The MAHA Custody Battle
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.”
“Know better, do better” is a popular MAHA mantra, another way of saying D.Y.O.R., or “do your own research.” This means turning to the internet to learn about red dyes, additives, food as medicine, essential oils, and when to apply a garlic poultice to the bottom of your feet. It also means knowing how to read vaccine inserts, the technical fine print on vaccine packaging. On parenting forums, mothers remind one another that no one cares about your child more than you do. On Facebook, discussion groups foster the feeling of a countercultural underground. Pages are shut down for promoting misinformation, then reappear under new names. Conversation takes place under the veil of coded language: vaccines are referred to as “vak seens” or, more commonly, with a cupcake emoji.
The descent into a full-blown MAHA life style can be swift. Heather Lindstrom-Hamilton, a mother in Thousand Oaks, a wealthy city outside Los Angeles, was thirty-nine when her husband received a cancer diagnosis. He died six months later, and Lindstrom-Hamilton was suddenly a widow caring for four children. Looking for answers about her husband’s death, she was “low-hanging fruit for the anti-vax world,” she told me. She came to believe that toxins had caused his cancer. She changed her diet and began telling her kids, “We don’t eat cancer, and we don’t drink cancer.”
Soon, she fell in with a group of anti-vax moms. She recalled once driving to Ojai to pay a doctor around two thousand dollars for vaccine-exemption cards for two of her kids. She gave herself coffee enemas and took her children to a holistic chiropractor, who told her that, if their bodies were in alignment, they wouldn’t be as vulnerable to illness. Chiropractors have asserted themselves as a MAHA-safe alternative to modern medicine. Lindstrom-Hamilton pointed me to the website of a prominent “pediatric and prenatal” chiropractor named Stanton Hom. He publicly calls himself “Dr Stanton Hom,” even though he is not a medical doctor. (Hom did not respond to requests for comment.) On his website, new patients are directed to a video of Hom introducing himself by saying, “So let’s be honest: if you’re here, something fully isn’t right.”
Lindstrom-Hamilton left the anti-vax movement during the pandemic. Her moment of revelation came while tuning in to the live stream of a pastor she watched every night, Rob McCoy (the former pastor of Charlie Kirk), as he interviewed a plastic surgeon about covid. “I had this cognitive dissonance of, like, ‘Wait a minute, we’re in a pandemic, and I’m listening to a guy that does boob jobs?’ ” she told me. She began what she now calls “my unlearning phase.” Years later, she still has a house full of expensive supplements that she no longer uses. When I asked her what she used to consume, she sent me a list of forty-three products and protocols. “It was exhausting,” Lindstrom-Hamilton said.
It does not take long to notice that much of MAHA is trying to sell you something. A formerly vaccine-hesitant mother named Brandie Hadfield, who lives in Toronto, told me that her pursuit of natural parenting involved spending about a decade of her life in a multilevel-marketing company called Juice Plus+, which sells capsules that it claims offer antioxidants from powdered fruits and vegetables. (Joe Schwarcz, a chemistry professor at McGill University, reviewed a study on Juice Plus+ and found that two of its capsules have the antioxidant power of only “about two to three bites of an apple.” A Juice Plus+ spokesperson said that the company’s products provide “added nutrition” but “aren’t meant to replace fruits and vegetables.”) MAHA encourages a certain entrepreneurial hustle. Heather Simpson, another mom who left the anti-vax movement, showed me a crew-neck sweatshirt that she had designed to sell to her followers, printed with key terms in millennial fonts: “elderberry syrup,” “colloidal silver.” The life style is up for sale on a grand scale, too. There are “agrihoods,” where families can live in healthful community with one another, including one in Georgia called Serenbe. Its founder recently claimed that none of the two hundred and forty children growing up in the community suffer from asthma, thanks to an emphasis on chemical-free living.
