On April 14, 2020, Judy Mikovits and her co-author (or ghostwriter) Kent Heckenlively published a little-noticed book,Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science, which was sponsored by the gruesomely named "Children’s Health Defense" -- Robert F. Kennedy jr's organization for attacking public health, specifically vaccines. It was a follow-up to their previous book, published in 2014: Plague: One Scientist's Intrepid Search for the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases.
Mikovits sprang into prominence in the fall of 2009, claiming to find an infectious retrovirus, XMRV, in the blood of patients suffering Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The fame turned to notoriety when the paper was retracted, Mikovits was fired, and then Mikovits was arrested for theft. Respectful Insolence has all the twists and turns in the Mikovits saga in detail
Failure to confirm XMRV/MLVs in the blood of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome: a multi-laboratory study.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3299483/
November 19, 2011:
Mikovits has been working with a filmmaker, Mikki Willis, whose previous output is about being "socially conscious". On May 4 or 5 (I have seen both dates) Willis released a 26 minute segment on his next film, "Plandemic", featuring an interview with Mikovits. The film was widely shared. The reaction from the science-literate segment of the population was not positive.
New to me as of May 8, 2020 10:30 pm, PDT: A transcript. Caveat: I haven't listened to the film with the transcript in hand. https://medium.com/@good_scribe/readable-transcript-plandemic-part-1-82ffdd72f5ab
Rebuttals to the Plandemic video
Note: I will be silently adding articles as I find them
Undated: Science Feedback: “Plandemic” vignette featuring anti-vaccination activist Judy Mikovits contains numerous false and unsupported claims about COVID-19
This video is the first in a series of vignettes preceding a movie titled “Plandemic”. First published on 5 May 2020, it quickly went viral on Facebook, with more than 2.2 million views on the platform to date. Produced by Mikki Willis, it features an interview with Judy Mikovits, former research director of the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), a medical research institute at the University of Nevada, who was terminated in 2011 over questions about the integrity of her work. In the video, Mikovits makes numerous inaccurate and unsupported claims about the origins of the 2019 novel coronavirus, vaccines, and the treatment and prevention of COVID-19.
Undated: "Anastaisa Beaverhausen": Plandemic Documentary: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 #DEBUNKED!!
Undated: James F. Chaffee, Jr., an Emergency Management & Homeland Security expert, with Debunking “Plandemic”. It is an exhaustive, detailed, critical breakdown of all the false information contained within the documentary, with sources.
Judy Mikovits claims to not be anti-vaccine but she has published several anti-vaccine books (“Plague of Corruption” and “Plague”) and is a celebrity to the anti-vaccine movement. Even her publisher admits that they are an anti-vaccine publishing company. She is commonly featured on conspiracy websites like InfoWars and Natural News as being someone who believes vaccines cause autism. She has also co-authored books with “vaccines cause autism” advocate Kent Heckenlively and the foreward in her book “Plague of Corruption” is written by notorious anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
May 5, 2020: Jennifer L Kasten, MD, MSc, MSc, on her Facebook page. Dr. Kasten addresses each of Mikovits's claims, and shows why they are wrong. For example:
Re: vaccines contaminated with mouse viruses which have been dormant for years and are the real cause of COVID: there is no evidence for any of this whatsoever. For starters, vaccines for viruses are not developed in mice for mass production: some are grown in eggs / chick embryos, and others are grown in the Vero cells mentioned above. If any of Mikovits' claims were true, we might see monkey or chicken viral contaminants- but we don't.
May 6, 2020: Retraction Watch Who Is Judy Mikovits?
A hint of things to come also appeared in 2014, when Mikovits spoke at Autism One, an annual conference that typically features discussions of how vaccines cause autism and that was co-founded by her co-author Kent Heckenlively. Her talk: “Environmental Causes of Autism: Investigate If You Dare,” included a slide titled: “The best scientist in jail story since Galileo.”
She and Heckenlively published “Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science” last month. She has taken to the airwaves to promote the book — and “Plandemic,” a video since removed from YouTube — and air her grievances against Fauci, which appear groundless
May 6, 2020: Orac at Respectful Insolence: Judy Mikovits in Plandemic: An antivax conspiracy theorist becomes a COVID-19 grifter
It is exactly why people are prone to conspiracy theories. A good conspiracy theory turns the believer into a hero, a warrior with secret knowledge that none of the other ignorant “sheeple” know, against powerful forces arrayed against him. A good conspiracy theory almost always has a part at the end in which the “people” (in this case, the people believing the conspiracy theory) “wake up” and see what is being “suppressed” by the powerful forces seeking to keep them ignorant. Conspiracy theories like this both make the believer feel special and brave for having secret knowledge and fighting to make it public, but also provide an explanation for bad things happening in the world. Yes, the conspiracy theory in Plandemic is utterly ridiculous to those of us who know science, medicine, and history, but most people don’t know the relevant science, medicine, and history. To them, it sounds plausible.
