Plandemic is a viral video featuring Judy Mikovits, a former virologist who claims she's the victim of a conspiracy against her and her research, orchestrated from the top by Anthony Fauci. The video implies that Fauci is somehow responsible for the existence of the current pandemic strain of coronavirus and that the pandemic was planned. Is there anything to it? No.
The Plandemic video that has been making the rounds on social media recently, to put it the most charitably possible, takes a skeptical view of Anthony Fauci, vaccinations, and the government response to coronoavirus. The video centers around an interview Judy Mikovits, an American virologist and former medical researcher. To put things less charitably, the Wikipedia article on Mikovits describes her as an anti-vaccination activist and a conspiracy theorist. Clearly, this video was going to be received as controversial; it is perhaps surprising that it has received as much attention as it has, given that some of ideas it appears to express are apparently fringe views. But I want to set aside, for now, the labels applied to Mikovits and simply look at some of the claims she makes in the video and ask whether we should take those claims at all seriously. After all, regardless of whether she is an anti-vaccine advocate, we can still evaluate her claims and the evidence for them rather than the alleged position of the person delivering them.
Before I begin, I do think that, in principle, there is nothing wrong with approaching established narratives with skepticism and asking hard questions of them. We should do that, since there are interests that are happy to deceive people to maintain power or to earn an extra buck. Daring to stand up against powerful interests should be lauded when evidence can be brought to bear against those interests and where deception can be uncovered and exposed. But skepticism cuts both ways, and there is no reason to think that every self-described skeptic is standing up for the truth; many use the label to hide their agenda, and we should be on-guard against those who would do so.
I think it will come as no surprise, given the title of this post, that I think Mikovits fits the latter description: There is clear evidence of an agenda here. If you are skeptical of her, I think you are right to be skeptical, and if you aren't, I think you need to spend some time more closely evaluating her claims and the claims made in this video. There are many red flags in this video in the form of unsupported claims about the science, personal opinions being cast as scientific or professional ones, lots of facts grouped together with insinuations that are left to the viewer to connect, and the choices the editors make to frame the discussion. Long story short: It's bunk.
The video opens by telling us what a great scientist Mikovits was before she was taken down by a government conspiracy. I am not really in any position to tell you whether Mikovits was a stand-out scientist, so I won't try to approach that claim; for all I know, she was, but that has little to do with the content of the video other than trying to garner sympathy from the viewer and to make you think she's authoritative in various ways.
Rather, I want to focus on the alleged conspiracy. In an apparently short period of time, Mikovits had a controversial paper retracted from the journal Science, lost her job, and was arrested for stealing from that job. She claims that her paper in Science rocked the boat too much, showing that powerful interests were responsible for getting people sick, and that the retraction and the arrest were meant to intimidate her into silence. The video even suggests she might fear for her safety after the interview.
The video, essentially, claims that Mikovits loses livelihood simply for uncovering the truth, alleging that the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, and that Anthony Fauci has something to do with it. If you already dislike Fauci, then you probably want to believe this. The problem is that this is just something she says. She doesn't provide any evidence that Fauci is directly responsible for her downfall. She provides no documents or letters or anything. She provides no evidence to support what she says, and the interviewer doesn't entertain any other possible explanations.
There were also some alleged irregularities with one of the figures, which points to some academic dishonesty on her part.It turns out that contemporaneous reports from the time note that her paper was retracted because the results simply couldn't be reproduced; Science itself published a study that refutes her claims. In other words, she and her colleagues were just wrong, and the retraction came as a result of her being flat-out wrong. This is not totally unusual for scientific journals, and the framing of her as somehow being unfairly treated relies on people not knowing how this process works. The framing of her being some sort of amazing scientist who wrote a great thesis on hiv/aids has nothing to do with whether this paper (which was not about hiv/aids) was demonstrably wrong.
Beyond that, she alleges that after her arrest she was held in jail without charges and that there was no warrant, but again, contemporaneous news reporting says she was charged with "possession of stolen property and unlawful taking of computer data" from her place of work and that a warrant was issued for her arrest. She goes on to say that the allegedly stolen materials were planted in her house by the police, but I'll admit that I'm not inclined to believe her: She literally just lied about the existence of charges and a warrant.
