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see antivax 420 vxr

BAK 9 25

mma

TikTok Shop is selling supplements made by Plandemic filmmaker

For $29 on TikTok, you can buy a supplement to “bulletproof your immune system” and “surround it with piranhas” from a company that pushes medical misinformation

Written by Abbie Richards (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/abbie-richards)

Research contributions from Alex Kaplan (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/alex-kaplan)

:{:{Published 09/25/25}:

On TikTok Shop, users can now purchase a supplement that will purportedly “bulletproof your immune system.” The product was “founded” by a group that includes Mikki Willis, who has falsely claimed that measles is a “bioweapon” and said he has been “working with” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Willis is also known for creating the viral film Plandemic, which pushed conspiracy theories about COVID-19.

TikTok Shop’s policies (https://seller-us.tiktok.com/university/essay?knowledge_id=1399532709988097&default_language=en&identity=1) prohibit the sale of “medicinal supplements,” including “unlicensed medicines, herbal or homeopathic products, and those making health claims.” But that isn’t stopping the creators of Fierce Immunity from selling their supplement on the platform and suggesting that people who take it “don’t get sick.”

Fierce Immunity is a supplement claiming to “supercharge your immune system”

Fierce Immunity is billed as (https://web.archive.org/web/20250918202732/https://www.getfiercenow.com/collections/shop/products/fierce-immunity) “a synergistic blend of bioactive compounds, precision-engineered to supercharge your immune system” and (https://web.archive.org/web/20250915185231/https://www.getfiercenow.com/pages/prepare) “a powerful blend of Vitamin D, Zinc Ascorbate, Quercetin, Hesperidin, and L-Arginine designed to fortify your immune system, reduce inflammation, and support rapid recovery.”

The supplement was created by a group that includes medical misinformers, and it was reportedly (https://www.wired.com/story/antivax-grift-measles-crisis-bioweapon/) formulated with an “AI technology,” known as Swarm Intelligence. Fierce Immunity is also the first item listed in parent company Rebel Lion’s “Measles Protocol (https://web.archive.org/web/20250915185231/https://www.getfiercenow.com/pages/prepare).” As part of the protocol, Rebel Lion claims Fierce Immunity works as “both prevention and response in times of viral threat.”

Health care experts have said that while some people can benefit from a vitamin D supplement, most people do not need vitamin D (https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/health-library/all/2024/12/new-vitamin-d-guidelines-who-really-needs-supplements) supplements because they get sufficient vitamin D from their diet and lifestyle. And while zinc plays a role in immune health, supplements are usually necessary only for people with zinc deficiency. In fact, some experts say excessive (https://www.matherhospital.org/related-content/bariatrics/excessive-zinc-supplementation-can-be-dangerous-to-your-health/) zinc levels can actually be “dangerous to your health.”

In small print, Fierce Immunity's website admits (https://web.archive.org/web/20250915185528/https://www.getfiercenow.com/pages/science), “Fierce Immunity is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. … You should not use the information contained herein for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease, or prescribing any medication.”

Rebel Lion is selling and promoting Fierce Immunity on TikTok

Rebel Lion is selling Fierce Immunity on TikTok Shop, even though the platform prohibits (https://seller-us.tiktok.com/university/essay?knowledge_id=1399532709988097&default_language=en&identity=1) the sale of “unlicensed medicines, herbal or homeopathic products, and those making health claims.” In fact, the company is selling the product on the platform at half of its usual price (https://web.archive.org/web/20250918202732/https://www.getfiercenow.com/collections/shop/products/fierce-immunity) of $58 a bottle.

On its TikTok account, Rebel Lion has posted videos of people making some bold claims about Fierce Immunity, such as saying (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033172) it will “bulletproof your immune system” and “lock it down, supercharge it, and surround it with piranhas,” “It shields my immunity. I don’t get sick (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033050),” and “Two years ago I began taking Fierce Immunity … and in that two years, I haven’t been sick, not even a sniffle (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033051).” In another video (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033054), a man is repeatedly hitting a tire in a gym with a voiceover saying, “After six weeks of constant gut issues, I tried Fierce Immunity and in just two days, my discomfort vanished.”

In Rebel Lion webinars on YouTube, the commentary about Fierce Immunity gets even wilder. In a webinar (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033173) dedicated to the “Real Story Behind the Measles Outbreak,” Rebel Lion co-founder (https://web.archive.org/web/20250911193249/https://www.getfiercenow.com/pages/affiliate) Chris Roy said (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033055) that “nobody that I know that’s taking Fierce Immunity is getting sick.” Roy also claimed (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033056) that his friend’s sister “had breast cancer — stage four — and started taking Fierce Immunity and within about a month they said her tumors are shrinking.”

Fierce Immunity is being sold by a company led by medical misinformers

According to Rebel Lion's website (https://web.archive.org/web/20250911193249/https://www.getfiercenow.com/pages/affiliate), Fierce Immunity was “founded by Mikki Willis, Chris Roy, and JP Sears.” Willis and Sears both have histories of spreading medical misinformation.

Willis is the creator (https://www.wired.com/story/mikki-willis-tulsi-gabbard-red-pilled-plandemic/) of the viral film Plandemic (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8318131/), which Wired reported was a “widely debunked pseudo-documentary” that “suggested Covid-19 was released to profit those in positions of authority and that vaccines were ineffectual.” During Rebel Lion's “The Real Story Behind the Measles Outbreak” webinar (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033173), he falsely (https://www.wired.com/story/antivax-grift-measles-crisis-bioweapon/) claimed (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033047) that measles is a “bioweapon” that has “been manipulated and targeted towards a community that is a threat because of their natural way of living.” In February, Willis also claimed (https://bsky.app/profile/alkapdc.bsky.social/post/3li5mgbblhk2g) that he had “been working with RFK Jr.” and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard “for over a decade.”

Willis is still sowing doubt and mistrust around the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. During the Rebel Lion webinar (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033269), Willis encouraged viewers to share an upcoming video with their friends and family who still trust vaccines and linked his father’s heart issues to vaccines:

MIKKI WILLIS: I was getting calls from these people that were severely injured. They were the first ones to line up for the COVID-19 vaccines. And they were manipulated and coerced into doing that for whatever reason. We’ve been following them on their journey of healing for the past four years. They went from perfectly healthy to confined to a wheelchair, having to have breathing apparatuses just so they can breathe, to having seizures every 30 minutes, some of them severely injured from being perfectly healthy.

And so we’ve witnessed that firsthand. And that movie, when it comes out, share it like crazy because I have been saying, that’s the movie that ends the debate. If you have family members, friends, whoever it is that are still in denial just because maybe they got vaccinated and they’re OK, which, thank God, so many people are. My father and mother-in-law both, I don’t know, two or three vaccines — they’re fine. My father, three vaccines, three heart attacks — I just put him in hospice care.

In the description (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033279) of the “ Real Story Behind the Measles Outbreak” webinar, Rebel Lion describes the video as an “urgent discussion … unpacking the latest measles outbreak in Texas and exposing what mainstream media refuses to report,” including questions like “Is this a mutated bioweapon?” and “Are vaccinated individuals more vulnerable?”

Journalists have described Sears as a “conservative, anti-vaccine comic (https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/nov/25/conservative-anti-vaccine-comic-jp-sears-to-crack-/)” and “the clown prince of wellness. (https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking-pseudoscience/clown-prince-wellness)” In his comedy sketches, Sears has implied that vaccines cause autism (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033311), that COVID-19 boosters are intended to depopulate the world (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033312), and that mRNA vaccines are ineffective (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033310).

Roy, who owns the “Rebel Lion” trademark (https://www.trademarkia.com/owners/christopher-roy?query=REBEL%20LION), doesn’t seem to have a significant history as a public persona online. Instead, he seems to bring the marketing expertise (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033175) to the Rebel Lion project.

In May, Rebel Lion released a film (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033048) that featured Dr. Ben Edwards and Dr. Richard Bartlett, who have downplayed the threat of measles, and Pierre Kory, whose certification was revoked (https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2024/08/14/doctors-accused-of-spreading-misinformation-lose-certifications/) by the American Board of Internal Medicine for his promotion of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.

Edwards reportedly (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/west-texas-measles-outbreak-families-forego-conventional-medicine-vacc-rcna194795) treated measles patients in Texas, including children, with cod liver oil while reportedly (https://apnews.com/article/texas-measles-outbreak-rfk-jr-ben-edwards-2dd7c79d47c64ad2e6d4a4ac3c87ec1f) having an active measles infection himself.

Bartlett has suggested (https://bsky.app/profile/alkapdc.bsky.social/post/3lmcowygluc2y) that the measles vaccine could cause measles and that (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033058) reporting on the rise in measles is a “misinformation, disinformation campaign to character-assassinate RFK and the Make America Healthy Again movement.” During the “Real Story Behind the Measles Outbreak” webinar, Willis asked Bartlett (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033275): “Should we stop all measles vaccines and let children get natural immunity?” Bartlett didn’t seem to answer the answer directly, but he said: “Parents deserve to know all the information. … We’re supposed to as doctors give informed consent. As far as vaccines, it’s again an individual decision. Traditional vaccines made with a live virus or a live weakened virus make sense to me. But there’s a risk. They’re live measles viruses. Live measles viruses cause measles.” He added that “every risk of measles can happen with the MR vaccine. And you’re not gonna hear that on CNN.”

During the May film, Kory argued (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033049) that “measles is essentially just a rash. It was one of the most common childhood illnesses. It’s not lethal by any stretch of the imagination. Over 90% of kids with measles will suffer no complications. And the few that do, those complications are easily treatable.”

The Centers for Disease Control (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measles-isnt-just-a-little-rash-infographic-508.pdf) has been clear: Measles “isn't just a little rash.” In fact, the CDC says that 1 in 5 people who get measles will be hospitalized, and 1 in 20 children with measles will get pneumonia, which is “the most common cause of death from measles in young children.” A 2024 study also estimated (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7345a4.htm) that measles vaccines averted over 60 million deaths between 2000 and 2023.

Medical misinformers often sow doubt around vaccines and then profit from anxious consumers

Fierce Immunity offers something of a window into a larger (https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/200112-The-Anti-Vaxx-Industry.pdf) industry in which grifters profit off fear and medical misinformation, seeding distrust in lifesaving vaccines while simultaneously selling bogus solutions.

Immediately after stoking fear about COVID-19 vaccines in the Rebel Lion webinar, Willis said (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4033269), “This is why we created Fierce Immunity.” Roy added that when measles started breaking out, “that was the beginning of the conversation — was we were getting so many people asking us what they should do, what they should take, how should they build their immune system. Because we know … it all starts with the immune system.”

This sort of approach is also seen elsewhere in the medical misinformation space. For instance, a 2024 study (https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/21128/4494) from the University of Washington documented how wellness influencers leveraged anti-vaccine messaging for profit, using it to sell products including heavy metal detox sprays and supplements, homeschooling resources, and “off-grid” supplies. And during the pandemic, right-wing (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-mentioned-ivermectin-nearly-300-times-then-ignored-new-study-finding-drug-ineffective) media figures (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/whats-getting-obscured-ivermectin-debate) and anti-vaccine (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/09/19/1038369557/ivermectin-anti-vaccine-movement-culture-wars) activists (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/13/ivermectin-treatment-covid-19-anti-vaxxers-advocates) peddled (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/ivermectin-and-right-wing-medias-con-culture) ivermectin as a miracle drug, even though it is ineffective (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1341321X23003161) at treating COVID-19.

Rebel Lion’s “Measles Protocol” also includes (https://web.archive.org/web/20250911194919/https://www.getfiercenow.com/pages/prepare) Budesonide, which the American Academy of Pediatrics has said (https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/fact-checked/fact-checked-budesonide-and-clarithromycin-unproven-and-risky/#::text=Budesonide%20is%20an%20inhaled%20steroid,is%20fighting%20measles%20for%20you.) is “not a recommended nor effective treatment for measles,” and an “antimicrobial oral rinse that reduces viral and bacterial load in the mouth.”

TikTok Shop is selling black market Ozempic, performance enhancement drugs, and cosmetic filler (https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktok-shop-selling-black-market-ozempic-performance-enhancement-drugs-and-cosmetic-filler)

10/22/24 2:04 PM EDT

### TikTok Shop is selling black market vapes to children … again (https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktok-shop-selling-black-market-vapes-children-again)

06/27/25 10:02 AM EDT

### Unregulated GLP-1 patches are exploding on TikTok Shop (https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/unregulated-glp-1-patches-are-exploding-tiktok-shop)

09/09/25

7 25

Plandemic - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plandemic)

Plandemic is a trilogy of conspiracy theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory) films produced by Mikki Willis, promoting misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation). They feature Judy Mikovits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Mikovits), a discredited American researcher and prominent anti-vaccine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-vaccine) activist. The first video, Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19, was released on May 4, 2020, under Willis's production company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_company) Elevate Films. The second film, Plandemic Indoctornation, which includes more interviewees, was released on August 18 by Brian Rose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Rose_%28podcaster%29)'s distributor of conspiracy theory related films, London Real. Later on June 3, 2023, Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening was released on The Highwire, a website devoted to conspiracy theories run by anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del_Bigtree).

Upon its release, the first video went viral (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_video), becoming one of the most widespread pieces of COVID-19 misinformation, its popularity most attributed to online word-of-mouth. It was quickly removed by multiple online platforms, but this failed to stop its proliferation. The video also plausibly contributed to non-compliance with health protocols. Due to social media companies' preparedness for its release, Plandemic: Indoctornation received less attention.

Scientists and health professionals have criticized all the installments of the trilogy for their misleading claims, while Willis's filmmaking style employing various modes of persuasion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion) has been cited as lending to a conspiratorial and brainwashing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing) character of the film. Responding to the outcry directed at the first video, Willis expressed doubt about Mikovits's claims but continued to defend her, with Indoctornation being self-described as a "response video" to debunkers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debunkers). The Great Awakening was also subject to debunking by fact-checkers.

Background

Main articles: COVID-19 pandemic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic), COVID-19 misinformation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation), and List of unproven methods against COVID-19 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_methods_against_COVID-19)

The COVID-19 pandemic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic) was caused by the virus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_2) (SARS-CoV-2), first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan), China, becoming a pandemic in 2020.\1] Billions of people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_cases) have contracted the disease and millions eventually died (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_deaths) from it.\2] As a result of the pandemic declaration, travel restrictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_restrictions_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic),\3] social distancing measures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_distancing_measures_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic),\4] and many other precautions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns) were enacted to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_mitigation_of_COVID-19)\5] while vaccines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine) were quickly developed and underwent phased distribution in most countries.[6] Meanwhile, [misinformation and conspiracy theories about the pandemic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation) emerged, concerning the pandemic's scale, the virus' origin, diagnosis, and [treatment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covid-19_treatment). Among the popular conspiracy theory is that the virus is a [bioweapon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioweapon) to [control the population (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_control).[7] Some people have claimed to have [magical or faith-based cures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_methods_against_COVID-19) for the disease.[8]

Judy Anne Mikovits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Anne_Mikovits) is a former American research scientist who is known for her discredited medical claims, such as the claim murine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse) endogenous retroviruses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retroviruses) are linked to chronic fatigue syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_fatigue_syndrome).\9] Even prior to the pandemic, Mikovits was engaged in anti-vaccination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-vaccine_activism) activism and the promotion of conspiracy theories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theories),\10] and was accused of [scientific misconduct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_misconduct).[11] Prior to the release of Plandemic, Mikovits had expressed support for various COVID-19 conspiracy theories, claiming, for example, that the COVID-19 pandemic is a predictable [flu season (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flu_season).[12]

Mikki Willis\a] is a former model and actor\14] who had been making several New Age (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age) documentary films and conspiracy videos.\15]: 4 At age 25, he founded the New York/Los Angeles Theater of the Arts, where he made several experimental plays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_theatre), before making his feature debut film, Shoe Shine Boys (1996). He owns a production company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_company), Elevate Films, which operates under the 501(c)(3) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501%28c%29%283%29_organization) non-profit Elevate Foundation, founded in 2006. At one point, it also operated a namesake film festival.\13][16][17] He was also co-director, co-cinematographer, and co-editor of the documentary [Neurons to Nirvana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurons_to_Nirvana) (2013), which makes therapeutic claims on [psychedelics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelics). Residing in [Ojai, California (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojai,_California), Willis has a wife and business partner, Nadia Salamanca, as well as two sons. He has a family YouTube channel, Elevate Family, where one of his videos encouraging young boys to be unashamed of their cross-gender interests went viral. In 2023, it was reported they were planning to launch an [alternative learning center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_school).[15]: 3 [18][19]

Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19

Summary

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plandemic_logo.jpg)The logo used for the first video

The first installment of the trilogy, a 26-minute video titled Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19,\19] promotes the conspiracist claim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Pharma_conspiracy_theory) that vaccines are "a money-making enterprise that causes medical harm",\20] exploring themes of the loss of [free speech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech) and [free choice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_choice), also promoting parental autonomy against the pharmaceutical industry.[15]: 14 It takes the form of an interview between Willis and Mikovits, who makes unsupported and false statements about SARS-CoV2, the disease it causes, and her own controversial history.[19]

Fact-checking responses

Fact-checking website PolitiFact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolitiFact) highlighted eight false or misleading statements made in the video:[19]

That Mikovits was held in jail without charge. Mikovits was briefly held on remand after an accusation of theft from her former employer the Whittemore Peterson Institute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittemore_Peterson_Institute) but charges were dropped. There is no evidence to support her statement notebooks removed from the Institute were "planted" or that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Allergy_and_Infectious_Diseases) and its director Anthony Fauci (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci) bribed investigators.[19] When asked, both Mikovits and Willis said it was an error to say Mikovits had not been charged; she had meant to say the charges were dropped. Mikovits later said "I've been confused for a decade" and that in the future she would try to be clearer when she talks about the criminal charge; "I'll try to learn to say it differently".[21]

That the virus was manipulated. This possibility is still being investigated. According to Nature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_%28journal%29) magazine, "Most scientists say SARS-CoV-2 probably has a natural origin, and was transmitted from an animal to humans. However, a lab leak has not been ruled out, and many are calling for a deeper investigation into the hypothesis that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located in the Chinese city where the first COVID-19 cases were reported."[22]

That the SARS-CoV2 virus evolved from SARS-CoV-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-1) within a decade and that is inconsistent with natural causes. This is incorrect; SARS-CoV-2 is similar but is not directly descended from SARS-CoV (SARS-1), and the viruses have only 79% genetic similarity.[23]

That hospitals receive $13,000 from Medicare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_%28United_States%29) if they "call it COVID-19" when a patient dies. This statement, which had previously been made on The American Spectator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Spectator) and WorldNetDaily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldNetDaily),\24] was rated "half true" by PolitiFact[25] and [Snopes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snopes);[26] payments are made, but the amount is open to dispute and there is no evidence this influences diagnosis. The evidence suggests COVID-19 may be under-diagnosed.[27]

That hydroxychloroquine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine) is "effective" against coronaviruses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus). This statement originates in work by Didier Raoult (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Raoult) that subsequently received a "statement of concern" from the editors of the scientific journal in which it was published.\28] The first randomized controlled trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_controlled_trial) to evaluate the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine#COVID-19) found no evidence of benefit and some evidence of harm.[29] The [NIH (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Health) said there is insufficient evidence to recommend for or against its use to treat COVID-19.[30] As of May 7, 2020, other bodies were running additional controlled trials to investigate hydroxychloroquine's safety and efficacy.[19]: 1

That flu vaccines increase the chance of contracting COVID-19 by 36%. This statement is false;\31] it misinterprets a disputed article that studied the 2017–2018 influenza season, predating the COVID-19 pandemic. The statement the flu vaccine increases the chance of contracting COVID-19 does not appear in the original article. The article's author Greg G. Wolff said coronavirus cases increased from 5.8% (non-vaccinated) to 7.8% (vaccinated) with an odds ratio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odds_ratio) of 1.36, with (1.14, 1.63) 95% confidence interval (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval), and the article highlight said; "Vaccinated personnel did not have significant odds of respiratory illnesses".[32] The article refers to seasonal coronaviruses that cause the [common cold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold), but COVID-19 was added by the website disabledveterans.org.[31]

That despite the goal of preventing coronaviruses, flu vaccines contain coronaviruses. In reality, there are no vaccines with coronaviruses.[33]

That "Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions." This statement is unsupported by evidence. Masks prevent airborne transmission of the virus, especially during the up-to-14-day asymptomatic period when carriers may not be aware they have the disease.[34] A virus may be deactivated, but cannot add to one's infection level if it leaves the body, even temporarily.[35]

\](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%27Free_Ohio_Now%27%28Columbus%29_bIMG_0868%2849876163551%29.jpg)A child protesting COVID-19 vaccines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine) with the word plandemic at [Franklin County, Ohio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_County,_Ohio)

The journal Science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_%28journal%29) also repeats some of the statements made by PolitiFact and fact-checked some of Mikovits's and Willis's other statements:[36]

That Italy's COVID-19 epidemic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Italy) is linked to influenza vaccines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine) and the presence of coronaviruses in dogs. There is no relation between these.

