Eric Trump spoke at the anti-vaccine conference.
Screenshot by NPR.
Eric Trump, the son of former President Donald Trump, was a political guest at the anti-vaccine conference.
Some of the younger Trump's biggest applause lines came when he attacked the vaccine mandates.
Do you want to get a vaccine or not? "Do you want to be left alone or not?" asked Trump.
The anti-vaccine activists who put on the event put on by Trump were very different from the other speakers.
The day before Trump's speech, a doctor named Edward Group stood on the stage and told the audience to drink their urine as an alternative to getting vaccinations. Carrie Madej said that the vaccines contained technology designed to put another kind of nervous system inside you. She claimed that the vaccines were supposed to turn humans into machines.
Political figures were not allowed to attend the conference in the past because of fringe views. The anti-vaccine movement and the political right are drawing closer together as America heads into the mid-term elections next year. The alliance promises to give both sides more power, but the cost could be thousands of American lives.
Understanding where the parties are coming from is important to understand what's happening. The anti-vaccine movement was not always political. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late senator, has supported liberal causes in the past.
An unlikely alliance.
Del Bigtree is an anti-vaccine activist who is a registered Democrat. He wrote and produced a documentary which claimed that childhood vaccines were linked to the development of the brain. The message never caught on with the liberals he was targeting.
Del Bigtree says he's seen his audience grow on the political right.
The Washington Post is pictured.
Instead, it seemed to be about the political right. He remembers the first time he noticed, after he was invited to speak at a conservative women's group.
"I was shocked as a lifelong liberal that I was hugging and hanging out with a bunch of extremely conservative mothers and grandmothers," says Bigtree.
Bigtree has been banned from social media for making false claims. His conservative audience keeps growing as the Pandemic drags on. He speaks at conferences with people who claim the election was rigged.
"If there's a white supremacist on the stage, or I find out that there's something distasteful, then I just see that stage as simply an audience that I want to hear this message," says Bigtree.
It's a game of numbers. He wants to grow his movement, and he'll talk to anyone who will listen.
Roger Stone is a key link between the pro-Trump political movement and the anti-vaccine activists.
Tasos Katopodis is a photographer.
Far-right conservatives like Roger Stone are on the other side of this alliance. Stone has been a Republican political consultant since the 1970s. He lied to Congress about his knowledge of the 2016 Trump campaign's contacts with Russia. Stone was pardoned by Trump in December 2020.
Stone said that he's open to some of the ideas presented at the conference. The shot is a powerful wedge issue that Republicans can use to motivate conservative voters during the upcoming elections. According to public polls, vaccine mandates are likely to be a campaign issue.
Many features make vaccine mandates a good issue to motivate conservative voters. The fight is about personal liberty and government regulation. Adding in the apocalyptic views of anti-vaccine activists and the political power of arguments against vaccine mandates gets punched up to a whole new level.
Some Republicans think that vaccine mandates, such as this New York City requirement to enter museums and other public places, will be a potent political issue in the future.
Spencer Platt is a photographer.
Bigtree claims that the COVID-19 vaccines are killing people and represent an "existential threat to humanity."
The synergy between real politics and imagined dangers is bringing the pro-Trump movement and anti-vaccine activists together.
The result of this union appears to be an even higher death toll from COVID, in part because many people resist getting the shot.
Liz Hamel is the head of public opinion research for the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care think tank.
Many Republican voters are being bombarded with bad science about vaccines every day. According to Kaiser's polling, 98% of Republicans think false statements about vaccine safety are true.
Republican vaccination rates have fallen further and further behind the rest of America over the past eight months. Kaiser's research shows that an unvaccinated person is three times more likely to lean Republican than they are to lean Democrat.
It's now affecting Republicans more.
According to an analysis by NPR, Republicans are dying at a higher rate. A nationwide comparison of 2020 presidential election results and COVID death rates since vaccines became available for all adults found that counties that voted heavily for Trump had nearly three times the COVID mortality rate of those that voted for Biden. The vaccination rates in those counties were much lower.
Individual political affiliations of those taken by COVID remains unknown, as the analysis only provides a geographic association. Charles Gaba, an independent health care analyst who has been tracking partisanship trends during the Pandemic, says asking someone what their loved one's ideology was after they passed away is a little tacky. The strength of the association and polling information suggest that Republicans are being disproportionately affected.
Stone was nonplussed when asked about Republicans' low vaccination rates. God bless the person who makes their own choice. He claimed that the vaccine enhances a person's chance of getting the disease. He says he would be more concerned if he were a Democrat.
Conservative politicians try to keep the discussion on the issue of choice to themselves. Mark Burns is a pastor who is running for Congress and he says it's not about whether the vaccines work or not. You are stripping citizens of the right to choose what's best for their own life, that's what matters to me.
Mark Burns is a pastor. Burns spoke at a major gathering of anti-vaccine activists.
A photo of Robyn Beck.
Burns compared the choice about vaccination to the choice about smoking, saying "Cigarettes kill people every day, but yet you can go to the supermarket right now and buy it with no issue, that's their choice." They have the right to put cancer into their lungs. He thought his position would help him win the primary in the conservative South Carolina district where he hopes to be elected.
He is the worst element in American politics today.
The willingness to use a vaccine into political capital is disturbing for many Republicans.
"They just care about winning," says Annette Meeks, who heads the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota conservative think tank. It's the worst element in American politics.
She's watched people get sick because of the data on vaccines. "To see people reject vaccines because of lies and pseudoscience is a tragedy beyond words," says Meeks.
The anti-vaccine movement carries huge political risks for the GOP. In states like Minnesota, elections are won and lost in the suburbs. Suburban voters tend to bevaccinated.
The long-term consequences for the Republican Party will be a lot of those independent suburban voters will look askance at us and say, 'What is this all about?' I got vaccine, my family got it, and we're all fine.
The anti-vaccine movement is not at risk of being hurt by the Republican Party's risks in lives and votes.
Del Bigtree says he's seeing more people at speaking engagements and getting more visitors to his website.
He says that the group is growing in size, numbers, and confidence. His audience is conservative America.
The report was contributed to by WPLN's Pfleger.
