As a crowd of 60 anti-vaxxers squeezed into the upstairs dining area of Jonathan’s Grille in Nashville on a recent Monday night, a moment of pride washed over Scott Armstrong.
Years ago, he had been let go from his job as a drug and alcohol counselor for refusing to get vaccinated. Now, unvaccinated people from all over the country were piling into the sports bar to meet others like them. There was a woman who flew in from New Jersey and another from Philadelphia. One group drove up from Florida.
They were there to attend a mixer hosted by Unjected, an anti-vaccination dating app that, according to its website, is “built on creating health-conscious relationships.” It was the second stop on Unjected’s four-city “Summer of Love” tour meant for singles who oppose the Covid-19 vaccine.
“We’re still some of the most persecuted people in society right now,” Armstrong, who now owns a video production company and helped organize the event, tells WIRED. “People still express this absolute hatred for us and for our beliefs in natural health. It just continues to encourage us to host these meetups.”
The reorientation around in-person events to cure app fatigue is a major trend among dating apps struggling for signs of new life. According to ticketing platform Eventbrite, IRL dating events have been on the rise since 2025. Tinder, as part of its rebrand this year, announced it was investing in member meet-ups. But singles in the anti-vax community say for them the events are about connecting with people—potentially future partners—who, above all, believe in bodily autonomy.
Other platforms include the app Unjabbed, NoVax.Singles, Unjuiced.Date, and the Reddit-style dating and community site also named Unjabbed.net, whose members are spread across the US and Europe. PureBlood.Dating, which operates like a social club, launched earlier this year with a street marketing campaign, posting flyers around San Francisco to attract members that urged people to sign up for notifications on its website if they wanted to join a “community for unvaccinated singles to connect at real, in-person events.”
“This is really a pro-freedom movement. It’s not just an anti-vaccination movement,” says Shelby Hosana, the 32-year-old founder of Unjected. “Whatever goes in your body and whatever you do with your body is 100 percent your choice.”
Unjected was designed specifically for people against the Covid vaccine but, according to its site, it is against all vaccinations. Members operate on an honor system, though the app does offer a premium tier—“Unjected Verfied”—where they attest to their unvaccinated status by affidavit. In 2021, the same year it launched, Unjected was removed from the Apple App Store for violating Covid misinformation policies. The app was reaccepted into the App Store, in addition to being uploaded onto Google Play, in fall 2024, which Hosana attributes to “the timing in the world.” Donald Trump, who in the past promoted the myth that childhood vaccines were linked to autism, won reelection that November.
Covid and other vaccines have been proven safe through rigorous trials and years of research, and prior to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known vaccine skeptic, taking over the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reflected those realities. Recommendations, according to the agency, are updated when warranted by new scientific research and are also monitored by the Food and Drug Administration, which collaborates with government and non-government partners to guarantee vaccine safety.
With the Trump administration weakening vaccine policies and more Americans opting out, the US is seeing a rise in the incidence of diseases that were largely stamped out. According to multiple recent reports, fatal illnesses that many vaccines are known to protect against are again on the rise in the US, including measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and various bacterial infections.
Despite Hosana’s claims about Unjected being a pro-freedom movement, experts say such actions pose clear health risks.
“Vaccine-preventable diseases still circulate. Vaccine-preventable diseases still cause people to suffer and be hospitalized and die. Why would you ever put yourself in harm’s way?” says Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist who is the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “This whole medical freedom movement is freedom for whom? Because it’s certainly not freedom for the people you’re coming in contact with when it’s an issue of a contagious disease.”
Unjected’s four-city tour was initially scheduled to kick off in Denver at Recess Beer Garden. On May 12, the app posted a flyer on to their social media pages announcing the tour, but according to a statement issued by Recess on May 13, the establishment “did not organize, sponsor, authorize, or book” the event, and only learned about it via social media posts “where our venue was promoted without our knowledge or involvement.” The beer garden said that it received “hostile rhetoric” from anti-vaxxers, “including hateful language, online attacks, threats toward our business, and harassment directed at our staff members who were not involved in this event.” The event, which was moved to another location and held on May 29, drew over 150 people. “Anti-vaxxers get a chance to fall in love with others who do not understand science,” read a Denver Post opinion headline.
Hosana has since filed a civil discrimination lawsuit against Recess with the US District Court of Colorado.
“Unvaccinated people deserve the same rights and freedoms as everyone else,” the app said in a statement posted to Facebook announcing the suit. Hosana is seeking $4 million in damages from the bar and its ownership group for allegedly infringing on their civil rights, in addition to claims of defamation.
Recess did not respond to an additional request for comment.
Hosana feels the public backlash is unwarranted because “even based on their own science, if they’re not getting boosters every six months, they’re considered unvaccinated based on the CDC standards.” While getting vaccinated every six months applies to people under very specific circumstances—including initial doses for children, or Covid boosters for seniors or immunocompromised people—it is not a standard rule for routine vaccinations.
In dating and within society at large, being anti-vax has become an ideological battleground rife with tension. According to a 2022 Pew Research survey, 47 percent of Americans said it was at least somewhat important for dating app users to display their vaccination status. What’s more, the emergence of anti-vax dating platforms, says Jess Garbino, a sociologist who previously led research for Tinder and Bumble, are a “reflection of the growing prominence of political issues as a proxy for broader values in dating.”
But Unjected, according to Hosana, has an apolitical mission and rejects the association that all anti-vaxxers are aligned with Trump.
Still, it’s hard to completely sidestep the association given that the administration has fully embraced a mistrust in science under Kennedy. At the helm of HHS, the agency has made “unprecedented changes” to the childhood immunization schedule by removing long-held recommendations for a half-dozen vaccines, WIRED previously reported, in addition to resetting dietary guidelines and pushing a pronatalist directive.
“They are all guilty in my opinion. Trump was the father of the vaccine. MAHA has been a disaster,” Hosana says, adding that it has given people a false view into what Unjected—which has upcoming mixers in Boise, Idaho, and Portland, Oregon—stands for. “We’re not just this cohort of right-wing lunatics. We believe that we have a right to make a decision for our own body without being subjected to judgment or mandates. But we are painted as trying to put others in danger.”
