The Falsehoods of the ‘Plandemic’ Video
The first installment of a documentary called “Plandemic” stormed through social media this week, promising viewers on its website that the film will “expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system.” The video appeared across platforms, with individual uploads each garnering hundreds of thousands of views.
But the viral video, running nearly 26 minutes, weaves a grand conspiracy theory by using a host of false and misleading claims about the novel coronavirus pandemic and its origins, vaccines, treatments for COVID-19, and more.
The video is largely an interview with Judy Mikovits, a former chronic fatigue researcher who has lobbed a number of accusations against National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. Mikovits was an author on a controversial 2009 study linking a retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome that was published in the journal Science, and then retracted in late 2011 after labs were unable to replicate the results and other issues were brought to light.
That same year, in September 2011, Mikovits was fired from her position as research director at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Nevada and arrested two months later after the institute alleged she stole a laptop, flash drives and other property with institute information. While Mikovits claims in the documentary that she was held in jail despite being charged with “nothing,” a criminal complaint from November 2011 shows she was charged with two felonies related to the stolen property. The charges were later dropped.
What followed was a years-long legal battle in which Whittemore won a civil judgment against Mikovits; Mikovits filed for bankruptcy; and Mikovits alleged that Whittemore defrauded the government by misusing federally funded research materials. The latter case was dismissed this year.
Mikovits recently co-authored a book with self-described “anti-vaxxer” Kent Heckenlively, with a forward by vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr., and has spoken at events aimed at discrediting vaccines.
In the video, she claims, “And they will kill millions as they already have with their vaccines.” It’s unclear what vaccines she’s referring to, but vaccines have been credited with saving millions of lives. For instance, according to one estimate by researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, the measles vaccine more than 20 million lives across the globe from 2000 to 2016 alone.
