Censors crack down on ‘Plandemic’ conspiracy documentary. What’s so dangerous about it?

A 23-minute teaser clip of the documentary went viral on Wednesday evening, notching up tens of millions of views across multiple platforms. However, a media outcry soon followed, with mainstream media outlets deploying their ‘fact-checkers’ to debunk its claims, and Facebook and YouTube removing the video, citing their new rules on Covid-19 “misinformation.”

Yet censorship is also a sure-fire way to generate interest in the very thing you’re trying to censor – and multiple copies and versions of ‘Plandemic’ began to appear like mushrooms. So who’s behind it and what’s in there?

A doctor with quite a reputation

Dr. Judy Mikovits is the central figure of ‘Plandemic,’ which basically claims that “billionaire patent owners” are stoking the spread of the coronavirus, all in the name of forcing “experimental poisons” on the population in the form of vaccines.

The claims are quite bold, but it doesn’t help that Mikovits herself is far from an unbiased source on the subject. She’s been active in anti-vaccine and fringe circles for years, even while insisting she’s not “anti-vax” herself.

Once an active cancer researcher and (mainstream) virologist, Mikovits was disgraced in 2011 for publishing what others in the scientific community called false research into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The dramatic events that followed – a search and arrest in her California home – are used in ‘Plandemic’ to establish her alleged conflict with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Donald Trump’s coronavirus adviser.

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Mikovits claims Fauci personally “paid off” law enforcement officials to arrest her and detain her without trial. She was indeed arrested in November 2011, but for allegedly stealing lab materials from the Nevada laboratory she worked at before her dismissal (which Mikovits claims were “planted” in her house). Criminal charges brought against Mikovits were later dismissed – but this has been tied to the legal troubles of her former employer, Harvey Whittemore.

Evidence-free claims galore

Of course, the central part of the video – something being discussed in every ‘Plandemic’ piece and review – is made up of an array of Covid-19-related claims that Mikovits makes. 

These range from claims that wearing face masks “activates your own virus” (there’s no evidence of that) to the assertion that the devastating coronavirus outbreak in Northern Italy can be linked to the uptake in flu vaccination the year before (a claim which appears to be based on a misleading interpretation of one tangentially-related study, not any fresh research).

Mikovits’ central argument – that an eventual vaccine for coronavirus will kill “millions of people” – is unprovable, and her assertion that Fauci will personally profit from any vaccine is outright false. Mikovits accuses Fauci of profiteering from royalties on an AIDS treatment he patented in the 1990s, but Fauci only placed his name on the patent because regulations required him to, and “donated the entire amount to charity.”

However, amid the half-baked theories, Mikovits touches on some truth. The federal government does in fact pay hospitals a set amount of money to treat coronavirus patients, about $13,000. This amount rises to $39,000 if the patient is placed on a ventilator. Mikovits insists that ventilation is the wrong treatment for coronavirus patients, and is only carried out to boost revenues – something the ER doctors would disagree with.

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It doesn’t help that many of the claims are disjointed, and rather than working towards its main goal of demonstrating a sinister plan by Fauci and vaccine evangelist Bill Gates to poison the masses, the documentary instead just lumps together anything critical of the mainstream consensus on the virus to paint Fauci in a bad light. 

For instance, it’s been widely reported that Fauci’s organization did give millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to finance its study of coronaviruses, after the federal government banned such research in the US. However, no smoking gun linking Fauci to the current outbreak is provided.

Boost by censorship

Yet, when information like this is declared verboten, that’s what people will think. There’s a popular quote by ‘Game of Thrones’ author George RR Martin: “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

When right-wing polemicist Alex Jones and his conspiracy-laden news site Infowars were essentially banned from the internet in 2018, the Infowars app shot to the top of both Apple and Google’s app stores.   

The phenomenon is known as the ‘Streisand effect,’ named for a 2003 lawsuit in which singer Barbara Streisand sued a photographer who shot an aerial snap of her California mansion for invasion of privacy. The lawsuit backfired, and led to hundreds of thousands of people downloading the picture. Before the case, it had only been viewed six times.

Likewise, the documentary’s producers will spin the furor over ‘Plandemic’ to their advantage. Already, their website urges viewers to “bypass the gatekeepers of free speech,” and slams the “overlords of big tech” for silencing them. 

Forbidden knowledge is tempting, and by wiping ‘Plandemic’ from the internet, Silicon Valley will only increase its notoriety.

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