That SARS-CoV-2 was created "between the North Carolina laboratories, Fort Detrick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detrick), the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Medical_Research_Institute_of_Infectious_Diseases), and the Wuhan laboratory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology)". Considering relations between the US and the Wuhan lab stopped, the claim is false.

That Mikovits is not anti-vaccine. According to Science, she once wore a piece of Vaxxed II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaxxed_II) merchandise promoting the 2019 sequel to a 2016 film that says MMR vaccines cause autism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_and_autism) and that she once sent Science a PowerPoint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPoint) presentation calling for an "immediate moratorium" for "all vaccines".

That the Department of Health and Human Services (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Health_And_Human_Services) (HHS) "colluded and destroyed" Mikovits's reputation, and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation) (FBI) kept this secret but did nothing to help her. Science said, "Mikovits has presented no direct evidence that HHS heads colluded against her".

That Mikovits's article on Science "revealed that the common use of animal and human fetal tissues was unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases", which the article does not say.

That Mikovits's Ph.D. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ph.D.) thesis Negative Regulation of HIV Expression in Monocytes "revolutionized the treatment of HIV/AIDS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS)"; the thesis "had no discernible impact on the treatment of HIV/AIDS".

Mikovits also alludes to several conspiracy theories that state Bill Gates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates) is implicated in causing the pandemic to profit from an eventual vaccine,\20] and makes false and unsupported statements such as the claim that beaches should remain open because of "healing microbes in the saltwater" and "sequences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%28esotericism%29)" in the sand that can "protect against the coronavirus".\37] The video states the numbers of COVID-19 deaths are purposely being misreported to control people.\38] External videos, such as one in which a [chiropractor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic) says [tonic water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_water) can treat or prevent COVID-19 and one of a press conference among doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi in [Bakersfield, California (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakersfield,California), says the COVID-19 pandemic is over-hyped. These external videos were also disputed beforehand.[39]

Production

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elevate_logo.png)Logo of Elevate Films, the production company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_company) for the first video

According to Willis, producing Plandemic was a struggle. At that time, he was aware getting involved in controversial topics would risk his reputation and would likely embroil him in heated discussions. "And of course there’s been tons of it. I’ve just been navigating all of that", he told the Los Angeles Times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times). Willis's concern arose from his perception of the pharmaceutical industry's corruption, a concern that began with the deaths of his mother from cancer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer) and of his brother from AIDS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS) during his 20s.[13]

Willis met Mikovits for the first time in 2019, via mutual friends. Willis told the Ojai Valley News (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojai_Valley_News): "Because of \Mikovits's] direct connection with [those] involved with the pandemic ... I reached out to her for advice. We met, had a meeting, and what she revealed to me I knew the world needed to know." [Principal photography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_photography) took a day and editing took two weeks. Willis said he stopped editing a "socially conscious" documentary film he produced in 2019, arguing Plandemic was urgent. He was unsure whether to make a continuation.[40][18] After hiring a cinematographer and researcher to join the project, Willis calculated it had a budget at less than US$2,000.[13]

Willis, a low-budget filmmaker who was 52 years old at the time of Plandemic's release, teamed up with Salamanca to market the video;\13] among their efforts were creating an Instagram (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram) account.[41] They intentionally chose conspiratorial branding to gain attention. The [project's title (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plandemic), a portmenteau of plan and pandemic, was the most popular choice in a Facebook poll conducted by Willis; runners-up were The Invisible Enemy and The Oath.[13]

Release

Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 was released on May 4, 2020.\42] It was promoted by American far-right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_far-right) conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones) on InfoWars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoWars),\43] and spread virally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_video) on social media, garnering millions of views,\20] making it one of the most widespread pieces of COVID-19 misinformation. "Judy Mikovits" became a trending search on Google for two days.[44] Two weeks prior to release, 30,368 [tweets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweets_%28Twitter%29) used the term "plandemic", most of which were merely retweets. After the video's release, the word "plandemic" was used 155% more on Twitter.[45] According to [CrowdTangle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrowdTangle), [QAnon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon) Facebook groups endorsed the video. A Facebook spokesman recalled its hired fact-checkers wasting a huge amount of time to verify the video's claims, partly due to its duration and the number of claims.[46] Before being removed, one of the videos featuring the work attracted one million views.[47] Despite its removal, viewings of the video on the original site continued.[48]

A YouTube spokesperson said the platform would remove videos supporting the claims of Plandemic without sufficient evidence, saying "\s]uggesting that wearing a mask can make you sick could lead to imminent harm". Vimeo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimeo)'s Trust & Safety team removed the video for violating its policies on misinformation; Twitter said hashtags like #PlagueofCorruption\b] and #PlandemicMovie had been blacklisted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisted) and that not all of Mikovits's attempts to spread propaganda on the platform violated its policies. By the time the video was removed from Facebook, it had been watched 1.8 million times, had attracted 17,000 comments, and had been shared nearly 150,000 times.\49] On TikTok (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok), the video continued to find popularity via excerpted clips, some of which were removed from the platform.[50] [Google Drive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Drive) and the [Internet Archive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive) were also used to spread the video; the former removed the files after being notified by [The Washington Post (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post).[41]

According to Zarine Kharazian, assistant editor of the Atlantic Council (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Council)'s Digital Forensic Research Lab, as the film was removed from mainstream social media platforms, a "censorship backfire" that was characterized as a form of Streisand effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) occurred; links to copies were promoted on alt-tech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-tech) platforms—some of which were designed to host controversial content—were shared, with people's interest attracted by the video's perceived taboo nature.\51] On Facebook, posts flagged as misinformation are more likely to be spread than those ignored. Shahin Nazar and Toine Pieters of the journal Frontiers in Public Health (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_in_Public_Health) called the marketing campaign of encouraging people via decentralized social media to propagate the anti-vaccine belief "sophisticated", noting that it might have been a major contributor to the lack of compliance towards health protocols.\45] According to The Verge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Verge), [end-to-end encrypted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encrypted) services like [WhatsApp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp) and private groups meant the video was still being spread, unbeknown to the public.[46]

Reception

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plandemic_Judy_Mikovits.png)The atmosphere, cinematography, and score (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_score) of Plandemic are said to be what makes the claims stated sound convincing. Pictured is a cutaway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutaway_%28filmmaking%29) during the video's opening scene.

Scientists, medical doctors, and public health experts condemned Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 for promoting misinformation and NBC News (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_News) called it "a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories".\44] Governmental organizations, including the Indonesian COVID-19 Task Force, also labeled the video as a hoax, describing it as brainwashing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing) and a red herring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring) to divert the public's attention from real issues.[52] Experts like specialist disinformation reporter [Marianna Spring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianna_Spring) and disinformation researcher Erin Gallagher said the video's professionally crafted atmosphere, cinematography, and ominously dramatic score (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_score) made the stated claims sound true; according to Spring; "That makes them as dangerous—if not more so—than advice with a mix of truth and misleading medical myths".[53][54][55]

Science journalist Tara Haelle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_Haelle) described the video as pseudoscientific propaganda and said it succeeded at promoting misinformation because it plays on the viewers' confusion and desperation for answers. The opening sequence best targets people unfamiliar with Mikovits, painting her as the scientific industry's underdog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underdog), giving a good first impression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion) on her. and editing, The video also uses various modes of persuasion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion) such as the Gish gallop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop) (giving excessive arguments to sound convincing), as well as scientific-looking images and "harrowing" stock footage of dying people during the AIDS scene.\55] Writing for the [Deseret News (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_News), Amy Iverson expressed sympathy for those who stumbled upon the video in search for "someone to blame" for the effects of the pandemic, however noted "we cannot turn to outrageous, unchecked claims from a few loud voices to ease our concerns. And we definitely should not spread their unsubstantiated claims."[39]

Meanwhile, the British musician Seal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal%28musician%29) expressed love for the video and called the responses to it unjustified. Other public figures including the mixed martial arts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts) fighter Nick Catone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Catone), spread the video's misinformation and Melissa Ackison, a Republican (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party%28United_States%29) politician, supported the video.\56] The video's legacy continues long after its release; in February 2021, The Washington Post (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post) reported an anti-mask Facebook page called "Shop Mask Free Los Angeles" used Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 to support its claims. By this time, the Post reported some of the links had suffered from [link rot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot).[57]

The Los Angeles Times contacted yoga teacher and author Shiva Rea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Rea), who was a member of the board of directors of the Elevate Foundation; Rea stated she was not associated with the foundation or the film, and found Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 to be "very disturbing".[13]

Mikki Willis's response

Willis said that although he expected the provocative marketing to garner interest, the actual scope of popularity was unexpected.[18] Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Willis said he is not anti-vaccine and that he was merely trying to "start a conversation about science". He described himself as open-minded; "I have a profound love and respect of doctors despite how many doctors are mad at me now". Willis said he is also skeptical of Mikovits's claims in the video; "We’re working very hard right now to validate the majority of the claims that were made" and expressed a willingness to be involved in civil discussions with doctors "on all sides".[13]

ProPublica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica) health care reporter and investigative journalist Marshall Allen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Allen_%28journalist%29) contacted Willis, who said Plandemic "is not a piece that’s intended to be perfectly balanced". When asked whether Plandemic might be fairly called propaganda, he said the definition fits, although he did not feel it contains anything misleading. According to Allan, "based on [the definition of propaganda], [Willis] feels 100% of news reporting is propaganda".[21]

The Center for Inquiry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Inquiry)'s (CFI) Benjamin Radford (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Radford) and researcher Paul Offit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Offit) asked Willis eight questions about the accuracy of the claims made in the video, either asking for evidence and clarification or asking questions such as "considering that bacteria don’t kill viruses, how would 'healing microbes' reduce or treat coronavirus infection?" Willis agreed to answer all of the questions but he never did. Radford said on the CFI's website:[58]

If the claims made by Mikovits and Willis in Plandemic are based in truth and facts, you’d think they would be eager to offer evidence supporting their claims. What better way to turn the tables on scientists, skeptics, and journalists than to offer a referenced, fact-based, point-by-point rebuttal to critics who offer them a platform? ... Where are their responses? Why are they suddenly so quiet? Why are they afraid to answer questions? What do they have to hide?

Plandemic: Indoctornation

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plandemic-Indoc.png)Plandemic: Indoctornation's logo

Summary and fact check

The second installment, an 84-minute film titled Plandemic: Indoctornation\c] was released on August 18, 2020.[59] Willis said the film is a "response video to all the debunkers", and that he worked with a coalition of 7,000 doctors and attorneys to make the film to "reform our medical systems such that they’re not under the stranglehold of Big Pharma".[40] PolitiFact categorized it as a [pseudo-documentary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-documentary).[60]

The film says there is a worldwide conspiracy seeking to control humanity through fear and to make money for the putative conspirators; the COVID-19 pandemic is described as a key moment in a decades-long plan. The film says people and institutions including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_and_Prevention) (CDC), Google (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google) and the fact-checking agencies it employs, climate scientists, John Oliver (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Oliver), and Bill Gates coordinate with each other to enact the conspiracy.[61]

Plandemic: Indoctornation says COVID-19 was engineered in a laboratory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_conspiracy_theory), that Event 201 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_201)—a 2019 disaster response (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_response) exercise—was a plan to release a real virus into the population, and that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation) was ejected from India.\59] The film also says a defensive patent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_patent_aggregation) applied by the CDC during the [2003 SARS outbreak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_SARS_outbreak) was meant to "[control] the proprietary rights to the disease, to the virus, and to its detection and all of the measurement of it".[60] These were later unproven; Event 201 was not a virus conspiracy plot, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation does not have technology allowing it to covertly implant an invisible proof of vaccination.[59] The CDC's defensive patent covers the genetic material detection methods for human coronaviruses so "public research and communication were not jeopardized by commercial parties seeking exclusive private control".[60]

Production and release

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LondonReal.png)Logo of distributor London Real

Immediately after the release of Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19, Willis said he was contacted by an independent producer who said he had worked on projects with HBO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBO), Netflix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix), and Amazon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Prime_Video). The producer asked Willis if he had an interest in collaborating on making a feature-length version, though the Los Angeles Times found the companies had expressed no interest in the film.[13] Soon after Plandemic's release, another set of teams announced the clips from Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 would be part of a documentary feature film.[19]

Plandemic: Indoctornation was released by an online distributor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_distributor) called London Real (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Real) on the website Digital Freedom Platform, which has promoted several discredited theories about the COVID-19 pandemic,[59] and was founded and managed by podcaster Brian Rose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Rose_%28podcaster%29).[60] Because the film's release was promoted in advance, social media platforms were able to prepare for its release rather than scrambling to react to misinformation already circulating on their networks.[59] As part of their policy to counter disinformation about the pandemic, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms took steps to limit the spread of the film as soon as it was posted, affixing warnings to links shared by users. YouTube removed multiple copies of the film and sixteen clips presenting specific sections from its servers.[61] Although no steps to block the content were taken, Facebook warned users when clicking the film's URL, which was blacklisted by TikTok and Instagram.[62]

According to London Real, Plandemic: Indoctornation was watched 1.2 million times by the end of its first day of release but the Digital Forensic Research Lab called the film "a total flop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-office_bomb)" that achieved much less social media engagement than the original video.\61] Because social media companies were forewarned by the viral nature of the first video, the distribution of Plandemic: Indoctornation was limited.\59] [The Daily Dot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Dot) said the only platform where it succeeded in getting exposure was Facebook, where it had 4,000 views of posts linking to the film on [BitChute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute), where it had 40,000 views.[62]

Reception

Critics compared Plandemic: Indoctornation unfavorably with the first video.\62] Jane Lytvynenko at [BuzzFeed News (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News) gave it zero stars, saying while the first video presents a protagonist (Mikovits) and a fairly clear narrative, the film does neither: it is "bloated, confused, and filled with nonsense", switching between topics without clearly establishing how all the information presented relate to each other. Its subjects are said to be cliché with respect to the first video. Lytvynenko said Willis's initial claim 'the first video is a trailer for a feature film is incorrect; while Plandemic: Indoctornation discusses the same themes and includes Mikovits, most of the material in the first video is not used in the feature-length film.[61]

Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening

Willis teamed up with Del Bigtree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del_Bigtree), the founder of the anti-vaccination group Informed Consent Action Network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_Consent_Action_Network), to release another film, Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening on Bigtree's website The Highwire.\14] In February 2023, a rough cut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_cut) was screened at the "Rabbit Room" section of the 21st Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles, a New Age and far-right conspiracy event\63] where he won a humanitarian award in 2008.[17] The trailer was released on May 23, 2023, and the film itself on June 3. Its promotional tagline, placed at a "slick" official website, is "100% Censored, 0% Debunked." The fact-checking organization [Logically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logically%28company%29) reported that the trailer had earned two million views on Twitter as of May 31.[14] The 101-minute film is said to be dedicated to conspiracy theorist [G. Edward Griffin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.Edward_Griffin), with archival clips of him used sporadically.[64]

The film begins with Willis claiming that his AIDS-infected brother died of consuming the treatment drug zidovudine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zidovudine). PolitiFact and Agence France-Presse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_France-Presse) found no evidence that it caused the deaths of AIDS patients. The clip circulated in Instagram, but was then flagged by parent company Meta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms).\65]\66] Willis then says that COVID-19 lockdowns are "synchronized tyranny" aimed at controlling the masses. The trailer includes out-of-context clips of world leaders and politicians discussing the Great Reset (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset) at the World Economic Forum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum) (WEF), and features personalities who have promoted misinformation about the pandemic and vaccines, including Ghent University (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghent_University) professor Mattias Desmet and Vladimir Zelenko (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zelenko).\d]\14] The film also misleadingly depicts WEF founder Klaus Schwab (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Schwab) as creating a "purported plot for a unified world government" as well as being a Nazi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism) due to him being born in Nazi Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany). It also falsely covers the George Floyd protests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests) (additionally calling [Black Lives Matter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter) a pro-communist organization), [antifa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_%28United_States%29) protests, and a [Washington state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_state) bill regarding [gender-affirming surgery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-affirming_surgery).[64]

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JAN 6 QANON VAXX CROSS-FERTILIZE ANTI-GUBMINT

ROLLING STONE

On Christmas Eve, Steven Brandenburg, a Milwaukee-area pharmacist, attempted to destroy more than 500 doses of coronavirus (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/coronavirus/) vaccine, because, he admitted, he feared the Moderna drug would “alter the recipient’s DNA.” Described in law-enforcement documents as a “conspiracy theorist,” Brandenburg, 46, had reportedly warned his wife that “the world is crashing down around us” and that “the government is planning cyberattacks and plans to shut down the power grid,” according to divorce-court documents.

