Every Claim Judy Mikovits Makes in Plandemic (and Why They're All Wrong)
Okay, folks. We know it was the hot topic, like, two weeks ago. But bear with us, we’re angry old ladies who didn’t realize there were people who could be this smugly misguided.
Yeah, we reviewed Plandemic.
Oh No.
For anyone who also lived under a rock, Plandemic is a 26-minute long documentary-type thing that went absolutely viral a few weeks ago for claiming that Anthony Fauci (director of the NIAIH and leader of the COVID-19 task force in the USA) and other top medical leaders in our country were systematically covering up viable treatments for COVID-19 to push vaccines and make millions. It gained further notoriety when basically every reputable social media platform systematically removed it from circulation on the basis that it had the potential to cause harm. Now, I won’t gripe about the inconsistency of social media keeping hate speech and removing pseudoscience because that’s a whole other episode - but suffice to say that I completely understand why it was removed. It is not only ripe with scientific inaccuracies and dangerous advice, it presents these under the guise of being “expert advice” and actively manipulates the viewer into feeling inferior if they question Mikovits’ claims.
So yeah, it’s dangerous.
Where Did It Come From?
Mikki Willis, a “dad from Ojai” who fancies himself a low-budget film director, decided that he knew more than the leading health experts of the world and pursued the belief that vaccines hastened the deaths of his mother and brother (from cancer and AIDS respectively). On his journey of whatever the opposite of self-discovery is, he found Judy Mikovits, a disgraced microbiologist who had systematically ruined her own career and then enmeshed herself in the world of anti-vaccination and pseudoscience.
It was after this chance meeting that Willis decided he would make a multi-part documentary about her beliefs about the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. The video in question, Plandemic, was meant to be a 26-minute first installment of a larger series - which has mysteriously been shelved for the time being.
According to Willis, he funded the entire thing on his own (allegedly production cost around $2,000) and his only goal was to present a different narrative from the socially accepted theories. He posted it to social media with incendiary and, self-admittedly, clickbait-y advertising, and the rest is history.
So Who Is Judy Mikovits?
Quite a few journalists have set out to answer that very question. As far as I could find, Jusy Mikovits was a lab tech in Dr. Francis Ruscetti’s lab while pursuing her Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry from George Washington University in 1988. In 2009, she had become the director of a private research facility in Reno, NV called the Whittemore Peterson Institute, which is a pretty big deal for any researcher. She wrote or co-wrote about 40 research papers over the course of her scientific career, but was generally unknown to the scientific community. That is, until 2009, when she co-authored a paper claiming a link between a mouse retrovirus and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
The paper was published in Science magazine, and the world was thrilled by her findings. Finding the cause for CFS would, of course, revolutionize the treatment and study of the disorder. It was understandably exciting. That is, until it was found that the lab samples used in their experiment were contaminated, that the rat retrovirus had likely been accidentally created in the lab during their experiments, and that it probably hadn’t ever entered a human body. The paper underwent mild revisions until other researchers found they couldn’t reproduce WPI’s data. Science magazine pulled the paper from circulation, and the entire thing left a pretty nasty scar on the research team’s collective careers.
Judy never gave up on that rat retrovirus, though. For years she would claim that it caused any number of ailments, though none of her “research” ever came to fruition. Later in her career, she was arrested and booked on two felonies for stealing files from a computer and other intellectual property from WPI.The charges were ultimately dropped by the DA, but WPI did win a civil lawsuit and she returned some of the research notes she had taken (though she maintains to this day that she was framed).
From there, she began speaking at anti-vaccination rallies and embedding herself into pseudoscience corners. She co-authored a book about her “scientific” beliefs titled Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science, but she hasn’t published anything in the scientific literature since 2012.
I Don’t Like “Scientific” in Quotes
Yeah, well, I don’t like it either, bud.
Plandemic is a scientific parody. It’s a farce. It presents itself as scientific fact - but in reality about 0% of her claims are accurate. Judy Mikovits is a dangerous liar and a fraud, and I’m going to prove it. Or, rather, I did prove it for almost two and a half hours. But here’s the rough transcript.
