If You Found This ‘Plandemic’ Video Compelling, Read This Too.
There is a video claiming that the government is silencing the scientist. I see people sharing it all the time, saying something like, “What do you think of this?” or “I don’t know if that’s right, but it’s worth listening to.” If you want to know more, but fear falling into the trap of propaganda, I wrote this for you.
The video is the “first part” of a forthcoming film called Plandemic and consists of one interview between the director and virologist Judy Mikowitz. She says the COVID-19 pandemic was somehow created in a laboratory or was allowed to spread on purpose (her story changes slightly). There are a few subtle truths here, but almost all of the actionable advice – like whether to wear a mask or take a vaccine – is dangerously unsupported. If you are having trouble deciding whether this video should be trusted or what information is true or false, we will break it down for you.
Big Truths
Before we get into details, let’s talk about the assumptions that underlie the appeal of this video. First, money is very important in this country. And Big Pharma has more power than it should.
This video portrays the US government as unreliable, and I think everyone can agree with that, although people from different political parties may have different ideas about which parts of the government they don’t trust.
The biggest truth I think this video touches on is that we, the public, have heard confusing and conflicting messages about this pandemic. We are experiencing something truly unprecedented, and many things do not make sense. This is inevitable – it is truly a novelty on this earth. But it also makes us strive for certainty, and no one can be blamed for wanting to seek clear messages.
But, as we said here earlier, real experts discuss the uncertainty of the facts about our situation . No one alive today can have 100% answers, so we should be skeptical of anyone who says they can explain it all.
We crave confidence. We may prefer to hear facts that support our biases, or things that make us feel like we are in control of what is happening in the world. We crave anything that can make this moment in our lives less weird. Remember, if you want to believe what you hear, you need to be a little more vigilant.
Some important prerequisites
The video was made professionally, professionally. It looks like a documentary. In it, for almost the first ten minutes, he makes Mikowitz an expert in his field, who is persecuted and silenced. By the time she started talking about COVID-19, we already recognized her, and we are on her side.
Someone filming a professional documentary will check her claims as she makes them and interviewed several people to get different points of view, so this is our first clue that things might not be like this. seems. (We’ve reached out to the manufacturing company to ask how they verified their claims and will update this part if they respond.)
One of the most important questions to ask about media is where it comes from, who created it, and keeping track of money in both directions. Who paid for it? Who benefits from it?
I expect we will learn more about who ordered and funded the video in the coming weeks, but very little of this information has been released to the public so far. We do know that Mikowitz, the scientist being interviewed, is selling the book that is currently the # 1 bestseller on Amazon.
Her book has been published in collaboration with Children’s Health Defense led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Its website features unscientific conspiracy theories, including claims that clearly indicate vaccines and cell towers are causing Alzheimer’s in children . Herd immunity is labeled “absurd” on a frequently asked questions page and is “controversial” as to whether vaccines save lives. These are categorically false statements.
So this is anti-Axist propaganda? It seems like it is, of course, coming from this backstory, but in the video, the interviewer asks Mikowitz if she is a “vaccine opponent” and she replies “no.” To the average viewer, this may seem reassuring. But if you’ve listened to anti-vax programs for a while, you know it’s a huge red flag. “I’m not against the vaccine, but …” is a version of the word “I’m not racist, but …” that denies science.
One more small note before we get to the content of the Plandemic video. Sometimes they ask me where I got the money from. When I write about controversial topics, I have been accused of pestering different interests. So, to be clear, about 98% of my income comes from writing for this website. The rest is from random book royalties. My books are devoted to historical epidemics and the basics of genetics . My position on controversial topics does not affect sales figures in any way.
Company policy and professional ethics prohibit me from letting the subject or source of my story influence the story itself, and I definitely cannot accept money for misrepresenting the coverage. There is even a “firewall” between the advertising department of the company and the people on my side, the editorial staff, who write the articles. I don’t have a dog in this battle. I just want people to be healthy and well informed, and I follow the facts where they lead me. Now I am sharing them with you.