IFrame Content (https://audm.herokuapp.com/player-embed/?pub=rolling-stone&articleID=how-anti-vaxxers-pilled)

:{:{If you’re surprised that a scientifically educated medical professional, trusted with dispensing lifesaving medicine, could suffer a rebellion against reason and give himself over to discredited conspiracy theories (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/conspiracy-theories/), you haven’t been paying attention. In the America of the 2020s, respectable men and women surrender to this kind of unreal thinking every day. (Brandenburg pleaded guilty to federal tampering charges in January; his lawyer would not discuss Brandenburg’s conspiratorial beliefs.) }:

The phenomenon is known as “red-pilling” — a reference to a scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves’ character chooses to take a red pill and discover the hidden truths of the world — and it affects those whose once-rational skepticism swallows them whole, pulling them into a networked community of like-minded conspiracy theorists. While the public record does not indicate Brandenburg traveled this far, many find a home in the big-tent conspiracy of QAnon (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/qanon/), whose members increasingly see vaccination as part of a diabolical plot by the “deep state” to enslave humanity.}:

:{:{Why has the nation become gripped with conspiracy theories — including so many revolving around the shots that could end this devastating pandemic? “It’s precisely because we’ve had 450,000 deaths, and so much uncertainty and so much fear, that there’s fertile ground for this stuff to take hold,” says Ashish Jha, a physician and dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. The pandemic is also occurring in the context of a 20-year decline of American trust in institutions, says Ethan Zuckerman, who formerly directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT.}:

He describes the QAnon cult as a reservoir at the bottom of that slippery slope. “Q is what happens when you take that mistrust in a really damaging direction,” he says. “It’s usually people who lost trust in one institution and then found a coherent worldview that says, ‘Don’t just mistrust this one institution — mistrust all the institutions. All of them are in it together.’ ” This full rejection of confidence in doctors and drug companies, in media and philanthropy, in politicians and government agencies, Zuckerman says, is “how the anti-vax movement underwent almost a merger with QAnon.”}:

For most Americans still grounded in reality, the arrival of safe, effective inoculations against Covid-19 has sparked hope. The nine-month dash to design, test, and begin to administer inoculations against the devastating pandemic was an unprecedented medical triumph. The rollout of these drugs has already delivered protection for millions of the elderly and medically vulnerable. For younger, healthier people awaiting their shots, vaccination promises a -ticket out of social isolation and back to a life of packed concerts, subway trains, restaurants, and nightclubs.

At present, America’s great challenge is ramping up supply to meet overwhelming demand. But experts caution the country will, sooner than later, confront a formidable wall of vaccine resistance that could block our return to “life as normal.” A Pew poll in December found that only 60 percent of Americans intend to vaccinate and nearly 20 percent — or roughly 50 million adults — are dead set against it.

If that many Americans abstain from vaccination, the coronavirus will continue to circulate, and to mutate, posing a grave ongoing threat to public health.

Vaccine hesitance can be rooted in reasonable concerns, says Jha. Were the new vaccines (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/vaccines/) rushed to market too quickly? Did the Trump administration’s overt politicization corrupt the approval process? Are side effects severe? Will our notoriously racist health system prioritize and safeguard communities of color that have been hardest hit by the pandemic? “We win no battles by minimizing” these worries, Jha says, “or suggesting that those people are being unreasonable or anti-science or anti-vaxxers. They’re raising legitimate concerns that should be addressed.”

But for millions of others, dread about vaccines defies logic or reason, and bleeds instead into belief systems of what Zuckerman has dubbed “the unreal” — that we’re pawns in a diabolical global game run by ruthless elites and that vaccines are somehow not medicine but poison. “Concerns about -safety have been absorbed into this other way of viewing the world,” says Jack Bratich, a Rutgers professor and author of Conspiracy Panics. “It’s about a plan to inject people with controlling substances. That’s where QAnon overlaps with the anti-vax movement.”

As demonstrated by the January 6th storming of the Capitol (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/united-states-of-qanon-capitol-insurrection-riot-conspiracy-theory-1110622/), perpetrated by many Americans immersed in the QAnon cult, this red-pilling can have deadly, destabilizing consequences, and not just for conspiracy-theory believers. “This may be the most important public-health issue of our time — misinformation, disinformation,” Jha insists. And unlike the coronavirus, the contagion of conspiracy theory is one against which we’re largely defenseless. “We have been blindsided,” he says. “We as public-health people have to figure out how to counter it in a way that’s effective. And we don’t have the tools.”

Exploring conspiracy theories and mass delusion can inadvertently popularize misinformation. So inoculate yourself with facts: The novel vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna are revolutionary and take advantage of our own cellular machinery to safeguard recipients against future coronavirus infection.

If you’ve seen computer renderings of the coronavirus, you know its surface is covered by spike proteins that create the “crown” that gives coronaviruses their name. Humans get infected with Covid-19 when these spike proteins pierce healthy cells, allowing the virus to invade, infect, and begin replicating.

Traditional vaccines have relied on exposing people to an inactivated (killed) or attenuated (weakened) virus. As the immune system reacts to a non-threatening inoculation, it gains the ability to fight off infection from the real pathogen. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines don’t include any virus at all. Instead, they use genetic code — messenger RNA or mRNA — to activate a few of our own cells to become spike-protein factories. The vaccine consists of tiny strands of mRNA encased in fat — a lipid particle — that allows them to slip inside a cell without being attacked. Once inside, the mRNA functions roughly like computer code, instructing cells to begin assembling coronavirus spike proteins out of amino-acid building blocks already in our bodies.

The presence of these strange proteins triggers our immune systems to create antibodies to neutralize them. Our immune system also summons T-cells to attack and shut down cells that were coded to produce spike proteins. Together, these immune responses prepare the body to fight off a real potential coronavirus infection. “It’s very elegant,” says Jha of the vaccine design. “It’s also de-risked it a lot. There’s no physical way to get Covid from this thing.” As for the conspiracy theory that an mRNA vaccine alters your own genes? “It literally doesn’t,” he says. “It doesn’t become part of your DNA.”

An anti-vaxxer at a MAGA rally in Washington, D.C. A Pew poll in December found roughly 50 million Americans are planning to abstain from vaccination, threatening herd immunity.Erin Scott/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Taming the pandemic will require both individual immunity — as produced by the vaccines — and community-level “herd immunity” created when a critical mass of individuals are resistant to infection. Herd immunity is like a firewall in public health; a localized flare-up of infection among a few individuals will be unable to spread broadly, instead burning itself out.

So far, the drugs appear to be living up to their billed efficacy of 95 percent protection from infection. And apart from some rare (and treatable) allergic reactions, the side effects seem well tolerated. But vaccine avoidance is already emerging as a troubling trend, particularly among health care and nursing-home workers on the front lines of the pandemic. Through mid-January, the CDC reported that only 32 percent of eligible nursing-home workers nationwide had chosen to get vaccinated.

Distrust (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/covid-vaccine-black-americans-1107657/) of the vaccine is also high among communities of color. The reasons for this, while complex, are not difficult to understand. American public-health history is marred by institutional racism (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/racism-public-health-crisis-1014162/), including the horrific 40-year “Tuskegee Experiment,” in which hundreds of black men with syphilis were promised treatment that was, in fact, deceptively withheld, leading to 128 deaths. Our current health care system produces wildly disparate outcomes for people of color, including a maternal death rate (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/shaasia-washington-death-woodhull-hospital-black-maternal-mortality-rate-1026069/) that’s 2.5 times higher for black women than for white women. In the pandemic, communities of color have been hardest hit (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/coronavirus-black-death-racism-donald-trump-mike-pence-981707/). These Americans disproportionately work in frontline positions, live in more crowded housing, have poorer access to doctors, and higher incidence of comorbidities. Meanwhile, crucial technologies like pulse oximeters, which use light to measure blood oxygenation and guide treatment, have been found to routinely malfunction on dark skin.

The hard truth is that returning to the point where Americans can go back to work or enjoy a night out at a crowded bar and be confident no one is going to get sick will require persuading millions to overcome their fear of vaccination and take a jab for the team. The 60 percent of Americans currently intending to get vaccinated is simply not good enough to establish herd immunity. “We’ve got to address the issues that help us get closer to 80 percent vaccination,” Jha says. “I’d love to get up to like 90, 95 percent.”

The larger the group of unvaccinated individuals, the more chance the virus can mutate to pose a danger, even to the already vaccinated. “Large outbreaks anywhere can give rise to variants that can escape vaccines everywhere,” Jha writes. “It’s the nightmare scenario of a never-ending pandemic.”

Long before the coronavirus hit, America had been gripped by a fierce anti-vaccine (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/anti-vaccine/) movement, which had itself become increasingly unmoored from scientific critique and drifted into conspiratorial waters.

Vaccines have always inspired popular fear. Decades ago, it was justified: The rollout of the polio inoculation in the 1950s tragically infected 40,000 children, paralyzing hundreds, and killing 10, because of botched manufacturing that failed to disable the live virus. Even with modern safety advances, vaccination campaigns expose a particularly American tension between personal choice and public safety. “In the U.S., there’s this suspicion or refusal around bodily sovereignty,” Bratich says. “People don’t like stuff stuck in them.”

Contemporary anti-vax culture took root in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when a startling rise in autism was hypothesized to be connected to childhood vaccinations. Robust science has since debunked any relationship between vaccination and autism. But at the time, the specter of vaccine injury sparked real concern among reasonable people.

In 1998, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published an article purporting to link the measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine to “developmental regression in a group of previously normal children.” In the U.S. a year later, a federal review of mercury in drugs highlighted that a mercury-based preservative in childhood vaccines could expose infants, over the first six months of life, to a potentially harmful quantity of the neurotoxic metal. Out of an abundance of caution, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that the preservative, thimerosal, be phased out of vaccines. In 2005, Rolling Stone and Salon co-published a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. piece, “Deadly Immunity,” that helped push the provocative hypothesis that thimerosal triggered autism into wider circulation. The piece drew swift criticism and required significant corrections, including to a key statistic about childhood mercury exposure.

By the turn of the decade, both hypotheses had collapsed under the weight of scientific evidence. In 2009, a paper inClinical Infectious Diseases (https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/48/4/456/284219)cited “20 epidemiologic studies” to conclude that “neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism.” The Lancetretracted its MMR paper in 2010, with the journal’s editor saying he felt he’d been deceived, while calling the paper “utterly false.” In 2011, Salon retracted the Kennedy piece, writing, “The best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.” The story no longer appears on Rolling Stone’s website.

Fear of vaccination, however, didn’t disappear because scientists said it should. Instead, anti-vax beliefs spread widely, popularized by celebrities (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/celebrities-anti-vaxxers-jessica-biel-847779/) like actress Jenny McCarthy and then-Apprentice star Donald Trump, who infamously tweeted in 2014: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes — AUTISM. Many such cases!” In a 2016 survey, 77 percent of parents who chose not to vaccinate their children cited a feared link to autism, and 71 percent cited fear of vaccine additives.

That same year, faced with a public-health threat from schools where up to 40 percent of kids were unvaccinated, California eliminated a “personal exemption” to vaccination, effectively requiring shots for all kids to attend public school. Measles had been eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but declining vaccination rates contributed to outbreaks infecting more than 1,200 across dozens of states in 2019. That year, the World Health Organization listed vaccine hesitance as one of its top “10 threats to public health.”

Today’s anti-vax movement has grown increasingly cozy with theories about dark agendas, ruthless profit motives, and powerful enemies, reserving peculiar animus for billionaire Bill Gates, whose foundation promotes vaccination globally. For his part, Kennedy continues to promote unfounded links between vaccines and autism, even though thimerosal has been phased out of childhood vaccines: “They replaced it with aluminum,” he says, “which is almost as bad.” (Aluminum salts have been safely used in vaccines for more than seven decades, according to the CDC.) “People like me get vilified and ridiculed,” he says, “but I will debate anybody about this.”

:{:{Kennedy}: now runs the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, where last April he published an article titled “Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination.” The piece purports to be grounded in science, but Kennedy gets the facts twisted. He claims, for example, that a 2010 Gates Foundation-funded trial (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1102287) of a malaria vaccine was responsible for “killing 151 African infants and causing serious adverse effects, including paralysis, seizure, and febrile convulsions, to 1,048 of the 5,949 children.” In reality, the trial was not implicated in the death of any child, and only 13 malaria-vaccine recipients had significant side effects.

The trial was conducted in a region of Africa with high child morbidity and mortality, and the terrifying numbers Kennedy touts come from tallying up every health crisis experienced by the kids in the trial — both malaria-vaccine recipients and those in control groups — and brazenly attributing every dark outcome to the jabs. This includes deaths from head injury, HIV, malnutrition, and drowning. (Confronted with these facts, Kennedy admits error: “One can never definitively say that a particular death was or was not caused by a vaccine,” he says. But he adds without evidence that every death was “plausibly attributed to the vaccines,” while also baselessly alleging that the use of different vaccines, rather than placebos, in the control groups was “an act of fraud that appears designed . . . to mask death rates in the study cohort.”)}:

The rest of Kennedy’s piece paints Gates as a reckless and unaccountable billionaire pulling the strings of global institutions. He points to a TED Talk that Gates delivered boasting that expanded vaccine use “could reduce population.” This is meant to sound nefarious, but Gates has long spoken of reducing childhood mortality as a key to stabilizing populations in the developing world. As the conspiracy-debunking site Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-gates-vaccinations-depopulation/) explains: “Gates is not interested in using vaccines to reduce the population by using them as an agent of death or a tool to sterilize unsuspecting masses. Rather, Gates is interested in keeping more children alive in order to reduce the need for parents to have more children, thus limiting the overall population growth rate.”

If Kennedy dabbles in the Bill Gates conspiracy waters — writing that the coronavirus has given Gates “an opportunity to force his dictatorial vaccine programs” on all Americans — millions of others are performing cannonballs. A gee-whiz proposal, supported by the Gates Foundation, to use tiny subdermal markers for patients in the developing world to track their vaccination history, without needing a clinic to keep the paperwork, has morphed into a widely embraced conspiracy theory that Gates wants to microchip the citizens of the world. A YouGov poll last May found that 28 percent of Americans believed Gates wants “to use a mass vaccination campaign against Covid-19 to implant microchips in people that would be used to track people with a digital ID.” The belief rose to 44 percent of Republicans and to 50 percent of dedicated viewers of Fox News.

Conspiracy theories have been part of the lifeblood of American politics for centuries. In the 1820s, so many Americans were convinced that a shadowy and perhaps satanic cabal threatened the republic that they formed the Anti-Masonic Party and elected dozens of members to Congress. In the Red Scare of the 1950s, the far-right John Birch Society accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”

Trump rose to political dominance promoting the birther conspiracy theory that Barack Obama had been ineligible to hold office. And he won and sustained the presidency by encouraging his white, working-class supporters to blame their social woes on the merciless “globalists” of the “deep state.” Conspiratorial thinking, academic research shows, often takes root in groups, like many in Trump’s base, that are experiencing economic or social dislocation. “People often turn to conspiracy theories when bad things are happening around them,” says Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in England. “They are looking for ways to cope, people to blame,” she says. “If people believe that powerful, secret forces are responsible, then it isn’t their fault that things are bad for them,” and they can make themselves feel better without having to “tease apart the complex reasons for their disadvantage.”

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 created a “perfect storm” for new conspiracy theories (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/coronavirus-china-bat-patent-conspiracy-theory-942416/) to take root, says Bratich, the Rutgers professor. The pandemic overwhelmed government institutions, creating enormous fear and economic uncertainty. Lockdown life also created super-spreader conditions for paranoia, with Americans searching for answers in online forums where unreal ideas circulated unchecked. New converts were then able to spread these ideas, in real life, to their pods of close family and friends under lockdown.

Eric Oliver is a political-science professor at the University of Chicago who has studied conspiracy theories since the 1990s. He argues that conspiracy belief helps conquer anxiety by giving people a feeling of “I understand what’s happening in the world. I have a narrative that explains things.” They also root free-floating fear in something that feels solid: “ ‘The reason I’m feeling anxious is there’s a secret cabal doing something terrible. And now I’ve identified it.’ ” A reinforcing factor is “a certain narcissism,” he says. “The conspiracy theory gives them a sense of special knowledge: ‘I know something that’s going on that nobody else does.’ It feels empowering to them.”

A protester holds an anti-vaccination sign as supporters of President Donald Trump rally to reopen California as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen, on May 16, 2020 in Woodland Hills, California.David McNew/Getty Images

A paradox of conspiracy theories is that they’re not full flights of fancy. They involve imagined and invented connections between real people, phenomena, and events. There’s a structure to the irrational belief. “Conspiracy theories are not the product of a disordered mind; they’re the product of an overly ordered mind,” insists Zuckerman. “Conspiracy theories happen when you have an enormous need for order in a disordered universe.” Zuckerman quit his post at MIT in protest of the university’s links to disgraced sex-criminal financier Jeffrey Epstein and now teaches at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “I do not subscribe to the theory that Epstein was killed in prison,” he says, but points to the myriad conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein as a case in point: “Having a genuine villain out there is really important for conspiracies to root themselves sufficiently in reality so that we continue to pay attention to them.”

This search for order has taken millions of Americans to a dark place — the nihilistic worldview of QAnon. The QAnon belief system is a crossover between a conspiracy theory and a religious cult, and its ideology takes strands of many past conspiracies and weaves them into a big tent where priors are welcome and almost any theory can find safe harbor.

The core of Q is familiar. It posits that the surface world of respectable politicians, well-intentioned government institutions, and a media seeking to hold them accountable, is an illusion. The real power in the world is wielded by shadowy power brokers in the government, Hollywood, and the media called “the cabal” or the “deep state.” QAnon takes this conspiratorial boilerplate to wild extremes. The “deep state” is alleged to be insatiable in its thirst for power, and willing to do anything — from launching wars to spreading pestilence — to move closer to global domination. The Q ideology has no room for subtlety. The conspirators are believed to be the embodiment of evil, actual “luciferians” and pedophiles.

The theory may sound lunatic, but QAnon is no longer relegated to the fringe: A Civiqs tracking poll finds that even after the attack on the Capitol, 10 percent of Republicans describe themselves as “supporters” of QAnon. Tenets of the Q belief system are even more widely held: An NPR poll released at the end of 2020 found 17 percent of Americans rated as “true” the statement that: “A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.”

In the Q mythology, the heroes fighting to expose the deep state include an alleged intelligence officer, known as Q, for the “Q-level” clearance he or she is alleged to hold. The conspiracy has elements of a massive role-playing game. For years, the anonymous “Q” dropped cryptic hints or “crumbs” on message boards like 8chan and 8kun, which QAnon adherents then sought to “bake” into coherent narratives about coming events. The community also revered Donald Trump as a lonely fighter, seeking to undermine, arrest, and vanquish the deep state.

