A Tale of Two Cults

The vaccine wars have produced two rival orthodoxies, and neither tolerates doubt or dissent.

AUDIO VERSION:

Robert W. Malone, MD, MS

It was the best of public health, it was the worst of public health. It was the age of molecular medicine and the age of magical thinking, the spring of Warp Speed and the winter of mandates. We were promised herd immunity. Instead, we lost public trust.

Charles Dickens wrote the original version about London and Paris in 1859, but his “superlative degree” describes the American argument over vaccines remarkably well. One camp insists that every licensed vaccine is safe and effective and that children should receive the recommended schedule. The opposing camp increasingly argues that vaccines cause more harm than the diseases they prevent. Both have little tolerance for doubt. Both have their authorities, articles of faith, heretics and financial interests.

Aaron Siri, a New York litigator, gave the first camp its name. His 2025 book Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines argues that vaccine policy has become a matter of faith, protected from the scrutiny applied to other medical products (Siri 2025). Siri also represents the Informed Consent Action Network, founded and run by Del Bigtree. That puts him in an interesting position: the lawyer who documented one vaccine orthodoxy also represents one of the most influential organizations on the other side.

There is a substantial academic literature on cults, ideological movements and systems of belief. It provides a useful way to examine both camps without first deciding which one is right. The question is not whether a group’s claims are true or false. It is how the group responds to dissent, conflicting evidence and challenges to its authority. By those measures, the similarities between the two vaccine extremes are difficult to ignore.

My own history gives me some experience with both. I researched and wrote the original patent disclosures on RNA as a drug and as a vaccine from 1986 to 1989, and continued this research through 2000. I continued to work in the vaccine field from both sides of the issue, well - I guess up to the present. I served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices until a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics invalidated that committee, and I declined to serve on its successor. MAHA Action, Inc., which Bigtree led as chief executive in 2025 (National Press Club 2025), paid me as a medical advisor until it terminated that relationship in June 2026. I remain a senior advisor to the Independent Medical Alliance.

What the Literature Means by a Cult

Sociologists largely stopped using the word “cult” casually decades ago. It had become a weapon, and the popular theory that people could simply be “brainwashed” did not hold up well in academic psychology or in the courts. What survived was more useful: a set of characteristics that describe how groups control belief and respond to dissent. They do not tell us whether the group is right or wrong. A group can be right about some facts and still behave like a cult.

Robert Jay Lifton developed one of the most influential frameworks after studying people subjected to Chinese Communist thought reform. He identified eight characteristics of what he called ideological totalism. Four are particularly relevant to the vaccine wars.

• The first is sacred science. The doctrine becomes unquestionable truth, and its authorities become difficult to challenge.

• The second is loading the language. Complicated questions are reduced to slogans and labels that shut down argument.

• The third is the demand for purity. People are divided into the faithful and the suspect, with members repeatedly required to demonstrate which side they are on.

• The fourth is the dispensing of existence. Those outside the accepted belief system lose standing. Their arguments need not be answered because they are no longer considered legitimate participants in the debate.

Other researchers described different parts of the same process. Janja Lalich studied groups including Heaven’s Gate, the religious cult whose leader and 38 followers died in a mass suicide in 1997 - the largest mass suicide event in America’s history. She called one of the forces at work bounded choice: people make choices, but within a world the group has already defined for them. Leon Festinger and his colleagues studied what happens when strongly held beliefs collide with reality. Committed believers often do not abandon the belief. They find a way to explain away the contradiction and may become even more committed. Lewis Coser described greedy institutions, organizations that demand extraordinary loyalty and weaken personal relationships that might compete with the group.

Political scientists have studied the related phenomenon of the cult of personality. Nikita Khrushchev gave the phrase its modern political meaning when he denounced Stalin’s cult in 1956. Max Weber had already described charismatic authority: followers grant a leader unusual authority because they believe that person possesses exceptional qualities, but the leader must continue demonstrating those qualities to retain their loyalty.

Lisa Wedeen found something even more interesting while studying Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. A leader cult does not require everyone to believe its claims. People can privately doubt them while publicly behaving as though they believe, and that public performance reinforces the system. Xavier Márquez describes what happens next. When loyalty to a leader becomes important, followers compete to demonstrate their loyalty. Yesterday’s praise is no longer enough, so today’s praise becomes more extravagant. He calls this flattery inflation.

The Church of Safe and Effective

The pro-vaccine absolutists have no single founder or leader. Their authority is spread across federal agencies, medical societies, academic journals and major news organizations. That does not put it outside Lifton’s framework. His original work examined ideological control within a state system, not a religious sect built around a single guru.

