• When were Covid conspiracy theories born?
• Were any of the original Covid conspiracy theories plausible?
• Why are conspiracy theories so seductive?
A few months after the start of the pandemic, on May 4, 2020, a slickly made, Hollywood-style film called Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 aired on several social media outlets. Through brooding music and black-and-white footage, the film introduced the conspiracies that would soon cause people to refuse to wear masks, social distance, test, isolate, quarantine, or receive a Covid vaccine. Plandemic was a case study in social engineering.
The movie, which cost only $2,000 to make, centered on two people: Mikki Willis, a little known filmmaker who would later speak at the January 6 insurrection, and Dr. Judy Mikovits, a biochemist.
Willis, a 52-year-old former model and actor, had directed a low-budget indie film called Shoe Shine Boys. Before Plandemic, he had produced short films on yoga and meditation, a public service announcement on composting, and a documentary about a man who had found a cursed bone in an ancient Maya burial chamber only to be diagnosed months later with bone cancer. (Coincidence? Yes. That’s what coincidence is.)
The film opened with an ominous warning: “Now, as the fate of nations hangs in the balance, Mikovits is naming names of those behind the plague of corruption that places all human life in danger.” Mikovits then explained that, far from a random act of nature, the Covid pandemic was a coordinated effort by government officials, public health agencies, pharmaceutical executives, evil scientists, billionaires like Bill Gates, and the medical establishment, all of which were willing to open Pandora’s box to pad their bank accounts.
The narrator described Judy Mikovits as “one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation [after she] published a blockbuster article in the journal Science [that] sent shock waves through the scientific community.” Mikovits, however, who would soon become the birth mother of Covid conspiracy theories, wasn’t what she appeared to be.
Judy Mikovits began her career in 1988 as a laboratory technician at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1991, she received her Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from George Washington University. After leaving Bethesda, Mikovits moved to California, where she served drinks at a yacht club before heading a privately funded research clinic in Reno, Nevada, called the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease. Scientists at Whittemore were committed to finding the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, a devastating condition of unknown origin.
In 2009, in a paper published in the prestigious journal Science, Mikovits claimed to have found it: People with chronic fatigue syndrome were infected with a mouse retrovirus. Retroviruses are common; most, except for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which is the cause of AIDS, are benign. Mikovits believed that she had now discovered another disease caused by a retrovirus. At last, a seeming ray of hope for patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (many of whom began taking potentially dangerous antiviral medications, like those that treat AIDS).
The narrator of Plandemic was right to claim that Mikovits’s discovery had sent shock waves through the medical community. The shock, however, was short-lived. Two years later, in 2011, the editors of Science retracted the paper, stating that “multiple laboratories, including those of the original authors, have failed to reliably detect the mouse retrovirus in chronic fatigue syndrome patients. In addition, there is evidence of poor quality control in several specific experiments.” In other words, Judy Mikovits’s laboratory had unknowingly contaminated blood samples from patients with chronic fatigue syndrome with a mouse retrovirus. This was a preventable laboratory error and explained why no one else could replicate what she had found. Judy Mikovits’s career as a scientist was over. She hasn’t published another scientific paper since then.
Mikovits cried foul, refusing to sign the retraction notice in Science. To put an end to the controversy, the National Institutes of Health provided $2.3 million to Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University (who would later serve as chief medical adviser for the movie Contagion), to answer the question once and for all. Lipkin’s laboratory carefully examined 300 samples of blood from patients with chronic fatigue syndrome in a study that Mikovits agreed would provide “the definitive answer.” Lipkin couldn’t find what Mikovits had found; mouse retroviruses were not a human pathogen. Nonetheless, Mikovits, who had previously agreed to abide by Ian Lipkin’s findings, refused to accept them.
The same year that the editors of Science retracted the paper, Annette Whittemore, director of the Whittemore Peterson Institute, fired Judy Mikovits; then Mikovits was arrested on allegations of theft from the institute. The district attorney in Washoe County, Nevada, had charged Mikovits with “possession of stolen property and unlawful taking of computer data, equipment, supplies and other computer-related property.” Mikovits fled from Reno, Nevada, to Ventura County, California, where she was arrested as a fugitive and jailed for five days (all criminal charges were eventually dropped).
At this point, Judy Mikovits could have chosen one of two paths. She could have agreed that her laboratory had made a mistake and moved on. She wouldn’t have been the first scientist to have published a paper that was wrong and to apologize for the error; in fact, many excellent scientists have done exactly that. Or she could have held fast to the notion that she was right and that everyone else was wrong. Mikovits chose the second path, and a conspiracy theorist was born. This is the person who would later “educate” millions of Americans about Covid and the Covid vaccines.
