Fact-checking ‘Plandemic’: A documentary full of false conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus

If you’ve been on social media in the past two days, there’s a good chance you’ve seen someone share "Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19," a 26-minute video about the coronavirus pandemic.

The video is a deep dive into conspiracy theories about COVID-19, public health and the pharmaceutical industry. It discusses Dr. Anthony Fauci’s efforts to combat the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and Bill Gates’ support of vaccination efforts around the world.

The film was produced by Elevate, a California production company run by Mikki Willis, who has more than 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. The video is billed as part one of an upcoming documentary.

Many of Willis’ videos highlight conspiracy theories. In one clip, Willis’ young son says Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. In another, Willis floats a debunked conspiracy that the coronavirus was "intentionally released."

In "Plandemic," Willis interviews Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former scientist at the National Cancer Institute. Mikovits, before her work was discredited, was lauded in the late 2000s for her research on chronic fatigue syndrome. Mikovits makes several claims that are either unsupported or outright false.

Several readers asked us to look into Willis’ documentary. Copies of the film have been removed from YouTube and Facebook for violating the platforms’ community guidelines, but they still received tens of millions of views.

This is inaccurate spin about Mikovits’ past legal problems. She was charged in 2011 with stealing computer data and related property from her former employer.

The Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, Nevada, fired Mikovits in September 2011 as research director after her study linking a mouse retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome was discredited and retracted by Science, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. In November 2011, the district attorney in Washoe County, Nevada, filed a criminal complaint against Mikovits for allegedly stealing computer data, notebooks and other property from the institute.

Mikovits was briefly jailed in California on criminal charges. On June 11, 2012, the district attorney’s office filed a petition to dismiss the charges without prejudice.

Mikovits says in "Plandemic" that the notebooks were "planted" in her house. She also alleged that the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases "paid off" investigators at the direction of Fauci, the director of the agency.

There is no evidence to support either claim. We reached out to the National Institutes of Health, which houses the NIAID, for a comment.

"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," a spokesperson said in a statement. "We are not engaging in tactics by some seeking to derail our efforts."

Scientists say it’s not. The genetic structure of the novel coronavirus rules out laboratory manipulation.

A Nature article published March 17 says the genetic makeup of the coronavirus, documented by researchers from several public health organizations, does not indicate it was altered. Instead, scientists have two plausible explanations for the origin of the virus: natural selection in an animal host, or natural selection in humans after the virus jumped from animals.

"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," the article reads.

That finding does not rule out the possibility that Chinese researchers were studying the virus in a lab when it managed to spread outside the lab, although the government there has denied that.

‘This occurred from SARS 1 within a decade — that’s not naturally occurring’

This is a wrong explanation for the source of the novel coronavirus. The virus that causes COVID-19 is a new disease — it’s not derived from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

The novel coronavirus is similar to SARS in some respects. Both are human coronaviruses that originated in bats, cause respiratory illness and spread through coughs and sneezes.

But the viruses only have a 79% genetic similarity, according to researchers. The novel coronavirus is more genetically similar to other bat-derived coronaviruses than SARS.

The federal government is giving more money to hospitals that treat coronavirus patients. But there is no indication that hospitals are over-identifying COVID-10 patients as having COVID-19 — if anything, evidence suggests the illness is being underdiagnosed.

Medicare pays hospitals a set amount of money for the treatment of certain diagnoses, regardless of what the treatment actually costs. Medicare has determined that a hospital gets $13,000 if a COVID-19 patient on Medicare is admitted and $39,000 if the patient goes on a ventilator.

In addition, Medicare will pay hospitals a 20% "add-on" for COVID-19 patients. That’s a result of the CARES Act, the largest of the three federal stimulus laws enacted in response to the coronavirus, which was signed into law March 27.

Experts previously told PolitiFact that Congress included the add-on in the CARES Act because hospitals have lost revenue from routine care and elective surgeries. It is unlikely that physicians would falsify the data, as there are strict policies for reporting.

This is unproven. There is no cure or vaccine for SARS or the novel coronavirus.

