How Anti-Vaccine 'Crunchy Mom' Got RFK Jr.'s Support

As the "Crunchy Mom" ​​Movement BeginsThe move symbolizes mainstream acceptance of vaccine skepticism.and a broader lack of trust in medical science.

How "crunchy mom" vaccine skeptics found big support in RFK Jr.

CLEVELAND - The word "Crunchy" once defined a progressive view of the world of health and wellness.

Curvy moms of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s championed yoga, granola, and wheatgrass, as well as a wide range of political views, from LGBTQ+ rights to anti-God abortion.

No more.

Nowadays, social media is awash with content from bad moms, including video clips about sitting, eating healthy, and exercising.But the brand has been embraced by conservative right-wing women across the country.Today’s bad content is more likely to call for prayer, gun safety, and patriotism than for progress.

And one theme, more than any other, has come to define the new Crunch Moms movement: vaccine skepticism.

As the Crunchy Moms movement grows, it is emblematic of a growing mainstream embrace of vaccine skepticism and a widespread lack of trust in established medical science that worries scientists and public health experts.

Dr. Peter Hotes, director of the Vaccine Development Center at Texas Children's Hospital and author of "The Deadly Approach to Anti-Science," denounces the "snake oil salesmen" of health and human services dealing with the Trump administration and Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again movement.Hotez says that this alliance will cause enormous damage to Americans' faith in science and medicine.

For example, rates of diseases that are considered largely under control if not exacerbated are reaching their highest infection rates in decades as diseases break out and kill children across the country.

"Anti-vaccination activism is the leading deadly force in the United States right now," Hotez said."And now it's spreading to children who are being vaccinated."

It creates movement

Among Crunchy Moms, there are women who argue that vaccines have caused legitimate harm to them or their children.But the movement is also drawing large numbers of women who, without their own experience of vaccine harm, question everything from the established benefits of vaccines to their reported side effects before they are approved and tested.

Business partners Brandi Bright and April Loconti host the "Crunchy Moms Unfiltered" podcast from their home and offices outside of Cleveland.

The couple, who have been friends for many years and now live in a tidy country house with a chicken coop and a vegetable garden, personify the movement to which they are committed.Bright says childhood vaccines made her daughter sick, prompting her to research “alternatives” to the vaccine industry.LoConti's children did not suffer the same fate, but she was drawn to Bright's experience and the stories of mothers like her.

During several interviews, Bright and Luconti spoke enthusiastically about the research they conducted on everything from seed oil to silver to double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines.They presented their rationale for not trusting vaccines in particular, and the medical and pharmaceutical industries in general.

"It's hard to know who to trust because everything is so intertwined and so much money is behind it, and so far no one has asked these questions," Loconti said.

Senior officials in the U.S. government also expressed the same view.

Perhaps the most famous vaccine critic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the most powerful health care official in the country.Kennedy, who spent years raising doubts about the effectiveness and safety of vaccines, spent his first year in office outlining the nation's childhood and adult vaccination policies.

"We don't know what, if anything, vaccines contribute to the chronic epidemic," Kennedy told USA Today in an exclusive interview."And it's something we need to find."

Like many Crunchy Moms, LoConti and Bright's skepticism about vaccines and drugs reflects their backgrounds in food and nutrition research.

They are also increasingly interested - some might say obsessed - with what their children consume.It started with careful labeling of products they have long enjoyed, from cereal to cookies.Once they began researching the effects of these foods on their children, what they discovered was shocking and terrifying.

Splendid and Loconti found that much of the food and drink they and everyone around them was consuming was full of chemicals, additives, and substances whose purpose they did not understand.

In their treasing discussion, the mirror has entered an internet loans of doubt, the smell and concern.The muddy world has his own words, a hard-minded words and the opposite feelings, and the legion of pseudoscienceific scientists.

"I look back at the food I fed my teenagers and I'm like, 'Oh my God, I would never give that to my kids,'" Bright said.

As mothers researched what they and their children were putting into their bodies, their research increasingly captured a subculture of vaccine skepticism and anti-vaccine research and propaganda.

The world was bright and ready for crunchy mommies like LoConti.

"Just asking questions" about vaccines

In the decades before Bright and LoConti found it, the anti-vaccination movement grew from strength to strength, gaining millions of followers while developing mass and public relations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has supercharged the vaccine hype machine, drawing in millions of Americans angry about mask mandates and social distancing regulations. Politicians, from U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have helped push the movement from the fringes to the mainstream — spreading conspiracy theories and fake science to bring in vaccine-skeptic acolytes.