Lindstrom-Hamilton observed that the commodification of MAHA often involves rich women—in “perfect white farmhouses, with their perfectly dressed children in beige clothes”—selling their way of life to non-rich women online. After following one popular influencer on Instagram, I received an automated D.M.: “Hey friend 🫶 So glad you are here.” She had an arsenal of coupon codes to help me make a “clean swap” to a nontoxic household. While browsing, I could also watch a nine-minute video of her home birth.
This year, a D.C.-based nonprofit embarked on a study to understand what, exactly, MAHA has become. Among its findings was the fact that phrases like “the research shows” or “follow the science,” when deployed to combat MAHA talking points, are instead perceived as versions of “you think I’m stupid.” During a briefing about their study, the researchers charted the typical path of a “worried mom” who goes online looking for answers. “The more beliefs she begins to adopt, the more the liberal community moves away/scorns her, the further she gets pulled down the pipeline,” the researchers explained. They called this phenomenon the “radicalization funnel.”
Michael and Leah met on the internet. He was living in northern Virginia and played bass in an eighties-metal cover band called Bad Habit. She lived in Texas and followed the band on MySpace. She sent him a friend request on Facebook, and he messaged her and told her that she was beautiful. In 2012, around the time that he turned twenty-one, he flew to Texas to meet her. He gave her a T-shirt that said “Someone in Virginia Loves Me” and, eventually, a one-way plane ticket to join him on the East Coast. As a couple, they looked like they’d arrived from another decade. Michael wore bell-bottoms, and his hair was long and curly, like Leah’s. He remembered thinking, How often do you find people who are into old-school rock and roll? They listened to the same records and went to shows together. “It was real simple, but that’s what we did,” Michael said. “It felt like love.” As far as he knew, Leah wasn’t particularly interested in health or wellness. But, from the start of their relationship, she was clear that the thing she wanted most in life was to become a mother.
Michael was not so sure about becoming a father. When he was born, he was given the name Gerald Lester Horrocks III, in honor of his father and his father’s father. But both men had problems with alcohol. His dad, who worked in construction, “drank heavy—real, real heavy,” Michael said. He decided that he wasn’t going to be the same way. After high school, he wrote a list of names next to a picture of himself in a notebook. He liked the name Rick, but he didn’t think he looked like a Rick. The only name that seemed to fit was Michael. He tried it out for a year, shortened Lester to Lee, then legally became Michael Lee Horrocks. He took whatever “crappy jobs” he could find. He worked at a plastics factory, a book press, a Home Depot distribution center. “I didn’t have a lot going through my head back then,” he said. “It was more like ‘Where’s my next joint coming from? What’s the next record? Who are we jamming with?’ That was all I did. We’re talking about a person who thought he made it if he got his forklift license.”
Michael and Leah had an outdoor wedding in 2016, holding hands under an arbor draped in greenery. Leah was old-fashioned about most things in life, especially marriage and kids—her “dream and desire.” But she had begun to feel that facets of mainstream feminism were set up to mock that life style. Leah wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, and Michael was mostly supportive of the idea. “We had a ‘You name the babies, I name the dog’ kind of thing,” he said. Two years after they were married, Keith was born. Leah called him the “sunshine of my life.”
In our conversations, Leah spoke frequently about her “transformation, awakening, activation, whatever you wanna call it.” These shifts started during the pandemic, when she was pregnant with Donnie. Michael, who had been following the emergence of the virus in China through his favorite news source, a conservative aggregator called Citizen Free Press, thought that the pandemic “didn’t smell right” and that covid was “make-believe.” His work at gas stations continued during lockdowns, and he watched with bewilderment as people unquestioningly followed government mask mandates and as plastic barriers went up around the cash register where he bought cigarettes.
When the covid vaccine became available, he and Leah declined to get it. “Michael was the very first person in 2020 to have me questioning vaccines,” Leah told me. (Michael said that his concern was with the federal government pushing a relatively untested new vaccine, not with “the normal shit that we have all gotten for years.”) On Instagram, where Leah was a part of a “sixties-seventies hippie community,” some of the people on her feed were “screaming, ‘Wear your mask’ ”; others were saying, “Don’t vaccinate your kids.” Leah started to post about her vaccine hesitancy. The more she did, the more polarizing her account became, which hardened her skepticism. Online, she met a woman who said that her son had started seizing and vomiting because of a vaccine. The woman claimed that, afterward, a doctor had pulled her aside and warned her that vaccines weren’t as safe as they seemed. The story terrified Leah. When Donnie was born, she didn’t vaccinate him.
