On a Thursday evening in April, at a date and time that had been determined by a family-court judge, Michael Lee Horrocks drove to his ex-wife’s house, in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, to collect their three children for the start of spring break. It was a ten-day holiday, longer than the usual weekends that he had been granted under the terms of his custody agreement. Michael, who is thirty-four, had come to think of himself as “the fun parent.” He drives a Harley-Davidson Road Glide and, online, goes by Kneepatch, a persona that he styles with graphic tees, chunky mixed-metal rings, and an arm of American-traditional tattoos. That weekend, he planned to take the kids to a monster-truck show. Michael had been married to their mother, Leah Stelly, for nine years, until the previous spring. Now he saw her only when they handed off the children. Most of these exchanges happened quickly, in a tense near-silence. But, other times, the pickups became hostile. When Michael and Leah did fight, it was usually about the kids’ medical care.
That day, Michael had received a call from the nurse at his eldest child’s school. Keith, who is eight, appeared to have a bad case of pink eye. The nurse told Michael that she couldn’t get hold of Leah and that Keith needed to see a doctor as soon as possible. Michael lived in a city called Charles Town, more than an hour away, and he wasn’t supposed to pick the kids up until 6 P.M. He imagined that Leah had been treating the pink eye with a natural home remedy, because, as he later told me, “she’s all holistic” and “has, uh . . . what did she call it? A ‘crunchy mom’ outlook.”
At the pickup, Keith looked worse than Michael had expected. “His whole eye was swollen up, almost out of his head,” he said. His middle child, Donnie, who is five, also had watery eyes. His daughter, Star, who is four, seemed fine. By then, Leah had received antibiotics from Keith’s primary-care provider. For Michael, this was another source of concern. The kids saw a physician assistant, rather than a pediatrician. Michael believed that this had to do with the fact that many doctors refuse to see unvaccinated children. Keith, who had been ordered by a judge to start public school in January, had received some of his standard immunizations, including shots for measles, mumps, and rubella. But Donnie and Star were unvaccinated.
Leah had undergone several transformations in her life—shifts that she described to me as “awakenings.” One of them had led her to the belief that vaccines were dangerous, and to a broader world view that aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement. Her particular MAHA leanings were laced with a kind of freethinking, hippie spirituality. She believed that she had manifested her daughter into existence and that Star’s arrival, via home birth at 2:22 p.m. in 2022, was a sign for 222, an “angel number” in numerology signifying alignment and cosmic timing. She dressed in vintage seventies clothing and wore her hair long, in ringlets. Online, she had posted about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “b!g ph@rm@,” and living a “non-tox” life style, and recorded lessons for her eleven thousand followers on divine femininity and receiving messages from the universe. In her videos, she rings herself in fuzzy golden light and talks in a wispy Southern accent. The word “TRUTH” is tattooed high across her neck, like a choker. Below that, on her sternum, is a fine-line rendering of the Seed of Life, a sacred geometric symbol.
Michael did not share Leah’s MAHA sensibility, but he was no liberal scold. He had nonspecific theories about the pandemic, telling me that it “duped a lot of people in a lot of different ways,” and he had refused the covid vaccine. He liked to take the kids to McDonald’s, even though—or possibly because—he knew that it drove Leah crazy. The first time we met, in the parking lot of a West Virginia chain called Tudor’s Biscuit World, he wore a graphic T-shirt that said “Fuck Your Mask” across the back and was chain-smoking Marlboro Black Reds. The kids were tucked in by his side, still sleepy from staying up the night before watching TV. Star meowed at me by way of greeting. They were sweet and polite children. Later on, as we talked, Michael received a pointed TikTok from Leah about exes who try to put you down when, really, they’re just jealous of your aura. Michael watched for a few seconds, then swiped away. “I’m burnt out on Leah,” he said. “I don’t go clicking on her stuff.”
Michael and Leah lived much of their lives online. To varying degrees, they’d both become microinfluencers. As Kneepatch, Michael maintained a Facebook page about biking, with a following of almost fifty thousand. During the week, he worked as an underground-petroleum-tank specialist, doing installations and repairs at gas stations across the mid-Atlantic. The nickname was a nod to this work: the job required him to kneel on the concrete, “opening up manholes and shit,” which wore holes in his jeans. Kneepatch shared real-time updates about his bike trips and his personal life. “Like ‘The Osbournes,’ ” he said, referring to the reality show about Ozzy Osbourne and his family. Kneepatch’s fans knew about his divorce; his new girlfriend, Brianna; the time his bike broke down in Las Vegas; the sunset in Ohio that made him believe in God; and the running sex jokes he made about feet, with pictures of himself giving Brianna a pedicure or smoking a cigarette held between her toes. His followers were also acquainted with Michael’s three children, who featured prominently in the Kneepatch adventurescape, sometimes riding with him on his Harley, outfitted in tiny helmets.
Several months before spring break, Michael had appealed his custody agreement. In addition to more time with the children, he wanted to control their medical care. Specifically, he told me, he wanted his kids to receive the same basic vaccinations that he had received when he was a child. He was especially worried about Donnie, who had spinal muscular atrophy, or S.M.A., a progressive genetic disease that weakened his muscles and left him vulnerable to respiratory infections.