For the sake of time, I’m not going to retype a summary of all my findings. Instead, you’ll see a bulleted list of claims and rebuttals followed by a list of sources. Feel free to do further reading/listening from actual research and science professionals. A lot of them can verbalize this stuff much better than I can.
Let’s Rock and Roll
Mikki Willis claims Judy “has been called one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation”
Don’t even have to go into detail on this one, her biography has already been clear. She was generally unknown to the scientific community until her fall from grace with the retrovirus/CFS garbage. I do think it’s slick that he says “she has been called” but without specifying who called her that. Technically could be true. Maybe her mom said it. Or her husband. Or, shit, maybe she said it about herself.
Willis claims “her 1991 thesis revolutionized the treatment of HIV/AIDS”
Weird claim, since the thesis is titled “Negative Regulation of HIV Expression in Monocytes” and had absolutely nothing to do with HIV/AIDS treatment.
Willis claims she “published a blockbuster article in the journal Science… revealed that the common use of animal and fetal tissue were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases”
This is a weird way to refer to the research paper that effectively ended her career (and notably wasn’t about fetal animal and human tissue).
Judy claims she was arrested and then placed under a gag order, saying that if she posted/talked about her findings “they” would find new evidence to re-arrest her
She also claims she wasn’t charged with anything when she was arrested and was held in jail as a “fugitive of justice”
As I mentioned earlier, she was arrested and held for five days on very clear charges of stealing intellectual property from her private lab. During the civil case, a Nevada court granted a request for a temporary restraining order against Mikovits to prohibit her from "destroying, altering, disseminating, or using trade secrets and confidential information." But I have no idea where the gag order thing comes from, there’s no evidence of that (in practice or in her behavior anywhere). This clearly didn’t stop her from being active in her own anti-vaxxer circles.
Judy claims intellectual property was planted in her home, that she never stole data or information from “the laboratory” - claims that she can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that she didn’t
It’s a bold claim to say that you can prove anything beyond a shadow of a doubt, especially if you’re being used as a government scapegoat. But it’s especially interesting, seeing as a colleague testified that he took materials from WPI on Judy’s order.
Judy claims that Anthony Fauci directed an nonspecific “coverup” related to COVID-19, and that the NIAID paid millions in hush money to everyone involved (doctors, scientists, though unspecified).
She also claims that Fauci’s “propaganda” killed millions in 1984 during the AIDS crisis with InterLeukin-2
There’s no evidence that Fauci covered anything up, though we’ll get to that further later. Interleukin-2, which was often used in combination with antiretroviral therapy or ART to treat HIV for its ability to promote the differentiation of T cells into effector T cells and into memory T cells. To my understanding, IL2 isn’t used so much anymore because we’ve honed a lot of different HIV meds and antiviral therapies, but it definitely had its role in treatment at the time. Judy claims here that IL-2 was actively killing people, which there is absolutely no evidence of.
Judy claims she was on the team that isolated HIV from blood and saliva with Dr. Francis Ruscetti
No evidence that she was on that team, but it would be hard to know for sure. She does say here that she isolated HIV for testing in saliva, and I mean… even today saliva tests have a 25% accuracy rate for HIV. Not sure if she said what she meant, but if that’s what she meant then that ain’t it chief.
Judy claims Fauci bullied Ruscetti into giving him a paper that would have revolutionized treatment of HIV much earlier and intentionally held up the paper for months while Dr. Gallo wrote his own paper
Her insinuation here is that if her work had been published when it was ready and not held up by Fauci, that millions of lives would have been saved. I agree that millions died when they shouldn’t have due to government negligence, as we talked about at length during Brie’s HIV episode, but there’s no evidence that Judy and Dr. Ruscetti’s work would have been formative. In fact, the only paper Ruscetti and Mikovits published on HIV was years after the landmark studies were published in Science magazine.