May 6, 2020: Derek Beres at Big Think: The anti-vaxx agenda of 'The Plandemic'
Below are seven instances that display how conspiracy theories are baked into "The Plandemic." To borrow from Mike Godwin, perhaps Beres' law is number eight: "As an online discussion about vaccines grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Bill Gates approaches 1." Because obviously, he's in there too.
May 6, 2020 Artin Massihi MD and his boss, Dan Erickson, object to clips from their video being used in Plandemic
May 6, 2020 Jeff Holiday on YouTube: Why The PLANDEMIC is Manufactured NONSENSE Mr. Holiday (see his Vaxxed rebuttals) plays the video, pausing to refute each inaccurate claim
May 6, 2020: Zubin Damania, AKA Zdogg MD, on YouTube: A Doctor Reacts To “Plandemic" and at MedPaage Today.
Really, you guys, like we don't have other things to worry about than a crazy attention-seeking person who is using this crisis to capitalize here? She's been at this for years. Go back. Go back. She's on Natural News and all the anti-vaccine sites. People say, "Oh, I'm just attacking her credibility and using ad hominems." Yeah, you should look at the credibility of the people who are trying to convince you that they're right when they don't have any science to prove it. Then you look at the credibility and you look at the people that they're associating with and they're citing, and you realize they are all non-credible lunatics.
May 6, 2020: Ross Grayson on Facebook
Ok, so the latest dumbass video that is going around that "PROVES EVERYTHING" (no it doesn't...) is "Plandemic". I will NOT link it here, but I will provide all the current information about why it is NOT valid. Starting with the background on the key interviewee, as summarized here:
May 6, 2020: Kat Montgomery, MD on Facebook This is a thorough and point-by-point debunking, including items I haven't seen elsewhere, such as:
She states that Ebola could not infect humans until it was engineered to do so in her laboratory. This is false. (Here is an article describing an outbreak of Ebola in 1976, long before Dr. Mikovits was conducting research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27357339?fbclid=IwAR0YRnwI0r_qrSMPuCTrm6Ol4lNvzMIx782RhFMJgtfWGH1ubI6x4N-NQrk
May 6, 2020: Chad Finley at his Facebook page. Mr. Findley is a pharmaceutical lawyer, and goes into Mikovits's allegations in detail. This bit was one I hadn't seen explained so clearly before:
She was not under a “gag order.” She was under a temporary restraining order (“TRO”) and Protective Order. These are very common. The TRO was for her to preserve evidence, meaning she couldn’t destroy the lab notebooks or delete anything from her computer. Protective Orders are common in litigation and essentially say that anything produced to the other side in litigation is protected and cannot be publicly shared. In litigation sensitive information has to be shared, including unpublished data, trade secrets, pending business deals, etc. I don’t always agree with Protective Orders and I often wish I could share some of the horrible information we have gleaned from our lawsuits. But the bottom line is she wasn’t under a gag order. She could and did discuss the facts publicly. And for anything “confidential” she could still use them in Court filings.
May 6, 2020: Angela Moller, a microbiologist, at her Facebook page, went through Mikovits's claims and refuted them.
6. There is also no scientific merit to her statement that you can reinfect yourself by wearing a mask if you have COVID-19. You're already infected- it's replicating inside your body. Your immune system is dealing with it. Breathing your own air won't make it worse.
May 7, 2020: Steven Novella MD at Neurologica Skeptical of Plandemic
The video features Dr. Judy Mikovits, and is basically an interview with her. Unfortunately this is a slick piece of utter nonsense and conspiracy mongering. Mikovits has zero credibility in any of her claims, but they are combined with music and clips of videos to create the impression that there is some reality behind her outrageous claims. Let me focus on a few claims to show how low her and the filmmaker’s credibility are.
In her introduction the narrator states that she authors a study in Science that “sent shockwaves through the scientific community” because it showed that fetal and animal tissue in vaccines was causing an epidemic of chronic illness. This is straight up lie, but that is the narrative of this video – that she is a courageous fighter going against the establishment, which is killing people for profit and trying to destroy her for calling them out.
May 7, 2020: Karen Ernst at The Vaccine Blog: Plandemic? Nope.
Dr. Mikovits was never important enough to launch a large-scale conspiracy against. That’s no knock against her; it’s just that she’s not Martin Luther King, Jr. or Galileo. Before her research into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, she was never the primary researcher on a topic. When her CFS research, claiming that viruses caused the syndrome, was retracted, ten other studies had failed to replicate her findings and scientists came to the conclusion that she only found the viruses present because she (likely unintentionally) contaminated her own samples. Finally, her arrest was not part of the conspiracy against her, but was instead due to her stealing intellectual property from her former employer after she was fired.
Even though these claims cover half the video, they do not touch on public health claims. So let’s answer some of those concerns about COVID19 pandemic vs. PLANdemic.
May 7, 2020: Reddit thread: Where can I find a good rebuttal to "Plandemic"?