That weekend, at the monster-truck show, Michael gave Keith a pair of sunglasses with mirrored lenses, to cover his swollen eyes. They hung back from the crowd, Star in a cowboy hat, Donnie in a miniature wheelchair. “Everything was fine,” Michael said. “The kids had a great time.”
By Wednesday, though, all three children were sick. They didn’t want to get out of bed or eat, and their skin felt hot to the touch. On Friday, eight days into spring break, Michael was at work when he received a text from his mom, who was babysitting, with a picture of Donnie. He had a rash of flat, red blotches on his face and body. Michael thought it could be chickenpox, but when he sent the picture to Brianna, who had kids of her own, she told him that it wasn’t a normal rash. “I’ve seen every rash a child can get,” she told me. “I have never seen that.” Michael took the boys to urgent care. Both were found to have respiratory issues and fevers of a hundred and one.
The urgent-care nurse was the first person to say the word “measles” to Michael. “I was, like, ‘Holy cow, are you serious?’ ” he said. By 9 p.m., Donnie was being seen by a doctor who described his symptoms as “textbook measles.” The medical staff administered a nasal swab. The results would take several days. They could still come back negative. But Michael had already latched on to the idea that Donnie was sick—and that one person was to blame. He texted Leah, informing her that a doctor was “confident” Donnie had measles. It was only a matter of time before they would have a confirmed diagnosis, he said. Public-health officials were being notified. Keith had a faint rash—possibly a breakthrough case. Star was also showing symptoms. “We are heading home and will be monitoring all three closely,” he wrote. “Given Donnie’s SMA and the ages involved, we are taking this very seriously.”
It is difficult to map what kind of person might one day become “vaccine hesitant.” There is a wider sensibility at play. It might be awakened by a Facebook parenting group, a particular aesthetic on Instagram, a church, a homeschooling community, a wellness influencer, a detox protocol, a curiosity about the ingredients in our food, a distrust of government, or the raw force of postpartum anxiety. Any of these entry points might lead to a feeling, deep in the gut and affirmed by countless strangers on social media, that something is poisoning our bodies and that it is up to us as individuals to wrest back control.
The modern anti-vax movement began, in large part, after The Lancet published a paper in 1998 suggesting that autism was caused by the M.M.R. vaccine. The study was found to be fraudulent; eventually, it was retracted entirely. But the confusion and fear that it unleashed was impossible to contain. Years later, the actress Jenny McCarthy popularized the idea that parental unease about vaccines was being dismissed by the medical establishment. During an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in 2007, she blamed her son’s autism on the M.M.R. vaccine and recounted telling her pediatrician, “I have a very bad feeling about this shot.” According to McCarthy, the doctor told her that she was being “ridiculous.” After the injection, she said, her son was changed: “Boom! The soul’s gone from his eyes.” She urged other mothers to listen to their “mommy’s instinct.”
The privileging of parental intuition over medical orthodoxy has become the emotional core of the MAHA coalition. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., helped bring these concerns into the mainstream, first as an anti-vax activist, then as an independent candidate for President, in 2024. In a sign of his campaign’s fluid appeal, Democrats spent months trying to figure out whether his presence in the race helped or hurt their chances against Donald Trump. Then Kennedy dropped out and endorsed Trump. “Don’t you want a President that’s going to make America healthy again?” he said at a rally in Arizona. In return, when Trump took office again, he made Kennedy his Health and Human Services Secretary.
Many of the MAHA coalition’s goals are admirable: reversing chronic disease, studying chemical additives in the food supply. The movement is powerful partly because it cannot be reduced to a single tenet. “Two truths and a lie” is how I heard one Democratic strategist describe MAHA’s messaging. Vaccines do come with risks—there are rare adverse reactions—but they pale in comparison to the diseases that vaccines prevent. Still, this fact is easily set aside when so many forces play on a parent’s fears. Ultra-processed foods make up more than half of our daily calorie intake. Microplastics are in our water and in our bodies, and the consequences are unclear. Rates of autism are rising to previously unseen levels, owing largely to better detection and new diagnostic criteria, but the numbers are still disconcerting. Autoimmune conditions are becoming more prevalent, and we don’t fully understand why. Pharmaceutical companies are driven by a desire for profits, not just the well-being of our children. Medical care is prohibitively expensive. Expert guidance is constantly changing: the theory that covid originated from a lab leak is disinformation, then suddenly it becomes the official stance of Joe Biden’s F.B.I. and his Department of Energy. Tylenol is safe for pregnant mothers, then Trump says that it’s not. It can be hard to know whom to trust.
MAHA promises answers. In the world of “crunchy” (alternative, natural) parenting—as opposed to “silky” (conventional, medicinal) or “scrunchy” (a hybrid)—there is a holistic remedy for almost any ailment. There is also genuine community and care and, tucked inside of that, a heady feeling of ascension: the knowledge that you have set yourself apart from a consumerist, toxic mainstream—or, as a group of social scientists studying vaccine hesitancy in Australia termed it, the Unhealthy Other. A mother in Virginia named Lindsay Logan told me that, when she was eight months pregnant, she attended a private screening, arranged by a mom friend, of “Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth,” a movie produced by Kennedy. The theatre was cool and dark. Surrounded by like-minded mothers, watching footage of crying babies, she felt overcome by a certainty that, having chosen not to vaccinate, she was living the right way. “You’re, like, ‘I’m so glad I’ve been enlightened,’ ” she told me. “I wasn’t one of the sheep.”