Judy claims Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield were working together to “take credit” and “make money” on the patent for IL2 therapy
Tony Fauci and Dr. Clifford Lane were required to put their names on the government patent by law, but the government absolutely did own the patent. The researchers received payment for their discoveries, but the royalties for Fauci have amounted to $45,000 since 1997. Fauci has also said that he felt it was wrong to take compensation for IL-2, so he donated the entire amount to charity.
Judy claims (smugly) that IL-2 was the wrong therapy for HIV
No idea where this comes from. She insinuates that it killed people, but there’s no evidence that this is true.
Judy (and to a degree, Mikki) claims that a doctor/researcher owning a patent is a conflict of interest and the Bayh-Dole act should be repealed because it gives researchers royalties for technology and medicine that taxpayers pay for
Doctors and researchers can speak to this better than I can, but my understanding of this is that Judy paints an extremely simplified and nefarious picture of this act. The idea was to create private and public checks and balances to the medical research system. If the government controls scientific research, innovation tends to screech to a halt. If private entities control it, then gouging skyrockets. This Act was meant to allow a give and take in the medical and technological patent world so that forward momentum continues without being outrageously corrupt. I’m not entirely sure how successful it’s been, but it certainly isn’t a conflict of interest to put researchers’ names to patents - especially, as we’ve demonstrated, when they aren’t making all that much money off it to begin with.
Judy equates this conflict of interest to Bill Gates “having a voice in this country” (unspecified as to what she means).
I have no idea what she means by “have a voice,” so I don’t know how to refute or explain it.
Judy claims that those who own the patents on vaccines “stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars” and will “kill millions as they already have with vaccines”
I can only assume she means people like Bill Gates. This argument falls apart before it even begins, as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already said that if their research teams find the viable vaccine for COVID-19 first, they won’t take a profit on it and give it to the public for free. So.
Also vaccines don’t kill people. The number of vaccine-related injuries and deaths are incredibly low (and the evidence suggests that those deaths occurred as a result of severe underlying health issues).
There is no RNA virus vaccine that works
Holy shit. This is just patently false. How does this woman think we eradicated Poliovirus? POLIO IS AN RNA VIRUS.
Judy claims to not be anti-vaccine, citing vaccines as immunotherapy
Interesting note, coming from the woman who was a champion for the anti-vax movement before this documentary was released. There’s footage of her wearing merch for anti-vax films, she’s spoken at numerous anti-vax events, the list goes on
Judy claims COVID-19 was manipulated in a lab because it is impossible for the virus to evolve that quickly. Her logic is that COVID-19 evolving from SARS-1 naturally would take up to 800 years and 10 years would make it non-naturally occurring
So she’s wrong about where the virus comes from. It’s not SARS-1 to COVID-19, it’s a strain of bat coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 to COVID-19. Also, there’s just no evidence of the virus being manipulated in a lab. None. Also, the idea that a virus can’t mutate in 10 years is bonkers, especially coming from a microbiologist. Flu strains mutate every year. The research has shown that evolutionary jump from the closest known coronavirus in bats to humans would actually take 20-80 years.
She does a fun thing that demonstrates the weird rhetorical strategies she uses to appear credible when she says “I wouldn't use the word 'created,' " Mikovits says in the video. "But you can't say 'naturally occurring' if it was by way of the laboratory. It's very clear this virus was manipulated, this family of viruses was manipulated and studied in a laboratory, where the animals were taken into the laboratory, and this is what was released, whether deliberate or not." She claims that she would never be so unreasonable as to claim it was created in a lab, and then talks around the issue for long enough that you forget that she’s absolutely saying it was created in a lab. If you throw in enough jargon, the audience will forget that you just agreed with the thing you just said was unreasonable.
Judy is “certain” that the manipulation occurred in the “North Carolina laboratories”, Fort Detrick, and “the Wuhan laboratory”
This is a ludicrous assertion given that she has no proof and no way to obtain that proof. She’s never been anywhere near these labs. She has no access to this information. For her to say she’s “sure” is outrageous and immediately discrediting.