A bit later, Mikovits makes some claims about Fauci and potential conflicts of interest he might have as a government official who owns drug patents. Seems sketchy!
I'll admit, this was harder to research, so I haven't looked into it as much Instead, I want to call attention to how the video is edited here because something weird happens that might be hard to catch if you're not paying close attention. It suggests that the video is edited in such a way so as to make a specific point (though it could, admittedly, just be sloppiness).
Mikovits and the interviewer pivot to vaccines around eight minutes in to the video, but this sudden shift doesn't really make a lot sense given what they were just discussing. They aren't talking about vaccines immediately before; they were talking about patents that Fauci owns regarding aids treatment and about IL-2 therapy. And then they cut to the interviewer saying that the people who invent vaccines stand to make billions. There is no vaccine for aids, and there is no clear connection between vaccines and patents that Fauci might hold. I can't say for sure that this is meant to be deceptive; edits happen for many reasons in video editing, and this is a little to obvious. But it is a very suspicious move.
Though it is hard to read intent, let me indulge that suspicion: At this point, it looks to me a lot like whoever edited this video wanted to draw a link between Fauci and vaccines through aids and edited the dialogue to make that connection. The interviewer says that the people who invent vaccines stand to make billions, and they cut to Mikovits saying they'll kill millions with their vaccines. This, I think, is trying to draw a rhetorical parallel to a previous claim that Fauci is responsible for deaths during the aids epidemic, something I won't fact-check here.
I think any engaged viewer should be asking a lot of questions at this point: What vaccines are they talking about? Vaccines for Coronavirus, or for aids? It's not totally clear.The video keeps getting taken down, so I haven't been able to go back and look at this again. How will these vaccines cause these deaths? No explanation is given. Mikovits notes that there is no vaccine schedule for any RNA virus, but what does that have to do with Fauci or the idea that some people stand to make money or that people will die? Again, no explanation. It's all aspersions, suspicious looks, and scary dialogue interspersed with scattered reference to medical-sounding things to make her sound more credible.
And then she denies that she's anti-vaccine. As I suggest in the introduction, it doesn't really matter whether she is or not – what matters here is whether her claims and arguments stand up to scrutiny. For what it's worth, the first time I watched this video was on an anti-vaccination YouTube channel.Again, I think the point of her saying this here is to make her appear more credible, especially to members of the audience that find the anti-vaccination movement objectionable, and to allow people who post the video to claim that this isn't actually an anti-vaccination video (I've seen this happen at least once now). But it does not matter how she identifies herself, and I think the video as a whole belies this claim, as we will see.
Then we get on to some of the zanier but apparently central claims in the video, specifically that Mikovits believes that the current strain of coronavirus was created in a lab and that Fauci, allegedly having connections to research in Wuhan, is responsible for the pandemic.
Now here she makes a number of claims about each of which we can ask easy and obvious questions: What leads her to believe that coronavirus was manipulated in a laboratory? How does she know it can't be naturally occurring? She says it should have taken 800 years to evolve, but where does this figure come from and how do we know it's accuarate? As before, no evidence is presented, no discussion of scientific studies is given, and no discussion of how these conclusions were met. I think we are supposed to take her word on her implied authority alone, but the fact is that the opinion of one scientist (disgraced or otherwise) without access to the most up-to-date scientific information on the virus should not be convincing. The fact she's got a PhD doesn't mean she knows what happened or is well-informed on the most recent research, and it appears to me that the video is trying to confuse personal opinion with a scientific one.
Mikovits claims that the virus originated between some unspecified North Carolina laboratory, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland and a laboratory in Wuhan. The connection appears to be joint research conducted on the possibility of sars jumping from bats to humans which was conducted in Wuhan Province, China, and funded by the United States nih. We see a screen shot of this Daily Mail articleThe Daily Mail is a British tabloid known for its sensationalism and poor science reporting. describing how much money went to Wuhan (though the article I just linked to makes clear, this research was no secret). We are given a set of facts: Fauci is and has been the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (niaid), which is part of the nih, and experiments had been conducted on coronavirus in Wuhan by niaid.