May 7, 2020: Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, NBC News: As '#Plandemic' goes viral, those targeted by discredited scientist's crusade warn of 'dangerous' claims. Initially pushed by anti-vaccination disinformation peddlers, the video was then promoted by minor celebrities.
Conspiracies crossing over to the mainstream can come with serious consequences, especially in relation to vaccines, according to David Broniatowski, an associate professor who studies weaponized health communication at George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics.
He said the video of Mikovits was able to unite various groups that often traffic in health misinformation.
May 7, 2020: Jane Lytvynenko at Buzzfeed: The "Plandemic" Video Has Exploded Online — And It Is Filled With Falsehoods
“Now, as the fate of nations hang in the balance, Dr. Mikovits is naming names of those behind the plague of corruption that places all human life in danger,” says the narrator of the 30-minute video, in which Mikovits falsely claims that masks can make wearers sick, that sand from the beach can build up coronavirus immunity, and that as-yet-uninvented vaccines for the virus that has killed at least 75,000 people in the US are dangerous......Produced by a company called Elevate, "The Plandemic" deftly weaves together several strands of rumors that have circulated since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, doing so with high production values and a sheen of unearned authority.
May 7, 2020: Lisa Keys, PhD on her Facebook page<
Judy Mikovitz briefly worked at UNR as head of the Whittemore Peterson Institute while I was in graduate school there. She was one of my PhD committee members and our lab even worked on a joint project with her briefly. I will not go into all the details since this will already be a small novel, but I worked specifically on that “blockbuster” project. You might notice my name is not on that retracted paper. That is because I made the decision to STOP working on the project and made sure to not have my name associated with any of her work.
My time/experience with Judy involved her project working on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, in which she believed she had identified a novel virus that caused the syndrome. Long story short, this was found to be a contamination in samples. However, she never accepted this and instead made sure the data to fit her hypothesis (and grant funding) and published anyway. The damage was only compounded by her own lack of ethics and soon multiple labs across the country noticed major discrepancies (such as data presented at one meeting showing a “positive result” then being published in a paper as a “negative” result).
May 7, 2020: Annie Reneau at Upworthy: That 'Plandemic' conspiracy video has been thoroughly debunked, people. Stop pushing it on us.
Bottom line: The video is bunk, but conspiracy theorists will keep on insisting that it's not. (Wake up! You're all sheep following the mainstream media! Experts who provide data backed up by multiple peer-reviewed studies can't be trusted! Individual doctors and scientists are more trustworthy than professional associations of thousands of doctors and scientists! Everyone is getting paid off, except these conspiracy theory pushers because I trust them because they say they're being persecuted by the science community for no reason and that sounds totally legit! And maybe the earth really IS flat—scientists have been wrong before!)
May 7, 2020: Allison Ruark at her Facebook page
I feel like all I really need to know about her is that she is a former researcher (yes, I mean former) who knowingly falsified data. In my mind this is a level of malpractice akin to a doctor knowingly performing the wrong surgery on a patient or a hedge fund manager knowingly misleading investors, and disqualifies her from being considered a credible researcher/scientist or speaking as an expert in the current pandemic. Also, for the record, she is NOT a well-known HIV researcher who has "revolutionized" the field, as Plandemic claims. I've been working in HIV/AIDS since the mid 2000s and have attended more HIV conferences than I can remember and have never heard of her. (Any HIV colleagues who want to chime in here, I'd be interested in your take.)
May 7, 2020: Jay Sizemore at Medium Plandemic:Debunked.Stop Sharing Propaganda and Misinformation
The person who made this movie is not exactly credible either. Mikki Willis has made quite a few questionable “documentaries.” In one of them, he concludes that a filmmaker named Daniel Northcott contracted leukemia and died due to finding a cursed Mayan bone…
Luckily for you, I’ve watched this 30 minute video so you don’t have to. Allow me to walk you through the claims it makes, and why they are blatantly incorrect and dangerous:
May 7, 2020 Daniel Funke at PolitiFact: Fact-checking ‘Plandemic’: A documentary full of false conspiracy theories about the coronavirus</p>
‘I was held in jail with no charges’
This is inaccurate spin about Mikovits’ past legal problems. She was charged in 2011 with stealing computer data and related property from her former employer.
The Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, Nevada, fired Mikovits in September 2011 as research director after her study linking a mouse retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome was discredited and retracted by Science, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. In November 2011, the district attorney in Washoe County, Nevada, filed a criminal complaint against Mikovits for allegedly stealing computer data, notebooks and other property from the institute.
May 7, 2020: Yashika Sharma writing at Republic World: Fact Check: Is The 'Plandemic' Documentary True? Claims From The Video Debunked
Dr Judy Mikovits' 'anti-vaccination' agenda as per news sources
Judy claims that she is not an 'anti-vaxxer' i.e., a person who is against vaccination, when she was asked about it by Mikki Wilkis. While she claims that she is not such, many of her works are either co-authored by or also related to well-known anti-vaxxers. As per an article on a news site, the book that she has published, Plague of Corruption, is through Skyhorse Publishing, which is known for its anti-vaxxer agenda. The co-author of the book is Kent Heckenlively and the foreword is given by Robert F. Kennedy, who is a leader in the anti-vaxx movement.
