Leah Wilson’s small organization was less than a year old when she realized she was making a difference. It was the beginning of 2020, just before the Covid shutdowns, and hundreds of protesters had gathered to demonstrate outside the State House in Trenton, N.J. They held signs with slogans like “my child, my choice” and “hands off our kids,” urging politicians to vote against a bill that would end religious exemptions for school-mandated vaccines.
Ms. Wilson, 38, wasn’t there. She was almost 700 miles away in her home state of Indiana. But more than 80,000 people had used her online platform to send messages directly to legislators. The measure ultimately fell short of passage by a single vote.
It was an outcome “no one thought was possible,” Ms. Wilson said, but her side had won.
Ms. Wilson’s organization, Stand for Health Freedom, has become part of a grassroots push in the years since. Hers is just one of many groups dedicated to the cause of “medical freedom,” a catchall term for ideas that often diametrically oppose scientific consensus and established medical practices. The movement has brought in people of various political persuasions, and Ms. Wilson considers her own organization “transpartisan,” though most of the candidates it endorses are Republican. To Ms. Wilson, those involved have coalesced around one idea: “There’s roles for government, and telling us how to care for our bodies is not one of them.”
The medical freedom movement represents people with a broad range of positions. Many want to reduce Food and Drug Administration oversight and see the United States exit the World Health Organization. They’re often resistant to proven public health measures like mask mandates and water fluoridation, and they support access to raw milk, despite the health risks associated with it. (On the issue of abortion, Ms. Wilson is anti-abortion but said she preferred that her group avoid the “very charged political issue.”)
Perhaps more than anything else, “medical freedom” has come to serve as a rallying cry for people who not only oppose vaccine mandates, but also see them as un-American. Ms. Wilson said she and her organization strove to be “protectors of freedom.” Her advocacy, she said, is ultimately about asking one question: “Do we truly believe that the American experiment of freedom is a worthy one? I do.”
Since the pandemic, the movement has gained momentum. Anti-establishment sentiment erupted as a result of Covid-related shutdowns and edicts. Medical freedom groups in places like Texas and Mississippi gained influence and secured victories, including around the issue of religious exemptions to vaccine mandates. The groundswell of interest energized Ms. Wilson’s small group as well. Though it has just two full-time employees and an annual budget around $400,000, the organization has used the internet to exercise outsize influence. It has issued 520 calls to action, according to the organization’s latest report, and had 72 “legislative wins” in which the vote went its way. More than 700,000 people have sent close to six million missives to legislators through the platform.
The energy has led to concern and anger among many medical professionals. Dr. Paul A. Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, sees the growing medical freedom movement as a pressing threat to public health — one that selfishly disregards the lives of others.
“It’s not just your body. Is it your right to catch and transmit contagious illnesses?” Dr. Offit said. “I think the answer to that question is, resoundingly, no. You’re a member of society. Act like one.”
Government Denial Leads to Action
Ms. Wilson felt a pull to get involved in activism in 2018, soon after she and her husband decided they were ready to take in a second foster child.
Ms. Wilson had long been passionate about the care of foster children. At 21, she became a court-appointed special advocate for them, and enrolled in law school with initial ambitions to work in child welfare.
The Wilsons decided not to vaccinate their biological children, which was not an issue the first time the couple fostered a child; they had filed for a religious exemption, which the state accepted. (When asked what beliefs she held, Ms. Wilson said it was irrelevant, adding, “there are so many different reasons why the practice of vaccination, or many other medical interventions, could violate a person’s deeply held personal beliefs.”)
But the second time, in 2018, the Indiana Department of Child Services told Ms. Wilson that the religious exemption no longer applied and that children wouldn’t be placed in households with unvaccinated family members, Ms. Wilson said.
For Ms. Wilson, the news was jarring, and evidence of government overreach. “My husband and I were like, ‘This is crazy. Our kids aren’t sick; they’re not a threat. This is nonsense,’” she said. Around then, a number of states introduced bills to remove religious exemptions from school immunization requirements after measles outbreaks. Both Maine and New York voted to remove their exemptions in 2019. New Jersey’s bill had passed the State Assembly and seemed poised for passage in a January 2020 Senate vote.
It felt as if other parents were facing situations similar to hers, and Ms. Wilson wanted to “give the people a voice.” She decided on a specific strategy: providing predrafted emails that could be personalized and sent directly to legislators through a website.
Part of a Broader Movement
Stand for Health Freedom is a young organization, but the wider movement “goes to the very roots of America,” said Lewis A. Grossman, a professor at American University’s law school who has studied the history of libertarianism.
“There’s always been a robust portion of Americans who embrace these values,” Mr. Grossman said. As early as 1902, organizations like the American Medical Liberty League were pushing for freedom from vaccine mandates. In the 1950s, the John Birch Society and National Health Federation took up the cause. In 1975, a group opposed to water fluoridation in Rockland Country, N.Y., called itself the Citizens for Health Freedom.
