A public conference featuring well-known anti-vaccine activists is taking place on Saturday in the public high school of the tiny Vermont town of Stowe, sparking a fierce debate about freedom of speech when it may endanger children.

The conference, called “Hope & Healing for Autism and Neuro-developmental Disorders,” is being billed as a “natural health conference,” and features some of the biggest names in the widely denounced movement questioning the safety of vaccines, which has been directly linked to the ongoing measles outbreak in Minnesota.

Studies have definitively shown that vaccines do not cause autism, one of the central claims of the anti-vaxx movement. Major scientific and medical organizations worldwide, as well as the CDC, have repeatedly stated that vaccines are safe.

The all-day event, which costs between $80 to $300 per ticket, is set to take place in the 500-person auditorium at Stowe High School, the biggest gathering place in the resort town with a population of just 4,314. Because there are no conference centers in Stowe, the high school has a policy that allows any community member to use the space for public events.

But since it was announced in April, the event has made Stowe an unlikely battleground between the outspoken anti-vaxxers who claim their right to free speech, and local parents, doctors, and public health experts who say that the conference should not get a platform in their town.

“Our community is being targeted by the anti-vaxxers,” doctor, parent, and Stowe resident Bob Arnot told BuzzFeed News. “We just think it’s wrong to come into small-town Vermont and target parents at a public school.”

Arnot believes that anti-vaccine activists are coming to Stowe partly because of recent changes to state vaccine rules. “Why aren’t they holding this at the New York Sheraton? Why aren’t they holding this across the street from the CDC?” he said.

Vermont is on the list of top five states where parents get exemptions for mandatory kindergarten vaccinations. A law passed in 2015, however, made it illegal to get an exemption for "philosophical" reasons, driving down the exemption rate from 6.1% in 2013 to 3.7% in 2016, said Christine Finley, the immunization program manager for the Vermont Department of Health.

“That’s still one of the highest rates in the nation,” Finley told BuzzFeed News. “I truly think that it’s odd that at a time where we’re seeing a huge measles outbreak in Minnesota, and vaccine exemption rates in Vermont plummeting, that we would see this [conference] coming to our community.”