But watch closely: The video presents no evidence that Fauci himself had anything to do with this research. There is no evidence presented that Fauci has any personal connection to the Wuhan labs at all. All they say is that he is the head of a large government organization that controls the flow of research money and that some of that money went to Wuhan to do research on coronavirus in case it jumped from animals to humans. The implication seems to be that actually Fauci was funding research to make a bat disease into a human disease, and from there we are supposed to see that the disease was intentionally released into the public. The pandemic, we are supposed to conclude, was planned all along. At least, this is what I think we are supposed to conclude. You will notice they are very careful not to spell this out for you. This looks to my eye like an attempt at plausible deniability: Since they never say these things explicitly, they can easily say "we never said that."
At this point the video delves into several tangentially related issues. I don't know if I've hit every one of them here, so think of this more as a sample of the sort of ways the video skips from one misleading point to the next.
First there's is a discussion of getting more money from Medicare if doctors report deaths as being from Covid-19. The figures she cites have been debunked by Snopes; they appear to be based on costs for providing care to the uninsured and are not real medicare numbers.
Hydroxychloroquine then comes up. There is, at time of writing, no credible evidence that hydroxychloroquine is effective against covid-19. There is some evidence that it actually increases fatality rates, though this study should be taken with a grain of salt since it was not double-blind. Doctors may have been giving the drug to sicker patients who had a greater chance of dying anyway (a form of selection bias), so we can't be sure that it makes outcomes worse, either.
She then brings up the drug Suramin, an old drug used to treat African sleeping sickness, and the claim it can be used to treat autism. This is a total non-sequitur in that it has nothing to do with Covid-19. Mikovits insinuates that we've known about Suramin's efficacy to treat autism for 70 years, but the only reference I could find to it being used to treat autism in humans comes from a study out of UC San Diego published in 2017, and I couldn't find any claims that it was effective for treating symptoms of autism from before that. The idea it "literally gave kids with autism a voice, a life," as Mikovits says, is unsupported here (and also ignores that there are adults with autism and that many autistic people can speak and live more or less normal lives). Mikovits then claims that after the study, Bayer and Monsanto took the drug away and now you can't get it. The only connection to Monsanto and Bayer I could find is that Bayer invented and produces the drug, but I couldn't even find anybody else claiming anywhere that either Bayer or Monsanto are somehow withholding the drug.
One issue that stands out to me here is where she says that "we tried" to make it available. This could be due to an editing mistake, though.Who are 'we' exactly? I think she's trying to imply that she did research on this drug herself, but if she has I cannot find it (if such research exists, it would behoove the producers of this video to actually provide some sources). Whether or not she has, this again strikes me as framing, an attempt to make her look as though she's fighting big pharmaceutical companies.
She pivots back to Fauci, the cdc, and the who as though Bayer and Monsanto are inseparable from these organizations. There's a jump in her discussion that makes no sense here unless she thinks there is an obvious connection between Bayer and Monsanto, on the one hand, and Fauci, the cdc, and the who on the other. She doesn't say what that connection may be, why it matters, or whether there is evidence for it. I think this is a point where some audiences who may be more familiar with her point of view will agree with her unthinkingly, but from the outside it looks tenuous at best.
She then claims that the flu vaccine increases the odds of contracting Covid-19 by 36 percent. This has been pushed by Children's Heath Defense, an anti-vaccine group, but the study that group cites (incidentally, the only study I remember being cited in the video) was conducted in 2018 before this strain of coronavirus developed and looks at strains that cause the common cold. Whether the flu vaccine increases the odds of contracting Covid-19 is totally unknown at the moment.
She then makes the most obviously false claim in the video: That if you received a flu vaccine you were injected with coronaviruses. That's just wild – literally not how the flu vaccine works.
And then, my favorite part, the part where anybody watching should stop and ask why we should take Mikovits seriously at all: She asks, "why would you close the beaches" during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic? The answer should be obvious to a virologist of Mikovits's calibre: because people can transfer highly contagious viruses when they get near each other. Instead, she says it's insanity, and claims that there are healing microbes in the salt water. There are several obvious questions to ask: Which microbes are you talking about? What evidence is there that they heal or prevent the spread of coronavirus infections? If she can point to these microbes, that would be great, but again she provides no evidence that they exist, and there is no reason to think that they do. It's not insanity to try to slow transmission of a potentially deadly disease.