But the COVID era did produce something close to a personality cult. By April 2020, online sellers were offering Fauci bobbleheads, Fauci prayer candles and merchandise reading “In Fauci We Trust.” Anthony Fauci had become more than the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. To many Americans, he had become the public face of science itself.

Fauci made that identification explicit in June 2021. Responding to critics on MSNBC, he said, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” The problem with that statement should be obvious. Science is a method for testing claims and correcting errors. No individual scientist, public health official or government agency is science itself. Siri reaches a similar conclusion through depositions. The first section of Vaccines, Amen, “The Clergy,” describes vaccinologist Stanley Plotkin as a high priest and his students as disciples.

I saw how deeply this identification with Fauci had taken hold of friends and family in my own life. In 2021, I worked as an editor on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci. After the book was published, Jill posted the following on Facebook, quoting a passage I had written for the book. That single post ended a fifteen-year friendship. Our daughter-in-law’s mother, whom we had known well and considered a close friend, blocked Jill on Facebook and essentially stopped speaking to us. We never really reconciled before she died of heart failure in 2023.

Fauci’s loaded language is familiar to anyone who lived through 2021. “Safe and effective” became a phrase applied to products and populations supported by very different levels of evidence. “Anti-vaxxer” became broad enough to describe both someone opposed to all vaccination, and a parent questioning the timing or necessity of a single dose. The Merriam-Webster definition of “anti-vaxxer” now includes people who oppose some vaccines or oppose vaccine mandates. By that definition, a fully vaccinated physician who objects to a mandate can be called an anti-vaxxer. Once the label was applied, the underlying argument could be ignored.

Festinger’s pattern appeared early. On March 29, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told Rachel Maddow that agency data suggested “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” Three days later, a CDC spokesperson told the New York Times that Walensky had spoken broadly and that the evidence on transmission remained unclear. The claim changed, but public health authorities continued to speak with extraordinary certainty and mainstream media amplified their voices.

Then came consequences for those who refused. On July 16, 2021, President Biden declared that “the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.” The same day, he accused social media companies of killing people by allowing vaccine misinformation on their platforms. That September, the White House required vaccination for federal workers and contractors and announced a vaccinate-or-test requirement for employees of large private companies. The military ultimately discharged about 8,400 service members who refused the vaccine. As booster recommendations expanded, the definition of being fully protected changed as well.

Fauci has retired, and no individual has replaced him as the dominant public face of vaccine policy. Peter Hotez of Baylor campaigns against what he calls the deadly rise of anti-science. Paul Offit, co-inventor of the RotaTeq vaccine, lost his seat on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee in September 2025 and became one of the most prominent critics of the new direction in federal vaccine policy. Institutions have also stepped into that role. The American Academy of Pediatrics now publishes its own childhood vaccine schedule and successfully challenged the ACIP on which I served. Michael Osterholm’s Vaccine Integrity Project in Minnesota has assembled its own group of vaccine experts.

The old public health establishment may no longer visibly control the federal agencies, but little has changed beneath the surface. The same vaccine policies remain largely intact, as do the institutional networks and consensus that produced them.

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The Church of Unvaxxed and Unafraid

The other side of the vaccine divide is more organized around identifiable leaders and organizations. Children’s Health Defense began as the World Mercury Project. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chaired it beginning in 2016, took leave in 2023 to run for president, and resigned in December 2024 before becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services. Del Bigtree founded the Informed Consent Action Network in 2016 after producing the film Vaxxed. By 2024, the two organizations had become substantial enterprises. Children’s Health Defense reported $15.2 million in revenue and ICAN reported $15.3 million. Bigtree’s reported compensation that year was $242,289, in addition to having a gourmet chef on staff.

The language at the Children’s Health Defense conference in Austin in November 2025 showed how far the movement had traveled. Speaking to roughly a thousand attendees, Bigtree declared, “God is an anti-vaxxer, and he needs you to speak up.” Vendors sold infant onesies printed “unvaxxed unafraid.” Hats declaring that Kennedy had been right about everything sold out. This is the flattery inflation Márquez described. It is no longer enough for Kennedy to have been right about important things. Loyalty demands that he have been right about everything.

The demand for purity was visible at the same conference. Mark Gorton, head of the MAHA Institute, told the crowd that the movement needed to become more openly anti-vaccine. Mary Holland, chief executive of Children’s Health Defense, pushed back, insisting that her organization was not anti-vaccine but “pro-informed consent.” The distinction matters. A movement built around opposition to vaccine mandates and demands for informed consent was now confronting pressure from within to become explicitly opposed to vaccination itself.