Then, in the spring of 2021, Leah’s elderly grandmother died. Before her death, she had received two doses of the covid vaccine. Leah blamed the vaccine for her death. “I know everyone dies eventually, but it didn’t have to be right now,” she wrote at the time. A few days later, she posted a picture mimicking pro-vaccine frames that people were adding to their Facebook profile pictures. Hers said “PROUDLY UNVACCINATED.” In the caption, she reintroduced herself to the world, as if reborn: “I’m Leah. I’m a mother. I used to follow blindly and trust in the system with out question.” She added, “Now I feel superhuman.”
She quickly gained a following of anti-vaxxers. On TikTok, she held up a sign that read “My body, my choice.” “I’m no longer your product,” she wrote. “I am aware and ready to fight.” She increasingly characterized her choice to be a stay-at-home mom as an act of defiance. Michael noticed that she began buying organic groceries and talking about the dangers that red dyes posed to their kids. “I’d get hollered at for giving them red lollipops,” he said. “Then, all of a sudden, groceries were twice as much, because we’re buying organic ketchup.” Soon, pregnant with Star, Leah introduced herself to her followers once again, this time wearing a “DEFUND FAUCI” T-shirt. “I’m Leah,” the post began. “Apparently now I am a ‘raging conspiracy theorist’ and an ‘anti vaxxer.’ ”
At the time, Michael and Leah were living in a tiny, unincorporated community in West Virginia called Yellow Spring, set in a system of river valleys and forested ridges. Star was born on the couch in the living room. By then, Michael was spending more time away from home, on his motorcycle. Leah was the parent who fed the children, changed their diapers, bathed them, and planned to homeschool them. Michael didn’t question these choices. It wasn’t until Donnie received a diagnosis of S.M.A., a few months after his second birthday, that Michael began to ask about the children’s medical care. Donnie had started receiving an injection of a medication called Spinraza every four months. Before Spinraza’s release, in 2016, S.M.A. was the leading genetic cause of infant mortality, and there was no approved treatment. The medicine was capable of stabilizing the disease—an actual miracle drug.
To be suddenly reliant on a medication “was very difficult, being somebody who is more natural-minded,” Leah said. She shared the news of the diagnosis with her followers: she remained a “ ‘crunchy’ mama,” she wrote, “but there is a time and place for modern medicine.” She still posted about raw milk, immune-boosting smoothies, and, as the 2024 election approached, R.F.K., Jr., and a coming “great awakening.” After Trump won, she defended those who had voted for him. She posted pictures of the sky, searching for chemtrails. “The rabbit holes run deep,” she wrote, “but once you know, you know and it all makes so. much. sense.”
In the spring of 2025, Michael noticed Leah using a messaging app that he didn’t recognize. She seemed increasingly preoccupied with her phone, sometimes tucking it away when he approached. He thought that she was cheating on him. “I would have preferred that, honestly,” he said. “It would have been so much easier to explain.”
Late one night, he took Leah’s phone to the garage behind the house and opened it. For months, he learned, she had been using WhatsApp to correspond not with a lover but with an unnamed woman who had been acting as some kind of spiritual adviser and healer. He thumbed through the messages, taking screenshots as he went.
The healer warned of “evil activities going on in the world” and offered various cleansings on Leah’s behalf. She volunteered a “protective juju” to intercept a “coming attack.” She promised to “wash the poison” from Leah’s body and talked of procuring fresh herbs with healing properties, along with a calabash for a “voodoo” to bury in the yard. Leah and the adviser called each other “sis” or “sister”; the adviser referred to Michael’s mother as a “witch.” Michael saw that the adviser had frequently asked for payments in bitcoin, ranging from fifteen to more than a hundred dollars, and that Leah, at the adviser’s request, had provided her financial-account information. In the messages, both parties referred to these payments as offerings. “It was instantly, like, ‘Whoa, what the fuck is going on?’ ” Michael said.
