Anti-Vaxxers Are Grifting Off the Measles Outbreak—and Claim a Bioweapon Caused It

WIRED

17-04-2025

Apr 17, 2025 11:35 AM Activists affiliated with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are selling a "measles treatment and prevention protocol" for hundreds of dollars, including supplements supposedly formulated by AI. Photo-Illustration:Anti-vaccine activists with close ties to US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are falsely claiming that the measles public health crisis in Texas is caused by a 'bioweapon' targeting the Mennonite community. These activists are now trying to sell their followers a range of pseudo-scientific cures—some purportedly powered by artificial intelligence—that supposedly prevent customers from contracting measles.
The claims were made in a webinar posted online last week and hosted by Mikki Willis, an infamous conspiracy filmmaker best known for his Plandemic series of pseudo-documentaries. These helped supercharge COVID-19 disinformation online and were, Kennedy has said, funded in part by Children's Health Defense (CHD), an anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded. Willis also created a video for Kennedy marking the announcement of his independent run for the presidency.
'I'm not going to be careful by calling it a virus,' Willis said in the measles webinar. 'I'm going to call it what it is, and that is a bioweapon, and my belief after interviewing these families is that this has been manipulated and targeted towards a community that is a threat because of their natural way of living.' (Measles is not a bioweapon. It is a viral infection that can be easily prevented by getting a vaccine.)
The webinar was hosted by Rebel Lion, the supplement company that Willis cofounded. On the website, and prominently featured under the webinar, Willis sells and recommends a 'measles treatment and prevention protocol' full of supplements and tools on the site. On the webinar, Willis claimed the protocol will help parents 'get prepped for, if God forbid this does get out, and their children get sick.' Together, purchasing the full protocol costs hundreds of dollars.
'This is the standard radical anti-vaccine extremist playbook,' Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, tells WIRED. 'You can see RFK Jr. has translated his anti-vaccine lies into political power. You can see others have converted it into economic power. And there's some that just do it because it makes them feel good to be listened to, to be important, to be the center of a community. There's always an ulterior motive.'
The community Willis refers to in the webinar is the Mennonite community in Seminole, a small city in west Texas, which has been the epicenter of the measles outbreak. Over 560 measles cases have been reported in Texas alone. To date, the deaths of two children have been linked to the measles outbreak, and another death is under investigation.
Willis's bogus claim about a bioweapon is part of a larger effort by the anti-vaccine community to undermine the threat posed by the infection. Many, instead, have claimed that the measles deaths were caused by other diseases, or in some cases, the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine itself. These claims are not true and 'there have been no deaths shown to be related to the MMR vaccine in healthy people,' according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
The claims have been facilitated, in part, by Kennedy, whose response to the outbreak has been widely criticized by public health officials. Kennedy has seemingly attempted a balancing act in his response to this crisis, accurately saying the MMR vaccine is 'the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles,' before undermining this statement days later by claiming, without evidence, that the effectiveness of the vaccine wanes by 5 percent every year.
Kennedy also praised doctors last month in an interview on Fox News who have been using alternative and unproven treatments within the Mennonite community. Among those doctors is Richard Bartlett, who also appeared on Willis's webinar last week and is credited on the Rebel Lion site with sharing the measles 'protocol' package for purchase.
'Not only are we going to talk to Dr. Bartlett about what's happening and what he's seen there on the front lines, but he's also going to share what he's been using and the protocols that he's been using to treat his patients,' Willis said in the webinar.
On the webinar, Bartlett pushed unproven measles treatments like the steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin. He also urged viewers to buy a range of pseudoscientific treatments. Along with mouthwash, supplemental oxygen, and a few other items, the measles protocol includes Rebel Lion's own Fierce Immunity capsules, which cost $50 for a single bottle and contain a blend of five supplements available off the shelf that the company claims have been formulated with a supposed AI technology known as 'Swarm Intelligence.' Swarm Intelligence was created by Anton Fliri, who says he has worked as a cancer researcher at Pfizer in the past. Fliri told Willis in a webinar last August that unlike regular AI, his technology 'is the natural form of intelligence, that's the way our brain works, that's the way our body works and it doesn't hallucinate because everything we are doing is based on reality, based on the real evidence.'