How did the anti-vax movement — which thrives in far-left communities like Portland, L.A., and Marin County, California, — get mixed up with a quasi-religious cult that held up Donald Trump as its savior? “It was very surprising to see the anti-vax community cross the streams” with QAnon, says Zuckerman. “Anti-vaxxers are people who often identify as leaning politically left. They often come to this stance because they’re anti–corporate, and they’re really concerned about Big Pharma making money.”

American political ideology is most often conceptualized as a straight line running from left to right. But an alternate visualization presents the spectrum instead as a horseshoe, where the left and right extremes bend back toward one another. Conspiracy theories can bridge these far ends like a powerful electric spark.

Oliver’s research has shown that openness to conspiracy theory is correlated to intuitive thinking over evidence-based thinking. Conspiratorial beliefs take hold in people who make gut-level decisions and place disproportionate weight on symbolic costs. He offers a questionnaire that helps tease out the personality trait.

Would you rather: Stab a photograph of your family five times with a sharp knife? Or stick your hand in a bowl of live cockroaches?

Would you rather: Sleep in laundered pajamas once worn by Charles Manson? Or pick a nickel off the ground and put it in your mouth?

Would you rather: Grind your heels into an unmarked grave? Or stand in line for three hours at the DMV?

A person avoiding actions with high symbolic costs (stabbing a family photo, sleeping in Manson’s PJs), he says, “is a very strong predictor of believing in conspiracy theories — regardless of where they are on the ideological spectrum.”

Oliver points out that conservative religious Americans — “evangelical or orthodox communities” — tend to have very high intuitionism scores, and receptivity to conspiracy theory. But so do New Age communities associated with the American left. “People who believe in conspiracy theories also believe that GMOs are bad,” he says. “They tend to like organic food or natural health remedies.”

The leap from anti-vax theories to QAnon is less mysterious, Zuckerman says, when you “think about how lonely it is to be an anti-vaxxer. You have the small group of friends who are willing to listen to you talk about mercury in vaccines,” he says. “But suddenly you have a whole group of people” in QAnon adherents “who say, ‘Oh, yeah, not just this, but did you know about this?’ You may be willing to go further, and say, ‘Sure I’ll buy this next part of the conspiracy.’ ” Finding such affirmation and community in the unreal, he says, makes it easy to surrender your hold on fact-based beliefs. “Red-pilling,” he says, “is when you move from your origin conspiracy theory to this full-conspiracy worldview.”

The anti-vax and Q movements began to merge with the release of a viral video last May. “We saw it in earnest around Plandemic,” says Zuckerman. Plandemic is the project of Mikki Wills, a 53-year-old self-described “investigative filmmaker” with piercing blue eyes and a salt-and-pepper goatee, who works from the coastal California enclave of Ojai, halfway between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.

Willis is politically liberal and his bio touts him as “a virtuoso of positive energy.” He tells Rolling Stone that he was inspired to shoot Plandemic because of his concern over the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed. “The idea that [the] administration was going to rush an experimental vaccine to market, then have it distributed to the masses by way of the U.S. military,” Willis says, “felt insane and reckless at best. I felt compelled to shine a little light on it.”

The slickly produced 26-minute video centers on discredited former federal scientist Judy Mikovits, whom Willis platforms as an Erin Brokovich-style whistleblower. Mikovits claims without evidence that her career was derailed by a federal conspiracy directed by Anthony Fauci. And she makes myriad wild, false, and unsubstantiated claims, including that the coronavirus was released from a lab and that mask wearing causes illness. The film baselessly insinuates that Fauci, Gates, and others have enormous financial interests in the pandemic. In one key exchange, Willis poses to Mikovits: “If we activate mandatory vaccines globally, I imagine these people stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars that own the vaccines.”

The film was roundly debunked, including by Science (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/fact-checking-judy-mikovits-controversial-virologist-attacking-anthony-fauci-viral), which said in part: “Science fact-checked the video. None of these claims are true.” Major social media companies banned the video, but not before it was viewed millions of times. Willis insists he’s “absolutely not” a conspiracy theorist and knows “very little” about QAnon. But his video became a cause célèbre among the Q set. “In many ways, Plandemic is much more of an anti-vax video than it is a QAnon video,” Zuckerman says. But it fits with the nihilistic Q worldview that elites are not simply misguided or incompetent, but so evil as to unleash a global pandemic and then seek to profit from a vaccine. “The Q community loves it. Right?”

The film hit the bull’s-eye of what Bratich describes as the overlapping “Venn diagram of the antivax movement and QAnon.” At the margins, he says, anti-vaxxers have long feared there exists a dark agenda behind inoculations, and these people have found in QAnon a “ready-made, tight narrative — it’s about the great reset, it’s about a new world order, it’s about Bill Gates — that explains the vaccinations.”

The full convergence of the anti-vax movement and QAnon belief can be seen in the trajectory of Larry D. Cook — a onetime healthy-lifestyle guru who became a high-profile anti-vaccine activist before he red-pilled, choosing to anchor his beliefs in the open harbor of QAnon.

Cook is 56 but looks perhaps a decade younger. He has a lanky runner’s build and an open, calm, somewhat flat affect when he speaks. He has made his home in Los Angeles for the past 15 years, and a profile picture on his personal website shows him beaming at a farmers market, holding aloft a bunch of kale in each hand.

In 2005, Cook wrote The Beginner’s Guide to Natural Living, touting the optimal conditions to express “the divine intelligence flowing through us.” He describes having become a vegan in 1990 and preaches the virtues of organic food, yoga, and alternative healing. There are seeds of distrust in Cook’s writing: He encourages readers to “question toxic medicine” that “makes more money by keeping us slightly sick.” But little in Cook’s rhetoric would have been out of place in a left-coast magazine like Mother Jones from the same era. He urges caution of “mainstream media . . . owned and controlled by its advertisers,” and of a government that can be “hoodwinked into allowing harmful products onto the market.”

Cook’s career path is nontraditional. He jumped from “being a sound guy in Hollywood” to a gig as executive director of the California Naturopathic Doctors Association. Cook did not respond to interview requests but told a radio interviewer that his fear of vaccines took root when he was researching a book about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and “came across some information that mercury in vaccines cause autism.” As a side gig around 2010, he started creating YouTube videos interviewing doctors who pushed the thimerosal hypothesis and parents whose children were allegedly harmed by vaccines.

The hobby would become a calling, and a conviction, for Cook in 2015, when California proposed ending the personal-belief exemption from public-school vaccination requirements. Cook started a site called Stop Mandatory Vaccination to oppose this and future legislation and describes how this anti-vax activism got him “fired” from his executive-director post and led to his becoming a full-time activist. “I found my voice,” he said. The deeper he dove into the anti-vax world, the more distrustful Cook became, decrying what he calls the “cover up” of children who die after being vaccinated as “a medical mafia conspiracy.” (No serious science suggests vaccination is secretly killing kids.) In 2016, Cook voted for Trump, he explains in a recent court document, because of Trump’s own claims that vaccines were linked to autism.

To popularize his anti-vax beliefs, Cook came up with a “system,” which involved raising money on GoFundMe to pay for alarming Facebook ads that he’d target at young mothers. “I was doing things in a certain way,” Cook explained. “Grabbing attention of parents and driving them into my Facebook group, where they could get their questions answered.” The idea was to spur the young moms to “go anti-vaccine. . . . Once they learn the truth,” he said, “they become activists.” A 2019 study by the journal Vaccine revealed that Cook was second only to Kennedy in promoting anti-vax sentiment on Facebook. “Many advertisements featured stories of infants allegedly harmed by vaccines,” the study reports, “using tag lines like, ‘Healthy 14 week old infant gets 8 vaccines and dies within 24 hours.’ ”

The social media giant didn’t have qualms about taking tens of thousands of dollars from Cook to promote the outrageous claim that vaccines kill babies until it was called out in a letter by Rep. Adam Schiff, who demanded information from Mark Zuckerberg in February 2019 about the company’s practice of monetizing and promoting misinformation about vaccines. Facebook soon tweaked its algorithms to stop recommending anti-vax content, which was instead downgraded on the platform. The move decimated Cook’s online reach from 2 million views a month to about 100,000. Facebook also turned off his ability to advertise on the site. YouTube likewise demonetized his channel.

This throttling by social media giants only appears to have pushed Cook further away from the mainstream. As he described his own conversion, in February 2020, Cook read a QAnon book titled Calm Before the Storm that opened his mind to the Q worldview. And he “red-pilled,” as he described in an hour-long video posted last July, in which he appears flanked by a giant Q in one corner and an American flag underscored with the hashtag #WWG1WGA — short for the Q battle cry of “Where We Go One We Go All!” — in the other.

Cook described how discovering QAnon suddenly gave him a context for his distrust of mainstream medicine and his sense of being persecuted and silenced by social media. “When you wrap your head around the idea that it’s the deep state that is facilitating the vaccine mandates,” he said, “all of a sudden it makes complete sense.”

Cook cast mandatory vaccinations as just one expression of the deep state’s “luciferian” agenda of “controlling everyone on the planet.” The mandates are “all part of the deep-state plan,” he claimed, because “when you inject poison into someone, you can incapacitate them very quickly, especially if you’re doing it at birth . . . as soon as a soul comes in — incarnates.” He called vaccination of children a “deliberate assault designed to suppress their consciousness, designed to shut off their connection to God.” But there’s hope, he insisted: “If you take the deep state down completely, we take down the vaccine mandates.”

Through the same jaundiced lens, Cook sees the coronavirus pandemic as part of the deep state’s sinister plot: “It’s a plandemic,” he said, borrowing Willis’ coinage. “It was planned, it’s a false flag. . . . Q would say these people are sick. They want complete control of our planet . . . And if that means killing . . . millions of people, they could care less.”

For Cook, as for most QAnon adherents, the fight is overtly political. “Democrats are lockstep with the deep state,” he insisted. “Our role is to educate the rest of humanity . . . who’s on the side of justice and truth and who’s on the side of God.” The good guys, for Cook, are Trump and the “Q Team.” And he celebrates the promise of redemption: “You shut down the deep state and we can have heaven on Earth,” he said, adding: “We are in the throes of the final battles.”

The attack on the Capitol on January 6th was a wake-up call for America that online conspiracy theories and QAnon’s nihilism are a serious threat not just to the mental health of individual believers but also to innocent life, not to mention the functioning of our democratic government.

The mass delusion of conspiracy-theory belief also constitutes a public-health crisis. As the WHO put it last fall, an “infodemic” is “endangering countries’ ability to stop the pandemic,” adding that “misinformation costs lives,” and that a lack of trust in science will cause immunization campaigns to “not meet their targets, and the virus will continue to thrive.”

Public-health experts say the addictive appeal of conspiracy theories has left them exasperated, but with few solutions. “I really had this mental model,” Jha says, that “you get the evidence, you speak it in plain, simple terms, and share with people what is true — and that’s it. Like, you win the game,” he says. “I have learned very much the hard way, from April on, that that is just naive.”

In January, a mob (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-31/protest-dodger-stadium-vaccination-site-angers-city-leaders-security-questions) of anti-vax protesters briefly shut down a mass inoculation site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, holding up signs like “COVID=SCAM,” “Don’t be a lab rat,” and “Tell Bill Gates to Vaccinate Himself!” The inability to respond effectively to this kind of mass delusion, Jha says, is a “huge liability in the public-health community. We should try to engage with people,” he insists. “But it is not done by giving them facts. They’re not actually lacking in facts; they don’t believe.”

Zuckerman says the core obstacle with QAnon is that its doctrine of blanket distrust leaves few avenues for intervention: “ ‘Scientists? Oh, they’re all at universities; they’re all part of the deep state. What about the media? Oh, my God. The media actually run the deep state.’ That’s epistemic closure,” he says.

Social media companies that had profited from allowing such conspiracies to run riot have recently booted (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/facebook-qanon-ban-deplatforming-social-media-1071802/) QAnon and anti-vaxxers from their platforms. But that also creates problems, says Bratich. “It’s just riled up the radical emerging right that sees themselves as being not just censored, but persecuted,” he says. This brings with it notions of a “dangerous self-sacrifice and martyrdom” and risks “more conflagrations before it subsides.”

Shortly after the election, Cook found himself completely de-platformed. In mid-November, he was kicked off Facebook as part of the social network’s purge of QAnon. Twitter shut down his account simultaneously. Cook has attempted to launch his own social media properties: Covid-19 Refusers — which features a 14-part video indoctrination on why to reject vaccination — as well as Medical Freedom Patriots: a $5-a-month, subscription-based group he touts as “Anti Vaccine, Pro Alternative Medicine, QAnon friendly.” Cook makes plain he’s seeking to spread the gospel of QAnon: “We are in an INFORMATION WAR,” he writes. “The first step is for us all to be informed — I am giving you the path to that — and then to share it yourself with others.”

As with many, many Q believers (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/qanon-joe-biden-inauguration-donald-trump-1116733/), Trump’s election loss has been hard for Cook to absorb. On December 7th, he posted on Parler that Americans should consider fleeing to “Republican held states” to avoid forced vaccination. “This is war,” he wrote. “We don’t need to be up front getting the kill shots when we know there’s Higher Ground.” In late January, he posted to Telegram his belief that the military would help Trump reseize control of America: “I have now seen enough pieces of the puzzle to believe that THE PLAN is in fact going EXACTLY as it was PLANNED to go for our US Military and President Trump to secure the United States of America and thereby end the Deep State’s rule over us once and for all,” he wrote. “In fact I do believe it will be BIBLICAL.”

Zuckerman argues that what’s required to reach the far edges of the anti-vax and QAnon communities resembles cult deprogramming (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ex-qanon-followers-cult-conspiracy-theory-pizzagate-1064076/). “The question that I think everyone would love to have a definitive answer to is, ‘Can people be unpilled?’ ” he says. He points with encouragement to forums on Reddit for people who have escaped Q and are trying to help others. “They talk about the incredible damage — that this is a belief system that ends marriages, ends friendships.” Bratich likens these groups to “QAnon recovery” and suggests that “the deprogramming that happens might be as networked and distributed as the way these people [originally] came together.”

But Bratich cautions that the pull of QAnon remains devilishly strong, and that the conspiracy theory has shown itself to be incredibly plastic and adaptable. He warns that as the notion of Trump as superhero fades, the fight against vaccination may well open up as the organizing battle in QAnon’s resistance against the deep state. “If Trump goes away or goes to the margins,” he says, “I think this will be the next thing that becomes front and center.” The far edge of the anti-vax movement, he says, “keeps talking about how the vaccine is ‘the beginning of the end.’ For QAnon there’s a code in there,” he warns. “It’s the beginning of the end of America, right?”

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In this article:

anti-vaccine, (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/anti-vaccine/)

Capitol Riot, (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/capitol-riot/)

conspiracy theories, (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/conspiracy-theories/)

coronavirus, (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/coronavirus/)

direct, (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/direct/)

long reads, (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/long-reads/)

qanon, (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/qanon/)

RSreports, (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/rs-reports/)

vaccines (https://www.rollingstone.com/t/vaccines/)

February 10, 2021

nyt

Far-Right Extremists Move From ‘Stop the Steal’ to Stop the Vaccine

Extremist organizations are now bashing the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines in an effort to try to undermine the government.

By Neil MacFarquhar (https://www.nytimes.com/by/neil-macfarquhar)

March 26, 2021

Adherents of far-right groups who cluster online have turned repeatedly to one particular website in recent weeks — the federal database showing deaths and adverse reactions nationwide among people who have received Covid-19 vaccinations.

Although negative reactions have been relatively rare, the numbers are used by many extremist groups to try to bolster a rash of false and alarmist disinformation in articles and videos with titles like “Covid-19 Vaccines Are Weapons of Mass Destruction — and Could Wipe out the Human Race” or “Doctors and Nurses Giving the Covid-19 Vaccine Will be Tried as War Criminals.”

If the so-called Stop the Steal movement appeared to be chasing a lost cause once President Biden was inaugurated, its supporters among extremist organizations are now adopting a new agenda from the anti-vaccination campaign to try to undermine the government.

Bashing of the safety and efficacy of vaccines is occurring in chatrooms frequented by all manner of right-wing groups including the Proud Boys; the Boogaloo movement, a loose affiliation known for wanting to spark a second Civil War; and various paramilitary organizations.

These groups tend to portray vaccines as a symbol of excessive government control. “If less people get vaccinated then the system will have to use more aggressive force on the rest of us to make us get the shot,” read a recent post on the Telegram social media platform, in a channel linked to members of the Proud Boys charged in storming the Capitol.

Image

A “Stop the Steal” rally at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in November.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

The marked focus on vaccines is particularly striking on discussion channels populated by followers of QAnon, who had falsely prophesied that Donald J. Trump would continue as president while his political opponents were marched off to jail.

“They rode the shift in the national conversation away from Trump to what was happening with the massive ramp up in vaccines,” said Devin Burghart, the head of the Seattle-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which monitors far-right movements, referring to followers of QAnon. “It allowed them to pivot away from the failure of their previous prophecy to focus on something else.”

Apocalyptic warnings about the vaccine feed into the far-right narrative that the government cannot be trusted, the sentiment also at the root of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The more vaccine opponents succeed in preventing or at least delaying herd immunity, experts noted, the longer it will take for life to return to normal and that will further undermine faith in the government and its institutions.

Last spring, a common purpose among far-right activists and the anti-vaccination movement first emerged during armed protests (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/coronavirus-extremists.html) in numerous state capitols against coronavirus lockdown measures. That cross-pollination expanded over time.

On Jan. 6, while rioters advanced on the Capitol, numerous leading figures in the anti-vaccination movement were onstage nearby, holding their own rally to attack both the election results and Covid-19 vaccinations.

Events overshadowed their protest, but at least one outspoken activist, Dr. Simone Gold of Beverly Hills, Calif., was charged with breaching the Capitol. She called her arrest an attack on free speech. She was one of several doctors who appeared in a video last year spreading misleading claims (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/technology/virus-video-trump.html?searchResultPosition=1)about the coronavirus. Mr. Trump shared a version of the video (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/technology/virus-video-trump.html), which Facebook, YouTube and Twitter removed after millions of viewers watched it.

Image

Dr. Simone Gold in a video for America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization accused of spreading misleading information about the coronavirus and possible treatments. She was later charged with breaching the Capitol.

In the months since inoculations started in December, the alliance grouping extremist organizations with the anti-vaccination movement has grown larger and more vocal, as conspiracy theories about vaccines proliferated while those about the presidential vote count receded.

With their protests continuing, far-right groups deployed many of the same talking points as the vaccination opponents. Prominent voices in both the “Stop the Steal” and the anti-vaccination movements helped to organize scattered rallies on March 20 against vaccines, masks and social distancing in American cities including Portland, Ore., and Raleigh, N.C., as well as in Australia, Canada and other countries around the world.

