary Holland, an attorney and CHD’s CEO, and Polly Tommey, a longtime anti-vaccine campaigner from England and the mother of a child she says was injured by a vaccine.
“One of us is going to be in the White House,” said Tommey. “Or around the White House. And that, for us, is a major breakthrough.”
The two women beamed as they interviewed John Gilmore, a teacher in New York and the executive director of a smaller, decades-old anti-vaccine group, the Autism Action Network. “This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in medical freedom in my lifetime,” Gilmore told Tommey and Holland. “Everything is going to be different.”
Gilmore added that he believes Trump is “sincere” in his support for the so-called medical freedom movement. “There are real incidents of vaccine injury in his own family that I think he wants to address,” he explained, without specifying who he believes to be affected by those injuries. “And this is finally his opportunity to do it.”
Gilmore recounted how he’d been at the West Palm Beach hotel watch party, and how Kennedy had told the room “how confident he is that his agenda is going to be fully represented in Washington D.C.”
One huge shift, Gilmore added, is that the movement is “no longer on the fringe…Our people will be at the CDC and the NIH and the HHS and all the other alphabet agencies in Washington. Not just being there, but we’re going to be in a policymaking position.”
Gilmore also expressed a common view in the anti-vaccine world: that the federal government is “sitting on” data showing that vaccine injuries exist, and showing “the connection between vaccines and autism.” With Trump at the helm and Kennedy in place, he said, “that data is going to be unleashed and that will hit the medical establishment like a tsunami. It’s going to be huge.” (Vaccine injuries, while rare, do exist, and a federal compensation program and specialized court system has existed since the late 1980s to pay settlements to people who can document harms. CHD has opposed the program and called for vaccine manufacturers to once again be sued in civil court, which would prove a massive windfall for the many personal injury lawyers involved in the movement. In an omnibus hearing, the vaccine court system, whose judges are experts in vaccine safety law, ruled in 2010 that vaccines definitively cannot be shown to cause autism.)
Holland agreed with Gilmore that their movement was entering a new era, and voiced a hope that what she called “the new press”—“the podcasters, the independent journalists on the internet”—would cover vaccine safety issues the way CHD prefers. “That’s what the zeitgeist is, finally,” she said.
Dawn Richardson of the National Vaccine Information Center, another anti-vaccine group, also appeared on the program. She said she’d wept while watching Trump’s acceptance speech. “We have to break up the CDC,” she added. “We have to take vaccine safety out of the CDC.” Such a goal seems in line with Project 2025, the Trump-linked policy agenda, which calls for splitting the CDC into two agencies. The American Public Health Association has called the proposal “concerning,” and warned it would “slow down emergency responses and take away the already limited authority for CDC to provide public health guidance.”
Amid all the excitement, there is precedent that casts doubt whether Kennedy can move the needle on their pet issue. The first time Trump was elected president, the two met, after which Kennedy claimed that he’d been asked to serve on a “vaccine safety and scientific integrity” commission. But that never happened. No particular vaccine “disclosures” or reforms were made during his first administration, despite his promise during one debate to “slow down” the childhood vaccine schedule. Many anti-vaccine activists were also bitterly disappointed in Trump for his Operation Warp Speed program. During his own 2024 presidential run, Kennedy assailed Trump for supporting a Covid vaccine.
“Donald Trump clearly hasn’t learned from his Covid era mistakes,” Kennedy tweeted in March, citing “documented harm being caused by the shot to so many innocent children and adults who are suffering myocarditis, pericarditis and brain inflammation.” (Covid vaccines have exceedingly rare side effects for a small number of people.)
Kennedy’s tune quickly changed when he was drawn into the Trumpverse, but there are signs that CHD is aware that Trump could easily reverse course. In a fundraising email, Holland, CHD’s CEO, cheered that Kennedy is “headed to Washington, D.C. to serve in President Trump’s inner circle.” But, with that, she added, CHD’s work remained more important than ever, “to cheerlead the administration’s efforts to make kids healthy again, and to hold their feet to the fire if they fall down on promises to make children’s health one of their top priorities.”