While some studies have found that hydroxychloroquine could mitigate some of the symptoms associated with COVID-19, other research has found no such effect. With more than 50 studies in the works, as well as an NIH clinical trial, it’s too soon to say whether the drug is a viable treatment for the coronavirus. (The most recent study, a large-scale study of nearly 1,400 New York-area patients with moderate to severe COVID-19, found that patients fared no better by taking hydroxychloroquine.)

Fauci tempered expectations for hydroxychloroquine during a March press conference after Trump touted the drug. And several states have restricted access to it given how little scientists know about how it affects the coronavirus.

In "Plandemic," Mikovits points to a study published in January in the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine. The study found that, among personnel in the U.S. Defense Department between 2017 and 2018, the odds of getting coronaviruses were greater for vaccinated officials than unvaccinated officials.

First of all, the study was conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic. And scientists have noted flaws in its experimental design; for example, the number of vaccinated subjects was more than twice as large as the number of unvaccinated subjects.

Finally, nowhere in the study do the authors say flu vaccines increased subjects’ odds of getting a coronavirus by 36%. That bogus claim was added to the study in a March 11 story from DisabledVeterans.org.

This is inaccurate. Similar claims have also been debunked by other fact-checkers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most flu vaccines in the United States protect against four different kinds of viruses: influenza A (H1N1), influenza A (H3N2), and two influenza B viruses. Others protect against three kinds of flu viruses.

There are no coronaviruses in the flu shot. And there are no human coronavirus vaccines.

There is no evidence to support this. We’re not sure what a "coronavirus expression" even is.

The CDC advises anyone who goes out in public to wear a mask. Since it can take up to 14 days for an infected person to exhibit symptoms, the goal is to prevent unwittingly spreading the coronavirus through coughs and sneezes.

Wearing a face mask prevents the spread of the coronavirus — it does not make people more susceptible to it.

"There is nothing about wearing a mask that would have any biologically relevant impact on viral activity," said Richard Peltier, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, in an email. "Wearing a mask simply catches the droplets before they reach our mouth or nose. It isn’t rocket science, and Dr. Mikovits should know that."

So, I am reading this fact check and it seems to be point for point confirming her points.. huh?

SO, I guess they are agreeing with her?

There is no evidence of admitted by the people she is charging of a huge earth shattering crime? Huh.. and the WHO didn’t approve her video either.. humm.. thats really an issue..

“Scientists say it’s not. The genetic structure of the novel coronavirus rules out laboratory manipulation.”

There, that is definitive proof!

Worst fact check ever.. but, consider the source.

You asked politely, and if this was purely politics I would save myself time and simply respond, if I were to respond, by saying “Get caught up.” But the subject requires background in molecular biology, so in the interest of being gracious, let’s start with a very short list of hundreds of backup references which are official or considered mostly credible:

1. Coronavirus has an ‘HIV-like mutation’ which helps it to attack human cells, scientists claim
https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/27/coronavirus-hiv-like-mutation-helps-attack-human-cells-scientists-claim-12314129/?ito=cbshare

==> Mutation? Or Insertion? <==

2. Cloaked similarity between HIV-1 and SARS-CoV suggests an anti-SARS strategy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC222911

3. Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier
The Coronavirus Is Man Made According to Luc Montagnier the Man Who Discovered HIV
https://www.gilmorehealth.com/chinese-coronavirus-is-a-man-made-virus-according-to-luc-montagnier-the-man-who-discovered-hiv/

Note the single most important piece of evidence supporting the above is the intensity, vehemence, rapidity with which the worldwide fake news media attacked the above sources and references (and there are hundreds of such reports supporting FOUR HIV insertions by CRISP technology of long sequence length not possible by natural evolutionary mutation, FOUR separate lengthy insertions are definitive evidence of an engineered virus). For example, hit pieces on Nobel Laureate Montagnier sprung out in full attack mode smearing him as having child-like dementia and so forth.

Note that Fauci was funding SARS/HIV weaponized virus research and was suspended from continuing his research, a deauthorization originating from Congress that covered all of the USA and its territories, so he diverted $3.7 million funds to the Wuhan Lab for continued research and development

And what was the fake news media reaction when the Fauci funds diversion to Wuhan was discovered?

“Trump funded Wuhan Lab Coronavus Development”

You see, during the Obama years, Fauci diverted $3 million of the $3.7 million to Wuhan. So fake news jumped on it and insisted $0.7 million occurred during the Trump presidency.