May 7, 2020 Taylor Hatmaker at TechCrunch Platforms scramble as ‘Plandemic’ conspiracy video spreads misinformation like wildfire
Mikovits, who in the video states that she’s not opposed to vaccines, later goes on to make the claim that vaccines have killed millions of people. “The game is to prevent the therapies ‘til everyone is infected and push the vaccines, knowing that the flu vaccines increase the odds… of getting COVID-19,” Mikovits says, conspiratorially. At the same time, she suggests that doctors and health facilities are incentivized to overcount COVID-19 cases for the medicare payouts, an assertion that contradicts the expert consensus that coronavirus cases are likely still being meaningfully undercounted.
May 7, 2020 Sascha Primeau at Facebook: A Response to Plandemic: Lies and Deceptions. Ms. Primeau watched the video and debunks claims point by point.
· Now we jump to autism and another supposed blocking of a drug. Not sure how that relates to COVID-19? Also, didn’t know she researched autism. No publications by her about autism https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mikovits%2C+JA+and+autism or suramin, a drug that she mentions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=mikovits%2C+JA+and+suramin. She goes on to say that suramin has been taken away by the drug companies and they tried to get it, but they can’t. We don’t know who “they” is, as they never tell us. But, suramin is a treatment for African sleeping sickness and river blindness. So the drug exists. And there is apparently a small, randomized clinical trial ongoing at UC San Diego on suramin and treating the symptoms of autism. https://health.ucsd.edu/news/topics/suramin-autism/pages/default.aspx. But it is not FDA-approved, so people can’t just use it--that doesn’t mean that the drug companies “took it away” or are blocking it from being used. It means that it has to be shown to be safe and effective through clinical trials first, as all drugs must do. Not to mention the ethical issues surrounding the idea that autism is something that needs to be treated.
May 7, 2020. Stefan Richter MD on Facebook
-About MDs being incentivized to report coronavirus cases (from a prior comment of mine): This is a common conspiracy theory. People who claim physicians are over-reporting deaths typically point to the (true) fact that hospitals get paid a bonus for Covid patients, so there's a financial incentive for claiming that a person died from Covid. This has a few major holes in it:
1) Falsifying a medical record is illegal, hospitals get audited by CMS (Medicare) all the time to make sure the charts are accurate, and there are huge fines for lying.
2) Hospitals do get paid extra, but physicians don't, which is something people seem not to understand. This theory assumes that physicians are willing to put themselves at legal risk for the sake of a hospital (we almost always aren't).
3) There's a huge list of conditions that allow hospitals to get paid more for admissions - low sodium, malnutrition, diabetes, etc. We don't lie about these conditions either, because of 1 and 2 above.
4) The extra money for Covid patients is for medical notes, not death certificates. This is a subtle distinction to people outside the medical field, but putting a cause of death on a certificate is a separate process from documenting in a note, and falsifying those is ALSO illegal.
May 7, 2020, updated May 8, 2020 Will Sommer at the Daily Beast Discredited Doctor and Sham ‘Science’ Are the Stars of Viral Coronavirus Documentary ‘Plandemic’
YouTube banned the video on Wednesday, saying in a statement to The Daily Beast that it violated the site’s rules on COVID-19. On Thursday, Facebook followed suit and banned “Plandemic” over Mikovits’s claim that masks somehow spread the virus.
“Suggesting that wearing a mask can make you sick could lead to imminent harm, so we're removing the video,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.
May 7, 2020 Ruth Reader at Fast Company: The ‘Plandemic’ video is a dangerous mashup of COVID-19 conspiracies
Joe Ondrak, a researcher at U.K.-based fact-checking organization Logically who has been following a variety of conspiracy theories related to COVID-19, says that fringe groups have been pushing Mikovits’s story for several weeks. “The plandemic hashtag has been around since last month,” he says.
May 7, 2020 Alex Kaplan at Media Matters: A coronavirus conspiracy theory film attacking vaccines has racked up million of views and engagements on YouTube and Facebook
A review by Media Matters found dozens of reuploads of the film in addition to Willis’ original upload on May 4 (including one from a major supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory), resulting in more than 9 million views combined (which includes videos still up and those since taken down). The high view count was achieved despite YouTube continuing to take down reuploads of the video for violating its Community Guidelines. Some of the reuploads have received hundreds of thousands of views on their own.
May 7, 2020, Jennifer Brenton MD at Medium: The Misadventure of Plandemic and Dr. Judy Mikovits
My Verdict:
After extensive research, including pulling up the papers she mentions in the video …
1) I found Dr. Judy Mikovits’s biographical information in the film severely embellished,
2) I found Judy’s best-known research at worst fraudulent — at best incompetent — and
3) I found that evidence-based medicine does not support her warnings and claims about COVID-19.