Plandemic made its debut nine years after Judy Mikovits’s Science paper had been retracted. By this time, Mikovits had claimed that mouse retroviruses not only caused chronic fatigue syndrome; they also caused autism, lymphoma, and prostate cancer. Mikovits also tried to rewrite history, arguing in Plandemic that she “was held in jail with no charges,” that the material removed from the Whittemore Peterson Institute had been planted, that a police SWAT team had executed a nighttime raid on her home, and that Anthony Fauci had “threatened her with arrest if she visited the National Institutes of Health to participate in a study to validate her chronic fatigue syndrome research.” “I have no idea what she is talking about,” said Dr. Fauci.
Four months after SARS-CoV-2 entered the United States and seven months before a vaccine to prevent it became available, Plandemic made its debut. Simply put, Judy Mikovits told millions of Americans exactly what they wanted to hear.
Plandemic offered many theories about Covid and Covid vaccines—all of which, as time would tell, were wrong.
Regarding the origin of the virus, Mikovits said, “The virus was manipulated at North Carolina laboratories, Fort Detrick, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the Wuhan laboratory. It is very clear that it was manipulated. If it was a natural occurrence, it would take up to 800 years to occur.” As described in chapter 1, SARS-CoV-2 was a product of nature, not man. And it occurred in the blink of an eye.
Regarding Covid cures, Mikovits said, “the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine is the most effective medication to treat Covid-19 … but they keep it from people.” As we’ll see in the next chapter, far from keeping it from people, the FDA briefly authorized hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid before realizing that it didn’t work and was dangerous.
Regarding masks, Mikovits said, “Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus.” SARS-CoV-2 is already activated; it doesn’t need a mask to help it become more devastating. On the contrary, because the virus is contained in small droplets in the nose and mouth, masks—which have a pore size much smaller than the droplets—dramatically reduce acquisition and spread of the virus. Nonetheless, Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas, feared that he had developed Covid because he had worn a mask.
Regarding vaccines as a cause of the Covid pandemic, Mikovits said, “If you’ve ever had the flu vaccine, you were injected with coronaviruses.” Influenza vaccines don’t contain coronaviruses. The FDA has strict protocols requiring companies to provide extensive evidence that no extraneous viruses, viral fragments, or viral genes are contained in vaccines. Also, Mikovits contradicted herself when she said that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab in Wuhan while at the same time arguing that it had contaminated influenza vaccines and that masks activate it. Which was it? Mikovits’s strategy was well worn. Just throw a lot of things up against the wall and hope that something sticks.
Regarding a Covid vaccine, Mikovits said, “There is no vaccine currently on the schedule for any RNA virus that works.” This statement alone told you everything you needed to know about Judy Mikovits, who had now become a full-fledged science denialist and anti-vaccine activist.
Mikovits claimed that because SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus—which is true—it would be virtually impossible to make a successful vaccine—which isn’t true.
Since the 1930s, many successful vaccines against RNA viruses have been made. For example, the yellow fever vaccine virtually eliminated a disease from the United States and Europe that had once killed 10 percent of Philadelphia’s population. Before vaccines, polio caused 30,000 cases of paralysis and 1,500 deaths every year in the United States; measles caused 50,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths; mumps caused 6,000 children to lose their sense of hearing, giving birth to many schools for the deaf; rubella (German measles) infections during pregnancy caused 20,000 children to be born blind and deaf with severe heart defects; and rotavirus caused 75,000 hospitalizations and 60 deaths from dehydration and caused hundreds of deaths every day in the developing world. All these diseases are caused by RNA viruses. And all have been tamed by vaccines.
Regarding the safety of the soon-to-be-released Covid vaccines, Mikovits claimed that companies making the vaccines will “kill millions, as they already have, with their [other] vaccines.” By June 2023, more than 13 billion doses of Covid vaccines had been administered in more than 180 countries to 70 percent of the world’s population. During that time, SARS-CoV-2 had killed more than seven million people; almost all those deaths occurred in people who had never been vaccinated. In the United States alone, Covid vaccines had saved the lives of at least three million people. Covid has killed millions of people, not the Covid vaccine.
Regarding efforts early in the pandemic to close the beaches, Mikovits said, “Why would you close the beach? You’ve got healing microbes in the ocean in the salt water. That’s insanity.” Healing bacteria in the ocean don’t exist. Although some viruses (called bacteriophages) can kill bacteria, it doesn’t work the other way around. Bacteria don’t kill viruses.