The video shows the thumbnail of an article (with the source cut off) with the headline “REVEALED: U.S. government gave $3.7million grant to Wuhan lab at center of coronavirus leak scrutiny that was performing experiments on bats from the caves where the disease is believed to have originated” from DailyMail
The video also plays a clip of audio of unknown origin which claims that Anthony Fauci had past history of coronavirus experiments with Wuhan lab
First of all, DailyMail is an utter garbage tabloid farce.
The rest of this article claims that scientists agree that the virus originated in bats in a specific cave, which is patently false
They also claim that scientists in Wuhan were doing cruel experiments on these bats, which is a sensationalist way of saying something essentially true. They were actually sequencing bat coronaviruses for years before this outbreak, and then the rumor mill started. The US almost immediately pulled funding from this honestly very useful project once the pandemic began, and the rest is history. Still, no evidence that the pandemic originated there. Also, “experiments” does not necessarily mean “cruel,” people are just afraid of lab coats.
Fauci was “involved” with these experiments to the extent that he’s involved in US medical politics and the US was funding the experiments. That’s it.
Judy claims her job in 1999 was to “teach Ebola how to infect human cells without killing them” and that Ebola couldn’t infect human cells until they manipulated the virus
There’s no way to verify her claim that she was working on “teaching Ebola how to infect human cells,” but I can tell you this: The first human ebola outbreak was in 1976 and killed 280 people, and there have been several more outbreaks between 72 and 1999 that killed hundreds more. Ebola absolutely, without a doubt was not manipulated in her lab - or any lab - to infect humans.
Judy claims that hospitals/doctors are being forced to inflate the numbers of COVID deaths for patients without COVID-19 symptoms
CONTRADICTORY CLAIM ALERT: That Judy is trying to save humanity from being systematically killed by Fauci and that there actually isn’t that much of a risk of dying from COVID-19
The video plays a clip of a doctor claiming that “if an elderly woman was being treated for pneumonia, had no symptoms of COVID-19, but had been exposed to her asymptomatic but COVID-19 positive son and she died, that her cause of death HAD to be marked as COVID-19” as evidence that the government is controlling people with fear
They also play a clip of two doctors claiming they are being “pressured” to add COVID-19 to death certificates
No doctor can be outright forced to do anything like this, but the CDC guidelines absolutely recommend this.
Doctors can put more than one thing on a death certificate. If someone comes in with suspected or diagnosed COVID-19 and dies from something unrelated, there’s no way for a doctor to know to what extent COVID-19 influenced the patient’s survival. It’s a safety precaution to make sure we aren’t under-representing the numbers, which would be far more dangerous. Either way it doesn’t matter because we’re looking at overall trends, not individual numbers. The death rate from this year compared to the last ten years is exponentially higher, and that’s what we’re looking at.
“You don’t die with an infection, you die from an infection”
This is… hilariously untrue. If you had cancer and developed and died from an opportunistic infection because of the cancer’s effect on your immune system, it would make sense that your death certificate would reflect both the infection and the cancer.
Judy claims that hospitals are incentivized to diagnose COVID-19 and put people on respirators because Medicare gives them $13,000 and $39,000 respectively
THIS INFURIATES ME. This is technically true. But! It’s not a measure of incentivizing lying about the number of sick people you have. It’s just a matter of how insurance works. Back in the day, doctors and hospitals would have to bill insurance companies, including medicare, by itemizing the things they did to treat each patient. It took a lot of time and cost a lot of money, so to save money for everyone they developed a new system where doctors and hospitals are paid by an average of what it costs to treat the ailments their patients have. So saying that doctors are incentivized to diagnose COVID-19 and use respirators is like saying they’re given free handouts for treating broken legs, or pneumonia, or… anything
Judy also claims that ventilators kill COVID-19 patients
Another weird sensationalist claim that likely stems from the idea that in some severe COVID-19 patients, the inflammation and fluid in the lungs blocks oxygen intake even with a respirator. The issue isn’t so much that respirators are killing people, but that they may not be effective on some.
