Blazer-Sharp, Prattle-Ready, Brainless Steel Samurai Banana

Posted by Tom Bartlett

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/del-bigtree-pro-infection-polio-measles/686092/?utm_source=feed

Over coffee at a Starbucks just outside Austin, Texas, Del Bigtree told me he wants his teenage son to catch polio. Measles, too. He’s considered driving his unvaccinated family to South Carolina, which is in the midst of a historic outbreak, so that they can all be exposed. He prefers pertussis—whooping cough—to the pertussis vaccine, which he later described to me as a “crime against children.” It’s not the diseases that Americans should be afraid of, Bigtree insists: It’s the shots that stop them.

Spreading that message is Bigtree’s lifework. He produced Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, a 2016 documentary that helped mainstream the modern anti-vaccine movement by alleging—spuriously—that the CDC suppressed evidence of vaccine harms. His weekly internet show, The HighWire With Del Bigtree, mostly targets the pharmaceutical industry and has helped raise millions for his nonprofit, the Informed Consent Action Network, which files lawsuits to overturn school vaccine mandates around the country. He’s been a close adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and served as communications director for Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign.

For years, Bigtree and Kennedy echoed each other’s positions, first on childhood vaccination and, later, on COVID. They’ve both argued that vaccines cause autism, that the CDC is corrupt, and that Anthony Fauci has committed crimes. Kennedy—who, like Bigtree, has no formal medical training—has questioned the idea that the polio vaccine wiped out polio in the United States and, in 2024, said that if he had young kids, he wouldn’t give them the MMR vaccine. Such views can be deadly; last year, two unvaccinated children in West Texas died of measles.

These days, Kennedy chooses his words more carefully, whereas Bigtree has remained just as proudly committed to discouraging Americans from getting vaccinated. If Kennedy is the face of the movement, Bigtree is more like its id—loud, unfiltered, and theatrically aggrieved.

He was also, for a while, a fellow dad at my son’s Waldorf school in Austin. Waldorf schools tend to attract parents who don’t want their kids to eat junk food or play Fortnite; they also draw a fair number who skip vaccines. During the pandemic, I began to hear considerable chatter about the anti-vaccine celebrity in our midst. Some parents I knew rolled their eyes at Bigtree’s online antics, which at the time included entertaining the idea that the pandemic was a hoax or perhaps a plot to depopulate the Earth. But when he and his wife pulled their two kids from the school and started a parent-run competitor without COVID restrictions, several families I knew—fed up with remote classes and mask rules—followed suit and enrolled their children. The school, Raphael Springs Academy, still exists, though the Bigtrees no longer run it.

COVID expanded Bigtree’s reach and gave him a new disease to downplay. In June 2020, Bigtree said on his show that everyone except the very sickest Americans should “actually catch what is just a common cold.” COVID had already killed more than 100,000 Americans by then. (Today, the World Health Organization counts more than 7 million COVID-19 deaths globally, which includes more than 1 million Americans.) Another episode purported to prove that masks are toxic for children. He speculated about the origin of the coronavirus, suggesting, variously, that it might be a bioweapon or a vaccine experiment gone awry. His audience more than tripled in just a few months. (In July 2020, YouTube removed Bigtree’s channel for violating its terms of service, so he decamped for the more permissive video platform Rumble, which still hosts his show today.)

I was one of those new viewers. Bigtree’s views were dangerous, particularly in the midst of a pandemic, but I was curious to learn what my friends saw in him. I remember being taken aback by his reckless advice but intrigued by his broadcast persona. Bigtree, who’s in his mid-50s, has swept-back silver hair and a penchant for button-down vests and rolled-up sleeves. On the air, his demeanor veers from folksy and affable to Alex Jones–lite. In May 2020, during a joint television appearance with Kennedy on Daystar, an evangelical Christian network, Bigtree warned that a possible COVID vaccine would be one more step in pharmaceutical companies’ “attempt to take over the governments of the world.” He said he so distrusted the vaccine that, when he became severely anemic in 2021, he flew to a clinic in Cancún so that he could get a transfusion of unvaccinated blood.