In April, a conference with the tagline “Learn How to Fight Back for Your Health and Freedom,” is set to bring together Trump allies like Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell along with high-profile members of the anti-vaccination effort.

Maligning the coronavirus vaccines is obviously not limited to extremist groups tied to the Capitol riot. There is deep partisanship over the vaccines generally.

One third of Republicans surveyed in a CBS News poll (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-vaccines-optimism-pandemic-opinion-poll/) said that they would avoid getting vaccinated — compared with 10 percent of Democrats — and another 20 percent of Republicans said they were unsure. Other polls found similar trends.

About 100 members of the House of Representatives (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/us/politics/congress-coronavirus-vaccine.html), roughly one-quarter, had not been vaccinated as of mid-March, according to Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader.

It is unclear where Mr. Trump will fit into the vaccine battle. The former president, who has been vaccinated, endorsed getting the shot recently, provoking some disbelief in QAnon and other chatrooms. “I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it, and a lot of those people voted for me frankly,” he said in an interview with Fox News.

Image

Protesters at anti-vaccination demonstrations are using similar imagery as those at “Stop the Steal” rallies.Credit...Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

Across right-wing channels online, certain constant memes have emerged attacking the vaccine, like a cartoon suggesting that what started with mask mandates will end with concentration camps run by FEMA for those who refuse vaccinations.

Numerous channels link to the government website called VAERS, (https://vaers.hhs.gov/) for Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, to energize followers. It had reported 2,216 deaths among people vaccinated for the three months before March 22, with 126 million doses administered. The Covid-19 vaccines in use, like most vaccinations, are considered overwhelmingly safe, but inevitably a small percentage of recipients suffer adverse reactions, some of them severe. The deaths have not been directly linked to the vaccinations.

The raw, incomplete VAERS statistics are meant for scientists and medical professionals, but are widely used among extremist groups to try to undermine confidence in the vaccine. One video consisted of a person reading the details from the chart aloud barking “Murder” where the chart said “Death.”

On Telegram, channels frequented by tens of thousands of QAnon followers are full of videos warning of the dire consequences of taking the vaccine.For example, David Icke, a British serial conspiracy theorist, posted a video called “Murder by Vaccine” saying that it transformed the nature of the human body. (The claims that the vaccines change human DNA are false.)

Mr. Icke was previously best known for pushing the idea that the world was controlled by shape-shifting alien lizards who inhabited a global network of underground tunnels.

The general proliferation of conspiracy theories by QAnon followers for years has helped to create a shared vocabulary among far-right organizations, experts said, which smoothed the way for spreading false information about the vaccines. “The last year with Covid has just been a perfect storm that whatever your crazy conspiracy belief is, there is someone who has a Covid conspiracy to match it,” said Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.

Image

Anti-vaccine protesters shouted and waved signs at health care workers waiting in line to enter the Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., in February.Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times

The vaccines are sometimes referred to as a “potion,” sometimes as a “bioweapon,” and there are claims that vaccinated people are “shedding mutant viruses.”

Telegram is the locus of much of the disinformation and fear mongering. On one channel, there are claims that the vaccine is an instrument of depopulation. “A massive death wave will be witnessed later this year among those who took the vaccine,” read one posting.

In Idaho, the far-right activist Ammon Bundy helped to push for a proposed state law to ban any mandatory vaccines, although work stalled after the legislature suspended its work on March 19 for more than two weeks because too many lawmakers contracted the coronavirus.

The question is where this newly forged alliance goes from here. Some analysts believe its life span will prove limited, with the far right pivoting to some other issue, like immigration. Eventually, hundreds of millions of Americans will be vaccinated, they noted, and vaccine skepticism is not the same thing as being anti-vaccination. Some doubters will soften if time proves the vaccines effective.

A new report (https://networkcontagion.us/reports/a-contagion-of-institutional-distrust/)by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University noted, however, that although the de-platforming of extremist groups made their campaigns harder to follow, the alliance has the potential to meld disparate factions into a large anti-government movement united around public health issues.

“It increases the opportunity for a big tent enemy,” said Joel Finkelstein, a fellow at Rutgers who runs the institute. “If you are feeling dispossessed, like all these right-wing groups are, boy do I have a tent for you.”

Ben Decker contributed research.

Neil MacFarquhar is a national correspondent. Previously, as Moscow bureau chief, he was on the team awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting (https://www.nytimes.com/series/russias-dark-arts). He spent more than 15 years reporting from around the Mideast, including five as Cairo bureau chief, and wrote two books about the region.

:{:{A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Moving On From ‘Stop the Steal,’ Far Right Now Vilifies Vaccines}:

See more on: U.S. Politics (https://www.nytimes.com/section/politics)

4 25 duck qanon vaxx

(https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qanon%20vaccine+site:www.rollingstone.com&atb=v353-1)

Rolling Stone

https://www.rollingstone.com › culture › culture-features › qanon-anti-vax-covid-vaccine-conspiracy-theory-1125197 (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-anti-vax-covid-vaccine-conspiracy-theory-1125197/)

QAnon: How the Anti-Vaxxers Got Red-Pilled - Rolling Stone (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-anti-vax-covid-vaccine-conspiracy-theory-1125197/)

The full convergence of the anti-vax movement and QAnon belief can be seen in the trajectory of Larry D. Cook — a onetime healthy-lifestyle guru who became a high-profile anti-vaccine activist ...

}}:

bannon guo?

no lnx

Pro-China Conspiracy Campaign Attacks COVID Drugmaker

BAD MEDICINE

Facebook took down troll accounts linked to pro-China disinformation for spreading conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and pharma giant Gilead

Adam Rawnsley

Updated Aug. 21, 2020 / Published Aug. 20, 2020

Samantha Hill’s crazed COVID-19 spaghetti chart looks like something out of an It’s Always Sunny meme—with blame for everyone from Steve Bannon to seafood export companies. But the intricate conspiracy isn’t an organic act of lunacy. Instead, the content and fake accounts pushing it are linked to a known pro-China disinformation outfit that’s looking to blame both the U.S. and Gilead, maker of a popular COVID-19 drug, for the global coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook says the fake accounts found by The Daily Beast are linked to a previous effort by sock puppets to attack the Chinese Communist Party’s adversaries and spread myths about the origin of the coronavirus. So what’s behind this latest attempt to hoodwink social media users about where COVID-19 came from and the drugmaker helping to fight it?

Welcome to Rabbit Hole, where we dive deep on the biggest story. It’s for Beast Inside members only.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/theres-a-simple-reason-why-america-was-so-vulnerable-to-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/

The worldwide conspiracy is vast — so vast that most of the world’s scientists, journalists and political leaders are in on it. Somehow, in all this time, not a single one of the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of conspirators has grown a conscience and decided to blow the whistle on the conspiracy. Their goal? To ruin everything that right-wing America holds dear: the nuclear family, NFL football, needlessly enormous vehicles, the specials menu at Hooters.

To accomplish this dastardly goal, the conspiracy will fabricate a worldwide threat.They will falsify the data and use the power of institutions like governments and universities and scientific journals to perpetuate this hoax, tricking billions of people into believing this threat is real and needs a drastic response. The only people in the world who see through the hoax are right-wing Americans, of course, who know what lengths the “socialist left” will go to in order to destroy Mom and apple pie.

Coronavirus denialism has, in the period of a few short months, become one of the most serious political problems in our nation. It’s a major obstacle to both containing the virus and reviving the economy, which can’t happen until the virus is contained.

Coronavirus denialism isn’t just flourishing on social media, but emanating from both right-wing media and from Republican leaders, most notably Donald Trump. Over the weekend, the president declared (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-factcheck.html) that “99 percent” of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless,” a claim that isn’t just false but part of a larger pattern of Trump’s statements suggesting that the threat of the virus is being faked in order to harm him politically.

in other words, it’s a conspiracy theory, one that dates at least back to February, when Trump claimed that fears of the coronavirus were a “new hoax” designed by Democrats to ruin him.

The rapid spread of this conspiracy theory is puzzling, especially as it requires many leaps of faith, including the belief that literally millions of professionals who don’t know each other — scientists, journalists, government employees, health care providers and so on — are working to perpetuate this hoax.[but note AGW denial prepped to doubt science [not to mention scopes trial] and anti-gubmint UN WHO goes back to JBS; Koch big funders of both]

There’s a simple reason why right-wing America was so quick to rally around a conspiracy theory that’s so utterly preposterous. They spent years training themselves by indulging in climate-change denialism.

It’s not a stretch to say that climate-change denialism and coronavirus denialism are basically the same conspiracy theory. In fact, it often seems like coronavirus denialists have simply copied and pasted their talking points about climate change and adjusted the wording a bit to be about virus spread instead of carbon emissions.

But the basic parameters are the same: a worldwide conspiracy, threats that are invented or exaggerated for supposed political gain, a sinister hidden agenda — whether that’s bringing down capitalism or ending Trump’s presidency.

The content of coronavirus denialism can be somewhat diverse. This article from the New York Times chronicling the struggles of nurses (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/us/coronavirus-nurses.html) to convince family and friends that the coronavirus is a real threat gives a good overview of the range of different flavors. Some folks insist the virus isn’t real at all. Some accept that it’s real but believe the danger of death or serious injury is being wildly exaggerated. Some deny that it’s as communicable as public health officials believe. Some claim that deaths from other causes are being falsely attributed to the virus.

We see the same kind of diversity in the world of climate-change denialism. At first, conservatives flat-out denied that climate change or “global warming” was even happening. But as evidence for changing temperatures grew, the flavors of denialism did too, with some denialists claiming it was just a natural fluctuation not attributable to humans, others saying that the effects wouldn’t be so bad, and still others saying it was too late to do anything about it so we should just give up.

What holds all these flavors of denialism together is the conspiracy theory undergirding them: The people raising the alarm about this problem are in cahoots with each other, and have ulterior motives.

Climate-change denialists have long held that progressives, and the scientists and world leaders who supposedly share their radical agenda, aren’t really concerned about species loss or rising sea levels or the devastating effects on poor people or any of that. Instead, they argue, these concerns are being faked to create a justification for an all-out assault on capitalism and “freedom.”

Similarly, coronavirus denialists argue that health care workers and scientists warning about the coronavirus are insincere, but instead are part of a larger — again, worldwide! — movement to take down Trump by making him look bad.

The rhetoric between the two forms of denialism is almost comically similar.

In September, Fox News host Laura Ingraham declared (https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/laura-ingraham-compares-greta-thunberg-and-youth-climate-activists-stephen-kings)that teenage climate-change activists were part of a sinister plot to seize control of “our economy, our way of life, our way of transport, how many children you want to have.”

In May, she made the same arguments about recommendations to wear face masks to slow the coronavirus spread, claiming it was about “control over large populations” that is “achieved through fear and intimidation and suppression of free thought.”

In case the link wasn’t obvious, Ingraham made it herself, saying, “They’ll say this whole mask thing is settled science, just like they do with climate change.”

It’s not possible that both things are just settled science, of course. It’s all just a massive conspiracy!

It’s the same story with Fox News superstar Tucker Carlson, who arguedlast September that climate strikes are “not about the environment” but are a left-wing scam meant to create “an emergency big enough to justify grabbing more power.”

Carlson copy-pasted those same arguments to deny the dangers of the coronavirus months later, claiming that the scientific evidence that it’s dangerous and communicable is overblown (https://www.salon.com/2020/05/13/how-is-that-based-in-science-fox-hosts-without-medical-backgrounds-question-top-disease-expert/), and being exaggerated by people who are hungry for “power” and want to see Americans following “orders.”

Both climate change and coronavirus denialism are given a boost by the tribalist politics of right-wing America. For decades now, one of the ways for conservatives to indicate their skepticism of climate change and fealty to the right was to buy giant, gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks, making quite clear to anyone looking that they don’t care one fig about your fears of carbon emission.

The same logic is driving the anti-mask phenomenon, where some of the most fiercely loyal Trump supporters make a big show out of refusing wear a mask, because they don’t care one fig about your fear of catching a potentially deadly virus.

It was clever of Trump and his media followers to encourage his supporters not to wear masks. That kind of showy public defiance has helped normalize coronavirus denialism, and exerted pressure on other conservatives to follow suit to show their tribal loyalties.It serves the same function as mocking people for driving fuel-efficient vehicles did, using peer pressure to get people on board with a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with climate-change conspiracy theories, once they take hold, it’s very hard to pry people free from their delusional beliefs. If you confront them with the evidence that the threat is real, they simply move to claiming it’s overblown. George Soros will probably be blamed. Or they’ll come up with excuses for why they personally won’t be affected and so shouldn’t care. Or they’ll just shift to casting aspersions on the motives of people who do care, whether that’s Greta Thunberg or Dr. Anthony Fauci, accusing them of being tools or power-hungry schemers. They’ll embrace any view, really, except admitting that the problem we’re all facing is real and that yes, we have to do something about it.

5/20 covid

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/podcast/dispatch/united-states-of-conspiracy/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=coveringcoronavirus_episode10_main (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/podcast/dispatch/united-states-of-conspiracy/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=coveringcoronavirus_episode10_main)

promote primary 4/20 on covid pandemic danger/qanon

perhaps neglected aha pioneer tag on early soc med viral

capt 818

long jbs history, revived? drs for dis prep

bak/capt 420 html ugly cause autism?

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/

trump trains?!

https://www.theatlantic.com/shadowland/

new 520

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/a-completely-absurd-conspiracy-theory-about-bill-gates-is-shockingly-popular-on-the-right-wing/

Along with Dr. Anthony Fauci and prominent Democrats such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been a frequent target at far-right anti-shutdown protests. Extremists have accused him not only of using the coronavirus pandemic to hurt President Donald Trump but of designing somevast plot aimed at societal control.

And according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll (https://news.yahoo.com/new-yahoo-news-you-gov-poll-shows-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories-spreading-on-the-right-may-hamper-vaccine-efforts-152843610.html) conducted on May 20 and 21, these preposterous beliefs are surprisingly popular on the right wing.

Yahoo News’ Andrew Romano reports that 44% of Republicans “believe that Bill Gates is plotting to use a mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign as a pretext to implant microchips in billions of people and monitor their movements— a widely debunked conspiracy theory with no basis in fact….In contrast, just 19% of Democrats believe the same spurious narrative about the Microsoft founder and public health philanthropist.”

The poll also found a connection between the media outlets that respondents were consuming and whether or not they believed that anti-Gates conspiracy theory. Naturally, whether one voted for Trump or Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 was a factor as well.

"Take the Gates example,” Romano explains. “Half of all Americans, 50%, who name Fox News as their primary television news source believe the disproven conspiracy theory, and 44% of voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2016 do as well — even though neither Fox nor Trump has promoted it. At the same time, just 15% of MSNBC viewers and 12% of Clinton voters say the story is true.”

The fact that 2016 Trump voters, Republicans and Fox News viewers were more likely to believe an outrageous conspiracy theory involving Gates, according to Romano, reflects “a growing problem: the dangerous, destabilizing tendency to ignore fundamental facts about the deadly pathogen in favor of misinformation peddled by partisans, including President Trump, and spread on social media.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-is-on-the-verge-of-repeating-a-historic-disaster-by-pushing-the-wuhan-lab-hoax/

There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.

This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 — maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue — was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like Infowars’ Alex Jones (https://youtu.be/EfCd-LrQb7A) to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.

Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/opinion/china-coronavirus-trump.html). But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.

Iraq Redux?

Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans). It was dedicated tofabricating intelligence on Iraq.

Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/06/05/some-iraq-analysts-felt-pressure-from-cheney-visits/4afb2009-20e7-4619-b40f-669c9d94dcf3/) to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/lie-factory/),” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor (https://theintercept.com/2020/01/16/david-wurmser-iran-suleimani-iraq-war/) to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pretext_for_War) book, A Pretext for War.

In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war (https://www.justsecurity.org/66035/the-pattern-and-practice-of-trumps-assaults-on-the-intelligence-community/) with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/21/trump-vs-the-deep-state?source=search_google_dsa_paid&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIztmyt7Ks6QIVre7jBx2SSQyYEAMYASAAEgLrr_D_BwE) and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state (https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176650/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_one_cheer_for_the_deep_state/).” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/08/next-administration-must-investigate-barr-his-henchmen/) against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/barr-mueller-investigation.html), the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/opinion/sunday/michael-flynn-william-barr-justice-department.html) against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security advisor.

To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Grenell) as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/04/new-us-ambassador-to-germany-under-fire-for-rightwing-support) the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview (https://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/06/03/trumps-right-hand-man-in-europe-wants-to-empower-european-anti-establishment-conservatives/) with Bannon’s Breitbart News.

To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/kash-patel-odni-post-116546). He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly (https://www.axios.com/national-security-council-staffer-denies-secret-ukraine-conversations-trump-e850964a-a743-4a81-94f4-6630f7f8cc77.html) acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.

Following that, the president re-named (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/the-senates-abdication-of-advise-and-consent/611368/) Congressman John Ratcliffe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratcliffe_%28American_politician%29) of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders (https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/11/13/ratcliffe-bill-taylor-testimony-trump-zelensky-pressure-impeachment-hearing-vpx.cnn) during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated (https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/29/dem-senators-ratcliffe-nomination-intel-chief-1439110) Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down (https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/02/trump-rep-ratcliffe-out-of-the-running-to-be-national-intelligence-director-1445150) days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/05/john-ratcliffe-us-senate-national-intelligence), awaiting likely confirmation.

It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.

The Wuhan Lab Lies

As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.

On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-link-to-china-biowarfare-program-possi/) entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-lab-studying-SARS-Ebola-Wuhan-outbreaks-center.html) that had appeared inLondon’sDaily Mailthe previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic (https://pandemic.warroom.org/),” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website ZeroHedge (https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21117663/twitter-zero-hedge-suspended-platform-manipulation-policy-doxxing-coronavirus) ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.

A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in (https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/dean-koontz-book-predicted-coronavirus), laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton — appearing on Fox, of course — agreed that China might indeed have created the virus.Then the idea began to go… well, viral (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic). (Soon Cotton was even tweeting (https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126) that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming (https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/02/24/overhyped-coronavirus-weaponized-against-trump/) that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index (https://disinformationindex.org/2020/04/evolution-of-the-wuhan-lab-conspiracy-the-ad-funded-sites-spreading-it/).)

Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted (https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/trump-china-coronavirus/index.html) on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/g-7-failed-to-agree-on-statement-after-us-insisted-on-calling-coronavirus-outbreak-wuhan-virus/2020/03/25/f2bc7a02-6ed3-11ea-96a0-df4c5d9284af_story.html) from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/30/trump-china-coronavirus-retaliation/) retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, whilehe began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52568405).