Bigtree went considerably further a few months later. In February 2026, he told a reporter for The Atlantic that he wanted his teenage son to catch polio and measles. He said he had considered driving his unvaccinated family into South Carolina’s measles outbreak so they could be exposed, and described the pertussis vaccine as a crime against children. Fewer than one in a hundred polio infections in children result in paralysis, but no parent knows beforehand whether his child will be among them. Seeking infection deliberately is something quite different from arguing that parents should be free to decline a vaccine.

None of this makes every criticism coming from this movement wrong. Siri’s firm successfully fought the FDA over access to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine licensing records under the Freedom of Information Act. The plaintiff was a separate organization, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency. In January 2022, a federal judge ordered the FDA to produce 55,000 pages every thirty days. Forcing those records into public view was a genuine public service. The point is not that a group exhibiting these characteristics must therefore be wrong. It is precisely the opposite: a movement can expose real misconduct, win important battles and still become intolerant of evidence or dissent that challenges its own beliefs.

Each Church Needs the Other

Neither side is particularly good at hearing evidence from the other. Lifton called this doctrine over person. When facts or experience conflict with the accepted belief, the belief wins. Dan Kahan’s research on identity-protective cognition helps explain why. People do not evaluate evidence in isolation. They also consider, often unconsciously, what accepting that evidence would mean for their standing within their own group.

Researchers have demonstrated this effect in the vaccine debate. In a 2014 randomized trial, presenting evidence that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism reduced belief in the autism claim. But among parents already most skeptical of vaccines, the same information also reduced their stated intention to vaccinate. Correcting one false belief did not necessarily change the larger conclusion. In some cases, people simply found another reason to hold their position.

The pattern works in both directions. Bigtree has dismissed the replicated studies finding no association between vaccines and autism by arguing that the researchers were committed to finding that result. On the other side, federal health officials were accused of minimizing evidence of myocarditis and other adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, an issue examined by a Senate subcommittee in 2025. The evidence and circumstances are different. The response is strikingly similar: evidence coming from the other side is treated as suspect before it is considered on its merits.

Coser’s work helps explain why this matters beyond the vaccine argument itself. Institutions that demand strong loyalty work to weaken relationships that might compete with that loyalty. In medicine, the relationships that matter most are between physician and patient, and between parent and child.

One extreme overrides those relationships from above through mandates and requirements imposed far from the examination room. The other undermines them by teaching parents that physicians and public health authorities cannot be trusted at all. Both the anti-vax and the pro-vax church demand that the parent’s decision be made in advance, by doctrine or edict.

The Comparative Degree

If you are a parent deciding whether your child should receive a vaccine, neither cult offers much room for an individual decision. Medicine (and medical practitioners) should. The question is always comparative: this vaccine against this disease, for this child, at this age, based on the available evidence and this child’s medical and family history. Sometimes the balance strongly favors vaccination. Sometimes it is a closer call. Sometimes there may be good reasons to wait or even not vaccinate at all. That requires a physician willing to say, “I don’t know yet.” It also requires a parent free to say, “not today” or even “not ever.”

Two principles protect that conversation and the patient or parent/guardian decision. The first is informed consent. A competent adult who understands the material risks, benefits, and alternatives of a medical intervention decides freely whether to accept it. Parents make those decisions for their children. Judge Benjamin Cardozo stated the principle in 1914: “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.” After the Nazi doctors’ trial, the Nuremberg Code placed voluntary consent at the center of medical ethics.

The second is shared clinical decision-making. The physician brings the evidence, experience, and uncertainties. The patient or parent brings medical history, values and circumstances that cannot be reduced to a line on a chart. They discuss the decision together, but the final decision belongs to the adult patient or, in the case of a child, the parent. The CDC already uses shared clinical decision-making for some vaccines, including HPV vaccination for adults aged twenty-seven through forty-five, where there is no blanket recommendation that everyone in that age group be vaccinated.

The two cults undermine informed consent from opposite directions. Mandates take away the voluntary part. Doctrine takes away the informed part. A parent told that every vaccine is poison is no better informed than a parent told that every vaccine is safe.

Dickens wrote about an age in which the loudest authorities insisted on seeing everything in the superlative. More than 150 years later, the vaccine debate has fallen into much the same trap. Vaccines must be either safe or dangerous, lifesaving or poisonous, something every responsible parent accepts or something every responsible parent refuses. Good medicine does not work that way.

The decision belongs to a parent, and in the examination room, a physician should be willing to discuss what is known and what is not, and to defer to a parent free to make the final choice.

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