Bay Area nurse Angela Wulbrecht becomes MAHA ally in Idaho case

For nearly 20 years as a nurse at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae and UCSF’s Parnassus campus, Angela Wulbrecht cared for babies, mothers with high-risk pregnancies and trauma patients. Her superiors described her as a “role model” and she believed in the vaccines she administered regularly.

But that changed in 2021, when she experienced a suspected adverse reaction to Moderna’s COVID vaccine, according to medical records reviewed by the Chronicle.

Since then, the 51-year-old Santa Rosa resident has transformed himself into a “traveling voice for the vaccine-injured” and an ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has devoted government resources to trying to prove that vaccines are unsafe. To supporters of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, campaign, she is known as “Nurse Angela,” although Wulbrecht, who is still licensed, no longer works in a hospital.

“It’s like believing in God your whole life and then all of a sudden, one day, waking up and finding out that he doesn’t exist,” Wulbrecht said in an interview when asked about his transformation.

Now an employee of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, an anti-vaccine advocacy group founded by vaccine skeptic and tech mogul Steve Kirsch, Wulbrecht has spent the past several years rallying the country to oppose vaccine mandates.

In recent months, she also rose to prominence as a defender of an Idaho woman accused of murdering her 18-month-old twins. Andrea Shaw, 23, says her 18-month-old twins died in May 2025 from vaccine injuries, days after receiving DTaP, flu and hepatitis A vaccines.

Payette County prosecutors say Shaw instead smothered the toddlers — Tyson, a boy, and Dallas, a girl — citing their autopsy reports and the fact that they died at the same time, in the same bed.

Days later, before the official autopsy findings were made, Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit founded by Kennedy, blamed the toddlers’ deaths on vaccines.

Wulbrecht, who flew to Idaho to prepare for Shaw’s trial in January, said she became involved in the case the day after the twins’ deaths. She hopes to testify as an expert witness for the defense and filed an affidavit in support of reducing Shaw’s bail, although she declined to discuss her role in further detail. She and Kirsch partnered with Children’s Health Defense to support Shaw’s defense.

Wulbrecht’s journey from Bay Area nurse to high-profile medical apostate underscores a key tension in public health. Amid falling vaccination rates and rising deaths from preventable diseases, experts are working to counter misinformation about vaccine safety while helping people understand that the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks.

Public health experts interviewed by the Chronicle said that, as with all medications, vaccines can cause side effects. These effects are usually rare and minor, although their total number increases as more people receive vaccines.

Experts agree that people who report unexplained illness often feel rejected. But they emphasized that the medical community as a whole supports studying vaccine side effects.

“People who think vaccines are harming them certainly deserve to be taken seriously,” said Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford who has testified before the U.S. Senate on vaccine science and safety.

Scott and other vaccine experts say the fact that a few people get sick or even die after receiving a vaccine can be explained by mathematical probabilities and has nothing to do with being immune.

“When you vaccinate millions of people, some of them will get seriously ill or die in the next few weeks, no matter what, by chance,” he said.

There is no clear estimate of how many Americans have suffered serious vaccine-related side effects. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that anaphylaxis occurs at a rate of 1.3 per million doses. A recent Stanford study found that myocarditis occurred in about 1 in 140,000 vaccination cases and peaked in men under 30, with generally rapid recoveries.

But the benefits of vaccines are broad and easier to measure. The World Health Organization estimated in 2024 that global vaccination efforts have saved more than 150 million lives over the past 50 years, and an analysis by researchers at Yale, York University, and the University of Maryland estimated that the U.S. COVID vaccination program prevented 3.2 million deaths between December 2020 and November 2022.

Experts say public health officials have addressed rare but real concerns that have emerged with some vaccines — such as blood clots linked to the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine — and that studies have helped remove inadequate vaccines from the market.

But Wulbrecht said her own experience with the pandemic has led her to question vaccines — and to believe stories of vaccine injuries.

She said she wanted to become a nurse since childhood, after surviving a catastrophic car accident that killed her father. They were heading to their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when his 1981 Cadillac collided with a 42-foot flatbed trailer. “He had the engine of the car on his lap,” Wulbrecht said. “The steering wheel was in his body.”

At a children’s hospital, the nurses who cared for her left an indelible impression. “They didn’t care who would take care of me,” said Wulbrecht, who wore a back brace briefly after the accident but was otherwise physically unharmed. “They filled my room with teddy bears and get well balloons.”

His mother, a native of the Seychelles Islands and sister-in-law of President France-Albert René – whose coup toppled the country’s first president – ​​moved the family to Copenhagen for her job at the United Nations. Wulbrecht attended a private boarding school in Switzerland, then moved to California, where she attended the University of San Diego and Cal State East Bay and married her first husband.

“My life was truly amazing,” she said of her early career at Marin General. “I was saving lives and doing really heroic things at the hospital.” She was drawn to the intensity of the emergency room: “I loved being the most compassionate and knowledgeable nurse I could be,” she said.

She led a quiet life in suburban Santa Rosa, caring for her young daughter, dancing with traveling salsa and bachata troupes, and eating “clean.” But in 2017, the Tubbs Fire ravaged her home, sending her family fleeing with their three dogs and just one change of clothes, she said. She gave up nursing for several years to focus on rebuilding her home and her life.

In 2021, Wulbrecht was ready to return to work. But first, she had to receive the recently released COVID vaccine under hospital mandates. She said that after receiving the injection at a mass injection site in Santa Cruz, the closest available appointment, she felt fine and left before the end of the allotted 15-minute observation period. “I had no concerns,” she said.

But after 12 minutes, she said, her heart began to race and her body felt numb. She slumped in her car seat, convinced she was going to die, and honked the horn with her hand. At the hospital, according to medical records reviewed by the Chronicle, she was told she was suffering a serious adverse reaction and was given medications to suppress an overactive immune response.

Once she returned home, she suffered a rash, loss of appetite and was “severely ill,” she later said in a lawsuit against the University of California, in which she and eight other UC employees — including MarinHealth nurses, anesthesiologists, professors and a pediatrician — said UC’s vaccination mandate violated their rights to privacy and bodily autonomy. UC has denied the allegations and the lawsuit is ongoing.

In the months following her reaction, Wulbrecht was evaluated by doctors at Stanford, UCSF and other medical centers, according to medical records. She was diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome and central hyperadrenergic POTS, conditions that can affect the immune and nervous systems, and she experienced weakness and difficulty with physical activity. Her symptoms were described as a constellation of effects – a “possible vaccine-related autoimmune disease,” a rheumatologist wrote.

A Stanford doctor described his condition as “suspected autoimmune urticaria and anaphylaxis after COVID vaccination.”

Wulbrecht said that after learning that others had had similar experiences, she began pressuring federal health officials to conduct studies on post-vaccination symptoms and investigate her case. In an email to Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the NIH, Wulbrecht described feeling “a prisoner in my body.”

“I’m almost a year in and I have no answers, no real medical treatment other than masking…