May 7, 2020 "Sherlock Beaver" on Reddit: Plandemic Documentary debunked (with helpful timestamps).
READ THROUGH THE COMMENTS FIRST so many of your questions have already been addressed and several contemporaries of Dr. Mikovits' at UNR (where WPI is) have contributed their own experience, as have other great investigators who caught even more misinformation in this video than I address here. The comments here are where there is more gold. Thank you.
May 8, 2020 Alex Mahadevan at Poynter: Fact-checking ‘Plandemic,’ a documentary full of false conspiracy theories about the coronavirus
The video is a deep dive into conspiracy theories about COVID-19, public health and the pharmaceutical industry. It discusses Dr. Anthony Fauci’s efforts to combat the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and Bill Gates’ support of vaccination efforts around the world.
May 7, 2020 Jessie Hawkins, PhD and Christy Hires, MPH at Franklin School of Integrative Health Sciences. This is a detailed, 3-part, point-by-point rebuttal of the claims made in the film. Fact-Checking "Plandemic" [Part 1]
Finally, keep in mind that the film bounces around on a timeline, often convoluting different phases of her career. It begins by discussing her work pre-PhD in the 80s, then leaps to her work in the 2000s. If we take this and put it back into a timeline perspective, we see that she worked as a lab tech in the 80s, achieved a PhD in the early 90s, her career ended in 2001, and she moved to California. She was working as a bartender in 2006 when she was recruited for the work related to her arrest. We don't typically find someone working in a completely unrelated career if they were thriving as one of the most accomplished individuals in their first career.
May 7, 2020 Jessie Hawkins, PhD and Christy Hires, MPH at Franklin School of Integrative Health Sciences: Fact-Checking "Plandemic" [Part 2]
[Judy Mikovits claims] 23. “There is no vaccine currently on the schedule for any RNA virus that works”
Oh. This is awkward. I’d like to introduce you to the flu, measles, polio, and Hep A, all of which are RNA viruses with vaccines.
May 7, 2020 Jessie Hawkins, PhD and Christy Hires, MPH at Franklin School of Integrative Health Sciences: Fact-Checking "Plandemic" [Part 3]
50a. “...so if you’ve ever had a flu vaccine, you were injected with coronaviruses”
Aside from this being immediately deemed false because its premise is false (see above), the implication is that the flu vaccine injects humans with all viruses contained in dogs. This is an outlandish distortion of the role of animal cells in vaccine production.
To begin, there are different types of flu vaccine; they can’t all be grouped together. Most influenza viruses for vaccines are grown in hen’s eggs. Only a few come from canine cell lines. Furthermore, the use of a cell line is not at all the same as injecting someone with the cell lines. Nobody is being injected with coronaviruses. Finally, coronaviruses are not interchangeable; canine viruses are completely unrelated to COVID-19.
May 7, 2020 Jessica McBride at Heavy: ‘Plandemic’ Movie: Fact-Checking the New COVID-19 Video
Claim: An Activist Named Larry Kramer Harshly Criticized Fauci for His Handling of HIV/AIDS
What the Plandemic video leaves out? The Times says that Kramer and Fauci “developed a grudging friendship, and Dr. Fauci helped get Mr. Kramer into a lifesaving experimental drug trial after Mr. Kramer had a liver transplant.”
Kramer told the Times of Fauci: “We are friends again. I’m feeling sorry for how he’s being treated. I emailed him this, but his one line answer was, ‘Hunker down.’” In addition, the New Yorker notes that Fauci “did not control the drug-approval process” for HIV/AIDS but does note “he was seen as a barrier to opening access to clinical trials.”....
Thus, the Plandemic video highlights the worst information regarding Fauci while omitting mitigating and contextual points.
May 8, 2020: Tara Haelle at Forbes: Why It’s Important To Push Back On ‘Plandemic’—And How To Do It
The video looks, sounds and feels like a documentary even though it isn’t
Plandemic is part of a disturbingly successful trend in which deep-pocketed purveyors of pseudoscience produce slick, professional videos as credible-appearing documentaries. The lighting, narrative structure, the pacing, use of imagery, camera angles, editing techniques—these are all common documentary filmmaking conventions that we’ve come to associate with factual information.
The people producing this video know what they’re doing, and they’re very good at it. On a subconscious level, no matter what words are being said, this video feels factual simply because of how it was produced. It’s intentionally manipulative. It’s a textbook example of effective propaganda. (That’s the line. Next is the sinker.)