MAHA has many side quests, and adherents sometimes fall into multilevel-marketing schemes, buy supplements promising miracle cures, or take advice from A.I.-generated doctors and healers. Some diversions are more unorthodox. The world of spellwork scams has been documented at length on Reddit, where users report paying anonymous healers for palm readings and magical cleansings. On Etsy, self-described psychics and witches peddle spells promising success, luck, money, revenge, weight loss, and more specific outcomes such as “make him cry and beg for you” and “punish everyone who wronged you.” Leah told me that she had met her “spiritual guide” on social media. The money, she said, was never much, and anything she spent was for her children’s benefit. “I was trying to protect my kids,” she said.
To Michael, it looked like an “obvious scam.” In one exchange, Leah appeared to request help with something irritating Donnie’s skin:
In another, she seemed to be making a payment on Donnie’s behalf:
Michael was furious, most of all about the money. They were already facing foreclosure on their house. “My biggest enemy is right here in my back yard,” he said. That same night, another crisis was unfolding. Keith had traces of blood in his urine. Michael told me that, early the next morning, he tried to sneak Keith out of the house for a doctor’s appointment. But Leah caught them in the driveway, getting into a car with Michael’s mother, who cursed at Leah. In response, Leah called her a witch.
By then, the couple’s relationship was effectively over. That afternoon, Michael filed for an emergency protective order, claiming that Leah had struck him in the face during an argument. Later, according to court documents, Leah alleged that Michael had once “grabbed her by the neck and left a bruise on her hip.” She told me that she also considered the relationship to be emotionally abusive, which Michael denies. (A report by a lawyer appointed to represent the children noted that there were no allegations of violence against the kids and that Child Protective Services had concluded that they were safe with both parents.) Regardless, for a period of sixteen days, Michael was given temporary custody. Leah was devastated. The separation was traumatic for her and, she feared, for the children. She told me that they had never spent a night apart from her before. Star, then two years old, was still nursing.
Divorce proceedings began, and, not long after, Michael started dating Brianna, whom he met through the Kneepatch page. She had her own spiritual interests and offered online tarot readings and consultations for energy awakenings and for “twin flame” connections—a type of “profound spiritual bond” between two people who share a “soul energy,” as her website says. Dating Bri, Michael said, was like having “a personal psychologist.” She helped him define his style as “free-range parenting,” as opposed to “helicopter parenting.”
Michael believed that the judge in his divorce case, who’d once worked as a registered nurse, would side with him. (Early on, she ordered that “neither party shall discuss witchcraft with the children.”) But the result was mixed. The judge ruled that Michael and Leah would share custody of the children. Michael would take the kids three weekends a month during the school year, plus various holidays and birthdays; they would spend the rest of the time with Leah. But, against Leah’s wishes, the judge ordered that Keith attend public school instead of being homeschooled. That meant meeting school vaccination requirements. The laws in West Virginia were strict. Leah couldn’t get an exemption.
According to the custody agreement, Michael and Leah were supposed to make medical decisions together. If they couldn’t agree, they were to “follow the recommendations of the doctor.” But Michael and Leah couldn’t agree on what kind of doctor the kids should see, or when they should see one. Months later, when the red blotches appeared on Donnie’s face, Michael believed that this was exactly the kind of thing that he’d been fighting to prevent.
Nothing will test MAHA’s hold on so many Americans like the reëmergence of vaccine-preventable diseases. Last year, as measles cases increased, Lindsay Logan, the mom who attended the screening of “Vaxxed II,” became consumed with thoughts about her unvaccinated daughter being exposed to the virus. During family trips, while riding on public transportation or using a rest stop, she would think, This is it. This is when we’re getting measles. Earlier this year, she scheduled an appointment to get her daughter an M.M.R. shot. She kept it a secret from her MAHA mom friends, afraid of what they might think. As the date approached, she grew more and more fearful. The day before the visit, she took pictures and videos of her daughter—a record of her pre-vaccinated state—because, she said, “I was convinced that the next day, when she got the shot, I might not have the same child.”
