How Anti-Vaccine Beliefs Reshaped the 'Crunchy Mom' Identity for RFK Jr.

CLEVELAND ― The word “Crunchy” once defined a progressive outlook in the health and wellness world. Crunchy moms of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s espoused yoga, granola and wheatgrass, alongside broadly left-leaning political views on everything from LGBTQ+ rights, to abortion, to God. Not any more. Now, social media feeds are awash with content from crunchy moms whose videos appear alongside clips about wellness, healthy eating and exercise. But the label has been enthusiastically adopted by conservative, right-leaning women across the country. Crunchy content of today is more likely to feature calls to prayer, protecting arms and patriotism than to progressivism. And one topic, more than any other, has come to define the new crunchy moms movement: vaccine skepticism. As the crunchy moms movement swells, it is emblematic of an increasingly mainstream embrace of vaccine skepticism and a broader lack of trust in established medical science that is alarming scientists and experts in public health. Dr. Peter Hotez, director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital and author of “The Deadly Rise of Anti Science,” decries what he calls a convergence of “snake oil salesmen” from the health and wellness industry with the Trump Administration and Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement. This alliance, Hotez says, is wreaking immeasurable damage to Americans’ trust in science and healthcare. The rate of diseases once considered essentially under control, if not eradicated, has been climbing in recent years in the United States as vaccine rates have fallen. Measles, for example, has reached its highest rate of infection in decades, as outbreaks sicken and kill children across the country. “Anti-vaccine activism is now a leading lethal force in the United States,” Hotez said. “And now it’s spilling over into childhood immunizations.” A movement builds Within the crunchy moms are women who say they or their children have suffered legitimate harm from vaccines. But also flocking to the movement, and in far greater numbers, are women who question everything from the established benefits of vaccines, to how they are approved and tested, to their reported side effects, without their own personal experiences of harm resulting from vaccines. Business partners Brandy Bright and April LoConti run the podcast “Crunchy Moms Unfiltered” from their home and a local studio just outside Cleveland. The pair – friends for years and now sharing a tidy suburban home with a chicken coop and vegetable garden – embody the movement they have become devoted to. Bright says childhood vaccines made her daughter sick, pushing her towards “alternative” research on the vaccine industry. LoConti’s children never suffered such a fate, but nevertheless she’s been pulled in by Bright’s experiences, and stories from moms like her. Over several interviews, Bright and LoConti spoke passionately about the research they have conducted into everything from seed oils to colloidal silver, to double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines. They laid out their reasoning for not trusting vaccines specifically, and the medical and pharmaceutical industries more generally. “For us, it's hard to know who to trust because everything's so intertwined and there's so much money and there's so much behind-the-scenes stuff, and there's nobody asking these questions until now,” LoConti said. That's a sentiment echoed from the very top of the American government. Perhaps the most well-known critic of vaccines, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the most powerful healthcare official in the country. Kennedy, who has spent years casting doubt on vaccines’ effectiveness and safety, has spent his first year in office redrawing the nation’s childhood and adult vaccine blueprint. "We don't know what, if any, contribution vaccines are making to the chronic disease epidemic," Kennedy told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview. "And that is something that we need to find out." Like many crunchy moms, LoConti and Bright’s skepticism over vaccines and medicine mirrors their experience researching food and nutrition. They have also become increasingly interested – some might say obsessed – with what their children are consuming. It started with carefully reading the labels on the products they had long enjoyed, from cereals, to cookies, to milk. Once they started doing research into the impact those foods might have on their children, what they found shocked and appalled them. Much of the food and drink that they and everyone around them had grown up consuming, Bright and LoConti discovered, was full of chemicals, additives and ingredients whose purposes they didn’t understand. As they investigated more and more, the mothers entered into an online ecosystem of skepticism, alarm and panic. Today’s crunchy universe has its own lexicon, myriad complicated theories and counter-theories, and a legion of skeptics and soothsayers, many with scientific or pseudoscientific backgrounds. “I look back at the food that I used to feed my teenagers and I'm like, ‘Oh my gosh, I would never feed that to my child now,’” Bright said. “And the amount of moms that reach out to us on social media when we talk about this that are like, ‘I had no clue those ingredients that were in this food I was buying for my kids.’” As the moms investigated the products they and their children were putting in their bodies, their research quickly took them into the subculture of vaccine skepticism and anti-vaccine research and propaganda. That world was primed to receive crunchy moms like Bright and LoConti. ‘Just asking questions’ about vaccines For decades before Bright and LoConti found it, the anti-vaccine movement had been going from strength to strength, picking up millions of followers while developing its pitch and public relations. The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the anti-vaccine rhetoric machine, pulling in millions more Americans angry about masking mandates and social distancing rules. Mainstream politicians, from U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, helped spur the movement from the fringes to the mainstream – spreading conspiracy theories and debunked science to bring in more and more