May 8, 2020 Beth Skwarecki at Lifehacker: If You Found That ‘Plandemic’ Video Convincing, Read This Too</p>
The biggest truth that I think this video touches on is that we, the public, have heard confusing and conflicting messages about this pandemic. We are living through something truly unprecedented, and a lot of things about it don’t make sense. That’s unavoidable—it’s truly a new thing on this earth. But it also makes us long for certainty, and no one can be blamed for wanting to seek out clear messages.</p
But as we’ve discussed here before, the real experts discuss the uncertainty of the facts about our situation. Nobody alive today can possibly have 100% of the answers, so we should remain skeptical of anybody who says they can explain it all.
May 8, 2020: Martin Enserink and Jon Cohen at Science: Fact-checking Judy Mikovits, the controversial virologist attacking Anthony Fauci in a viral conspiracy video
Mikovits also accuses Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a prominent member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, of being responsible for the deaths of millions during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The video claims Mikovits was part of the team that discovered HIV, revolutionized HIV treatment, and was jailed without charges for her scientific positions.
Science fact-checked the video. None of these claims are true. The video is an excerpt from a forthcoming movie Plandemic, which promises to “expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system.” YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms have taken down the video because of inaccuracies. It keeps resurfacing, including on the Plandemic website, which, in “an effort to bypass the gatekeepers of free speech,” invites people to download the video and repost it.
May 8, 2020 Scott Neuman at NPR: Seen 'Plandemic'? We Take A Close Look At The Viral Conspiracy Video's Claims
In an article originally published in 2018, Snopes reported on a claim by Mikovits that Fauci sent an email that "threatened her with arrest if she visited the National Institutes of Health to participate in a study to validate her chronic fatigue research."
"I have no idea what she is talking about. I can categorically state that I have never sent such an e-mail," Fauci told the fact-checking website. "I would never make such a statement in an e-mail that anyone 'would be immediately arrested' if they stepped foot on NIH property."
May 8, 2020 Angelo Fichera, Saranac Hale Spencer, D'Angelo Gore, Lori Robertson and Eugene Kiely at FactCheck: The Falsehoods of the ‘Plandemic’ Video
In the sections below, we break down eight of the false, misleading and unfounded claims aired in “Plandemic."
Unfounded Attacks on Fauci
Scientists: Novel Coronavirus Not ‘Manipulated’
Misleading Claim on Wuhan Lab Funding
Flu Vaccines Don’t Contain Coronaviruses
No Evidence Flu Shot Increases Risk of COVID-19
Hydroxychloroquine: Unproven COVID-19 Therapy
Wrong Message on Masks
False Suggestion About Ebola
May 8,2020 Anna Merlan at Vice: 'Plandemic' Is Dangerous, Viral Nonsense. A pseudo-documentary full of outrageous, verifiably false claims is still going viral, despite being repeatedly removed from YouTube and Facebook.
The volume of nonsense and revisionist history in the clip is truly, profoundly exhausting—which makes its virality depressing. And while the claims made in the video are incoherent, the underlying point is pretty clear: The fear and panic over COVID-19 are part of a larger plot of oppression and enslavement, with Fauci at its head. It’s classic conspiracy theorizing, wrapped in a slightly contemporary packaging.
May 8, 2020 Ashley Alker MD on Twitter Plandemic Rebuttal
May 8,2020: Greg Fish at Rantt Media: Debunking “Plandemic,” The Coronavirus Conspiracy Video. The viral conspiracy video "Plandemic" spreads anti-vaccine lies, false coronavirus claims, smears Dr. Fauci, and fabricates Dr. Judy Mikovits' record.
One of their latest and most talked about efforts is the very professionally produced conspiracy series Plandemic, which takes all the greatest hits of the anti-vaccine movement and dials them to eleven before ripping the knob off in invoking COVID-19 because that’s the crisis on which all of us are currently focused. Its main allegation? That the pandemic which has us sheltering in place is a bioweapon designed to scare us into getting vaccinated by amoral billionaires using vaccines as a way to keep us sick and dependent on the evils of science-based medicine.
In short, it’s the anti-vaxxer version of screaming fire in a crowded theater, blocking the exits, then saying “now that I’ve got your attention, you have to look at my pamphlet” with references to the coronavirus hastily scribbled in at the margins. The minute you strip away the tie in to the hottest disease of the year, Plandemic’s allegations are just well worn and long-debunked tropes, and its creator, Mikki Willis, is downright beaming with pride that it’s been removed from Facebook and YouTube for spreading dangerous misinformation, claiming that the very sinister elites trying to vaccinate us into sickness are just scared their nefarious plots are being exposed.
p>May 8, 2020 N'dea Yancey-Bragg and Joel Shannon at USA Today: Claim in viral 'Plandemic' video 'could lead to imminent harm,' Facebook says
'Plandemic' is a viral video spreading misinformation</>
USA TODAY has rated the claim that face masks weaken the immune system as false.
Wearing a face mask can lessen the spread of the coronavirus from a sick person to a healthy individual, according the The Mayo Clinic. Masks are also suggested for people caring for someone with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Risks associated with wearing face masks only apply to a select few in the general population.