How true is Mikowitz’s backstory?
The impartial reporting tells a very different story than the Plandemic version of her backstory. This recent Washington Post article is helpful if you want to know more about it.
Early in her career, Mikowitz published what the video calls a “blockbuster” article claiming that chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by a virus. It later emerged that other laboratories could not reproduce her results , and her own laboratory could not reproduce them either. The article has been withdrawn . But Mikowitz went on to argue that viruses cause many chronic diseases, including autism , and that they can be found in vaccines. There is no proof of her claims.
Other elements of her story are exaggerated (or even worse) due to the narrative in the video. A scene in Plandemic shows a SWAT team while Mikowitz talks about being arrested without a warrant, but footage is taken from an unrelated event and news reports at the time say she surrendered .
The events in which she participated were well covered in the news and scientific journals at the time; here is an article from Science in 1985 about the controversy over who was the first to confirm the HIV test results. (There is no reason to believe that the delay in publication here cost her life, as she claims.)
But enough about Mikowitz. Is what she says true?
Are there indications that the COVID-19 virus was created in a laboratory?
No. There are many coronaviruses, and scientists have long known that sometimes a virus that infects one animal can end up infecting another (such as humans) with little genetic variation. There is no reason to believe, says Mikowitz, that this will take “800 years” of evolution. Several pandemic viruses have resulted from animal-to-human transmission of the virus. SARS, MERS, Ebola, and several strains of pandemic flu (including the 1918 and 2009 strains) are just a few, and scientists have warned for decades that there will always be another just around the corner. Here is an excellent 2012 book by David Quamman, which talks about several groups of scientists who are studying these events and trying to predict and understand where it might happen next.
Yes, there is a coronavirus laboratory in Wuhan, China . It was founded after the SARS epidemic (which was also caused by the coronavirus), and yes, the US funded it, because if you are interested in preventing pandemics, you can do one thing – fund research of the same kind. viruses that have caused large-scale epidemics in the past. There is nothing suspicious about this.
Scientists have repeatedly denied the idea that the virus was artificially created. Its genome is clearly linked to animal viruses and not to coronavirus samples from a Wuhan laboratory .
Is Dr. Fauci the mastermind behind everything?
Mikowitz continues to mention Fauci’s name, but never actually associates it in any material way with the story she tells. This man runs a gigantic government office; not that he was in the office next door with her personal meddling in everything.
Listen carefully to his name throughout the video and you will see what I mean. It never really has anything to do with it. For example, Mikowitz claims that Fauci orchestrated the cover-up (which is unclear), claiming that people were “paid big.” Sounds creepy. But then she explains that she means that the research laboratories received funding from NIAID. This is not payback. This is the normal way of funding science. If there is any reason to believe that something sketchy was going on with the allocation of funding, we have not seen any evidence of this.
Are cheap drugs banned by the FDA and Big Pharma as a money changer?
Mikowitz argues that pharmaceutical companies are only interested in drugs they can patent and charge a lot of money for. It is true that the business practices of pharmaceutical companies involve raising drug prices and patents are helping, but Mikowitz is unfortunately not sufficiently informed if she believes that pharmaceutical companies need to collude with the FDA to remove cheap drugs from the market. to make it happen. If the drug works, the obvious step is to meet the increased demand and charge more.
I mean, we know that. Remember daraprim, a drug that Martin Shkreli sadly inflated the price of? It still costs almost $ 700 per tablet , retail price (less with coupon, but that’s another issue ), and it’s not patented at all. Adrenaline isn’t proprietary either, but look at the price of the Epi-Pens.
Charging a ton for drugs is common and perfectly legal. You don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain this.
As for her specific claims, Mikowitz mentions a cheap old drug called suramin, which allegedly cured autism. The actual results from this test were not what she describes .