Across the country, pediatricians have watched in horror as Kennedy’s H.H.S. has weakened the public’s faith in vaccination. He has released a new childhood vaccine schedule (which has since been blocked by a federal judge) that cut the number of recommended shots from seventeen to eleven. He has said that he personally ordered the C.D.C. to change its long-standing public guidance stating that vaccines do not cause autism. The agency’s website now says that this assertion is not “evidence-based,” because studies cannot definitively rule out the possibility that they do. Trump, meanwhile, has encouraged the vaccine debate. He recently signed an executive order calling for “maximal parental choice over vaccines.” At the signing, he spoke about vaccines in menacing terms, evoking images of “vats of vaccine” and “fluid”—“what seemingly looks like gallons”—being “pumped into your child’s body.” The combined three-in-one M.M.R. shot, he claimed, can be “quite lethal” and “explosive.”
This year, vaccination rates among kindergartners decreased across immunizations for measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. New parents are also increasingly declining a Vitamin K injection for their infants. The shot has been standard for newborns since 1961. A so-called black-box warning associated with the shot mentions adverse reactions and has become a major topic among crunchy-parenting groups online. But the warning refers primarily to allergic reactions in adults; only one case of an allergic reaction has ever been recorded in a newborn. There is virtually no downside to the injection apart from the transient pain of the needle, and the upside is tremendous. Babies are born with low amounts of Vitamin K, which is required to form blood clots. Without the shot, an otherwise healthy newborn can bleed to death internally, usually in the brain.
This is what Stefani Leavitt, a Ph.D. student in Washington State, learned after giving birth to her second child. She had decided to deliver the baby at a birthing center, to avoid the temptation of an epidural. At one of her preparatory appointments, she was handed a form about Vitamin K, which she soon forgot about. “I am not someone who refuses vaccines,” Leavitt said. But she was overwhelmed caring for her first child, and never looked into it. When her second child, Olive, was born, no one mentioned the Vitamin K injection. Olive was about a month old when Leavitt noticed “little bruises” on her body and head. A few days later, she wouldn’t wake up from a nap. Leavitt rushed her to the hospital, where doctors found that her skull was filling with blood. She nearly died. Today, Olive has autism and epilepsy, and experiences several seizures a week. Leavitt told me that she has empathy for mothers who are overloaded with medical choices. “I understand why it’s happening,” she said. “But I just want to be, like, ‘Your child could die.’ ”
Some vaccine-preventable diseases are illnesses that today’s doctors have never treated firsthand. Deborah Greenhouse, a pediatrician in South Carolina, saw several babies with fatal cases of whooping cough when she was a resident. One coughed and gagged until it turned blue. “You don’t forget that,” she said. Alexandra Cvijanovich, a pediatrician in New Mexico, once assisted with a case of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis—a rare, deadly form of brain inflammation that typically develops seven to ten years after a case of measles. The patient had caught measles as a baby, when he was too young to be vaccinated. Then, when he was twelve, his brain suddenly began to shut down. It was “the worst death I’ve dealt with in my career,” Cvijanovich said.
Measles is one of the world’s most contagious diseases. Infected people typically recover within about two weeks. The danger lies in how quickly it can turn. For every thousand children infected, between one and three die from respiratory and neurological complications. In most states, measles-vaccination rates have fallen below the level required for herd immunity. Last year, an outbreak in West Texas killed two children. Two more deaths, in Pennsylvania, were recorded late this August. Earlier this year, South Carolina became the site of the country’s largest outbreak since the virus was declared eliminated, in 2000. It took nearly seven months to contain. In the meantime, another outbreak was under way in Utah—including in a small city called Vernal. One day, when a high-school student there reported that she was feeling feverish, her mother, a stay-at-home mommy blogger named Tamsyn Spackman, knew immediately that it was measles.
