A disgraced scientist and a viral video: how a Covid conspiracy theory started
On the surface, it is a classic tale of whistleblowing.
A brave insider claiming to lay bare corporate power corrupting the US government. A truth teller courageously naming names who are part of what she calls a “circular cabal” killing Americans.
Seen from another perspective, the viral video of Dr Judy Mikovits blaming the coronavirus outbreak on a conspiracy led by big pharma, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization is the work of a discredited crank. But scientists fear that does not make her claims any less dangerous because, in an age of conspiracy theories, those about medicine have unusual potency.
The film of Mikovits is taken from a soon to be released documentary, Plandemic, in which the virologist claims US health agencies buried her research showing vaccines weaken people’s immune systems and made them more vulnerable to Covid-19. She also asserts that wearing masks is dangerous because it “literally activates your own virus”.
Mikovits’s claims have gained currency in part because she points the finger at Dr Anthony Fauci, the face of the Trump administration’s scientific advice on coronavirus and director of the agency she claims buried her research, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In an added twist, Trump has given weight to Mikovits’s claims with his own questioning about the origins and spread of Covid-19.
The video racked up more than 7m views on YouTube before it was taken down for making false claims. Facebook followed suit after the film was pushed in particular by anti-vaccination groups. But conservative and rightwing media organisations have continued to promote Mikovits.
Professor Eric Oliver, author of a book about conspiracy theories and the spread of false information, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics, said those about medical issues are the most widely circulated and believed.
“When we’ve done surveys we’ve consistently asked a question: do you think the Food Drug Administration has been deliberately withholding natural cures for cancer because of secret pressure from the pharmaceutical industry? Typically we get about 40% of people in our surveys who agree with that, and that is by far and a way the most commonly held conspiracy theory,” he said.
“Medical and health conspiracy theories do well because oftentimes they’re not explicitly ideological in the way that other conspiracy theories are. They tend to cross ideological domains. The FDA conspiracy theory is endorsed as much by conservatives as it is by liberals.”
On Tuesday, Mikovits appeared for two hours on the Truth News Network claiming that Covid-19 is only the latest in a series of false health crises created by the medical industry in league with the Gates Foundation to make money.
“We’ve gone through swine flu, bird flu, Aids. All of the pandemics, epidemics are perpetrated fraud to control, to drive our healthcare system. Literally it’s bankrupting our country,” she said. “A third of our gross national product is this medical cabal. Health insurance that we never had to have before that costs us thousands of dollars a month. Insurance for what? So you can buy their chemotherapies which literally help no one.”
Mikovits long ago lost credibility in the scientific community when the journal Science retracted a 2009 article the virologist co-authored claiming her research showed that a mouse retrovirus caused chronic fatigue syndrome .
The controversy helped cost Mikovits her job at the Whittemore Peterson Institute. A few months later she was briefly jailed for allegedly removing a computer, notebooks and proprietary information from the institute although the charges were dropped on technicalities. Mikovits has since claimed she was arrested in an attempt by the “deep state” to stop her revealing the truth.
She has also been discredited over claims of having made a breakthrough in researching treatment for HIV only for Fauci to hijack it to make money off patents at the expense of millions of lives.
But none of that stopped Mikovits’s book, Plague of Corruption, from becoming an instant bestseller after it was published last month.
Prof Oliver said that doubts fre
quently coalesce around fear of the unknown when it comes to medical conditions.
“This sort of contagious disease that’s invisible makes people extremely apprehensive. This is a profoundly displacing event and the uncertainty and anxiety it has generated in health, the economy and politics are just really deep. Some people are primed to seek out some sort of simple answer to very complex political and health issues and into that void conspiracy theories rush right in,” he said.
Medical conspiracy theories have particular potency and not only because they more directly touch on people’s lives than claims about where Barack Obama was born or who really brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11. There is also a foundation to some of the claims.
The drug industry wields a corrupting influence over politicians and the FDA, as seen in its facilitation of the rise of the opioid epidemic. Neither is it beyond the realms of possibility that government researchers would carry out secret medical experiments on people. For four decades, until 1972, the United States Public Health Service ran the notorious Tuskegee study of leaving syphilis untreated in African American men.
“What’s complicated with these things is that there are actual conspiracies that do happen in the world,” said Oliver. “Enron conspired to fix energy prices, for example. And there are lobbying efforts and interest groups that try to advance their causes and probably do so behind the scenes, and so it’s easy to take the next step and infer some more deliberate and orchestrated conspiracy.”
But unlike most conspiracy theories, medical ones can have deadly consequences.The anti-vaccination contributed to a measles outbreak in the US and other countries last year.
Polio remains endemic in Pakistan in part because of misinformation campaigns claiming vaccines are a CIA plot to sterilise Muslim men, or contain pig fat or alcohol. It has not helped that CIA used a vaccination campaign as a front to hunt down Osama bin Laden in north-west Pakistan, leading to attacks on polio workers.
Two decades ago in South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki allied himself with a rogue group of scientists who denied that HIV caused Aids, costing hundreds of thousands of lives when he withheld life-saving drugs from hospitals and blocked use of a medicine which could prevent mothers from passing the virus on to their babies during childbirth.
A study of millions of Facebook users in the journal Nature released this week found that groups opposed to vaccinations were much more effective at penetrating discussion among those who were undecided than those who support the science. It said growing distrust in scientific expertise “could amplify outbreaks” of coronavirus.