Claims that Italy has a high population of elderly people with inflammatory. disorders who received an untested flu vaccine in 2019 with H1N1, that the vaccines were grown in a dog cell line, that dogs have lots of coronaviruses, and that “that’s why they’re not testing there”
Just wow. The logic leaps here are staggering. This is the extent of her answer about Italy, and I still can’t find anything to refute because it’s just so illogical.
Clip of an unidentified man in scrubs, implied to be a doctor, claiming that hydroxychloroquine and zinc are working “great” for patients and implies that Fauci has denied this treatment because there is no “double blind placebo study”
This man is a chiropractor, not a medical doctor.
If you watch the entire clip, you’ll also hear him advise COVID-19 patients to buy tonic water because it has quinine in it which is another malaria drug that is similar to hydroxychloroquine. But the thing is - the FDA limits the amount of quinine in tonic water, so to get the medicinal benefits of quinine you’d have to drink 12 liters of tonic water every 8 hours.
To quote the doctor I heard speak about this, the fact that this documentary would use this man as a source speaks to its own lack of credibility.
Audio clip cites that a survey polling nearly 2300 doctors found that hydroxychloroquine was the most effective medication to treat COVID-19
This survey was apparently super bizarre, as it basically just asked these doctors “which treatment do you think is the best?” and reported the answers.
Claims that doctors will lose their license for prescribing hydroxychloroquine at all because Fauci calls its efficacy “anecdotal data”
This is patently false. Fauci did not call hydroxychloroquine’s efficacy as a medicine “anecdotal,” he called its use for COVID-19 anecdotal - and he’s right. There are no scientific studies that prove its use for this virus. Period. And to clarify, you can absolutely still prescribe this medication for its intended purposes (for malaria, immune disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, etc.) and you can ALSO prescribe it for COVID-19 patients. Specifically, doctors can prescribe it to patients who are in dire need of treatment and cannot wait for a double blind study. They won’t lose their license. It’s available. End of story. And shocker - the results of giving these patients hydroxychloroquine aren’t great! Folks are still dying even with this drug - it isn’t a miracle cure. And to treat it like one for patients who don’t need it imminently is… absolutely malpractice.
Implies a history of keeping effective medicine from the public because a 100-year old drug called Suramin (on the list of essential medicine) supposedly “cured” autism, but Bayer and Monsanto ripped it from the public forever
CORRECTION: Brooke thought Suramin is a medication derived from earwax, but actually was thinking of the homophone “cerumen” which means earwax. This medication is actually an intravenous drug that was initially used to treat the Sleeping Sickness, and its use in treating autism is, again, anecdotal. At most, it seemed to help in some patients’ agitation. Other than that, there’s no evidence that it works as Judy characterizes.
Also - if Bayer and Monsanto had a stranglehold on this miracle cure - why wouldn’t they patent it? Or, if they can’t patent it, why wouldn’t they just sell it themselves and make an INSANE profit?
Also also, it is on the WHO List of Essential Medicines but it can still be obtained by the CDC and the WHO. It’s generally given out for free to countries that most often struggle with sleeping sickness and river blindness. You know, the diseases Suramin is meant to treat.
Also also also, this drug has pretty severe side effects. I see you, anti-vaxxers who think it’s better to have a child with crazy physical illness than a child with autism. I see you.
Just claims that if we end banning effective natural remedies, that we’ll suddenly have all the money we need from the patents researchers have and the population will be healthy
As several doctors have said before me, it is completely bonkers to imply that we were better off before modern medicine. Please I beg you, look into Polio. Before antibiotics, people suffered and died from infections in small cuts. Before vaccines, people just died of viruses that we didn’t have the means to stop or build immunity to. These technologies save lives. The science is there.
Mikki Willis claims that “anything that cannot be patented has been shut down because there’s no way to profit from it”
Judy claims that the goal of the powers that be is to withhold effective treatment until everyone is infected and then force vaccines
I mean, we’ve already seen that this isn’t true. Hydroxychloroquine hasn’t been pulled from shelves, it’s just being used responsibly. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other private research centers want to give the vaccine away for free. The proof is kind of in the pudding on that one.