And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology) or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Center_for_Disease_Control_and_Prevention), a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/us/politics/trump-administration-intelligence-coronavirus-china.html) that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”

Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence (https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/495571-trump-says-he-has-seen-evidence-linking-coronavirus-to-wuhan-lab)” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-community-china-coronavirus-origins/index.html) about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance (https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-with-martha-raddatz-of-abcs-this-week-with-george-stephanopoulos/) on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”

On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement (https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2112-intelligence-community-statement-on-origins-of-covid-19), saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.

A Finger on the Scale

The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, andbioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.

Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.

There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/05/fauci-dismisses-trump-claim-coronavirus-started-wuhan-lab-200505170558959.html), saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree (https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-05-09/was-the-coronavirus-made-in-a-wuhan-lab-heres-what-the-genetic-evidence-shows) that it was not generated in a lab.

Among America’s allies — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion (https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/coronavirus-intelligence/index.html) that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia (https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-intelligence-knocks-back-us-government-s-wuhan-lab-virus-claim-20200504-p54pk3.html), in particular (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-australia-china/australia-annoyed-as-u-s-pushes-wuhan-lab-covid-19-theory-idUSKBN22K118), rejected (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/australia-hits-back-at-us-claim-linking-coronavirus-to-wuhan-lab) what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed (https://www.courthousenews.com/germany-doubts-us-claim-of-wuhan-virus-lab-leak/) the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.

Finally, according to (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-05/trump-pushes-virus-from-china-lab-theory-that-divides-u-s-spies) Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.

John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said (https://news.wjct.org/post/trump-pushes-theory-virus-origins-some-see-parallels-lead-iraq-war). “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”

Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html) President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/presidents-intelligence-briefing-book-repeatedly-cited-virus-threat/2020/04/27/ca66949a-8885-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html) about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following (https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf) clarion calls from China (https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/) and the World Health Organization (https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/01/30/coronavirus-1st-us-human-to-human-transmission-confirmed-right-before-who-emergency-meeting/#44e30d07fcac) that what was happening in Wuhan could spread (https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=20a99c10_4) worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.

Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.

By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.

Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular (https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176671/tomgram%3A_bob_dreyfuss%2C_a_giuliani-trump_foreign_policy/), is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805081372/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20).

5/18/2020 no results from pvt srch in duck, so tried 1 word in ggl main, got link to movie, but malware warning:

Your connection is not private

Attackers might be trying to steal your information from plandemicmovie[DOT]com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more[i cut link]

NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/23/facebook-posts/no-democrats-arent-pushing-microchips-fight-corona/

There’s no evidence that implanted microchips are being contemplated in a serious way to fight the coronavirus. This notion appears to stem from an incorrect interpretation of comments made by philanthropist Bill Gates.

• Democrats are not “pushing” for mandatory vaccinations, because state government already has the power to compel vaccination. All 50 states use the authority, with some exemptions permitted.

• Some Democrats and some Republicans oppose efforts to limit mandatory-vaccination exemptions based on religious or personal beliefs.

See the sources for this fact-check (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/23/facebook-posts/no-democrats-arent-pushing-microchips-fight-corona/#sources)

Is the coronavirus pandemic going to force Americans to undergo microchip implants? What about mandatory vaccinations? That’s what a Facebook post says.

"The Democrats are pushing for an implanted microchip in humans, and everyone to be vaccinated." says a Facebook post with text on a plain background (https://www.facebook.com/glenn.kresge/posts/2935727656541227). "These are words of war to me!"

It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership (https://www.facebook.com/help/1952307158131536?helpref=related) with Facebook.)

The claim is unsupported.

Microchips

We found no evidence of proposals or legislation, Democratic or otherwise, to promote implanting microchips to counter the coronavirus.

Not that this would even make sense as a solution to coronavirus.

Even the smallest microchips "are rather large, such that none would ever fit into a vaccine needle — these are very small-bore needles," Wilbur Chen, an infectious-disease scientist at the University of Maryland’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health, previously told PolitiFact (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/03/facebook-posts/no-us-isnt-developing-vaccine-or-antivirus-chip-tr/).

Other fact-checkers have traced the assertion in the Facebook post to an inaccurate interpretation of comments made by Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist who has focused his efforts on global health.

On March 18, Gates took part in a forum on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/) in which he was asked, "What changes are we going to have to make to how businesses operate to maintain our economy while providing social distancing?"

Gates responded, "The question of which businesses should keep going is tricky. Certainly, food supply and the health system. We still need water, electricity and the internet. Supply chains for critical things need to be maintained. Countries are still figuring out what to keep running. Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it."

The website Biohackinfo.com soon posted a story (https://biohackinfo.com/news-bill-gates-id2020-vaccine-implant-covid-19-digital-certificates/?fbclid=IwAR28OKNVYJ1fEXnjHdCBwvEc5GqLuv3ocqLjX8MDHSp_n_oLy7OdgwiKE5U) on Gates’ comments headlined, "Bill Gates will use microchip implants to fight coronavirus." It included the line that by "‘digital certificates,’ Gates was referring to implantable ‘QUANTUM-DOT TATTOOS.'"

This misinterpretation was amplified on April 13, when Roger Stone, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, told radio host Joe Piscopo, "Whether Bill Gates played some role in the creation and spread of this virus is open for vigorous debate. I have conservative friends who say it’s ridiculous, and others say absolutely." But, Stone added, Gates "and other globalists are using it for mandatory vaccinations and microchipping people so we know if they’ve been tested. Over my dead body. Mandatory vaccinations? No way, Jose!"

This conversation was spread further by coverage in the New York Post (https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/roger-stone-bill-gates-may-have-created-coronavirus-to-microchip-people/) and the Russian news service RT, according to BuzzFeed (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/conspiracy-theorists-are-using-a-bill-gates-reddit-ama-to).

None of this is correct.

"Digital certificates" are electronic information used to securely communicate over the internet, and Gates never mentioned microchips. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told FactCheck.org (https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/conspiracy-theory-misinterprets-goals-of-gates-foundation/) that Gates was referring to digital certificates as part of an effort to create a system of home-based, self-administered testing (https://www.gatesfoundation.org/TheOptimist/Articles/coronavirus-interview-dan-wattendorf) for COVID-19 that would involve a secure connection with health officials.

FEATURED FACT-CHECK...[image]

Meanwhile, unrelated research (https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/523/eaay7162) funded by the Gates Foundation proposed recording vaccination history on a patient’s skin using an invisible dye that could be read by a smartphone and last up to five years.

Kevin McHugh, a Rice University bioengineering professor who worked on the study, told Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-coronavirus-bill-gates-micr/false-claim-bill-gates-planning-to-use-microchip-implants-to-fight-coronavirus-idUSKBN21I3EC), "The quantum dot dye technology is not a microchip or human-implantable capsule, and to my knowledge there are no plans to use this for coronavirus."

There are legitimate concerns about privacy in some of the contact-tracing methods being considered to prevent the spread of coronavirus, experts say. However, "the fear of insertion of tracking chips and other things like that into our bodies has been a longstanding bogeyman," said Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida who has written extensively about conspiracy theories. "There is a lot of tracking that goes on, but the suggestion that it’s being used in this manner and this way seems absurd."

Mandatory vaccinations

This part of the claim isn’t as far-fetched. Many Democrats and some Republicans do support narrowing exemptions to mandatory vaccinations based on personal beliefs.

States have had the authority to require vaccinations for more than a century, and they use that authority all the time, with certain exceptions allowed.

In the 1905 case Jacobson vs. Massachusetts (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/197us11), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that a mandatory-vaccination law was a legitimate exercise of state power to protect public health and safety.

Since that decision, every state has instituted a variety of vaccine requirements, usually for school-age children. All but five states have exceptions for non-medical reasons. Some are for religious exemptions, some are for "personal beliefs," and some are for both. (The National Conference of State Legislatures has the full list (https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/school-immunization-exemption-state-laws.aspx).)

In the past several years, certain states (https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/16/republican-reject-democrat-vaccines-1361277), led in many cases by Democratic lawmakers but often with some bipartisan support, have moved to limit the religious- or personal-belief exemptions to vaccinations. This came amid concerns about outbreaks of measles and other diseases that were believed to stem from growing opposition to vaccination.

Ultimately, several states narrowed exemptions in 2019, including California (https://calmatters.org/health/2019/09/california-new-law-vaccination-medical-exemption/), Maine, New York and Washington. They did so over the opposition of groups on the right and left who are skeptical of the value of vaccinations, a perspective the medical community strongly opposes. (Read our analysis of complaints about the safety of vaccines (https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/nov/01/5-facts-about-vaccines/).)

The precedent set by Jacobson vs. Massachusetts continues to be cited, three academic experts at Boston University — Wendy K. Mariner, George J. Annas, and Leonard H. Glantz — have written (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449224/) in the American Journal of Public Health.

"A law that authorizes mandatory vaccination during an epidemic of a lethal disease, with refusal punishable by a monetary penalty, like the one at issue in Jacobson, would undoubtedly be found constitutional under the low constitutional test of ‘rationality review,’" the co-authors wrote, as long as regulators determined the vaccine was safe and effective.

Even without an ongoing epidemic, they added, such a requirement "would probably be upheld" as long as the disease was still spreading to some degree and as long as the vaccine was safe.

The federal government could theoretically impose stronger mandates, but it has not done so, Richard Hughes IV, a vaccine specialist at Avalere Health, wrote in the journal Health Affairs (https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20190318.382995/full/). The federal government could do this through a law pre-empting state policies or by using federal funding as leverage against the states, Hughes wrote. But Mariner said she’s doubtful about this scenario, and there is no evidence of legislation of this type for now.

Our ruling

A Facebook post says, "The Democrats are pushing for an implanted microchip in humans, and everyone to be vaccinated."

On microchips, there’s no evidence that implanted microchips are being contemplated in a serious way to fight the coronavirus. This appears to stem from a warped translation of comments by Gates.

As for mandatory vaccinations, the idea that Democrats are pushing for this power is exaggerated, because the Supreme Court long ago decided that the government has that power. This authority is now used in all 50 states. A minority that includes some Democrats and some Republicans oppose efforts to limit religious or personal exemptions.... Bill Gates will use microchip implants to fight coronavirus," March 19, 2020

New York Post, "Roger Stone: Bill Gates may have created coronavirus to microchip people (https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/roger-stone-bill-gates-may-have-created-coronavirus-to-microchip-people/)," April 13, 2020

National Conference of State Legislatures, "States With Religious and Philosophical Exemptions From School Immunization Requirements (https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/school-immunization-exemption-state-laws.aspx)," Jan. 3, 2020

Politico, "Republicans reject Democratic attempts to tighten vaccine laws (https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/16/republican-reject-democrat-vaccines-1361277)," April 16, 2019

American Journal of Public Health, "Jacobson v Massachusetts: It’s Not Your Great-Great-Grandfather’s Public Health Law (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449224/)," April 2005

Health Affairs, "Vaccine Exemptions And The Federal Government’s Role (https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20190318.382995/full/)," March 21, 2019

CalMatters, "Five things to know now about California’s new vaccine law (https://calmatters.org/health/2019/09/california-new-law-vaccination-medical-exemption/)," Sept. 15, 2019

BuzzFeed, "Here’s A Timeline Of How A Bill Gates Reddit AMA Turned Into A Coronavirus Vaccine Conspiracy (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/conspiracy-theorists-are-using-a-bill-gates-reddit-ama-to)," April 18, 2020

FactCheck.org, "Conspiracy Theory Misinterprets Goals of Gates Foundation (https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/conspiracy-theory-misinterprets-goals-of-gates-foundation/)," April 14, 2020

Reuters, "False claim: Bill Gates planning to use microchip implants to fight coronavirus (https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-coronavirus-bill-gates-micr/false-claim-bill-gates-planning-to-use-microchip-implants-to-fight-coronavirus-idUSKBN21I3EC)," March 31, 2020

PolitiFact, "5 facts about vaccines (https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/nov/01/5-facts-about-vaccines/)," Nov. 1, 2019

PolitiFact, "No, the US isn’t developing a vaccine or ‘antivirus’ with a chip to track people (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/03/facebook-posts/no-us-isnt-developing-vaccine-or-antivirus-chip-tr/)," April 3, 2020

Email interview with Wendy K. Mariner, professor of health law, ethics and human rights at Boston University, April 22, 2020

aha: youtube to facebook pipeline/escalator to everyone's news feed [2 biggest FANGs, synergy? amplifier?]

plandemic

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2020/heres-how-plandemic-went-viral/

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/may/08/fact-checking-plandemic-documentary-full-false-con/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/23/facebook-posts/no-democrats-arent-pushing-microchips-fight-corona/

For Erin Gallagher, the conspiratorial documentary “Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19” came to her attention like it did for myself — a question from her mom about the veracity of the 26-minute video full of coronavirus misinformation (https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/may/08/fact-checking-plandemic-documentary-full-false-con/).

After hearing about it from more friends and family, Gallagher decided to investigate how the video went viral so quickly.

Gallagher, an independent social media researcher who has been featured in NBC News (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/conspiracy-theorists-far-right-agitators-head-white-house-social-media-n1028576) and Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/twitters-disinformation-data-dumps-helpful/), analyzed 37,000 posts containing the word “plandemic” and 24,000 posts with the name “Judy Mikovits,” the former National Cancer Institute scientist whose work has been discredited, yet is the key expert in “Plandemic.”

Using graphs showing the Facebook groups where “Plandemic” was posted, along with the type of link users were sharing, she found a pipeline of how this video went viral: from YouTube to Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members and names like “Chemtrails Global Skywatch,” “OFFICIAL Q / QANON” and “Drain the Swamp.” YouTube links were the most commonly-shared access points for “Plandemic,” regardless of how quickly YouTube removed them.

“Everyone uses multiple platforms to varying degrees now so nothing is ever limited to just one or two,” Gallagher told me this weekend. “But in this case, YouTube hosted the video, and I suspect many mirrors of it once it started getting pulled down, and these large, highly-active Facebook groups were key to spreading it like wildfire and pushing it into all of our families’ Facebook feeds.”

In the “plandemic” keyword data, which was collected between April 8, and May 8, YouTube links posted on Facebook had nearly 200,000 likes and more than 150,000 each of shares and comments.

I reached out to YouTube and Facebook for comment but haven’t heard back. I will send an updated note with tomorrow’s newsletter if either company responds.

“‘Plandemic’ creators encouraged viewers to download the video from the documentary’s website and post it across video platforms,” said Alex Kaplan, senior researcher at the left-leaning Media Matters for America. “And you could see the impact: dozens of reuploads of the video on YouTube — even after they tried to remove the original — and shares of it on other platforms.”

[video 6 min ]

This isn’t the first YouTube-to-Facebook conspiracy video Kaplan has studied. He found some of the most-viewed YouTube videos touting the debunked claim (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/23/facebook-posts/no-democrats-arent-pushing-microchips-fight-corona/) that Bill Gates is pushing a coronavirus vaccine to microchip the public receiving thousands of engagements on Facebook. And a video calling COVID-19 a “false flag” drew 6 million views on YouTube and more than 1 million engagements on Facebook before it was removed. Both videos went viral over the last two months.

“Be really careful about sharing content coming from places you haven’t heard of before just because it gives you some kind of emotion,” Kaplan said. “Take the time to do some research on the person(s) behind it or the claims made in it, and see if someone, like a fact-checker, has debunked it, before sharing.”

presented as rough transcript with rebuttal: (not vetted)

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/86487

"Mikhail Varshavski, DO (https://findadoctor.atlantichealth.org/provider/Mikhail+Varshavski/639510?unified=Mikhail%20Varshavski%2C%20DO&sort=networks%2Crelevance), (better known on social media as "Doctor Mike") is a board-certified family medicine physician at the Atlantic Health System's Overlook Medical Center in Summit, New Jersey. "

https://www.ecowatch.com/coronavirus-conspiracy-video-plandemic-2645951410.html

Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo are among the companies scrambling to remove a coronavirus conspiracy video called 'Plandemic,' as The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/07/plandemic-youtube-facebook-vimeo-remove/) reported.

The widely circulated video makes unsubstantiated medical claims about the coronavirus and it features Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist and activist in the anti-vaccine campaign.

In the 26-minute video, which is billed as an extended trailer for a longer documentary that the filmmakers say "will expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system," Mikovits contends that wearing masks activates the coronavirus within people, without providing evidence, and criticizes orders to stay away from beaches, as Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tech-video/facebook-youtube-remove-plandemic-video-with-unsubstantiated-coronavirus-claims-idUSKBN22K077) reported.

"Suggesting that wearing a mask can make you sick could lead to imminent harm, so we're removing the video," Facebook said, according to Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tech-video/facebook-youtube-remove-plandemic-video-with-unsubstantiated-coronavirus-claims-idUSKBN22K077).

A YouTube spokesperson said the company removes "content that includes medically unsubstantiated diagnostic advice for covid-19," which includes the "Plandemic" video. A Vimeo spokesperson said the company "stands firm in keeping our platform safe from content that spreads harmful and misleading health information. The video in question has been removed by our Trust & Safety team for violating these very policies," as The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/07/plandemic-youtube-facebook-vimeo-remove/) reported.

Despite efforts to remove it, changing the name slightly, misspelling search terms, or altering the video slightly has allowed plenty of lengthy clips to pass through the AI filters, as TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/07/plandemic-video-judy-mikovits/) reported.

The video uses high-production value to cater to a number of topics that strike a chord with online conspiracy-theorists, filtering most claims through a lens that vaccines are simply a money-making plan put forth by greedy pharmaceutical companies and they cause more harm than good, as TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/07/plandemic-video-judy-mikovits/) reported.

Plandemic videos racked up a combined 4.7 million views on YouTube on Monday and Tuesday, according to BuzzSumo, a social media tool, as CNET (https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-youtube-and-twitter-grapple-with-viral-plandemic-conspiracy-video/) reported.

In the video Mikovits, who has said Dr. Anthony Fauci should be charged with treason, vociferously criticized the nation's leading infectious disease doctor and also suggested the virus had been engineered, saying it wasn't a "natural occurrence." As CNET (https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-youtube-and-twitter-grapple-with-viral-plandemic-conspiracy-video/) reported, scientists widely believe the virus jumped from animals to human beings (https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theories-claim-new-coronavirus-was-bioengineered/), and the U.S. intelligence community took the unusual step of publicly saying it believed the virus wasn't "manmade or genetically modified (https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2112-intelligence-community-statement-on-origins-of-covid-19)."

According to TechCrunch, "To the uninformed viewer, Mikovits might appear to ably address scientific-sounding topics, but her own scientific credentials are extremely dubious. In 2009, Mikovits authored a study on chronic fatigue syndrome that was retracted (http://retractionwatch.com/2011/12/22/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-xmrv-paper-retracted-by-science-completely-this-time/) by the journal Science two years later when an audit found "evidence of poor quality control" in the experiment and the results could not be replicated in subsequent studies. That event and her subsequent firing from a research institute appear to have kicked off her more recent turn as an anti-vaccine crusader, conspiracist and author."

