Jen Golbeck/SOPA/Zuma

The elites of the anti-vaccine world and “medical freedom” saw the presidential election take place to one hotel watch party in West Palm Beach, with a dizzying and growing sense of what was unfolding.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most famous anti-vaccine activist turned presidential candidate turned Trump promoter, appeared at the event before direction Mar a Lago; At the hotel, he sat alongside Del Bigtree, his campaign’s communications manager and founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, another major anti-vax group. They were joined by people like Aaron Siri, a prominent trial lawyer who focuses on vaccine injury cases, educators who advocate for “vaccine choice” in schools, and others who have dedicated their lives of adults to oppose a fundamental principle of public health.

The group watched on screen as President-elect Donald Trump praised Kennedy, their longtime friend and traveling companion. “He’s going to make America healthy again,” promised a gleaming, freshly tanned Trump in his victory remarks. In the crowd, a chorus rose up chanting: “Bobby! Policeman! Policeman!”

Trump smiled. “Go have fun, Bobby,” he said.

It’s a heady time for Kennedy and his anti-vaccine allies. While his own presidential campaign failed spectacularly, his choice to suspend it and support Trump’s resulted in the future president’s promise that Kennedy will play a role in the second Trump administration related to what Kennedy did. titled his project “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 country. Although he is currently described by the organization as its “president on leave,” its staff has spent time since Trump’s victory discussing their hopes for what Kennedy will do for the cause in Washington.

The day after the election, during a morning show on the online television channel CHD, a group of people affiliated with the organization celebrated their surreal luck. The show was hosted by Mary Holland, a lawyer and CEO of CHD, and Polly Tommey, a longtime anti-vaccine campaigner in England and mother of a child who she said was injured by a vaccine.

“One of us will be in the White House,” Tommey said. “Or around the White House. And this, for us, constitutes a major step forward.

Both women beamed as they interviewed John Gilmore, a New York City teacher and executive director of a small, decades-old anti-vaccine group, the Autism Action Network. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened in medical freedom in my lifetime,” Gilmore told Tommey and Holland. “Everything is going to be different.”

Gilmore added that he believed Trump was “sincere” in his support of the so-called medical freedom movement. “There are real incidents of vaccine injuries in his own family and I think he wants to take care of them,” he explained, without specifying who he thinks is affected by these injuries. “And this is finally his opportunity to do it.”

Gilmore recounted how he attended the West Palm Beach hotel watch party and how Kennedy told the room “how confident he was that his program would be fully represented in Washington, D.C.”

A major change, Gilmore added, is that the movement “is no longer on the fringes…Our collaborators will be at CDC, NIH, HHS and every other agency in the alphabet in Washington.” Not only will we be there, but we will be in a policy-making position.

Gilmore also expressed a common view in the anti-vaccine world: that the federal government is “relying on” data showing that vaccine harm exists and showing “the link between vaccines and autism “. With Trump at the helm and Kennedy in place, he said, “this data is going to be unleashed and it will hit the medical establishment like a tsunami.” It’s going to be huge. (Vaccine injuries, although rare, do exist, and a federal compensation program and a specialized court system has existed since the late 1980s to pay compensation to people who can document harm. CHD opposed the program and requested that the vaccine manufacturers be sued again in civil court, which would be a huge boon 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.)

Holley agreed with Gilmore that their movement was entering a new era and expressed hope that what she called “the new press” – “the podcasters, the independent journalists on the Internet” – would cover the issues of vaccine safety as CHD prefers. “That’s ultimately what the zeitgeist is,” she said.

Dawn Richardson of the National Vaccine Information Center, another anti-vaccine group, also appeared on the program. She said she cried while watching Trump’s acceptance speech. “We must dismantle the CDC,” she added. “We need to take vaccine safety away from the CDC. » Such a goal seems consistent with Project 2025, the project linked to Trump. political programwhich calls for split from CDC in two agencies. The American Public Health Association called the proposal “concerning” and warned that it would “slow emergency responses and take away the CDC’s already limited authority to provide public health guidance.”

Amid all the excitement, there is precedent that casts doubt on Kennedy’s ability to move the needle on their pet issue. The first time Trump was elected president, the two men met, after which Kennedy claimed he was asked be part of a “vaccine safety and scientific integrity” commission. But that never happened. No specific vaccine “disclosures” or reforms were made during his first administration, despite his promise. during a debate to “slow down” the childhood vaccination schedule. Many anti-vaccine activists have also been bitterly disappointed in Trump for his Operation Warp Speed ​​agenda. During his own 2024 presidential campaign, Kennedy criticized Trump for supporting a Covid vaccine.

“Donald Trump has clearly not learned from his mistakes in the Covid era” Kennedy tweeted in Marchciting “the documented harm caused by the shooting to so many innocent children and adults who suffer from myocarditis, pericarditis and brain inflammation.” (Covid vaccines have extremely rare side effects for a small number of people.)

Kennedy’s tone quickly changed when he was drawn into the Trumpverse, but there are signs that CHD is aware that Trump could easily change course. In a fundraising email, Holland, CHD’s CEO, welcomed Kennedy “heading to Washington, D.C. to serve in President Trump’s inner circle.” But, with that, she added, the CHD’s work remains more important than ever, “to encourage the administration’s efforts to make children healthy again, and to keep their feet to the fire s “They are not keeping their promises to make children’s health one of their priorities.” priorities. »