[Read: Polio was that bad]

Bigtree makes two core claims about vaccination, both of which are demonstrably false. The first is one that other anti-vaxxers, including Kennedy, have been making for decades: that the apparent rise in autism cases in the U.S. since the 1990s can be blamed on immunizations, rather than, as is the consensus among experts, largely on broader diagnostic criteria and better surveillance. Bigtree believes that the dozens of studies that have found no evidence of a connection between autism and vaccines are flawed, and that immunizations have never been properly tested for safety. “Why can’t we find a double-blind placebo trial in any of the childhood vaccines?” he asked me. In fact, many early versions of vaccines, like ones for polio and measles, were tested against unvaccinated groups or a placebo. (Bigtree and others in the anti-vaccine movement object to trials that didn’t use a saline-only placebo, or weren’t double-blind.) New vaccines, however, are usually compared with older vaccines because it’s considered unethical, not to mention unwise, to put children at risk of contracting a vaccine-preventable disease.

That brings us to Bigtree’s second, arguably more outrageous claim: Vaccine-preventable illnesses simply aren’t so bad. He wants children, including his own, to get infected so that they can avoid the dangers of vaccination and develop more robust immunity. They will have, as he put it, the “Ferrari of immunity,” while the rest of us will be driving around in Ford Pintos. He told me he would prefer to live in an entirely unvaccinated country, one where the diseases that sickened millions in the first half of the 20th century could spread freely. That’s a frankly ridiculous notion, as I told him later. But Bigtree is committed to it. “I genuinely am upset that your kids are vaccinated, because it’s keeping my kids from getting chickenpox. It’s keeping my kids from getting measles,” he told me. “I believe their health depends on them catching those live viruses.” I asked him if he wanted his kids to catch all of the illnesses against which American children are routinely vaccinated. “Yes,” he said.

Bigtree no doubt wants what’s best for his kids, and he’s not wrong that, for some viruses, including polio and pertussis, the vaccines given in the United States don’t reliably block transmission. But they do, as I pointed out to him, guard against the worst outcomes of those diseases. And although he’s also right that most infected children have only mild symptoms, others are not so lucky. Pertussis killed about 4,000 people each year in the U.S. prior to the vaccine; during major outbreaks, annual polio deaths numbered in the thousands too.

[Read: His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade]

I had wondered, before meeting Bigtree, how sincere the bellowing figure on The HighWire really was. He’s not exactly a disinterested observer: Opposing vaccines has become Bigtree’s livelihood. He realizes, as he told me, that he could never return to his mainstream-television career (he spent years as a producer on The Doctors, a syndicated medical-advice show). But after our conversations and lengthy text exchanges, I don’t doubt that Bigtree is genuinely—if incorrectly—convinced that he’s stumbled onto, as he put it, “the biggest cover-up of all times.”

He was even more explicit, and more heated, in our conversations than he is on his show. He insisted, for instance, that he was less worried about disability and death from infectious disease than he was about vaccines causing profound autism. He told me that he would accept the risks of contracting polio “over a one-in-fucking-12.5” chance—the ratio of boys found to have autism in some regions of California, according to a 2025 CDC study—“of my son having an inability to have a marriage, to have children, to potentially even wipe their own ass, okay? That is what drives me now.” (The CDC study included diagnoses across the autism spectrum; most people diagnosed with autism do not have profound impairment.)

That sort of intensity played a role in his exit from the formal leadership of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. Bigtree was the original CEO of MAHA Action, the nonprofit started in late 2024 to promote Kennedy’s agenda. But last April, during the dramatic measles outbreak in West Texas, Kennedy posted on X—accurately—that “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” Bigtree, in a reply, wrote—inaccurately—that the vaccine was “also one of the most effective ways to cause autism.” Although Kennedy didn’t scold him for the public rebuke, Bigtree decided not long after the exchange that he should step down, he told me. (Neither MAHA Action nor the Department of Health and Human Services responded to a request for comment.)

Kennedy has delivered big wins for the anti-vaccine movement, including moving several vaccines off the CDC’s universally recommended list and undermining the agency’s statement on its website that vaccines don’t cause autism. But Bigtree continues to think the health secretary hasn’t gone far enough in his anti-vaccine agenda. He wants him, for instance, to trash the rest of the CDC’s list of recommended vaccines so that schools can’t mandate them. He also wants the federal law that limits pharmaceutical companies’ liability for vaccine injuries changed. And he wants HHS to conduct a study comparing the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated people. If that study doesn’t happen, Bigtree told me, then Kennedy’s tenure will have been mostly a failure.

