A coronavirus conspiracy video 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 int…

A coronavirus conspiracy video 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 its 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 dont violate the platforms rules around COVID-19 misinformation, but it has marked the videos URL as unsafe and blocked the related hashtags #PlagueOfCorruption and #Plandemicmovie. The company also hasnt found evidence that her account is being amplified as part of a coordinated campaign.
Over on Facebook, the video indeed runs afoul of the platforms coronavirus and health misinformation rulesbut its 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 Instagrams #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 videos spread, but its already collected millions of views in a short time.
On YouTube, a search for Plandemic mostly pulls up content debunking the videos 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 shes 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 Dr. Anthony Fauci of suppressing treatments like hydroxychloroquinefalsely 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 NIHs facilitiesan 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 its 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 vacuumher 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.
Its 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 weve reported previously, the coronavirus crisis is fertile ground for conspiracy theories and potentially lethal misinformation a fact that the Plandemic videos 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.