But by and large, these groups and others like them existed outside the mainstream. Starting in the 1960s, however, American trust in institutions began to wane. And as vaccines successfully eliminated polio and measles — and greatly reduced rates of whooping cough and other infections — the perceived benefits of immunization began to fade from some people’s minds as well.
“It’s not only that we’ve largely eliminated measles from the United States,” Dr. Offit said. “We’ve eliminated the memory of measles.”
Then, Covid struck and cities were locked down. Public health officials also fumbled critical early messaging, painting the vaccine as a “miracle” that would provide immunity with a single dose, said Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
“We really lost credibility, because that’s not what happened,” Dr. Osterholm said.
Suddenly, medical freedom became a salient issue to many more Americans, and resistance to Covid restrictions became their unifying principle. Melanie Dragone, 48, who lives in Passaic County, N.J., and runs a group that opposes vaccine requirements, said the pandemic “grew our community exponentially.”
Much of that growth occurred online, as people lost faith in traditional medical institutions and searched for like-minded thinkers, Dr. Osterholm said. New supporters flocked to Ms. Wilson’s organization as it took on all sorts of causes. It opposed the construction of new Verizon cell towers in rural Nevada, citing “potential” radiation damage. (Gayle E. Woloschak, an associate dean and professor of radiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, has said there is “no risk.”) It supported the proposed federal PRIME Act, which would allow some local livestock producers to sell meat that was not inspected by the United States Department of Agriculture. (Ms. Wilson’s organization said the bill would “protect our meat from Big Pharma”; a food safety coalition said the measure would “compromise long-established food safety standards.”)
But like the activities of many organizations in the medical freedom movement, much of Stand for Health Freedom’s advocacy came to revolve around removing or blocking vaccine-related restrictions. Among the platform’s targets were a pending Georgia bill that would prevent hospitals from denying organ transplants to the unvaccinated and a Kentucky law, enacted last April, that requires any produce or other food item engineered to contain “vaccine material” to be labeled a drug. (There are currently no such products on the market, though scientists are experimenting with vaccine-laden lettuce and spinach in an ongoing study at the University of California, Riverside.)
As it grew, Ms Wilson’s organization gained support from a politically diverse group of advocates. Roughly 40 percent of the people who have taken action on the platform are Democrats, she claimed. Ms. Wilson saw this as evidence that “there are plenty of people who care about being the one who makes the ultimate health decisions for their children,” she said.
“This is common sense,” she added, “not strange or rare.”
A New Position of Power
In September 2023, only a few years after forming her organization, Ms. Wilson flew to Los Angeles to interview the leader of her movement: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
For decades, Mr. Kennedy has promoted fringe ideas, most famously the thoroughly debunked idea that vaccines and autism may be linked. But over the pandemic, Mr. Kennedy’s longtime areas of focus became some of the country’s most passionate points of contention. In May 2023, when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill barring vaccine and mask mandates in Florida, he boasted that it made the state “the national leader for medical freedom.”
By the time Ms. Wilson appeared onstage with Mr. Kennedy, he had become a folk hero to some by loudly expressing skepticism of Covid decrees. One month earlier, he had announced his candidacy for president. Still, even Mr. Kennedy was surprised, he told Ms. Wilson, when polling numbers showed sizable support for his presidential bid.
“I had nothing but bad articles written about me for years,” he said onstage. “I assumed that the general population of our country would have a very low opinion of me.”
Instead, he built a passionate coalition. It included Ms. Dragone, who had previously been a lifelong Democrat. She said that her dedication to health freedom now outweighed her other political leanings. So when Mr. Kennedy suspended his own campaign and endorsed Donald J. Trump, Ms. Dragone decided she would cast her ballot for the former president.
“I don’t think I would have voted for Trump otherwise,” she said. “Actually, there’s no way.”
Mr. Trump has since selected Mr. Kennedy to run the Department of Health and Human Services and has met with medical freedom activists in New Jersey. In November, Mr. Kennedy said that he did not plan to “take away anybody’s vaccines.” But, he added, he wanted to make sure that people had the freedom to choose whether to take them at all. After decades of being on the fringes, and perhaps for the first time, “medical freedom activists are in a position of power, rather than resistance,” Mr. Grossman said.
Dr. Offit said the United States was already experiencing “the effects of medical freedom.” In recent years, opposition to vaccine requirements for students and children has risen, and vaccination rates for kindergartners have fallen, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That trend leaves the nation poised to lose herd immunity to childhood diseases, Dr. Offit said, if it hasn’t already. Rates of whooping cough are climbing. A strain of the polio virus is still present in the environment, and could begin to infect more people. Measles outbreaks have occurred in dozens of states, and Dr. Offit worries it will only get worse from here.
Whether these developments might turn the tide away from medical freedom remains to be seen.
“How many children have to die to get their attention? I don’t know,” Dr. Offit said. “I guess we’ll find out.”
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