“See! Look! Trump did it too!”

Yes, early on in 2017, the Trump Administration allowed funding to continue to be diverted to the Wuhan Lab because they were not aware of what Fauci was doing. When they caught wind of Fauci’s duplicitous diversion, they cut him off.

> “But being manipulated ( i.e., designed on purpose in the lab ) and being accidentally released in a lab due to carelessness are two different things.”

The US Government (NSA) and surviving assets on the ground in China have proof that SARS-COV-2 was developed in the Wuhan Lab AND THERE IS EVIDENCE IT WAS DELIBERATELY RELEASED but the official line is that “it appears it may have been an accidental release.”

Why not just come out and say China launched a Bioterror attack?

WWIII.

It will/may come out later. For now it’s in JFK assassination conspiracy mode.

Good post.. but you need to add this to your list of articles..

https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748

This is a hell of a read.. eyes blurring.. dive into molecular biology.. and virus research but.. the payoff is that it explains just exactly what happened.

It comes to the conclusion that somehow RNA from three different species make up COVID19 and it just happens to be an almost exact match of the only other known sample of something like it which just happened to be being studied at the Wuhan lab.

But, why are they doing this research? And the Anti-vaxxers explain why, money.. to develop a vaccine that can be made “required” by governments and where the manufactures cannot be sued for any harm they do. This is why this particular video which anyone would have dismissed a year ago hits such a nerve.. because it is sniffing around this truth.

Yes the ‘Gain-Of-Function’ research is material evidence of substance weighing into proof.

Note that Dr. Judy Mikovits is not an ‘Anti-Vaxxer’ although she was smeared as such.

Dr. Mikovits favors vaccine research which is part of her work in Immunotherapy. She supports vaccines. What she’s doing is calling out the criminal elements among the Fauci group.

There’s an analogous activity that occurs in computer viruses in our smartphones and PCs. Computer viruses are planted by companies that sell/market virus removal software and services.

That’s what’s happening in the world of Dr. Mikovits. She saw what was happening and brought it to the attention of high ranking health officials.

And what did Fauci and gang do?

What did Obama/Brennan/Clapper/Comey/McCabe/Pelosi/Nadler/Schiff and on and on do when they realized Trump was going to expose them?

Same thing.

Psychological Projection.

A big part of the effort to discredit her relies upon the initial effort to discredit her that is very analogous to what we are seeing the Left screeching about Flynn... the set-up and take down are the evidence that it was justified.

The dispute was about her lab notes after she was dismissed. She said she was dismissed because she pointed out stuff people didn’t want known. And, frankly they had the power to discredit her work and having her notes would have been her only defense, and you see it all tumble out.

With less than 30% of these various academic studies being repeatable..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

The issue that her work wasn’t repeatable is the norm, not the outlier. But, the repeatability issue could just be an assertion.. because, they wanted her gone and blacklisted.

None of this stuff really matters that much.. but what does matter is the hints that it gives to look for stuff that isn’t fury and counter fury. And, this material brings much that clarifies the rest of the data on the table.

> "The issue that her work wasn’t repeatable is the norm, not the outlier."

Repeatability is a pillar of the scientific method. I know the principle well.

Looking at the characters of Fauci and his group, and the mountain of evidence growing, it is a certainty it was an assertion, a LIE regarding the disparaging and dismissal of her work.

When her notebooks are legally available to her, she can defend herself.

Until then, she receives the benefit of the doubt because of the proven disingenuous and duplicitous actions and statements of Anthony Fauci.

Offers Glowing Praise for Crooked Hillary Clinton in Leaked Wikileaks Email – Update: second letter surfaces

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/from-your-doctor-admirer-flashback-dr-fauci-offer-glowing-praise-for-crooked-hillary-clinton-in-leaked-wikileaks-email/

