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Who is Del Bigtree?

Del (Delores) Bigtree somehow rose from being a producer on The Doctors TV show to being a major influencer in the anti-vaccine movement.

Did Del Bigtree ever tell you that he gets millions to promote his anti-vaccine agenda?
Did Del Bigtree ever tell you that he gets millions to promote his anti-vaccine agenda?

How did that happen?

Who is Del Bigtree?

It’s not hard to understand once you see that he left The Doctors to work with Andrew Wakefield.

Why?

To produce Wakefield’s “documentary” Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe.

That’s the whistleblower film that was missing one thing – a whistleblower!

“…a propaganda film by a known scientific fraud whose UK medical license was revoked featuring a viewpoint trumpeting a long-discredited idea that MMR causes autism grafted onto a conspiracy theory about the CDC “covering up” the evidence that vaccines cause autism that has no basis in fact…”

Mystery solved: It was Robert De Niro who got Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccine propaganda film selected for screening at the Tribeca Film Festival

Still, while it was widely panned as anti-vaccine propaganda, producing Vaxxed did seem to set Del Bigtree up to be a celebrity in the anti-vaccine world.

He formed the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), began hosting a weekly video broadcast called The Highwire, and now goes around the country speaking at anti-vaccine events and lobbying against vaccine laws that could protect our children from vaccine-preventable diseases.

“The Selz Foundation provides roughly three-fourths of the funding for the Informed Consent Action Network, a three-year-old charity that describes its mission as promoting drug and vaccine safety and parental choice in vaccine decisions.”

Meet the New York couple donating millions to the anti-vax movement

And he is able to do all of this because he is funded by Lisa and Bernard Selz through the Selz Foundation.

Lisa and Bernard Selz, through the Selz Foundation, have given nearly $3 million to Del Bigtree's Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), not counting contributions since 2018...
Lisa and Bernard Selz, through the Selz Foundation, have given nearly $3 million to Del Bigtree’s Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), not counting contributions since 2018…

Just as David and Leila Centner seem to be supporting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and Claire Dwoskin and Barry Segal were previously outed as big financial supporters of anti-vaccine activists.

Del Bigtree wore a yellow star with the words “No Vax” in Hebrew-stylized letters at a 2019 rally in Austin, during the largest measles outbreak since the early ’90s.
Del Bigtree wore a yellow star with the words “No Vax” in Hebrew-stylized letters at a 2019 rally in Austin, during the largest measles outbreak since the early ’90s.

But that doesn’t necessarily explains how Del Bigtree got involved with Andrew Wakefield, does it?

But I would think when you have a child with autism, you know, or on the spectrum, you have no reference point. You have no…

I don’t want this to sound wrong, but it’s a little bit more like having a dog or a Doberman or something that you don’t understand how it thinks, you don’t know. I mean, I mean a better figure than animal reference except… you don’t have their brain.

Or you hear about stories of people that bring home of exotic you know of chimpanzee or something where they can’t, and this is not sounding right.”

Del Bigtree

Del Bigtree grew up unvaccinated.

“Bigtree is the son of Jack Groverland, who was the minister at Unity of Boulder for 40 years, and told the AutismOne crowd he himself grew up unvaccinated. (Bigtree told me in an email that his mother’s choice not to vaccinate her children was a spiritual one: “She believes very strongly that our bodies are designed by God to thrive and that good diet and exercise are much more important to developing a strong immune system than being vaccinated.”)”

Everything I Learned While Getting Kicked out of America’s Biggest Anti-Vaccine Conference

And his kids are unvaccinated.

But he had always wanted to make a movie about vaccines, and felt like it was his destiny to make Vaxxed with Wakefield.

You have to wonder if it also his destiny to become a super-spreader of misinformation about vaccines…

More on Del Bigtree

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