Her claim in the movie that she was arrested for discovering a retrovirus that was transmitted through vaccines was thoroughly debunked by Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/scientist-vaccine-jailed/?fbclid=IwAR3o4wl1u88oaA5sq9MKMW1o2-AniwH-NXEZYRlP1PXmdA4v41glTZGakj4).

As MIT Technology Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/07/1001469/facebook-youtube-plandemic-covid-misinformation/) noted, when YouTube started to remove "Plandemic" from its platform, supporters took to Twitter with claims of unfair censorship. The documentary then became a trending hashtag on Thursday, driving even more attention, outrage and media coverage to it.

Mikovits has tweeted a video in which she urged President Donald Trump to end the lockdown and stop requiring people to wear masks, calling the face coverings "dangerous." Twitter told The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/07/plandemic-youtube-facebook-vimeo-remove/) that it would allow that video, but it did remove #PlagueofCorruption and #PlandemicMovie from its searches and trends sections.public health (https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/public-health) coronavirus (https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/coronavirus) science (https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/science) vaccines (https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/vaccines)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/scientist-vaccine-jailed/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/technology/plandemic-judy-mikovitz-coronavirus-disinformation.html

no lnx

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. Judy Mikovits at the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in 2011, the year she was fired there.Credit...David Calvert/Associated Press

By Davey Alba]

May 9, 2020

In a video posted to YouTube on Monday, a woman animatedly described an unsubstantiated secret plot by global elites like Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci to use the coronavirus pandemic to profit and grab political power.

In the 26-minute video, the woman asserted how Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading voice on the coronavirus, had buried her research about how vaccines can damage people’s immune systems. It is those weakened immune systems, she declared, that have made people susceptible to illnesses like Covid-19.

The video, a scene from a longer dubious documentary called “Plandemic,” was quickly seized upon by anti-vaccinators, the conspiracy group QAnon and activists from the Reopen America movement, generating more than eight million views. And it has turned the woman — Dr. Judy Mikovits, 62, a discredited scientist — into a new star of virus disinformation.

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Her ascent was powered not only by the YouTube video but also by a book that she published in April, “Plague of Corruption,” which frames Dr. Mikovits as a truth-teller fighting deception in science. In recent weeks, she has become a darling of far-right publications like The Epoch Times and The Gateway Pundit. Mentions of her on social media and television have spiked to as high as 14,000 a day, according to the media insights company Zignal Labs.

The rise of Dr. Mikovits is the latest twist in the virus disinformation wars, which have swelled throughout the pandemic. Conspiracy theorists have used the uncertainty and fear around the disease to mint many villains. Those include Dr. Fauci after he appeared to slight President Trump and Mr. Gates, a co-founder of Microsoft, as someone who started the disease. They have also pushed the baseless idea that 5G wireless waves can help cause the disease.

On the flip side, they have created their own heroes, like Dr. Mikovits.

The conspiracy theorists “recast a pusher of discredited pseudoscience as a whistle-blowing counterpoint to real expertise,” said Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Dr. Mikovits did not respond to requests for comment.

Judy Mikovits has a degree in biology from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from George Washington University. From 1992 to 2001, she worked at the National Cancer Institute as a postdoctoral fellow, a staff scientist and a lab director, then served as research director of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease from 2006 to 2011. In 2011, after her research into chronic fatigue syndrome was discredited, she was fired from Whittemore.

Dr. Mikovits’s rise to internet notoriety has been sudden. According to data from Zignal Labs, she was rarely mentioned on social media platforms in February.

[

Image GoFundMe removed a fund-raiser for Judy Mikovits, stating that the campaign violated the website’s terms of service.]

GoFundMe removed a fund-raiser for Judy Mikovits, stating that the campaign violated the website’s terms of service.

By April, coverage of Dr. Mikovits rose to 800 mentions a day. That month, Darla Shine, the wife of Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive and former top aide to Mr. Trump, promoted Dr. Mikovits’s book in a tweet. Videos by The Epoch Times, a publication with ties to the Falun Gong, and the conservative outlet “The Next News Network” interviewed Dr. Mikovits about the pandemic, generating more than 1.5 million views on social networks.

Then came the video from “Plandemic,” which made mentions of Dr. Mikovits on social media spike far higher. The video was produced by Mikki Willis, who was involved in making “Bernie or Bust” and “Never Hillary” videos during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Her arguments also began to spill over into the real world, including her baseless assertion that “wearing the mask literally activates your own virus.” There is no evidence that wearing a mask can activate viruses and make people sick. On Thursday in Sacramento, Calif., a woman brandished a sign in front of the state Capitol building that read, “Do you know who Dr. Judy Mikovits is? Then don’t tell me I need a silly mask.”

YouTube and Facebook have removed the “Plandemic” scene, saying that it spread inaccurate information about Covid-19 that could be harmful to the public. But the video continues to circulate, as people post new copies. Twitter added an “unsafe” warning on at least one link featuring Dr. Mikovits on the social network, and blocked the hashtags #PlagueOfCorruption and #Plandemicmovie from trends and search.

Dr. Mikovits has attacked Dr. Fauci online since at least 2018. But her claims did not gain much traction until this year, when the narrative that Dr. Fauci was secretly plotting to undermine and discredit the president started spreading.

Dr. Mikovits says Dr. Fauci’s attacks on her work date back to the 1980s, when she contributed research to the National Cancer Institute as a graduate student. In the video being shared, Dr. Mikovits alleges that Dr. Fauci intercepted her research on H.I.V. to make money off patents, threatened her and then took undeserved credit for moving the field of H.I.V. treatment forward.

She also ties her professional downfall to Dr. Fauci. In 2009, Dr. Mikovits published research in the journal Science claiming to show that a mouse retrovirus caused chronic fatigue syndrome and other illnesses. That research gained significant media attention, but it was discredited a couple of years later, including with a retraction by the journal. Dr. Mikovits was briefly jailed in California on charges of theft made by Whittemore. The charges were later dropped.

Dr. Mikovits has sought to reframe the scandal as part of a broader campaign of persecution, aimed at silencing her work questioning the safety of vaccines.

There is no evidence that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Mikovits interacted. This week, in a statement to the fact-checking website Snopes, Dr. Fauci denied ever having threatened Dr. Mikovits. “I have no idea what she is talking about,” he wrote.

The National Cancer Institute referred an inquiry about Dr. Mikovits’s claims to the National Institutes of Health, the agency that oversees the N.C.I.’s cancer research and training. Dr. Fauci came to the National Institutes of Health as a clinical associate in 1968, and was appointed director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the N.I.H. by 1984.

In a statement, the agency said, “The National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases are focused on critical research aimed at ending the Covid-19 pandemic and preventing further deaths. We are not engaging in tactics by some seeking to derail our efforts.”

Dr. Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University, said in an interview on Saturday morning that Dr. Fauci had asked him in 2011 to design a study that would address whether Dr. Mikovits and others could reproduce her research showing an association between XMRV, the mouse retrovirus, and chronic fatigue syndrome. He pointed to a September 2012 news conference at Columbia in which Dr. Mikovits admitted the link her original research had made between the mouse retrovirus and chronic fatigue syndrome was “simply not there.”

“Now is the time to use” the invalidating results that came out of the effort to reproduce her research “and move forward,” Dr. Mikovits said at the time. “And that’s what science is all about.”

Ivan Oransky, a co-founder of the academic watchdog Retraction Watch, which has followed Dr. Mikovits’s work closely, said that when he sees videos like the one posted in the past week, “they tend to coalesce around certain kinds of subjects, then the trajectory turns to martyrhood really quickly.”

There is some evidence that prominent members of conspiracy groups have tried to give her name and her story a lift online.

Zach Vorhies, a former YouTube employee who has recently promoted QAnon conspiracy theories, posted a GoFundMe campaign on April 19 titled “Help me amplify Pharma Whistleblower Judy Mikovits.” The campaign was first spotted by Ms. DiResta, of the Stanford Internet Observatory.

A day before the GoFundMe campaign began, a newly created account for Dr. Mikovits tweeted for the first time. “A big thanks goes out to Zach Vorhies (@Perpetualmaniac) for helping me get on Twitter!” It was retweeted 400 times and liked more than 2,200 times. The account has gained over 111,000 followers in less than a month.

GoFundMe removed the page on Friday, stating that the campaign violated the website’s terms of service for “campaigns that are fraudulent, misleading, inaccurate, dishonest, or impossible.”

Mr. Vorhies did not respond to requests for comment.

Dr. Mikovits’s newfound notoriety has also lifted sales of her new book. This week, “Plague of Corruption” shot to No. 1 on Amazon’s print best-seller list. The book was out of stock on Friday. Amazon said that the book did not violate the company’s content guidelines.

Skyhorse, the independent publishing company behind the book, defended its decision to print Dr. Mikovits. “The world should discuss the ideas in this book, rather than allow censorship to prevail,” a spokeswoman for Skyhorse said.

Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said her 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.”

Sheera Frenkel and Alexandra Alter contributed reporting. Ben Decker and Jack Begg contributed research.

How Virus Misinformation Flourishes

Medical Expert Who Corrects Trump Is Now a Target of the Far RightMarch 28, 2020

Trump’s Disinfectant Talk Trips Up Sites’ Vows Against MisinformationApril 30, 2020

Bill Gates, at Odds With Trump on Virus, Becomes a Right-Wing TargetApril 17, 2020

Surge of Virus Misinformation Stumps Facebook and TwitterMarch 8, 2020

The New York Times Company

no lnx

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news

Conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and QAnon supporters spread the false claim online

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/alex-kaplan)

PUBLISHED04/08/20

A conspiracy theory about Microsoft founder Bill Gates and a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been circulating for weeks on social media platforms, getting high engagement numbers, and has since been pushed by both Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a Newsmax correspondent.

As the coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, Gates, who runs an organization that focuses on public health worldwide and has warned of the threat of epidemics for years (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31956344), has been leading efforts to and spoken out about finding a vaccine. That has included spending (https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-factories-7-different-vaccines-to-fight-coronavirus-2020-4) billions of dollars to find a cure via his foundation and doing interviews on shows including Fox News Sunday (https://www.mediaite.com/tv/bill-gates-says-were-facing-nightmare-scenario-but-expresses-hope-death-toll-can-be-well-short-of-projections/) and The Daily Show (https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/bill-gates-coronavirus-pandemic-ted-talk-daily-show-trevor-noah-977869/) about the need for a vaccine.

Gates on March 18 also participated in (https://www.cnet.com/news/bill-gates-calls-us-coronavirus-testing-disorganized-in-reddit-ama/) a Reddit “AMA” (“Ask me anything”) Q&A, where he encouraged a “national tracking system” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/03/18/bill-gates-calls-for-national-tracking-system-for-coronavirus-during-reddit-ama/#402c2ba6a72f) for the coronavirus and (https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/fkupg49/) “some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.” Scientific American reported (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invisible-ink-could-reveal-whether-kids-have-been-vaccinated/) in December that Gates had been funding efforts to create an invisible ink that could go into people’s skin to see who has been vaccinated. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology bioengineer said the ink could provide data that is useful in fighting disease around the world, noting, “If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease” (though the outlet also quoted a bioengineering professor admitting it could raise privacy concerns).

During this time, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory (https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/fbi-calls-qanon-domestic-terror-threat-trump-has-amplified-qanon-supporters-twitter-more-20) have spread a baseless conspiracy theory on multiple social media platforms, far-right sites, and message boards claiming that Gates’ effort to help develop a vaccine is some kind of nefarious attempt to control, follow, or even depopulate the world’s population via a “microchip” of some sort(the “depopulation” claim is based on a major misreading of (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/may/03/blog-posting/no-bill-gates-did-not-outline-2018-plan-depopulate/) Gates’ past remarks).

A review by Media Matters found that the conspiracy theory first seemed to gain traction aroundMarch 17, when a YouTube video (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863331)about the virus mischaracterized Gates’ work to develop trackable vaccine data as “implanting everybody with a global ID” and compared it to tattoos on Holocaust victims. The video received more than 120,000 views. On that same day, conspiracy theory outlet Infowars published (https://web.archive.org/web/20200407190712/https://www.infowars.com/covid-19-tracking-bracelets-invisible-tattoos-to-monitor-americans/) a piece and video of an Infowars host suggesting Gates was using the situation to “reduce the world’s population,” citing the invisible ink, and tied it to claiming the government would give out a “color-coded wristband that will be used for traveling Americans during an impending COVID-19 lockdown.” The Infowars article subsequently spread in (https://www.facebook.com/groups/294759880597706/permalink/3794753137265012) Facebook groups (https://www.facebook.com/groups/188295541208911/permalink/2948636005174837) and showed up as a meme on Instagram (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863361)....[pix]

...Following Gates’ AMA and his “digital certificates” comment, the conspiracy theory spread on March 18, moving to message boards including 4chan’s “/pol/” (https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/248903553/) and the conspiracy subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/fkzyui/bill_gates_lets_slip_the_real_reason_for_the/) on Reddit, where a user called Gates’Reddit posts “pretext for introduction of certificate of movement” and a plan to be “fully enslaved by the Deep State.” On Telegram that evening, white nationalist (https://www.mediamatters.org/white-nationalism/steve-king-says-hes-repeatedly-talked-white-nationalist-commentator-faith-goldy) Faith Goldy wrote that Gates’ posts were “underreported” and that a “microchip implant ID” would be harmful to “nationalists.”[fiath g twt?]

...

The following day, as the conspiracy theory continued to circulate on 4chan (https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/248998405/), it was picked up by (https://web.archive.org/web/20200403234354/https://newspunch.com/bill-gates-coronavirus-means-need-digital-certificates-prove-who-received-vaccine/) NewsPunch, a disinformation site formerly known as (https://mashable.com/article/yournewswire-news-punch-domain-facebook-fake-news/) YourNewsWire (https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2018/fact-checkers-have-debunked-this-fake-news-site-80-times-its-still-publishing-on-facebook/), which accused Gates of pushing for technology that will be “adopted for its ‘convenience and safety’ and then overnight will become mandatory for you and your family – or else.” That piece, too, circulated (https://www.facebook.com/groups/277201189587719/permalink/557910038183498) on social media and as a meme (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863376), along with other memes accusing Gates of using a vaccine to work with “globalists” for a “new world order.”

[pix]

On March 21, another YouTube video (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863386) was uploaded saying Gates wants to implant microchips in people and calling them a “mark of Satan” that could be used for “identifying us to the United Nations.” The video has received nearly 1.8 million views and at least 1.2 million Facebook engagements (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863391), according to the tracking tool BuzzSumo. That includes shares in QAnon Facebook groups (https://www.facebook.com/groups/346378325942318/permalink/628567417723406) and on a major anti-vaxx Facebook page (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/drowned-out-algorithm-pro-vaccination-advocates-struggle-be-heard-online-n976321).[pix w/ pyr eye]

throughout the rest of March, more videos popped up on YouTube (despite the platform’s pledge to crack down on (https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2020/03/coronavirus-update-on-creator-support.html) coronavirus misinformation) accusing Gates of wanting “eugenics” and “population control” (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863406) and claiming he is (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863411) the antichrist and that he essentially supports genocide; they racked up another 1.6 million views combined. The videos included a clip from anti-Semitic (https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/youtube-permanently-bans-channel-that-called-trump-s-impeachment-jew-coup-1.8569322) conspiracy (https://twitter.com/AlKapDC/status/953019673775353863) theory (https://twitter.com/AlKapDC/status/1138513233629843457) outlet TruNews and a video whose title called the virus (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863416) a “hoax” (those videos received hundreds of thousands (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863436) of Facebook engagements (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863441) combined)....[rw talk?]

Videos on social media platform TikTok pushing the conspiracy theory in late March and early April also racked up many views (despite the platform’s anti-misinformation policy (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/coronavirus-denying-conspiracy-theory-hashtag-spreading-tiktok-infowars-host)). One video (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863451) that received more than 230,000 views included in the caption “#fvaccines” andaccused Gates of pushing for everyone on the planet to have a “digital ID … by combining mandatory vaccines with implantable microchips.” (Media Matters removes identifying information from videos created by or featuring minors to protect their identity.) Another video that received tens of thousands of views claimed Gates was “evil” and connected him to a plan to “get everybody microchipped” via vaccines.

...[pix]

The conspiracy theory continued to spread following news in early April of Gates’ spending for a coronavirus cure. Another major white nationalist Telegram account (https://angrywhitemen.org/2020/03/24/the-owner-of-a-white-nationalist-telegram-channel-revealed-his-jewish-heritage-now-some-allies-are-abandoning-him/) shared (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863481) a post saying Gates wants the population “extinguished,” and multiple accounts on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/1468136673415899/posts/2677335485829339) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/p/B-lj5YsApEk/), including QAnon and anti-vaxx accounts, shared a meme urging people to take “no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet.” Ben Garrison, a far-right and pro-Trump cartoonist (https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/here-are-extremist-figures-going-white-house-social-media-summit), drew a cartoon pushing the conspiracy theory that portrays Gates as a Nazi, which was also posted on (https://web.archive.org/web/20200408124550/https://thedonald.win/p/FMSsg9Mm/ben-garrison-bill-gates-vaccine/c/) the backup site of the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”[pix meme blk kid]

...By April 6, bigger QAnon (https://twitter.com/Education4Libs/status/1247317002189975553) accounts (https://twitter.com/QBlueSkyQ/status/1246905905301663747) on social media had spread the conspiracy theory, such as Dylan Wheeler (https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/shortly-talking-about-jewish-question-qanon-supporter-says-turning-point), who accused (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3863501) Gates of using “microchip[s]” in order to be “the face of the New World Order.”

That afternoon, Emerald Robinson, Newsmax’s White House correspondent, tweeted a thread accusing Gates of “control[ling] global health policy” and saying that his “plan” was to use “vaccines to track people.”

On the morning of April 7, Fox host Laura Ingraham, whilequote-tweeting an anti-vaxx musician's (https://www.irishpost.com/news/jim-corr-corrs-comes-support-anti-vaxx-movement-168537) post about Gates’ AMA,said “globalists” see the pandemic as a “perfect vehicle” for their “dream” of “digitally tracking Americans’ every move.”

The spread of the conspiracy theory comes as multiple other conspiracy theories (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/guide-right-wing-media-coronavirus-reactions-and-conspiracy-theories) about the coronavirus have circulated (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/right-wing-media-figures-spread-empty-hospitals-theory-downplay-threat) on social (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/qanon-conspiracy-theory-post-about-coronavirus-spreading-social-media) media (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/06/tech/5g-coronavirus-conspiracy/index.html), including others about Gates and the virus (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/qanon-supporters-and-anti-vaxxers-are-spreading-a-hoax-that).

https://www.ecowatch.com/coronavirus-conspiracy-video-plandemic-2645951410.html

facebook, YouTube and Vimeo are among the companies scrambling to remove a coronavirus conspiracy video called 'Plandemic,'as The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/07/plandemic-youtube-facebook-vimeo-remove/) reported.