[Read: The CDC’s website is anti-vaccine now]

But he still has faith. At a recent taping of The HighWire that I attended—a professional operation involving multiple cameras, a control room with a dozen computers, and several producers scurrying around—Bigtree opened by praising Kennedy’s decision to strike several vaccines from the recommended childhood schedule. “We’re obviously bathing in all the success that we’ve had,” he told viewers.

Although the first year of Kennedy’s tenure amounted to a flurry of anti-vaccine changes at HHS, he has in recent weeks emphasized more popular priorities, such as the new protein-heavy food pyramid. (The New York Times has reported that Kennedy is backing away from vaccines, at least for now, in the lead-up to the midterms.) But creating the MAHA movement was fundamentally a joint effort by Bigtree and Kennedy, and there’s been no indication that Kennedy is abandoning the anti-vaccine cause or disavowing longtime allies like Bigtree. The two had dinner together late last year, Bigtree told me. Last fall, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy founded, featured Bigtree as a speaker for its annual meeting. Bigtree, whose father is a minister, used his speech to embrace the anti-vax label, even calling God an anti-vaxxer.

[Read: RFK Jr.’s cheer squad is getting restless]

After getting to know Bigtree and watching his show, I’m not sure that the label fully captures his philosophy. He’s more than anti-vaccine: He’s pro-infection. And even though Kennedy hasn’t come out so strongly on the side of diseases since becoming health secretary, he has done so previously, suggesting, for example, that contracting measles could bolster the immune system later in life. Bigtree, for one, thinks his former boss shares his views. Kennedy “recognizes the same thing I do,” he told me. “We would be healthier if we were catching these illnesses.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/del-bigtree-pro-infection-polio-measles/686092/?utm_source=feed

Posted by Katherine J. Wu

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/measles-death/686122/?utm_source=feed

Of every 1,000 people the measles virus infects, it may kill as few as one to three. In a way, this can seem merciful. But the mathematics of measles is also unforgiving. The virus is estimated to infect roughly 90 percent of the unimmunized people it encounters; each infected person may pass the infection on to as many as 12 to 18 others. In large part owing to an ongoing outbreak in South Carolina, the United States is watching those risks unfold in real time. As of last Thursday, the CDC is reporting 982 cases of measles. That count is expected to break 1,000 this week; a tracker run by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that many experts consider more reliable has ticked past 1,000 already. By the numbers alone, another death seems inevitable, and inevitable soon.

Probabilities aren’t guarantees, of course. So far, 2026 may be seeing some improvements over 2025, when the U.S. documented more than 2,200 measles cases—more than in any year since 1991. This year, just 4 percent of measles cases have led to hospitalization, compared with 11 percent last year. Several factors could be contributing to that discrepancy, including how hospitals in South Carolina are reporting measles admissions or of more mild cases being diagnosed to begin with; experts aren’t yet sure.

That 4 percent, however, still represents 40 or so people who have ended up in the hospital with at least one of the conditions that can make measles so devastating—among them, pneumonia, respiratory failure, and brain disease. In South Carolina, multiple people, including children, have been hospitalized with a form of brain swelling called encephalitis, which can lead to permanent intellectual disability or deafness, and in some cases turn fatal.

Outbreaks are brewing elsewhere in the country too—Florida, Utah, Arizona. The nation is on the verge of losing the measles-elimination status it has held for 26 years, which would officially mean that the virus was once again routinely circulating in the United States. The majority of measles cases will remain somewhat mild. But as outbreaks continue, Americans will see where percentages mislead. Even if the rates of death and disabling disease remain roughly the same, as case numbers grow, so too will the absolute amount of suffering.

The calculus of the measles vaccine, meanwhile, should be comforting: A single dose of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine can protect people against measles for decades at rates of 93 percent; two doses can protect at 97 percent. Some vaccines work mostly to keep people from getting very sick, but the measles one is powerful enough to prevent many infections from taking hold at all. Only 150 or so of 2025’s measles cases—7 percent—occurred in people known to have received at least one MMR dose. (The CDC and Johns Hopkins haven’t been reporting on hospitalizations by vaccination status.)

If those numbers still sound uncomfortably high, consider that 90 percent of American kids have gotten at least one MMR dose. The higher the vaccine coverage, the more cases will occur among the vaccinated—but also, the far fewer cases will occur overall. And studies have consistently found that when vaccinated people do contract measles, their cases are much milder and potentially less contagious than unvaccinated cases.