May 8, 2020, Jason Puckett (TEGNA), David Tregde, and Terry Spry Jr. at VERIFY: The 'Plandemic' documentary is full of misinformation Much of the information in the video that spread like wildfire on social media was presented without evidence or was demonstrably false.
After thoroughly digging into the video, the VERIFY team is labeling “Plandemic” as disinformation.
It’s filled with false information presented by sources that aren't credible, and trying to push a narrative.Let’s break it down.
May 8, 2020 Katherine Mac at her Facebook page: a detailed, point-by-point rebuttal.
• They show Nepute again at the end and of course he says "And I’m blown away why there are not more doctors like me talking about this all over the place. "
KM: He literally not a medical doctor. He's a chiropractor trying to sell his woo nutritional pack from his wellness center.
May 9, 2020 Marshall Allen at ProPublica: I’m an Investigative Journalist. These Are the Questions I Asked About the Viral “Plandemic” Video.
Does the Work Claim Some Secret Knowledge?Plandemic calls itself a documentary that reveals “the hidden agenda behind COVID-19." We are in the midst of a global pandemic where few people in the world can figure out what is happening or the right way to respond, let alone agendas. We have almost every journalist in the country writing about this. And if the truth about a conspiracy is out there, many people have an incentive to share it. But Plandemic would like us to think it's presenting some exclusive bit of secret knowledge that is going to get at the real story. That's not likely.
Plus, to be honest, there were so many conspiratorial details stacked on top of each other in the film I couldn't keep them straight. When I spoke to Willis I told him I was having a hard time understanding his point. Then I took a stab at what I thought was the main thrust of his argument. “Are you saying that powerful people planned the pandemic and made it happen so they could get rich by making everyone get vaccines?" I asked.
It turns out Willis isn't sure either. “We're in the exploratory phase," he told me. “I don't know, to be clear, if it's an intentional or naturally occurring situation. I have no idea."
Then he went on to say that the pandemic is being politicized and used to take away our civil liberties and leverage other political policies. “Certain forces" have latched onto the situation, he said. “It's too fishy."
He had me at, “I have no idea." That sums it up. This is a vast pandemic and massive catastrophe. Our country wasn't prepared for it, and the response by our top leaders has been disjointed. We're restricted to our homes. Many people have lost their jobs and some are afraid or sick or dying. That makes us vulnerable to exploitation by people who will present inaccurate or intellectually dishonest information that promises to tell us the truth.
May 9, 2020 Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic: If Someone Shares the ‘Plandemic’ Video, How Should You Respond? Experts provide scripts to help you push back as effectively as possible.
The experts I reached out to also had plenty of suggestions for what not to do in these situations: Don’t lecture someone, don’t get exasperated, don’t insult them, and don’t try to refute specific falsehoods. “It is likely ineffective to directly argue with someone on the merits of the documentary’s claims,” Piltch-Loeb said.
May 9, 2020 Davey Alba at the New York Times: Virus Conspiracists Elevate a New Champion. A video showcasing baseless arguments by Dr. Judy Mikovits, including attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been viewed more than eight million times in the past week.
Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said [Judy Mikovits's] rise illustrated how the anti-vaccination movement had “taken a new ominous twist” with the coronavirus.
“They’ve now aligned themselves with far-right groups,” Dr. Hotez said, “and their weapons of choice are YouTube, Facebook and Amazon.”
May 10, 2020: Mike Varshavski MD on YouTube: Doctor Fact-Checks PLANDEMIC Conspiracy . Dr. Varshavski pays particular attention to Mikovits's AIDS claims, and the Bayh-Dole Act.
May 10, 2020 Mackenzie Zlatos at Front Page Alive: The ten red flags from the viral ‘Plandemic’ interview.
4. Hydroxychloroquine is not a proven cure
Mikovits claimed that the malaria treatment, touted by the Trump campaign as a possible cure for COVID-19, is effective in treating the virus. The one problem with this statement: it’s not.
May 10, 2020 Skeptical Raptor at Skeptical Raptor: Judy Mikovits – another false authority on COVID-19 and vaccines
Judy Mikovits is not an authority on COVID-19
So let’s review.
- She spent 12 years as a lab tech, losing several jobs along the way.
- She did get a Ph.D. in which she studied HIV, but apparently she used none of that knowledge in her later years (a typical issue with false authorities). And, as far as I can tell, her Ph.D. work did not lead to a single published paper as first or last author (the only ones that matter)..
- In fact, up until her retracted work with XMRV and CFS, she published 10 papers, none of which included her as the primary author..
- She worked as a bartender at a yacht club in Ventura, CA before getting her the position at WPI..
- She published a much-criticized and eventually retracted paper. .
- hSe was arrested for stealing from WPI..
- In other words, she has no experience in vaccine development, no experience in coronaviruses, no experience in epidemiology and public health, and no experience publishing respected primary research. .