The widely circulated video makes unsubstantiated medical claims about the coronavirus and it features Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist and activist in the anti-vaccine campaign.

In the video Mikovits, who has said Dr. Anthony Fauci should be charged with treason, vociferously criticized the nation's leading infectious disease doctor and also suggested the virus had been engineered, saying it wasn't a "natural occurrence." As CNET (https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-youtube-and-twitter-grapple-with-viral-plandemic-conspiracy-video/) reported, scientists widely believe the virus jumped from animals to human beings (https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theories-claim-new-coronavirus-was-bioengineered/), and theU.S. intelligence community took the unusual step of publicly saying it believed the virus wasn't "manmade or genetically modified (https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2112-intelligence-community-statement-on-origins-of-covid-19)."

ref

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/07/plandemic-video-judy-mikovits/

no lnx twt

a video about the coronavirus featuring a well-known vaccine conspiracist is spreading like wildfire on social media this week, even as platforms talk tough about misinformation in the midst of the pandemic.

In the professionally-produced video, a solemn interviewer named Mikki Willis interviews Judy Mikovits, a figure best known for her anti-vaccine activism in recent years. The video touches on a number of topics favored among online conspiracists at the moment, filtering most of them through the lens that vaccines are a money-making enterprise that causes medical harm.

The video took off mid-week after first being posted to Vimeo and YouTube on May 4. From those sites, it traveled to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter where it circulated much more widely, racking up millions of views. Finding the video is currently trivial across social platforms, where it’s been reposted widely, sometimes with its title removed or reworded to make it more difficult to detect by AI moderation.

According to Twitter, tweets by Mikovits apparently don’t violate the platform’s rules around COVID-19 misinformation, but it has marked the video’s URL as “unsafe” and blocked the related hashtags “#PlagueOfCorruption and #Plandemicmovie. The company also hasn’t found evidence that her account is being amplified as part of a coordinated campaign.

Update: On Friday, Twitterclarified to TechCrunch that the company is assessing individual clips from the video when they are shared to Twitter in order to determine if the snippets violate the platform’s rules. The company will also add a warning label to links on Twitter to the full video hosted elsewhere. Twitter is choosing not to remove these links across the board as it says many users include links as context when disputing the video’s claims.

Over on Facebook, the video indeed runs afoul of the platform’s coronavirus and health misinformation rules—but it’s still very easy to find. For this story, I was able to locate a copy of the full video within seconds and at the time of writing Instagram’s #plandemic hashtag was well-populated with long clips from the video and even suggestions for related hashtags like #coronahoax. Facebook is currently working to stem the video’s spread, but it’s already collected millions of views in a short time.

On YouTube, a search for “Plandemic” mostly pulls up content debunking the video’s many false claims, but plenty of clips from the video itself still make the first wave of search results.

The video itself is a hodgepodge of popular false COVID-10 conspiracies already circulating online, scientifically unsound anti-vaccine talking points and claims of persecution.

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.

In the video, Mikovits accuses White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci of suppressing treatments like hydroxychloroquine—falsely touted by President Trump as a likely cure for the virus. While her claims appear to have landed at the perfect opportunistic moment, her beef with Fauci is actually longstanding. As Buzzfeed reported,in a book she wrote six years ago, Mikovits accused Dr. Fauci of banning her from the NIH’s facilities—an event Fauci himself was not familiar with.

Mikovits also touches on a popular web of conspiracy theories fixated on the idea Bill Gates is somehow implicated in causing the pandemic to profit off the eventual vaccine and makes the unfounded claim that “it’s very clear this virus was manipulated and studied in the laboratory.”

In other interviews, Mikovits has suggested that face masks pose a danger because they can “activate” the virus in the wearer. In the “Plandemic” clip, Mikovits also makes the unscientific claim that beaches should not have been closed due to “healing microbes in the saltwater” and “sequences” in the sand that protect against the coronavirus.

To the uninformed viewer, Mikovits might appear to ably address scientific-sounding topics, but her own scientific credentials are extremely dubious. In 2009, Mikovits authored a study on chronic fatigue syndrome that was retracted by the journal Science two years later when an audit found “evidence of poor quality control” in the experiment and the results could not be replicated in subsequent studies. That event and her subsequent firing from a research institute appear to have kicked off her more recent turn as an anti-vaccine crusader, conspiracist and author.

With “Plandemic,” Mikovits seems to have positioned herself successfully for relevance in the pandemic’s information vacuum—her book sales have even soared on Amazon. Toward the end of the clip, her interviewer even cannily sets up a future outrage cycle at the inevitable crackdown from social media platforms, where the video flouts rules ostensibly banning harmful health conspiracies like the ones it contains.

“It’s other people shutting down other citizens and the big tech platforms follow suit and they shut everything down,” Willis says with steely concern. “There is no dissenting voices allowed any more in this free country.”

As we’ve reported previously, the coronavirus crisis is fertile ground for conspiracy theories and potentially lethal misinformation— a fact that the “Plandemic” video’s apparent mainstream crossover success demonstrates. Widespread uncertainty and fear is a powerful thing, capable of breathing new life into debunked ideas that would have otherwise kept collecting dust in conspiracist backwaters, where they belong.

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nyt

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Bill Gates, at Odds With Trump on Virus, Becomes a Right-Wing Target

The Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist has been attacked with falsehoods that he created the coronavirus and wants to profit from it.

By Daisuke Wakabayashi, Davey Alba and Marc Tracy

April 17, 2020

In a 2015 speech, Bill Gates warned that the greatest risk to humanity was not nuclear war but an infectious virus that could threaten the lives of millions of people.

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That speech has resurfaced in recent weeks with 25 million new views on YouTube — but not in the way that Mr. Gates probably intended. Anti-vaccinators, members of the conspiracy group QAnon and right-wing pundits have instead seized on the video as evidence that one of the world’s richest men planned to use a pandemic to wrest control of the global health system.

Mr. Gates, 64, the Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist, has now become the star of an explosion of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak. In posts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, he is being falsely portrayed as the creator of Covid-19, as a profiteer from a virus vaccine, and as part of a dastardly plot to use the illness to cull or surveil the global population.

The wild claims have gained traction with conservative pundits like Laura Ingraham and anti-vaccinators such asRobert F. Kennedy Jr. as Mr. Gates has emerged as a vocal counterweight to President Trump on the coronavirus. For weeks, Mr. Gates has appeared on TV, on op-ed pages and in Reddit forums calling for stay-at-home policies, expanded testing and vaccine development. And without naming Mr. Trump, he has criticized the president’s policies, including this week’s move to cut funding to the World Health Organization.

Misinformation about Mr. Gates is now the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods tracked by Zignal Labs, a media analysis company. The misinformation includes more than 16,000 posts on Facebook this year about Mr. Gates and the virus that were liked and commented on nearly 900,000 times, according to a New York Times analysis. On YouTube, the 10 most popular videos spreading lies about Mr. Gates posted in March and April were viewed almost five million times.

Mr. Gates, who is worth more than $100 billion, has effectively assumed the role occupied by George Soros, the billionaire financier and Democratic donor who has been a villain for the right. That makes Mr. Gates the latest individual — along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading U.S. infectious disease expert — to be ensnared in the flow of right-wing punditry that has denigrated those who appear at odds with Mr. Trump on the virus.

“Bill Gates is easily transformed into a health-related meme and figure because he’s so well known,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who teaches digital ethics. “He’s able to function as kind of an abstract boogeyman.”

Especially since Mr. Gates has sharpened his comments about the White House’s handling of the coronavirus in recent weeks.

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“There’s no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus,” he wrote in an opinion column in The Washington Post on March 31. “The choices we and our leaders make now will have an enormous impact on how soon case numbers start to go down, how long the economy remains shut down and how many Americans will have to bury a loved one because of Covid-19.”

[ImageIn a 2015 talk, Bill Gates said an infectious virus could be the greatest threat to humanity.

In a 2015 talk, Bill Gates said an infectious virus could be the greatest threat to humanity.Credit...Ted]

Mark Suzman, chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Gates’s main philanthropic vehicle, said it was “distressing that there are people spreading misinformation when we should all be looking for ways to collaborate and save lives.”

Through a representative, Mr. Gates declined to be interviewed.

The conspiracy theories about Mr. Gates may particularly damage what people think about a future coronavirus vaccine, said Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, an organization that fights online disinformation. She said the narratives “have the potential to kick off coordinated and sophisticated online campaigns that turn people against taking a virus vaccine.”

[Latest Updates: Economy

Tesla’s plans to reopen its California factory are not in compliance with a local health order.

April’s job losses highlight the depth of the pandemic’s devastation.

...]

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, which also owns Instagram, said they were fighting coronavirus misinformation.

Mr. Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and built it into a software behemoth, has largely devoted his time to philanthropic endeavors since he stepped back from the company in 2008. As of 2018, the Gates Foundation had a $46.8 billion endowment, making it one of the world’s largest private charitable organizations.

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Thefoundation has worked to distribute vaccines in developing countries, advocated family planning through greater use of contraceptives andfunded the development of genetically modified crops.Those efforts have prompted unfounded accusations that Mr. Gates was hurting the world’s poor with unnecessary drugs and harmful crops while trying to suppress the global population.

His disdain for Mr. Trump, whom he has met several times, has also become public.In 2018, footage surfaced of Mr. Gates recounting how Mr. Trump needed help distinguishing H.I.V., which refers to the human immunodeficiency virus and causes AIDS, from HPV, which is the human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted infection.

“Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between H.I.V. and HPV, so I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other,” Mr. Gates said to laughter in comments to his foundation.

In January, when the coronavirus began spreading, the Gates Foundation committed $10 million to helping medical workers in China and Africa. In February, Mr. Gates weighed in on the illness, warning in The New England Journal of Medicine that Covid-19 was behaving like a once-a-century pathogen.

In addition to writing the Washington Post op-ed, he called for more and equitable testing in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session last month.This month, Mr. Gates appeared on “The Daily Show” and said his foundation would fund factories for the seven most promising potential vaccines.

On Wednesday, the Gates Foundation said it would commit $250 million — up from an earlier pledge of $100 million — to slow the disease’s spread.

By then, falsehoods about Mr. Gates had taken off. The first mention of a baseless conspiracy connecting him to the outbreak was on Jan. 21, according to the Times analysis. That was when a YouTube personality linked to QAnon suggested on Twitter that Mr. Gates had foreknowledge of the pandemic. The tweet was based on a coronavirus-related patent from the Pirbright Institute, a British group that received funding from the Gates Foundation.

[Image

Mr. Gates at Trump Tower in New York in 2016. He has met President Trump several times.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times]

The patent was not for Covid-19; it was connected to a potential vaccine for a different coronavirus that affects poultry. But two days later, the conspiracy website Infowars inaccurately said the patent was for “the deadly virus.”

The idea spread. From February to April, conspiracy theories involving Mr. Gates and the virus were mentioned 1.2 million times on social media and television broadcasts, according to Zignal Labs. That was 33 percent more often, it said, than the next-largest conspiracy theory: that 5G radio waves cause people to succumb to Covid-19.

Some of the theories tapped into Mr. Gates’s acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who was convicted of sex trafficking and committed suicide, saying a global elite had banded together to create the coronavirus.

In other theories, internet trolls twisted comments that Mr. Gates had made. In one, trolls said Mr. Gates, who had raised the idea of “digital certificates” to confirm who had the virus, wanted to surveil the population with microchip vaccination implants.

By April, false Gates conspiracy theories peaked at 18,000 mentions a day, Zignal Labs said.

The theories were amplified by people such as Mr. Kennedy, a son of former Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who campaigns against vaccines as a director of the Children’s Health Defense network. On his Instagram page, Mr. Kennedy has said Mr. Gates pushes vaccines to feed his other business interests.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy posted a cartoon of a smiling Mr. Gates with a syringe and a caption: “Your Body, my choice.”

Mr. Kennedy, whose Instagram followers have doubled to more than 285,000 since March, said in an interview that he was telling the truth about the “terrible damage” that Mr. Gates had inflicted on the world with vaccines.

In an April 7 tweet, Ms. Ingraham, a Fox News host, shared a conspiracy theory about nefarious motives behind Mr. Gates’s call to track and identify who had received a Covid-19 vaccine. “Digitally tracking Americans’ every move has been a dream of the globalists for years,” she wrote.

Ms. Ingraham did not respond to a request for comment.

And Roger J. Stone Jr., the Trump confidant who was sentenced this year to 40 months in prison for felonies related to the 2016 Trump campaign, said in a radio interview this week reported by The New York Post that whether Mr. Gates “played some role in the creation and spread of this virus is open for vigorous debate.”

On Wednesday, after Mr. Gates said pulling funding to the World Health Organization was ill advised, the online reaction was swift. (The Gates Foundation funds the organization.)

One anti-vaccinator posted a poster of the movie “Kill Bill” on Instagram that read “Kill Bill Gates” and called for people to flood the comments on Mr. Gates’s Instagram account.

That same day, when Mr. Gates posted his thanks to health care workers, it received over 14,000 comments. One read: “This virus is a big, big lie.”

Michael H. Keller contributed reporting. Ben Decker contributed research.

see oann kris rouz

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-film-attacking-vaccines-has-racked-million-views

no vid/pix

A film featuring a known anti-vaxxer pushing conspiracy theories and false claims about the novel coronavirus, including attacking vaccines, has racked up more than 9 million views on YouTube. Additionally, the video and its reuploads have tallied more than 16 million Facebook engagements. The spread of the film -- called “Plandemic” -- through reuploads on YouTube shows the platform’s continuing issues with enforcing its policies against coronavirus misinformation during this public health crisis.

In March, as the disease spread throughout the United States, YouTube wrote (https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2020/03/coronavirus-update-on-creator-support.html) that it had “worked to prevent misinformation associated with the spread of the virus” and would “quickly remove videos that violate our policies when they are flagged, including those that discourage people from seeking medical treatment or claim harmful substances have health benefits.”

Yet despite that promise -- and despite YouTube’s attempts to take the video down for violating its policies (https://twitter.com/donie/status/1258478735411552257) -- “Plandemic” has gone viral on the platform, and has been going viral on Facebook and even trending on Twitter (https://twitter.com/noUpside/status/1258186894313058304). In the video, a filmmaker named Mikki Willis (https://heavy.com/news/2020/05/mikki-willis/) interviews Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former chronic fatigue researcher whose claims have been retracted (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/scientist-vaccine-jailed/) by a scientific journal and who was arrested for “allegedly stealing equipment belonging to the Institute that fired her.”

Mikovits has since become popular in anti-vaxx circles -- she attended (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870266) a recent major anti-vaxx summit (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/05/05/anti-vaxxers-wakefield-coronavirus-vaccine/) -- and has also become involved (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxevj5/the-coronavirus-truthers-dont-believe-in-public-health) in efforts to have Dr. Anthony Fauci fired as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force (she relitigated her claims against him, which he has denied (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/scientist-vaccine-jailed/), in the film).

The film makes multiple false and misleading (https://www.truthorfiction.com/researcher-behind-retracted-paper-launches-anti-fauci-campaign/) claims about the coronavirus and public health. Mikovits argues that mandatory coronavirus vaccines will (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870271) “kill millions as they already have with their vaccines,” and that (https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/no-evidence-that-flu-shot-increases-risk-of-covid-19/) “flu vaccines increase the odds by 36% of getting COVID-19” (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870276) and are part of a plot against what Willis calls “natural remedies” for the virus. Mikovits also asserts that it’s “insanity” (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870286) to close beaches because somehow the sand and “healing microbes in the ocean” will actually help treat the virus. She also touts (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870296) anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the virus, despite multiple studies casting doubt (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-news-mentions-hydroxychloroquine-have-significantly-dropped) on its use, and she and the film push (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870301) the false (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/right-wing-media-suggested-covid-19-fatalities-were-overcounted-new-data) claim that the death count from COVID-19 is being inflated. To push that claim the film includes footage of two California doctors pushing the claim in a video that YouTube has already removed (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-facebook-split-removal-doctors-viral-coronavirus-videos-n1195276) for violating the platform’s rules. The film also falsely suggests (https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1258474256460996613) that wearing a mask could be harmful.

A review by Media Matters found dozens of reuploads of the film in addition to Willis’ original upload on May 4 (including one (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870366) from a major supporter of (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/qanon-grifter-dustin-nemos-was-selling-colloidal-silver-supposed-coronavirus) the QAnon conspiracy theory (https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/fbi-calls-qanon-domestic-terror-threat-trump-has-amplified-qanon-supporters-twitter-more-20)), 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 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870306) hundreds of thousands of views on their own....

Much of the video’s YouTube virality is likely thanks to Facebook, where Media Matters’ review also found the videos receiving more than 16 million Facebook engagements (Facebook on May 7 announced (https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1258473974603763713) that it would ban shares of the film). Some of the uploads of the video have received (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870311) millions (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870316) of Facebook (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870321) engagements (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870331) on their own. Many of the engagements have come from Facebook groups, including anti-vaxx (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870336) groups, groups demanding (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870361) an end to stay-at-home orders, and groups (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870346) promoting (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870356) the QAnon conspiracy theory (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/qanon-conspiracy-theory-post-about-coronavirus-spreading-social-media).

...

The film has also spread on Instagram (https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1258430521690017792), which is owned by Facebook.

The videos also received tens of thousands of shares on Twitter (where the platform has blocked (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/07/facebook-youtube-struggling-to-remove-plandemic-conspiracy-video.html) some hashtags promoting the film), including from (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870376) Newsmax host and coronavirus grifter Wayne Allyn Root (https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmax-host-wayne-allyn-root-endorses-scammy-silver-product-which-can-supposedly-kill); Darla Shine, the wife of former Fox News executive Bill Shine (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/us/politics/bill-shine-resigns.html), who is working on President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign; and some widely followed QAnon accounts (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3870381).

...The video’s spread is just the latest instance in YouTube’s serious struggle to contain (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/03/youtube-coronavirus-treatments-profit-misinformation) coronavirus (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/youtube-anthony-fauci-deep-state-coronavirus) misinformation (https://www.buzzfeed.com/joeydurso/youtube-coronavirus-misinformation) on its platform (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news) -- including reuploads (https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/youtube-took-down-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-video-violating-its-rules-its) -- a problem that continues to be compounded (https://twitter.com/AlKapDC/status/1251240680996900868)by its spread on Facebook (https://twitter.com/AlKapDC/status/1252329080286052352).

NEW

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-trump-may-already-be-discrediting-a-covid-19-vaccination/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/anti-vaxxers-are-latching-onto-the-coronavirus-pandemic-to-bolster-their-movement

no lnx...