vaccine-skeptical acolytes. Suspicious and angry from what they had found out about the food and drink they had trusted, Bright and LoConti fell headlong into this anti-vaccine movement, spending hours watching documentaries and interviews with scientists and doctors ostracized from the scientific community for their views. It made them more and more skeptical and concerned. “I think what we're asking as moms, and what a lot of moms are asking, is just to have the conversations, to do the studies. Let's compare. Let's ask the questions, let's do the research,” Bright said. “Something's not right – we don't know what it is, so let's figure it out.” Bright and LoConti had followed a familiar path that millions of mothers like them were also going down. Concerns about their children’s food and other consumption led to concerns and skepticism about what had been injected into them. If the large corporations had lied to them about food and drink being healthy, they reasoned, the monolithic pharmaceutical companies were probably doing the same. 'I've never been anti-vaccine' In an attempt to understand what future changes 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 stance on vaccines. "I've never been anti-vaccine," Kennedy said. "I've said that thousands and thousands of times. "My concern is that we should set properly safety test vaccines so that people understand, and we are able to understand, the risk profile for these products." Experts like Hotez consider statements like this misleading. Vaccines have already proven their worth because billions of people have taken them and side effects remain vanishingly rare, they argue. Vaccines that have been around for decades were tested originally, and have essentially been tested ever since, they say. That's not good enough for Kennedy and his followers. Kennedy told USA TODAY that he questions whether he, himself, was injured by annual flu shots, which he took until the mid 1990s and then later stopped entirely in 2005. The health secretary has spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice disorder, that he says may have resulted from his vaccines, although the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation has said vaccines don't cause the condition and can actually protect against some forms of dystonia. "Do I know that it was caused by my annual flu shot? I have no idea," he said. "It's a potential culprit that I cannot rule out, but I can't prove it." Kennedy pledged to keep delving into the concerns of mothers like Bright and LoConti, who have lost their faith in the government to tell the truth about complicated medical issues. "My job as HHS secretary is to tell the truth to people and then to let them to make up their own minds," he said. "And so we've implemented new policies here where we don't tell 'noble lies.' We tell the truth, whatever the impacts are." Trusting science, but only some science There is a fundamental contradiction in the logic employed by crunchy moms like Bright and LoConti. When it comes to established science, and what the experts believe, the scientific community largely has their back 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, that support from the established scientific community all-but evaporates. Bright and Lo Conti like to say they are simply asking questions – questions they need to ask about everything from the nutritional benefits of Oreos to the value of the measles vaccine – because nobody has ever really questioned these things before, at least not with real, honest American skepticism, they said. But that’s not really true. Select a few “Crunchy Moms Unfiltered” videos about nutrition – whether raising concerns about heavy metals in foods, or questioning the value of food dyes that are legal in the United States but banned in Europe – and it soon becomes clear that there are actually legitimate scientific concerns underpinning those claims. Bright and LoConti question these things precisely because they can quickly and easily look up research from large, established scientific institutions that have also asked the same questions many times before. There are dozens of published scientific papers digging into the same concerns the crunchy moms have. When it comes to vaccines, however, the body of research is more complicated. Jonathan Howard, an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at New York University who has written two books on the anti-vaccine movement, summed up one inherent challenge in researching vaccines: “One problem with vaccines is the good that they do is invisible, right?” Howard told USA TODAY. “No one ever comes home and says, ‘Boy, my kid didn't get measles today because of the vaccine,’ or ‘My kid didn't get polio today because of the vaccine.’” There exist vast troves of data showing how many lives vaccines have saved across the world, Howard said. Study after study has concluded that vaccines have helped eradicate certain diseases while controlling and mitigating others. But for almost every legitimate study that concludes vaccines are beneficial, there are now counterparts that concerned mothers like Bright and LoConti can find online that raise concerns and fear about vaccines, Howard said. The key difference, however, is that the vaccine-skeptical studies Bright and LoConti and other crunchy moms point to do not come from the same established sources that provide much of the fear and skepticism that drive their concerns about food and nutrition. Traditionally, scientists and doctors who have questioned vaccine safety, and even the benefits of vaccines, have quickly become pariahs. Their studies, documentaries and papers are often debunked, ridiculed and dismissed by experts on vaccines and immunology. Ultimately, Howard said, to become an anti-vaxxer, or even a vaccine-skeptic, one has to tangibly choose to believe a largely discredited subset of research that is not academically or scientifically sound, over what the vast majority of scientists have long established. That’s more than just skepticism, Howard said, it’s a form of wilful denial. “Nothing is wrong with being skeptical and there's nothing wrong with asking questions; the problem is when you don't accept the answers,” Howard said. “Anyone who now says that they are just asking questions about this sort of thing is not doing that. They are not willing to hear the answer.”