Willis, Bartlett, Rebel Lion, and Fliri, who also appeared on last week's webinar, did not respond to requests for comment.
Willis's attempt to cash in on an ongoing public health crisis is reminiscent of a strategy that has been playing out for decades in the anti-vaccine community and was seen most recently during the COVID-19 pandemic. Antivaccine influencers and groups like America's Frontline Doctors pushed the baseless claim that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were viable treatments for COVID-19, encouraging followers to spend millions of dollars on these products.
From the very beginning of the measles outbreak in Texas, the anti-vaccine community has sought to undermine the threat posed by the disease, presenting false narratives about what caused the deaths and the dangers of the MMR vaccine.
Central to this push has been CHD. Within hours of the first child's death reported in Lubbock, Texas on February 25, the Defender, CHD's news publication, published an article citing several unsubstantiated text messages from medical professionals suggesting that the child had not died of measles.
CHD has also pushed the debunked claim that vitamin C offers protections against contracting measles. The group's website is currently promoting an ebook titled The Measles Book: Thirty-Five Secrets the Government and the Media Aren't Telling You about Measles and the Measles Vaccine . The foreword of the book is written by Kennedy, who is now the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
CHD, Kennedy, and the HHS did not respond to requests for comment.
On X, anti-vaccine influencers claimed without evidence that hospital employees had mistreated the first patient, leading to their death. One of those pushing this narrative was Syed Haider, a doctor who was part of the notorious Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), which formed during the pandemic and pushes dubious and ineffective treatments. Haider has almost 170,000 followers. Henry Ealy, a naturopathic doctor based in Oregon with 50,000 X followers, also pushed this claim. Ealy's 2022 report falsely claiming that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had altered records to boost deaths linked to COVID-19 has been cited in the past by CHD.
Marissa Brooke Alesi, an influencer known as Red Pill Patriot, posted a video on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook claiming the child was hospitalized for pneumonia and RSV. 'They then proceeded to give that child the MMR vaccination,' Alesi says, suggesting that the use of the MMR vaccine contributed to the child's death. The video has been viewed over 3 million times on Instagram alone.
Haider, Ealy, and Alesi did not respond to requests for comment.
Pierre Kory, a doctor best known for his role as the founder of FLCC and a central figure promoting ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, has also been pushing the narrative that measles was not the cause of the deaths of two children in Texas. In recent weeks, he has claimed without evidence that the measles crisis was, in fact, a targeted attack on the Mennonite community.
In August of last year, the American Board of Internal Medicine revoked Kory's certifications; just a month earlier, Kennedy described Kory as a 'brave dissident doctor.'
'Do you want to know the real story on this case?' Kory told a physician and activist last month. 'Several of us believe that they weaponized this measles virus—on purpose. She got sicker from this measles probably because they monkeyed with the virus.'
Kory did not respond to a request for comment.
Kory has called Willis a 'friend,' and the pair have collaborated multiple times in the past on webinars and podcasts. In 2023, Willis turned Kory's War on Ivermectin book into a documentary.
Willis also claimed in the webinar that he has been given exclusive access to the Mennonite community in Texas after Bartlett convinced community members to speak only to him and people from CHD, and to avoid speaking to members of the mainstream media, who Willis described as 'vultures.' Willis said he has interviewed at least 20 people for a short documentary that will be released in the coming days.
'This is a very contemporary example of very old tropes, which is that an extremist who's seeking to radicalize someone else, separates them from people that might persuade them otherwise, whether that's doctors, family, community, journalists who might be asking them questions to expose what's happening,' Ahmed says. 'You need to separate them out so you can indoctrinate them without impediment.'