From: Cheryl Mills
To: Hillary Clinton
Date: 2013-01-23 11:21
Subject: TODAY'S PERFORMANCE
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439
Doc No. C05797268 Date: 12/31/2015
RELEASE IN
FULL
From: Mills, Cheryl D
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 6:21 PM
To:
Subject: FW: Today's performance
From your doctor admirer
From: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] [mailto:AFAUCI@niaid.nih.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 6:10 PM
To: Mills, Cheryl D
Subject: Today's performance
Cheryl:
Anyone who had any doubts about the Secretary's stamina and capability following her illness had those doubts washed away by today's performance before the Senate and the House. She faced extremely difficult circumstances at the Hearings and still she hit it right out of the park. Please tell her that we all love her and are very proud to know her.
Warm regards,
Tony
Anthony S. Fauci, MD
Director
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Building 31, Room 7A-03
31 Center Drive, MSC 2520
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD 20892-2520
Phone: (301) 496-2263
FAX: (301) 47-4409
E-mail: afauci

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/4379

There are tons more facts and evidence streaming in daily of Fauci's detestable character.

Believers have no obstruction to a clear view of the forces at work here.

You do good work.. keep it up.

Yea.. the repeatability crisis is kind of at the depth of much of the controversy we are coping with right now, as well as the bogus “science” that is actually conjecture spouted by an anointed talking head.

Shelter in place is clearly wrong, and yet.. at the cost of our economy we keep at it and everyone genuflects. This stupid virus dies outside and if you watched the thing on Trump’s visit to Texas.. they are saying Prisons, Meat Packing house and Nursing homes account for almost all of their cases. To weird to wrap your head around.. but they really do.. account for many. New Jersey almost 50% are Nursing home deaths.

SO why, when this is clear CLEAR.. in Texas.. are they still doing it????? Much less anywhere else.. it comes out of their mouths.. this is where the problem is.. then they attack it somewhere where it is not.

And Cuomo waking up to the fact that 60% of his admissions are comeing from folks sheltering in place.. and he is going to do more that? and Claim he is saving lives?

Does anyone even pretend to understand logic?

Well.. I am going to have to do something that folks rarely do here.

You are right, the masks a mostly useless. And, probably a hazard.

https://www.foxnews.com/health/cdc-now-says-coronavirus-does-not-spread-easily-via-contaminated-surfaces

As, Covid isn’t spread by contaminated surfaces.. the whole touching your face deal mostly dies.. and observation in the field shows that face mask wearers touch their face even more frequently then those who do not wear them.. shockingly.

There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation. The lethality of the virus is real as I’ve had people close to me in my community die from it before HCQ + Zinc was known to cure it.

However, what is not known is why some people react so severely and others don’t.

There are numerous reports of family members having the virus where one does not even develop a cough or anything whereas the other is rushed to the hospital gasping for their last breath. And both family members are young.

There are reports saying those with Blood Type O are unresponsive to the virus. There may be a genetic component. We will see.

I am slowly circling around some thoughts on this.

This whole video is one pile of mind bending truth, save a copy. But, I marked this at a point just before the important part of the discussion.. of 2nd Exposures to Corona viruses as a problem developing the SARS vaccine.
https://youtu.be/QLi6ZrFp6vQ?t=1935

Sharyl Attkisson talks about pieces of this.. while supporting Kennedy’s testimony
http://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/the-vaccination-debate

Attkisson’s Link Hoard on the subject:
https://sharylattkisson.com/medical-vaccine-links/

What if the exposure to animal Corona viruses in the annual flu shots that are one of the factors driving the number of people who are experiencing the auto-immune reactions that are leading to some of these deaths.

Bad, if this stupid thing comes roaring back in a evolved form then the death toll could be multiply more than we have seen so far. I think this is unsaid under-issue that has some attempting to prevent people from being exposed the first time. (As opposed to seeking ‘herd immunity.) But, if this was the case, then the vaccine idea is serious stupidity, as you erase any benefit of keeping people from being exposed.

SO, it gets to why? And the answer is money.. which is what the stuff is all about above.

This also may point at why this research was being done at Wuhan in the first place.

On the mask thing.. as fact based push back is getting stronger.. the argument to wear them is morphing..

Coronavirus: wearing a cloth face mask is less about science and more about solidarity
https://www.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-wearing-cloth-face-mask-095121104.html

This article also has some insights.. about Vitamin D as a predictor

Vitamin D appears to play role in COVID-19 mortality rates
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/05/vitamin-d-appears-to-play-role-in-covid-19-mortality-rates/

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