This story comes from WIRED, where reporter Kate Irby documented a strange corner of modern dating culture that’s getting harder to ignore.
On a recent Monday night, Scott Armstrong stood amidst a crowd of 60 people squeezed into the upstairs dining area of Jonathan’s Grille in Nashville. The occasion? A mixer hosted by Unjected, an anti-vaccination dating app that bills itself as “built on creating health-conscious relationships.” For Armstrong, it was a moment of vindication. Years earlier, he’d been fired from his job as a drug and alcohol counselor for refusing to get vaccinated. Now, unvaccinated people from across the country were traveling to this sports bar to meet others who shared their views.
There was a woman who flew in from New Jersey, another from Philadelphia. One group drove up from Florida. The energy was unmistakable—a sense of belonging among people who feel they’ve been marginalized.
“We’re still some of the most persecuted people in society right now,” Armstrong told 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 Rise of Anti-Vax Dating Platforms
Unjected is far from alone. A whole ecosystem of dating apps has emerged catering specifically to people who oppose Covid vaccines and, in some cases, all vaccinations. There’s Unjabbed, NoVax.Singles, Unjuiced.Date, and even a Reddit-style community site called Unjabbed.net with members spread across the US and Europe. PureBlood.Dating launched earlier this year with a street marketing campaign, posting flyers around San Francisco to attract singles looking for community.
The timing is notable. Dating apps have been scrambling to combat user fatigue by investing more heavily in real-world events. Tinder announced major meet-up initiatives as part of its rebrand this year. Eventbrite reports that IRL dating events have been on the rise since 2025. But for the anti-vax community, these gatherings serve a dual purpose: they’re not just about romance, but about finding people who share core values around bodily autonomy.
Unjected’s founder, 32-year-old Shelby Hosana, frames the movement as fundamentally about freedom. “Whatever goes in your body and whatever you do with your body is 100 percent your choice,” she told WIRED. “This is really a pro-freedom movement. It’s not just an anti-vaccination movement.”
The app was designed specifically for people against the Covid vaccine but explicitly states it opposes all vaccinations. Members operate on an honor system, though the platform does offer a premium tier called “Unjected Verified” where users attest to their unvaccinated status by affidavit. In 2021, the same year it launched, Apple removed Unjected from its App Store for violating Covid misinformation policies. The app was reaccepted into the App Store and uploaded onto Google Play in fall 2024—a shift Hosana attributes to “the timing in the world,” noting that Donald Trump, who has previously promoted the myth that childhood vaccines are linked to autism, won reelection that November.
Controversy Follows Both Online and Offline
The four-city “Summer of Love” tour was meant to kick off in Denver at Recess Beer Garden. On May 12, Unjected posted a flyer on social media announcing the tour. But the venue quickly pushed back, issuing a statement the next day saying they “did not organize, sponsor, authorize, or book” the event and only learned about it through social media posts “where our venue was promoted without our knowledge or involvement.” The beer garden said 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 eventually moved to another location and drew over 150 people on May 29. A Denver Post opinion headline captured the sentiment: “Anti-vaxxers get a chance to fall in love with others who do not understand science.”
Hosana has since filed a civil discrimination lawsuit against Recess, seeking $4 million in damages for allegedly infringing on their civil rights and for defamation. The app posted a statement on Facebook asserting that “unvaccinated people deserve the same rights and freedoms as everyone else.”
There’s also a notable political tension here. Despite Hosana’s insistence that Unjected has an “apolitical mission” and rejects the association that all anti-vaxxers align with Trump, the connections are difficult to ignore. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known vaccine skeptic, now leads the US Department of Health and Human Services. Under the Trump administration, unprecedented changes have been made to the childhood immunization schedule, with the CDC removing long-held recommendations for half a dozen vaccines. The administration has also pushed a pronatalist directive and reset dietary guidelines.
“They are all guilty in my opinion,” Hosana told WIRED, referencing both Trump and the Make America Healthy Again movement. “We believe that we are painted as trying to put others in danger. We’re not just this cohort of right-wing lunatics.”
A Growing Public Health Concern
The broader context here is deeply troubling for health experts. Covid and other vaccines have been proven safe through rigorous trials and years of research. Yet with the Trump administration weakening vaccine policies and more Americans opting out, the US is seeing a rise in diseases that were largely stamped out. Recent reports indicate fatal illnesses that many vaccines protect against—including measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and various bacterial infections—are again on the climb.
“Vaccine-preventable diseases still circulate. Vaccine-preventable diseases still cause people to suffer and be hospitalized and die,” says Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist and director of the Vaccine Education Center 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.”
The tension between personal choice and public health isn’t new, but it’s taking on fresh dimensions in the dating world. 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. Jess Garbino, a sociologist who previously led research for Tinder and Bumble, says the emergence of anti-vax dating platforms reflects “the growing prominence of political issues as a proxy for broader values in dating.”
Whether these events will continue to grow remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: the intersection of technology, dating, and public health has never been messier. The next mixer is scheduled for Boise, Idaho, followed by Portland, Oregon. If the pattern holds, the controversy will follow right along with it.