Suspicious and angry about what they had learned about their trusted food and drink, Bright and LeConti dove headfirst into the anti-vaccine movement, spending hours watching documentaries and interviewing scientists and doctors who had been ostracized from the scientific community to find out their views.

It made them increasingly skeptical and worried.

"I think what moms are asking, and what a lot of moms are asking, is just talking, doing research. Let's compare. Let's ask, let's research," Bright said."Something's wrong—we don't know what it is, so let's find out."

Bright and LoConti had followed a familiar path that millions of mothers like them also followed.Concerns about her children's eating and other consumption led to concerns and skepticism about what was in her injection.

They reasoned that if the big companies lied about healthy food and drinks, the same pharmaceutical companies might have done the same.

"I have never been against vaccines"

In an effort to understand the future changes that may be coming to America's vaccine landscape, USA TODAY sat down for an exclusive interview with Kennedy at the Health and Human Services office in downtown Washington DC.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Kennedy clarified his position on vaccines.

"I've never been anti-vaccine," Kennedy said."I've said that thousands and thousands of times."My concern is that we need to set up adequate safety testing for vaccines so that the public understands, and we understand, the risk profile of these products."

Experts like Hotez say such claims are false.They say that vaccines have already proven their worth because billions of people have taken them and the results are still very rare.They say vaccines that have been around for years were first tested, and have been tested ever since.

This is not good enough for Kennedy and his followers.

Kennedy told USA TODAY that she wonders if she herself is being harmed by the annual flu shots, which she took until the mid-1990s and then stopped entirely in 2005. The health secretary has spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice disorder, which she said may have resulted from her shots, although the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation has not said the medical research foundation would not protect against vaccines.

"Do I know if it's because of the annual flu shot? I don't know," he said."It's a potential culprit that I can't rule out, but I can't prove it."

Kennedy promised to continue to address the concerns of mothers like Bright and LoConti, who have lost their trust in the government to tell the truth about complex medical issues.

"As secretary of Health and Human Services, my job is to tell people the truth and then let them make up their own minds," he said.- So we have a new policy here, we don't tell "noble lies".We will tell the truth regardless of the impact."

Trust science, but only some science

There is a fundamental contradiction in the logic used by difficult mothers like Bright and LeConte.

When it comes to the established science, and what the experts believe, the scientific community is largely on the back foot when it comes to their views on seed oils, or trans fats, or how much screen time their kids should have.

But when it comes to vaccines, support from the mainstream scientific community has disappeared.

Bright and lo Conti only want to ask questions - questions that they need to ask what the neris fits are for the greatest income.

But that's not quite true.

Pick a few "unfiltered moms" videos about nutrition (whether it's concerns about heavy metals in food or questioning the value of food dyes that are legal in the US but banned in Europe) and it quickly becomes clear that there are indeed legitimate scientific concerns behind these claims.

Bright and LoConti asked these questions precisely because they could quickly and easily find studies from large, established scientific institutions that had asked the same questions many times before.Dozens of scientific papers have been published investigating the same concerns that fussy mothers have.

However, when it comes to vaccines, the body of research is more complex.

Jonathan Howard, an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at New York University who has written two books on the anti-vaccine movement, summarizes one challenge facing vaccine research.

“One of the problems with vaccines is that they're invisible, right?”Howard told USA TODAY."No one comes home and says, 'My child didn't get measles today because of the vaccine,' or 'My child didn't get polio today because of the vaccine.'

"There is enough data on the number of life-saving vaccines worldwide," Howard said.

But for almost every legitimate study that concludes vaccines are beneficial, there are now counterparts that worried mothers like Bright and LoConti can find online that stoke anxiety and fear about vaccines, Howard said.

But the biggest difference is that the research points out that the sources of many of the fears and doubts that make Bright and LoConti and other crunchy parents worry about food and nutrition are not the same.

Traditionally, scientists and doctors who questioned the safety and even benefits of vaccines became pariahs.Their studies, documentaries and papers are often dissected, ridiculed and dismissed by vaccine and immunology experts.

Ultimately, Howard said, to be an anti-vaxxer, or even a vaccine skeptic, you must choose to believe a largely discredited subset of research that is not academically or scientifically sound, long established by the vast majority of scientists.

Howard said it's more than suspicion, it's deliberate denial.

"There's nothing wrong with doubting and there's nothing wrong with asking questions; the problem is when you don't accept the answers," Howard said."Anyone who says now they're asking questions about something like this isn't doing it. They're not ready to hear the answers."

Will Carless covers extremism and emerging issues for USA TODAY.This story is part of a new documentary series, “Extremely Normal,” exploring new fronts of extremism across the country.