PerspectiveVirus Conspiracists Elevate a New Champion
A discredited scientist who blames her professional downfall on Dr. Anthony Fauci, is the new hero of the anti-vaccinators, the conspiracy group QAnon, activists from the Reopen America movement, and some right-wing media. They support her claims that Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, and other “establishment” figures inflated the danger of the coronavirus in order to make money by selling more vaccines.
In a video posted to YouTube on Monday, an agitated woman described a nefarious 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 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.
Davey Alba writes in the New York Times that 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.”
Mikovits was a researcher at 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. The same year, an article she published in the journal Science two years earlier was retracted by the journal after her research was discredited.
Since then, she has been blaming Dr. Fauci for her professional downfall.
Her book, Plague of Corruption, in which she spins other lurid tales of various conspiracies, came out in April, and it was favorably reviewed in far-right publications like The Epoch Times and The Gateway Pundit.
Alba writes:
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.
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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.
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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.”
Dr. Mikovits has also made a contribution to the debate over coronavirus measures, arguing that “wearing the mask literally activates your own virus.” Some participants in Reopen America protests now carry signs with her name, using her as an authority to validate their claims that face mask are not only not helpful, but actually harmful to those who wear them.