On her blog, Spackman describes herself as “a bit of a maverick” and “Dr Mom.” She writes about practicing “natural parenting” with her eight children, who range in age from infancy to eighteen years old. Spackman was vaccinated, but none of her children were. Within weeks, seven of the kids were sick. Fever came, then Koplik’s spots, then the telltale rash. Spackman spent about a thousand dollars on herbs, tinctures, and oils. These included yarrow, feverfew, catnip, elderberry, burdock root, licorice root, valerian root, pleurisy root, redroot, and zinc.
The kids recovered, but Spackman herself soon got sick. She waited for the rash—“a sign that the body has won,” as she wrote on her blog—but it never arrived. Instead, she had a recurring fever for about four weeks. Spackman told me that measles itself wasn’t “that scary.” She believed that, with the right natural approach, the virus could pass through the body like a “cleanse.” But, after weeks of her managing the illness at home, Spackman’s husband finally asked whether she had any “emotions” that she needed to work through. She admitted that she was, in fact, afraid. “I talked about some of those things, and I cried a little bit,” she said. That night, she took a hot bath, administered an herbal enema, drank teas to help her sweat, wrapped herself in a cold, wet sheet, and then went to bed. The next day, she said that the “deep ache I’ve had in my bones” was gone. “I’m finally, finally on the mend.”
“If you or your child have measles, you can: Rest.” Michael came home from the urgent-care center with an informational packet that included this advice. It also advised drinking fluids, taking Tylenol, and staying in a cool, dimly lit room. But mostly, it seemed, he had to wait. The next day, he took Keith and Star to a pediatric urgent-care unit to be tested for measles. The medical staff told Michael that Star’s oxygen level was below ninety per cent—dangerously low. An ambulance was already on the way.
Star was placed on a tiny stretcher, with tubes hooked up to her wrist and nose. Doctors tended to her in face masks and isolation gowns. They told Michael that Star had pneumonia—a common measles complication—and RSV, another respiratory virus. Once she was evaluated, she was taken to a second hospital, in Leesburg, Virginia, where the doctors held her overnight. Michael was “stressed to the absolute max,” he said. That evening, he “slept like a cat at the foot of her little bed.”
The next day, Leah drove to the hospital to be with Star, while Michael returned home to take care of the boys. Keith had been improving, but Donnie started getting worse. He coughed small, weak coughs. It sounded like his lungs were full. One day, Michael said, Donnie woke up from a nap and was “burning hot.” Michael checked his temperature; the thermometer read a hundred and five. Then he checked his oxygen; the oximeter said eighty-one per cent. Michael grabbed him, rushed out of the house, and blew through several red lights on the way to the hospital. He left the truck running with the doors open in the parking lot. “I was panicked,” he told me. The doctors said that Donnie had pneumonia in one of his lungs. Because of his S.M.A., he didn’t have the muscle to cough out the mucus. Another ambulance arrived.
By then, the children’s illness had become the subject of a battle online. Leah’s mother had posted first. If Donnie had measles, she wrote, he got it “from the ‘vaccinated’ kids” who went to public school with Keith. “The doctors visits have been almost every week and yet they tell us vaccinated kids are healthier! Hum!” Michael responded in a lengthy post on the Kneepatch page, with screenshots of his text messages with Leah and a picture of Donnie staring at the ceiling, his arm folded on his tiny chest, his face covered in red spots: “Y’all send some prayers our way [for] Donnie today. He is currently being tested for measles. I have fought tooth and nail in court to get my children vaxxed especially Donnie.” He added, “I’m so upset it’s hard to get into words.” Comments accumulated, some torching Leah’s parenting. But, as the days went by, Michael didn’t post an update on the test results. “So . . . .,” one follower asked, “did they test positive for measles or not?”
