I have a confession: When I arrived at the Grand Hyatt hotel in D.C. on Thursday to cover an anti-vaccine conference, my intention was to make fun of it. That was wrong.

To be clear, I have an unshakable faith in vaccines. I have written about immunizations for years, so little of the anti-vaccine rhetoric at the convention surprised me much. Most of it — including the keynote address from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — was the same deceptive talking points I have heard countless times.

Over the course of the day, however, I realized that treating those views with disrespect, wrong though they might be, would help no one. It would only feed into the resentment that created the anti-vaccine movement as it is today.

The event, organized by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), which Kennedy once led, featured a long list of speakers who ran through the usual gripes of the “medical freedom” crowd. Sometimes that veered into odd territory, such as electromagnetic radiation and “chemtrails” (the white lines left behind airplanes that some people fear are toxic chemicals), but it almost always returned to vaccines — especially covid-era mandates.

Most people who appeared onstage were associated with CHD, but it also attracted a few prominent elected officials, such as Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) and Rand Paul (Kentucky), who both took turns castigating Anthony S. Fauci and the........

© Washington Post