Still, certain factors, including genetics and immunocompromising conditions, can alter the level of protection a person gets from an immunization. Age, too, naturally erodes defenses, especially for people decades out from their most recent measles-vaccine dose. And not all vaccinated people are vaccinated in an optimal way. Some Americans, for instance, are too old to have been vaccinated with both modern MMR doses; children generally don’t receive their second injection until they’re about to begin kindergarten. The more a virus transmits broadly, the more easily it can exploit any vulnerability it finds. During a measles outbreak that began in the Netherlands in 1999, more cases were detected in vaccinated people living in mostly unvaccinated communities than in unvaccinated people in highly vaccinated communities—simply because low-vaccine communities were giving the virus far more chances to spread.

Unvaccinated people living among other unvaccinated people remain at the highest risk, Maia Majumder, an infectious-disease modeler at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. The current statistics reflect that: The large majority of measles infections—93 to 94 percent—are still happening in unvaccinated people. Last year’s largest outbreak, centered on West Texas, killed two school-age children, both of whom were unvaccinated.

Other consequences of measles can take years to become obvious. Because of a quirk in its biology, the virus can erase a person’s preexisting immunity against other pathogens, leaving them more vulnerable to all sorts of illnesses. The more severe the measles infection, the more thorough the damage. Another of measles’ worst and most insidious outcomes is subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), an untreatable neurodegenerative condition that can take nearly a decade to manifest. Alex Cvijanovich, a pediatrician in New Mexico, told me that about two decades ago, she treated a middle schooler who had caught the virus as a seven-month-old, still too young to be vaccinated. The initial illness was tame, seemingly inconsequential. But around the age of 12, the boy—an honor student—“started getting lost between his classes,” Cvijanovich said. A spinal tap eventually showed that the virus had lingered in his neural tissue for more than a decade, causing irreversible brain damage. In the following months, the boy’s nervous system deteriorated until he could no longer control the flow of fluid into his lungs. He asphyxiated on his own body’s secretions just a few years after measles had been declared eliminated in the United States.

“It was the most horrible, devastating death of all my years of training and doing pediatrics,” Cvijanovich said. “I comforted myself by telling myself, I’ll probably never see this again.”

Now she is no longer so sure. SSPE, like many other measles complications, is rare, occurring in perhaps one out of every few thousand infections among the unimmunized. (Cases among the vaccinated are virtually nonexistent.) But children who catch the virus in infancy seem especially vulnerable.

To protect their patients from infection, Cvijanovich and her colleagues keep a “rash phone” outside of their office, for families bringing in children who look especially blotchy and red, so that a nurse can inspect them far away from other vulnerable kids. James Lewis, the health officer for Snohomish County, Washington, which has been battling a smaller measles outbreak for several weeks, told me that his department has been advising any patients with suspicious symptoms and a potential measles exposure to call ahead, so they can wait outside the doctor’s office until they can be seen inside. Some may even be evaluated in their car.

Not every place has the resources for such investments, or for the testing, contact tracing, isolation rooms, vaccine clinics, and other measures necessary to help stop measles outbreaks. And some experts worry that as measles continues to appear in confined environments—such as, recently, an ICE facility in Texas—adequate infection-prevention measures will too frequently fall short.

Measles is one of the most contagious viruses ever documented and requires near-comprehensive levels of vaccination—roughly 95 percent or more—in a community to prevent it from spreading. But uptake of the MMR vaccine has ticked steadily down in recent years. Experts anticipate further drops under the Trump administration, especially as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department and Health and Human Services and a longtime anti-vaccine activist, continues to restrict access to vaccines, dismiss vaccine experts, challenge vaccine manufacturers, and question vaccine safety. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.) One recent modeling study found that a drop in nationwide MMR uptake of just a few more percentage points could lead to millions more measles cases over the next 25 years. And the more measles moves around, the more the risk to everyone will increase.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/measles-death/686122/?utm_source=feed

Posted by Nicholas Florko

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/are-protein-bars-candy/686099/?utm_source=feed

Eating candy for breakfast is not a good decision. But most mornings, I start my day with something that looks and tastes a lot like just that. The Built Puff protein bar is covered in chocolate and has a sweet coconut center, making it practically indistinguishable from a Mounds bar. Nutritionally, though, the two products are very different. A Mounds bar has north of 200 calories and 20 grams of added sugar. My bar has 140 calories, just six grams of added sugar, and about as much protein as three eggs.