What Michael didn’t say was that, sometime after Star’s hospital visit, the kids’ nose swabs had come back negative for measles. PCR tests for measles are considered generally reliable, though false negatives do happen. I asked several doctors to review an account of the children’s symptoms, along with a photo of Donnie’s rash. They told me that the professionals who had treated the kids as if they had measles had been right to do so. But it’s also possible that the kids had something else. Other illnesses can produce fever and rash: rubella, HHV-6, parvovirus, scarlet fever. Michael could have arranged for an antibody test, but he didn’t pursue it. Even after the test results came back, he and Brianna believed that the culprit was measles. “There were 8+ doctors over the course of this situation, in VERY different hospitals, that ALL diagnosed them with Measles,” Brianna eventually wrote to Michael’s followers. “It would be VERY weird for it to be anything else.” Her own three children—all vaccinated—had shared a house with Michael’s for a few days at the beginning of spring break, and they never caught so much as a sniffle. Keith, who was vaccinated, had a milder case. What else, they reasoned, could explain this?
Leah was not moved by these arguments. She believed that Michael had seized on whatever explanation would benefit his custody appeal in court. “This came out of nowhere and you think this is a coincidence due to ME not vaccinating our kids?” she texted him. “No dude. Absolutely not.” At the start of the ordeal, she had accused Michael of spiritual manipulation. “Sounds like your witches have been at work,” she texted him. But she had also asked reasonable questions about how this could have happened when there were no confirmed cases of the illness in West Virginia at the time. “Logically speaking, I wouldn’t think it’s the measles if no one else has it, but who knows?” she wrote. When the tests came back negative, she felt vindicated. Now who didn’t trust the science?
They had the test results, but little had changed. They were still living in two different realities, unable to agree on the truth. Donnie spent a night in the hospital, then was released. A couple of days later, the boys finally returned to their mom’s house. Spring break was over.
What should be done when parents differ on whether to vaccinate a child? I spoke to several mothers who said that the more they committed to a MAHA life style, the more it strained their relationship. Lindsey Fergins, a forty-two-year-old mom in Ohio, told me that she almost lost her marriage as a result. “It caused a huge rift between myself and my husband,” Fergins said. Around 2019, it became the focus of their couples counselling. “It got to the point where, if I had found out that he went to take our daughter to get a vaccine against my will, I would have divorced him,” she said. During the pandemic, though, Fergins found that she was more scared of the virus than of the vaccine. She discovered a Facebook group for women who’d left the anti-vax movement. She sat her husband down, apologized, and told him that they needed to get their kids caught up on their vaccines. “He was just speechless,” Fergins said. “It was a turning point in our marriage.”
Other times, disagreements end in legal action. One such case, in 2017, centered on a mother in Michigan named Rebecca Bredow, who did not want to vaccinate her son. Her ex-husband, James Horne, did. Bredow’s lawyer signed a consent order on her behalf agreeing to vaccinate the child, but Bredow ignored it. Bredow was held in contempt and handcuffed, and spent five days in jail. She later claimed that Horne never cared about vaccines at all—he had just used the issue to secure a better custody deal. The case made Horne a target of the anti-vax community. Del Bigtree, an activist close to R.F.K., Jr., once followed Horne through an airport, filming as he asked questions like “Is your son’s health really what matters to you?”
The central legal inquiry of any custody dispute involves determining what’s in the “best interest of the child.” This is a broad, flexible standard—and it’s up to a judge to decide. Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, who studies cases involving vaccine disputes, told me that judges sometimes favor the pro-vaccine parent, but not always. “Family law is highly localized and very particular to the specific case,” she said. More often, courts hesitate to override a parent who, up until a divorce, has been a child’s primary decision-maker.
For all the years of Michael and Leah’s marriage, that person was Leah. When I spoke to her recently, I found her to be open about her beliefs. Her sincerity, combined with her slow Texas drawl, had an unembarrassed, guileless quality to it. She told me that, even if a medical cure for Donnie’s S.M.A. is never found, she hoped that “one day I can heal him from this.” Leah seemed to understand the turns in her life as twists of fate that had set her on a different “timeline.” “Whatever comes is meant to be,” she told me. She had not planned to become an anti-vaxxer, but she liked to keep an open mind; when arguments about the dangers of vaccines had arisen on the internet, she had accepted them into her way of viewing the world. If MAHA is a uniquely modern movement, born of fraying American systems, then Leah’s path reflected those same forces. She had sought community and identity online. Her experience of motherhood, the thing she valued most, had been transformed by pandemic-era fear and polarization. She had slipped away from the mainstream.
