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The coronavirus pandemic has given conspiracy theorists plenty to work with. QAnon obsessives are now blaming the outbreak on 5G, the latest upgrade for cellphone networks. Trump administration officials and other Republicans are alleging that the virus was deliberately created in a lab in China, and then scrambling to find evidence to back up that claim. And a new conspiracy theory has taken off on social media, thanks in part to a nearly half-hour-long documentary titled Plandemic.
With better production than your run-of-the-mill YouTube crank video, it racked up millions of views online before Facebook and YouTube took it down. It paints a pretty dramatic narrative:
It's not quite our current reality, though—it's some well-spun facts and some pretty flagrant misrepresentations.
What is the "plan" of "plandemic"?
The "plan" is a mash-up of conspiracies that have been around for a while—a secret society of billionaires around the world are plotting global domination, and they plan to control people through a vaccine. It's similar to the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory that resulted in a shooting at a North Carolina pizza joint in 2016, though the details are coronavirus-specific. To get everyone to take this possibly mind-altering vaccine, the powers that be created the novel coronavirus, which the human immune system would be able to fight off were it not for things like face masks and hand-washing, which "activate" the virus and help to spread it. And it's vital to the plan that public beaches stay closed because seawater "microbes" protect people from the virus. Bill Gates (who also plays a large role in the overlapping 5G conspiracy theory) is at the center of the narrative—since the Gates Foundation is, in Gates's own words, the "biggest funder of vaccines in the world," he's considered one of the "architects of the Plandemic" by people who have bought into the conspiracy theory. This isn't a uniquely American obsession, either: At a recent anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne, Australia, the crowd broke out in chants of "arrest Bill Gates."
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Who has been promoting it?
Rumors about a "plandemic" have been circulating online since at least March, when anti-vax activist Larry Cook took to Facebook to call the outbreak an opportunity for governments to "usher in mandatory testing, tracking, and vaccination," urging his followers to "#ResistThePlan." In addition, a number of lifestyle anti-vaxxers started making plandemic posts (there are currently 24,000 posts under that hashtag), like Australian Taylor Winterstein, who, on April 6, posted to her 49,300 followers that the "PLANdemic" is part of "THE GLOBAL 'BILL GATES' AGENDA," as well as more meme-focused accounts like The Truth About Vaccines, which recently posted a photo of an N95 mask labeled "THIS IS A MIND CONTROL DEVICE."
Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced former doctor who first publicized the discredited idea that vaccines cause autism, said at the online "Health Freedom Summit" last week, "One of the main tenets of the marketing of mandatory vaccination has been fear. And never have we seen fear exploited in the way that we do now with the coronavirus infection," adding, "I think what we have reached is a situation where—I hope we’ve reached a situation where—the public are now sufficiently skeptical."
But it's not just popular with anti-vaxxers. The "Plandemic" documentary has also taken off with a cross-section of QAnon followers and right-wing extremists, who promoted it in their own online groups and channels. Actress Kirstie Alley has also been a big promoter for both the documentary and the overall conspiracy theory, pointing to Gates's involvement with funding vaccine research as evidence that it's all a giant scam. "Me will refrain. Me no want government mandated cooties in me body," she wrote on Twitter.
What about the scientist in the documentary, though?
The documentary itself relies heavily on interviews with scientist Judy Mikovits, who publicly says she doesn't believe anti-vaccine conspiracy theories but has embraced the people who promote them. As Will Sommer points out at the Daily Beast, she's coauthored two books with Kent Heckenlively, an anti-vax blogger. Another anti-vaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (yes, son of that Robert F. Kennedy), wrote the foreword to her latest book, Plague of Corruption.
How is Anthony Fauci involved in all this?
The documentary heavily focuses on Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who has gained a 74 percent approval from Americans for his straightforward assessments during interviews and White House press events. In Plandemic, Fauci is the mastermind behind the entire outbreak, and Mikovits's most recent book, Plague of Corruption, is largely about what she sees as her ongoing feud with him. Mikovits claims that Fauci threatened to have her arrested if she "set foot" in the National Institutes of Health, and in the 1980s threatened to fire her over HIV research. There's no evidence that either of those things ever happened.
What is Mikovits's background?
Mikovits's own record as a researcher is controversial. In 2009, she led a team of researchers in publishing an article in Science that connected chronic fatigue syndrome to a retrovirus called XMRV. As the Chicago Tribune reported then, Mikovits started claiming without evidence that this retrovirus also had a role in causing autism and other disorders. But other researchers weren't able to replicate her results. In fact, they found evidence that Mikovits's results were based on contaminated samples. Science wound up retracting the paper.
When her research was called into question, Mikovits blamed other scientists, telling the Chicago Tribune at the time, "Some are not trying in completely good faith." She started claiming that the retraction was evidence of a conspiracy against her and her work.
After the XMRV debacle, her employer, the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Nevada, which studies neuro-immune disease, let her go in 2011, and then she was arrested and briefly jailed. In Plandemic, she claims this was retaliation for research that was somehow threatening to big business and/or the government. She says that she was never charged with anything, and the retelling includes dramatic footage of a SWAT team breaking into her home.
In reality, she was charged with stealing lab notebooks, a computer, and proprietary data from the institute—the charges were dropped in 2012, reportedly because it complicated a separate case against the Whittemore Peterson Institute's cofounder for making illegal contributions to a federal official. And the production company responsible for the SWAT footage has put out a statement saying that video was taken from their website without permission and that the raid in question had nothing to do with Mikovits.
What's in the video itself?
A lot of the claims are distorted or flat out wrong. At one point, Mikovits says that the flu vaccine increases a person's odds of contracting COVID-19 by 36 percent, an argument promoted by Robert Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccine Children’s Health Defense and repeatedly refuted by fact-checkers and public health experts. The flu vaccine also contains strains of coronavirus already, according to Mikovits, another claim that's flourished on social media since April and has also been proven wrong. According to her, hydroxychloroquine is effective against the entire family of viruses that the novel coronavirus belongs to, which again is wrong since there's no known cure for any SARS virus. Mikovits also accused hospitals of over-reporting COVID-19 cases to secure $13,000 payments from Medicare. It's true that hospitals get additional funding to handle an influx of coronavirus cases, but higher overall weekly death rates now suggest that the U.S. is massively undercounting the rate of infection and the death toll.
Why can't I find the video anywhere?
On May 6, social media platforms started removing the video, a move that has reinforced the idea that Mikovits ran afoul of the ruling class and is being censored. In statements, Facebook says it took down the video because it claims that wearing a face mask "activates" the virus, and is therefore a public health hazard. And a YouTube spokesperson claimed it "violates our Community Guidelines, including content that includes medically unsubstantiated diagnostic advice for COVID-19." Those explanations don't sit well with the documentary's boosters, including actress Kirstie Alley.
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Deplatforming in this case has only added to Mikovits's cred in conspiracy circles, especially among people who already believed that she was being targeted for unearthing a nefarious global plot. On Friday, Plague of Corruption was the number one seller on Amazon, beating out preorders for the upcoming addition to the Twilight series. As of Monday, it was holding steady in the top five.
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