Protein bars have come a long way from the chalky monstrosities that lined shelves not long ago. In this era of protein everything, they are successfully spoofing candy, but with much more impressive macronutrients. Built also makes bars in flavors such as Blue Razz Blast, Strawberries ‘n Cream, and Banana Cream Pie—all with a similar nutritional profile to my preferred coconut version. Another one of my favorites, the Barebells caramel-cashew bar, tastes like a mash-up of a Twix and a Snickers. There are rocky-road protein bars, birthday-cake protein bars coated in sprinkles, and snickerdoodle-flavored protein bars. In theory, I can eat frosted cinnamon rolls or a package of sour gummies without blowing my diet.

For anyone with a sweet tooth, it can feel like food companies have developed guilt-free candy. But that’s where things get disorienting. Some of these products are seemingly nutritionally benign, whereas others are nothing more than junk food trying to cash in on protein’s good reputation. The new protein-spiked Pop-Tarts contain the same amount of sugar as the original Pop-Tarts—30 grams. Or consider Gatorade’s protein bar, which has roughly as much sugar as a full-size Snickers. At this point, the line between protein bar and candy bar has never been blurrier.

[Read: America has entered late-stage protein]

If you’re confused, you’re not the only one. In 2023, a group of Gatorade customers sued PepsiCo, the brand’s parent company, over its sugary protein bars. They alleged that Gatorade was deceiving customers by labeling the products as protein bars as opposed to “a candy bar or dessert.” Pepsi’s lawyers said that it had not engaged in false advertising, because the sugar content was right there for anyone to see on the nutrition-facts label. (In October, the case against PepsiCo was resolved out of court; the bars are still loaded with sugar.)

The lawyers have a point: For some bars, the nutrition facts do tell a clear story. You don’t need to be a nutritionist to figure out that protein Pop-Tarts are not particularly good for you. Other cases, however, aren’t that simple. An oatmeal-raisin-walnut Clif bar tastes pretty healthy, and its 10 grams of protein may keep you fuller for a while—one of the many reasons people are protein-maxxing these days. But is that worth 14 grams of added sugar?

Calories and sugar only tell you so much about whether you’re munching on a healthy snack or something that’s more akin to a Butterfinger. Consider the FDA’s advice on the matter. The agency used to say a protein bar could be classified as healthy if it provided at least 10 percent of a person’s daily recommended protein and also didn’t have much fat, cholesterol, or sodium. Under those guidelines, most of these new bars would qualify as healthy. But the FDA finalized those guidelines in 2024 after complaints from Kind, which makes bars studded with whole nuts. The company argued that the rules unfairly maligned its products, because nuts are too high in fat to qualify as healthy. Under the new rules, it seems that protein bars and other products can’t be labeled as healthy if they rely on protein powders and isolates, rather than whole foods such as nuts and eggs, for their protein. As a result, many modern protein bars probably can’t be labeled as healthy.

The FDA is onto something, according to many nutritionists. “Protein bars are candy bars in disguise,” Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition at NYU, told me. Even products like David bars, which come in flavors such as Cake Batter and Red Velvet and have just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar, are not as healthy as they may seem. They are made with artificial sweeteners and several other food additives, as are many other candy-protein hybrids with impressive macros, including my beloved coconut-flavored Built Puff.

[Read: Coke, Twinkies, Skittles, and … whole-grain bread?]

These bars lack the slew of micronutrients, such as vitamins and minerals, that are typically part of whole foods. “Eat a bag of nuts, and you will be healthier and get your protein,” Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Like candy, most modern protein bars are squarely in the category of ultra-processed foods, which many researchers believe may prompt people to overeat and contribute to our collective dietary problems. The science of ultra-processed foods remains largely speculative, however. It’s not yet clear just how bad these products are for us—and why. In an email, David CEO Peter Rahal told me that the macronutrients are what matter most. “To call David a candy bar because it tastes good is like calling a Tesla a toy because it’s fun to drive,” he said.

At the very least, something like the David bar is probably better than a Snickers for anyone craving a quick snack. If protein bars truly replace candy, perhaps Americans will be marginally healthier. If these products become people’s breakfast instead of a well-balanced meal, then not so much. The protein boom has made it easier than ever to get your macros from fun, tasty treats. But for the most part, they are still just treats.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/are-protein-bars-candy/686099/?utm_source=feed