She also mentions hydroxychloroquine as a potential remedy for COVID-19, which is now being suppressed. In fact, there are currently 169 trials going on . It is so widely used off-label that the supply for people who need it for other conditions, such as lupus, is in jeopardy. And despite her claims in the video, there is no conclusive evidence that it works – just hope.
Here’s the truth: The company that makes remdesivir, one of the most promising drugs for COVID-19 right now, will almost certainly charge an unreasonable amount per dose just because it can . No conspiracy: this is literally how our system works. Anyone who thinks Big Pharma needs a conspiracy to make money is oblivious to how Big Pharma actually works.
Does the mask make us more susceptible to coronavirus?
No. The video says that the masks “activate” the virus. Where is the evidence for this? There is none. (This, by the way, is a specific statement that Facebook cites when deleting the video as misinformation. “The assumption that wearing a mask could cause illness could lead to inevitable harm, so we are deleting the video,” the company said. The New York Times .)
Does staying inside weaken our immune system?
No. What for? There is a theory according to which the impact of microbes during children growing up can affect their immune function in adulthood, but there is a known phenomenon in which the immune system is extinguished, when we are inside. Anyway, our homes are full of germs.
Incidentally, the doctors cited in this part of the video are Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi from Bakersfield, California. Plandemic pretends that the two are speaking on behalf of many doctors, sharing common sense, but they are not. The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) have released a statement in which they “jointly and strongly condemn” the doctors’ video (which was posted separately prior to the release of Plandemic) for spreading misinformation. …
Does the flu vaccine make you more susceptible to the coronavirus?
Not that we know about it. No influenza and COVID-19 vaccine studies have been conducted, and studies looking at the effects of the flu vaccine on the common cold (some of which are caused by other members of the coronavirus family) have produced mixed results .
Are COVID-19 deaths overstated?
True numbers are difficult to know, but since tests are still not widely available, we are underestimating rather than overestimating.
However, this is a simple question. You don’t need test results to see that all-cause deaths have skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic in all countries .
Are hospitals getting more money if they diagnose or ventilate a patient with COVID-19?
Yes, because hospitals charge more for resource-intensive treatment. Hospitalized patients with COVID-19 tend to get sick and stay in the hospital longer than patients with other conditions. When Mikowitz talks about Medicare giving $ 13,000 to hospitals for COVID-19 patients, it’s not a gift or a bonus. This is the price of their departure.
Does this conspiracy theory hold at all?
Here’s the funniest part: no.
I listened carefully to the part where Mikowitz – or someone else – explains why and how this pandemic was planned (because that’s a statement, right? Plandemic?). I was waiting to see how logical the logic was, how difficult it would be to parse it. It should be good, right?
That’s all we get. Mikowitz says:
The game is to prevent the cure until everyone is infected, and then to administer the vaccines.
What is this great master plan? When everyone is infected, no one needs the vaccine. On the other hand, if you have had effective treatments now, literally everyone will buy them. If you were to use the virus as a get-rich-quick scheme, wouldn’t you start selling the drug ASAP?
There is one more thing, and this is the flaw in all conspiracy theories: how to hold every pharmaceutical company and every world government accountable? How do you get one government to act as a united front on any issue?
The White House and CDC can’t even agree on whether we need a coronavirus task force . And we have to believe that our government is not only acting according to a single plan, but also coordinating with several pharmaceutical companies and acting in sync with the governments of all countries of the world?
Once you think about it, you will see it in a second. Did they really use the final snapshot of Fauci’s prediction of the pandemic to signal that he started it? Or is it more likely that everyone who studies infectious diseases knows that a pandemic is always around the corner , and we better be prepared? There have been pandemics in the past – it’s not like the Black Death escaped a medieval biosafety laboratory – and there will be more in the future. Truth is stranger than fiction, and there is no need to shoot documentary-style fiction to make it look like truth.
Updated on 8/05/2020 at 7:42 pm to say “animal-to-human transmission” as discussed in the surrounding text, not vice versa.