As the video begins to wrap up, we return to a common claim that her message is being suppressed by those with power and by the big tech companies, and we even get some hand-wringing about threats to dissent and living in a free country. It's true that this video has been taken down from YouTube and Vimeo for violating their terms of service regarding misleading information, but if I'm being honest, I do not think Mikovits's rights to free speech are under any real threat: Her book is available for purchase on Amazon, one of those tech companies that are allegedly suppressing dissenters, though at this point I can't recommend you buy it.
We then hear about how scientists don't get funded or published if they try to overturn "established" science. This is an old line, seen in several anti-science circles (climate change denial, anti-vaccination circles, and flat earth conspiracies come to mind). The problem here is that if it were true, Mikovits's original study shouldn't have received funding to begin with (for if she indeed did apply for external funding, she would have had to explain what the goals of her study were when she applied) and her article in Science wouldn't have been published in the first place (it would have been rejected by peer reviewers or else by the editor of the journal). If Mikovits' thought her research was right despite being retracted, she should have put together another study that tried to address the flaws that other researchers said they found in the apparently only study she seems to have published on this. But she hasn't done that; she's gone to the popular press and the media instead where her ideas won't be subject to the same level of scrutiny as they would be in the scientific literature.
The video ends with a clip from a speech Fauci gave in 2017 talking about pandemic preparedness, saying that there is "no question there will be a surprise outbreak"; after a cut, we hear "the thing we're extraordinarily confident about is that we are gonna see this in the next few years" (though, since there has been a cut we have no idea what he is actually talking about). Given previous comments in the video and the parts of the speech we hear, it is made to sound like the current coronavirus outbreak was planned, tying back to the claims made earlier that Fauci is behind the outbreak. This is clearly a cherry picked part of the speech, and in any case many scientists and public health officials have been warning about the possibility of a pandemic for years. To be totally frank, Fauci saying that there is going to be a pandemic is as sinister as me saying that there will be an earthquake in California.
I hope I've provided enough discussion here to explain why you should substantially doubt the content of the Plandemic video. Mikovits has a history of portraying herself as the victim of a conspiracy and is willing to misrepresent the truth to do so. She makes a number of claims that she either does not or cannot back up. The crux of the video seems to be that Anthony Fauci is somehow responsible for the creation of this strain of coronavirus and deployed it intentionally; it is not made clear in the video how or why he did this, but the implication is that he stands to gain monetarily from vaccination against the disease. Virtually no real evidence is given for any of these claims, and it is somewhat obscured by a number of other tangentially related issues.
There are topics I've left out here for brevity's sake – for example, I don't try to debunk the gag order she brings up early on, I didn't want to try to figure out what the Bayh–Dole Act is all about or why Mikovits seemed so intent on bringing it up, and I thought the thread about masks and how immunity didn't even seem to me like it was worth addressing.
So, in conclusion: It's fine to question authority; hell, it's important. But also question those who you feel compelled to agree with. They are not always being honest, and sometimes in cases like these there is a reason the scientific and medical community rejects them and their claims. Going through the claims in Plandemic took me a while, but evaluating and fact-checking Mikovits was not at all hard. I don't think it holds up. In my estimation, Mikovits and the people who made this video are more interested in pushing an agenda than exposing the truth, in reinforcing previously held beliefs rather than convincing the skeptical, and I think that's pretty clear once you sit down and evaluate their claims and their discourse.
I'm not a virologist or medical expert. I just know it's important to ask basic questions and demand evidence before accepting somebody's claims, especially outrageous ones. Learning to ask the right questions is important. A lot of this post was inspired by Potholer54's videos debunking pseudoscience; his video on conspiracy theories and another on how video editing is done came to mind a lot while writing this. Hbomberguy's recent video about climate change also comes to mind, especially as he points out how flimsy many climate-change-denial arguments are and how they are not really meant to convince anybody.