COVID AND THE VACCINE - TRUTH, LIES, AND MISCONCEPTIONS REVEALED, page-1796

They cannot be taken seriously after their MMR stance.

Anti-vaccination activism

Bigtree produced the film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, based on the discredited^[1][2][3] views of Andrew Wakefield on an alleged connection between vaccines and autism. The film debuted in 2016 and was widely panned by critics. The epidemiologistIan Lipkin wrote that "as a documentary it misrepresents what science knows about autism, undermines public confidence in the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and attacks the integrity of legitimate scientists and public-health officials."^[5][13]

However, the film, its promotional bus tour, and funding from the Selz Foundation^[5] quickly established Bigtree as an important voice of a re-energized American anti-vaccination movement. He has since spoken at multiple anti-vaccine events in which he repeats false information about the risks of vaccines and alleges governments are engaged in a vast conspiracy to hide the truth.^{[5][14]:1[15][16]} His anti-vaccine advocacy has been described by medical professionals as fearmongering.^[5][17][18]

When Bigtree got involved with Wakefield, several states, including California where Bigtree resided, had begun to consider legislation that would restrict the types of exemptions for which parents could apply to have their unvaccinated children attend schools. Bigtree strongly opposed such bills and has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum for wearing a Star of David at an anti-vaccination event in an attempt to compare the treatment of those opposed to vaccination to the persecution of Jews.^{[19][20][21][22]} Often in collaboration with Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Bigtree still lobbies legislators to convince them to keep vaccination exemptions in place.^[23]

Bigtree is the public face and the chief executive of the anti-vaccination group Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), for which he received a salary of $232,000 in 2019. Under his leadership, ICAN promotes the conspiracy theory that government officials collude with the pharmaceutical industry to cover up grievous harms from vaccines. Bigtree hosts a regular stream webcast in which he frequently repeats anti-vaccination messages. The webcast is produced by ICAN and often features Kennedy. Before it was shut down in 2020, the YouTube broadcast of The Highwire attracted 174,000 subscribers.^{[5][16][24][25][26]}

In New York State in 2019, Bigtree was a keynote speaker at several anti-vaccination events targeting the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn and in Rockland County during a measles epidemic fueled by low vaccination rates.^[5][18] Bigtree gave an anti-vaccine speech as headline speaker at a natural health product conference in Toronto in 2018, but a repeat performance was canceled in 2019 after The Globe and Mail started asking questions.^[14]