Regarding claims of personal freedom, Mikovits said, “If we don’t stop this now, we can not only forget our republic and our freedom, but we can forget humanity because we’ll be killed by this agenda.” Mikovits was firmly in the camp that our country, founded on individual rights and freedoms, should allow people to catch and transmit a potentially fatal virus. Efforts to counter public health measures would soon become a rallying cry for anti-vaccine activists and the political Right.
On the morning of May 5, 2020, about 24 hours after Plandemic had debuted on Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo, a loose, alt-right group called QAnon sent the film to its 25,000 members with the headline, “Exclusive Content, Must Watch.” Within hours, 1,700 people had shared the video on their Facebook pages. On the evening of May 5, Plandemic appeared on a Facebook page called Reopen Alabama, which included 36,000 members who wanted to lift shelter-in-place orders. Dozens of other Reopen America groups shared the link. More powerful engines of disinformation, such as Collective Action Against Bill Gates, Fall of the Cabal, and Truth Revolution, joined in. Inspired by Plandemic, protesters at one anti-vaccine rally shouted, “Arrest Bill Gates.”
The next day, on May 6, 2020, Plandemic ripped into the mainstream and exploded. Within the week, more than eight million people had seen it on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (now called X), and Instagram. While Plandemic was debuting on Facebook, Taylor Swift announced that she would air her City of Lover concert on television; the cast of The Office announced that it would reunite for an 18-minute Zoom wedding; and the Pentagon posted three videos of unexplained “aerial phenomenon.” None of these blockbuster cultural events went as viral as Plandemic, which apparently was more interesting than alien invasions or Taylor Swift. Celebrities joined in. Comedians Darren Knight and Larry the Cable Guy, mixed martial arts champions Tito Ortiz and Alex Reid, NFL stars, and Instagram influencers all promoted the theories Judy Mikovits spawned.
By the end of May 2020, Mikovits’s book, Plague of Corruption, which had been published the month before, was #1 on Amazon, beating out Stephenie Meyer’s addition to her highly successful Twilight series. “It pays to be a Covid-19 conspiracy theorist,” wrote David Gorski, editor of the blog Science-Based Medicine. “Before she glommed onto Covid-19, she was a second- or third-string anti-vaccine crank. And now look!”
Judy Mikovits and Mikki Willis had carved order out of chaos. While we yearned to understand the source of the virus, Mikovits had provided one (the Wuhan Institute of Virology). While we yearned for a treatment for Covid, Mikovits had offered a readily available drug (hydroxychloroquine). While we yearned to shed our masks, Mikovits told us why it was OK to throw them away (masks activate the virus). While we yearned to go back to the beaches, Mikovits gave us a reason to open them (healing microbes in the ocean cure Covid). While we yearned for someone to blame, Mikovits gave us villains (Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and evil scientists in the United States and China).
Years later, researchers would also carve order out of chaos. But the order created by scientific discoveries is much harder earned, much more difficult to understand, and much longer in coming. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, are easy to understand and only take a few minutes to create and disseminate. Which is why they will never die.
In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been surprising that new, deadly viruses give birth to conspiracy theories. When human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was first identified in 1981, many wondered whether the virus had been created in a laboratory. One of the more outrageous theories at the time was that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had created HIV as a weapon, later testing it in unsuspecting populations in Haiti and Africa, where the experiment had gotten out of control. Indeed, Wangari Maathai, an ecologist in Kenya, who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize, responded to this conspiracy theory at the time saying, “Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? That makes me suspicious … I have always thought that it is important to tell people the truth, but I guess there is some truth that must not be exposed.”
In 2010, about 30 years after HIV had entered the United States, scientists showed that a related virus, called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which was first detected in chimps, had evolved into HIV. The evolution of SIV into HIV most likely occurred in Cameroon in the 1930s. Conspiracy theories about lab leaks and the CIA eventually faded away. But it took decades to determine the true origin of the AIDS virus, allowing these theories to flourish.
By the MIDDLE OF 2020, thousands of people were dying from Covid every day. The world was desperate for a cure; surely, there must be something available. Something that was being used to treat another disease, but that could also work for this new scourge. Something that was readily available on pharmacy shelves or hospital formularies.
As it turned out, something was available in the early days of the pandemic—something that had been available for more than a hundred years. But it wasn’t what everyone was talking about. And it planted the early seeds of distrust in public health agencies—a distrust that would only grow over time.