Judy cites a recent research paper to claim that influenza vaccines increase the odds of getting COVID-19 by 36%
This research paper was published in January of 2020, so the research was done long before we knew anything about COVID-19. The findings were that, in the study of 2880 people, it seemed that those who were vaccinated against influenza had a higher occurrence of coronavirus and human metapneumovirus with 507 immunized participants testing positive for coronavirus and 170 non immunized participants testing positive - but the “overall results of the study showed little to no evidence supporting the association of virus interference and influenza vaccination.”
Judy claims that coronaviruses are in every animal
I mean, obviously not. Every person familiar with zoology will tell you that it’s impossible for a virus to be in every genus and species of animal. We could argue that this wasn’t meant to be taken literally, but if she’s going to make a sweeping generalization in a documentary about science then I’m gonna gripe
If you’ve ever had a flu vaccine, you were injected with coronavirus
It’s just not true. Given what I said before, coronavirus isn’t in all animals. And even if a virus was cultured in, for instance, dog cells, there’s no way a live coronavirus would be transferred to you. Also, it probably wouldn’t be valid in humans? Also also the amount in a vaccine would be so minute that your immune system would destroy it immediately?
They play a clip of those two doctors saying “we wear a mask in an acute setting to protect us” but that they don’t wear masks otherwise because wearing masks will weaken their immune systems
These doctors also Claim that sheltering in place will cause significantly weaker immune systems and result in higher levels of hospital stays when the pandemic is over because people won’t be able to handle common illnesses
An unreal statement from two actual urgent care doctors who have since been CRUCIFIED by the scientific community. This is patently false. Just, entirely biologically false. For a dude who smugly states that he doesn’t wear a mask because he “understands microbiology,” this is shockingly stupid.
The immune system isn’t weakened by sheltering in place and lack of exposure to pathogens, it’s strengthened. The thing that makes us so much more sensitive to pathogens and irritants when we spend a considerable amount of time isolated is that our immune system becomes so strong that it freaks out when we encounter a new pathogen or irritant for the first time. It’s why we see allergies in older kids who have never had a peanut but not in kids who had peanuts from a young age. We see increases in disorders and disease after long periods of isolation because our immune systems are OVER active, not UNDER active.
And none of this matters anyway, because we aren’t being fully isolated from all pathogens! We still go outside! A weekly trip to the grocery store or a socially distanced walk in the park will give you more than enough to balance your immune system!
Judy makes the bewildering claim that wearing a mask “activates your own virus” and that it makes you ill from “your own reactivated coronavirus expressions”
I have no idea what this means. This is perhaps the clearest example of paranoid ramblings in the entire doc. That, and:
Judy also claims that there are sequences in the soil and sand and healing microbes in the salt water of the ocean, so we shouldn’t be closing beaches
Another one where I can’t imagine what she possibly could mean. There’s no evidence of healing microbes in sea water. There are no “sequences” that heal COVID-19 in dirt. I’m sorry, but… what?
Mikki Willis and Judy Mikovits both claim there are “no dissenting voices allowed” in this country
They are a dissenting voice! Clearly we can still watch the video if we want to. A social media platform’s right to pull content from their site is not an infringement on their freedom of speech, it’s actually an enactment of their own. Freedom of speech protects them from censorship from the government, not the YouTube. And if their policies state that harmful speech isn’t allowed, then that’s their fault for not reading the terms and conditions, pal.
They play another clip of the chiropractor claiming he is “here to defend his freedoms and his patients’ rights to choose what to do with their lives” and that doctors should be banding together to fight their “liberties being taken away”
Not really sure what liberties are being taken away from them or what his chiropractic patients are being forced to do, seeing as he doesn’t treat COVID-19.
Also, doctors ARE banding together. Just by researching this god forsaken episode I found hundreds of examples of doctors sharing their experiences and traumas from this very very real threat to public health. They are coming together - just not to suit your conspiracy theory.
Judy allegedly started an education company to “wake up” doctors
The most I could find on this was that she and her old boss Dr. Francis Ruscetti founded M.A.R.C. Inc., which she describes as a consulting company focused on education for prevention and treatment autoimmune/auto-inflammatory diseases resulting from drugs and environmental toxins.