Leah was still waiting to hear whether Michael’s appeal would lead to a new family-court hearing. In the meantime, Donnie was scheduled to start public school in the fall. For a while, Michael believed that Leah would somehow try to circumvent the school’s vaccine requirements. At a recent pickup, he and Leah argued about one of the kids’ ear infections, while Michael, who was filming the interaction using a camera attached to his motorcycle, repeatedly asked, “Did you get Donnie set up for his vaccines for school?” He even considered taking Donnie to the doctor himself, without telling Leah. But, in August, Leah took the child to his first appointment. “It’s scary,” she told me afterward. “Anytime they get vaccines, or anything like that, I pray about it and make sure that they’re shielded in protection. That’s just the way I’m living.”
It was hard to imagine the two parents coming to an understanding. Michael was still frightened and disoriented by what had taken place over spring break. Whatever the kids had been sick with, he said, showed how risky this could be. “How are we going to make a sound decision if something goes crazy with Donnie?” he asked. To him, Leah had gone down a TikTok rabbit hole and never come out. “I feel like I’m living in crazy town,” he said on several occasions. Leah, for her part, had come to a serious, almost spiritual belief—reinforced by everything she saw online—in the fallenness of the medical establishment. How many well-meaning parents felt the same? It was clear to me that Leah, like the other MAHA moms I met, was motivated by a real desire to protect her children. This was something that even Michael could admit. “She loves her kids,” he said. “You can’t take that away from her.”
When I visited Michael in Charles Town, all three of his kids had made a full recovery, though problems remained: persistent ear infections, a stubborn case of dermatitis. Michael still had the hospital discharge papers in his truck. It was a Saturday, and I followed him and the children to a playground made up of two large play structures in a sea of wood mulch chips. No one else was there. Michael, who sometimes encouraged Donnie out of his chair to help him build muscle and independence, placed him in the mulch chips near the base of one of the structures, where Keith and Star were already climbing. The sun was blazing. “Get your hands the right way,” he called to Donnie, who was scooting through the wood chips. “Fists or palms, O.K.?”
At a nearby table, he took out his cigarettes and lit one up. In the spirit of free-range parenting, Michael told me, he believed in letting the kids wander. “Just go out and play and be kids,” he said. He wanted to teach them how to swim and take them camping. Across the playground, Star climbed to the top of a slide, then got too scared to come down. Michael retrieved her. Donnie seemed content on his own. I tried not to talk too much about the illness in front of the kids. Brianna had told me that they had been “terrified” to be so sick. Today, though, they seemed happy to be enjoying an aimless afternoon at Dad’s.
After a couple of hours, Keith ran over and asked when they were leaving.
He held up a small, bent twig like a weapon: “He’s a bad guy. Pew, pew, pew, pew.” He withdrew the twig, then said, “Now you’re a good guy.”
“Thank you,” Michael said.
Donnie was crawling over. Michael hoisted him up to the table with us. “I’m about to fall asleep,” Donnie said.
“O.K., lean on me here. You can sleep on me, O.K.?”
Star soon joined. “Meow,” she said.
The kids had already explored both play structures, said hi to a dog, and picked blades of grass beneath a tree. “Dad, when can we go home?” Donnie asked.
Michael loaded the children into the back seat and put Donnie’s wheelchair in the truck bed. “Star,” he said. “Seat belt, baby.” From the back seat, Star was asking for chicken nuggets, a treat that she associated with her father. Michael laughed. “Already?” he said. Star asked again. Michael said O.K. It was past lunchtime, anyway. They drove off to McDonald’s. ♦