May 12,2020: Brooklyn Neustaeter at CVTNews dot ca Truth Tracker: 'Plandemic' video full of false conspiracy theories about COVID-19</p>
MASKS DO NOT 'ACTIVATE' THE VIRUS
In the video, Mikovits alleges that wearing a face mask can "activate" the coronavirus. She says that people who wear masks are becoming sick from their own "reactivated coronavirus expressions." There is no evidence to support this.
According to health professionals, wearing a non-medical face mask may prevent the spread of the coronavirus; it does not make people more susceptible to it. Public health officials have recommended that people wear homemade face masks when they’re out in public, especially when physical distancing may be difficult, such as in grocery stores or on public transit. This is to protect others around the wearer because there is evidence the virus can be spread among asymptomatic individuals, or those who don't have any symptoms of COVID-19.
May 12, 2020 Helen Petousis Harris at Diplomatic Immunity: Plandemic – effective fact-free marketing
The first words uttered in this video can be proven not true.
“Dr Judy Mikovits has been called one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation.”
Judy Mikovits cannot be one of the accomplished scientists of her generation (baby boomers). A quick google scholar search shows she is not an active scientist and has not been practicing for years. Her most notable publication was retracted (these things happen but in this case it got messy, see links below). So here, in the first sentence of the narrative, chimes the first warning bell.
May 12, 2020 Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Ullrich Ecker, and Sander van der Linden at Cranky Uncle: Plandemic and the seven traits of conspiratorial thinking
The video Plandemic is a textbook example of conspiratorial thinking. And so it’s instructive looking at examples from this video.. We put together a video examining the traits of conspiratorial thinking found in Plandemic. The purpose of our video is to help build our resilience so we’re not misled by other conspiracy theories.Readers may also with to download the short manual, "How to Spot COVID19 Conspiracy Theories
May 16, 2020: Rebecca Corey at Yahoo News: Debunking the coronavirus conspiracies in viral ‘Plandemic’ video. Corey interviews Dara Kass MD and Michael Saag MD
“If we see things that are actually not only going to mislead people, but really harm them, it’s our obligation to speak up and say, ‘That’s not correct,’” Saag tells Yahoo News.
"Plandemic” is just one of many videos spouting baseless claims that we are likely to encounter during the coronavirus pandemic, Saag and Kass say. Kass says their effect is “to distract people from whatever we’re trying to tell them that may be uncomfortable, or difficult, or hard work, or may take longer than they want to hear it.”
May 21, 2020, Benjamin Radford at Center for Inquiry. ‘Plandemic’ Asks Questions—But Won’t Answer Them
The video repeatedly emphasizes the importance of “considering different points of view” and asking questions, yet offers no other points of view that contradict or undermine Mikovits. Plandemic claims the medical community has a set narrative that refuses to answer opposing voices—and instead offers its own set narrative that refuses to answer opposing voices. Plandemic made many claims, most of which have been widely debunked. We have to wonder: Where are their responses? Why are they suddenly so quiet? Why are they afraid to answer questions? What do they have to hide?
How many debunkings as of 6 pm PST (USA) Friday May 8, 2020? 28
How many debunkings as of 11:00 am PST (USA) Saturday May 9, 2020? 39
How many debunkings as of 10:00 pm PST (USA) Saturday May 9, 2020? 45
As I worked on compiling this list, I was thinking again and again of the propaganda technique known as firehosing.
Firehosing relies on pushing out as many lies as possible as frequently as possible. That’s typical for propaganda, but the aspect that makes firehosing a unique strategy is that it doesn’t require the propagandist to make the lies believable. That seems counterintuitive, but as Carlos Maza of Vox explains, firehosing is effective because its goal isn’t to persuade. It’s to rob facts of their power.
Steven Novella MD on firehosing:
But this end of the spectrum also blends into the more sinister end, where firehosing is used as a deliberate propaganda strategy.
At this end the firehoser knows what they are doing. They are not intellectually lazy, they are intellectually dishonest. They know they are spouting falsehoods, or are indifferent to their truth status. The purpose of their communication is not to persuade, but to confuse and befuddle, even to distract. Go ahead, deal with all these lies. I can pile them on endlessly. While you’re busy doing that, I will make my emotional and ideological appeals. I will build a compelling narrative, and you will lose before you even realize you are playing the wrong game.
It’s diabolical, and unfortunately it works. But it’s even worse than that. It works similarly to a virus that takes out the immune system of the host. The Guardian puts it well when they write that of the greater purpose:
It’s to rob facts of their power. Firehosing inundates us with so many wild opinions that it becomes exhausting to continually disprove them. In this scenario, reality is reduced to positioning and who can sell their position best.
We can see this strategy at work. In American politics it seems the overall strategy recently is to just manufacture your alternate reality, the actual facts and logic be damned. Both sides may think they have the real facts, and the other side is hopelessly misinformed. (I always have to point out, I am not suggesting symmetry here, but both sides certainly believe this.) There is no engaging honestly without a common set of shared facts.
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