I can’t find any trace of this online, so I assume it’s been disbanded? Or it’s extremely underground, in which case, GOOD.
Holy Cow.
Yeah. I spent like five hours transcribing every claim she made, because it was just a whirlwind of bonkers claims for 26 minutes straight. Literally nothing she says is entirely accurate, and any true statement is manipulated to be misleading. It’s so, so dangerous.
So Why Do People Believe It?
I think it comes down to a couple things. First, the video is editing in such a way that it discourages fact checking. From the first moment, Mikki Willis places Judy Mikovits on a pedestal and lays out the red carpet for her to state her opinions as fact. The editing slickly uses clips that aren’t related to enforce her points (for instance, using stock footage of a SWAT raid while she tells the story of her arrest, implying that she was mistreated by a SWAT team). Judy and Mikki’s tones actively condemn questioning her worldview, calling everyone else “lost” and “misguided.” And, as I already mentioned, Judy rapid-fires claims without any evidence which has a dizzying result. It’s impossible to keep up with her claims long enough to refute them, which disorients the viewer and makes them more suggestible. Combine that with some incendiary sound effects and headlines, and you’ve got yourself a propaganda piece.
Also, I think it’s just sexier to believe a conspiracy theory than it is to accept that the world is just broken. Yeah, there’s corruption in the world, but the level of cooperation it would take for a worldwide cover-up of a pandemic is… unlikely to say the least. The logic doesn’t flow. It simply doesn’t make sense that a group of people would take the worldwide economy to make money. But it feels better to have someone to blame for the world turning to garbage. If someone is already mistrustful of the government and susceptible to manipulation, all they need is a so-called “expert” to tell them that they were right the whole time.
Unfortunately, social media platforms removing this video also played into the general idea that Mikovits could be telling the truth. It’s something called the scarcity heuristic, or the notion that information that is harder to find must be more accurate. People who want to believe in the conspiracy theory will see Facebook and YouTube as accessories of the government for taking down Mikovits and Willis’s video, that their “censorship” is proof of the video’s truth. It’s a fallacy, but it can be a powerful one.
Honestly, we can see the trajectory of this woman’s life pretty clearly. It takes a smart and dedicated person to receive a double Ph.D. from GWU and then become director of her own research lab. After a series of unfulfilling papers, her career tanked with a bad experiment that threatened her livelihood. Rather than gracefully accept the loss, Mikovits - a clearly very ill woman - refused to be wrong to a pathological degree. She took up pseudoscience as a way by which she could be useful, she could be the expert. She enmeshed herself into circles where people would revere her degree and experience, rewrote her own history to fit a new narrative, and began selling herself as an enemy of the state here to save the people of the world. It’s a sad, narcissistic story, but it makes sense in the context. Even her self-written biographies on consultation websites completely rewrite her own history. Nothing she says about herself is true.
Key Takeaways?
Honestly, we understand how titillating it can be to buy into conspiracy theories when things seem out of control. Even moreso, we understand how hard it can be to do the level of research it takes to debunk this caliber of pseudoscience (and, sometimes, outright lies). It took me five hours to fully research and write up rebuttals to everything Mikovits said - and that’s only for a 26 minute video. Very few people have that kind of free time on their hands, and even fewer actually want to spend that precious free time sifting through nonsense to find out the truth.
My only advice is this: just because a narrative is generally-accepted doesn’t mean it is corrupt. Most scientists and doctors do what they do because they want to help people. Where you can, follow the science. Find impartial views of the situation. Understand that most people are doing their best, but others may have a reason to mislead. If you can’t find a motive for someone to mislead, then chances are they aren’t.
It can be hard to see the forest for the trees when there are so many dissenting voices. But a general understanding of scientific concepts can go a long way when you’re looking for those who know what they’re talking about and those who are bending facts to suit their agenda.
Listen to the CDC. Listen to the NIH. Stay inside. Care about others. Do your best.