Case Study 11.1: The "Plandemic" Video — A Taxonomy Analysis

Overview

In May 2020, a 26-minute video titled Plandemic was released online, featuring an interview with Judy Mikovits, a former biomedical researcher who had become estranged from the scientific establishment following research misconduct findings against her. The video alleged a vast conspiracy involving the pharmaceutical industry, the Gates Foundation, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and mainstream public health institutions to suppress a cure for COVID-19, profit from vaccines, and control the global population. Within days of its release, the video had been viewed tens of millions of times across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms. Despite rapid removal by major platforms, the video continued to circulate through alternative platforms, encrypted messaging apps, and physical distribution.

Plandemic is one of the most extensively documented and analyzed pieces of health misinformation/disinformation from the COVID-19 pandemic. Its anatomy — how it was constructed, how it spread, and what harms it caused — provides a rich case study for applying the information disorder taxonomy introduced in this chapter.

Learning Objectives for This Case Study

By analyzing this case study, students will be able to: 1. Apply the three-category framework and seven-type taxonomy to a complex, real-world information disorder episode 2. Distinguish between different types of misinformation within a single piece of content 3. Analyze the roles of different actors in creating and amplifying information disorder 4. Evaluate the strengths and limitations of platform removal as a response to viral health misinformation 5. Consider the ethical dimensions of malinformation in public health contexts

Background: The Content of the Video

The Plandemic video made numerous claims that have been extensively fact-checked by independent journalists, public health experts, and fact-checking organizations. The video's claims can be organized into several categories:

Factual Claims Made in the Video

Claim: Judy Mikovits was arrested without a warrant and imprisoned for years because she tried to expose pharmaceutical industry corruption. - Finding by fact-checkers: Mikovits was arrested in 2011 following a warrant related to theft of laboratory notebooks. She served five days in jail, not years. The circumstances were related to a dispute over lab materials at her former institution, not pharmaceutical industry whistleblowing.
Claim: Wearing masks activates viruses living in your nasal passages and causes disease. - Finding: No scientific basis. Mask wearing has no mechanism for "activating" dormant viruses. This claim contradicts basic virology.
Claim: Dr. Anthony Fauci has long planned a global influenza vaccine to enforce mandatory vaccination. - Finding: The video misrepresents a 2019 scientific paper co-authored by Fauci about influenza research. The paper does not describe any such plan.
Claim: Beaches and outdoor spaces should not be closed because the ocean contains healing frequencies. - Finding: No scientific basis. No known "healing frequencies" in seawater affect COVID-19 or any other infectious disease.
Claim: Vaccines are the primary driver of chronic diseases including autism. - Finding: This is a long-debunked claim. The 1998 Wakefield study that originally alleged a vaccine-autism link was retracted due to fraud. Extensive subsequent research has found no such link.
Claim: Judy Mikovits published a paper proving that murine retroviruses contaminated vaccines used from 2009 onward. - Finding: Mikovits was a co-author on a 2009 paper in Science claiming to find a retrovirus linked to chronic fatigue syndrome. The paper was retracted in 2011 after other researchers could not replicate its findings.

Taxonomy Analysis

Applying the Three-Category Framework

Plandemic does not fit neatly into a single category — it is a layered information disorder product that contains elements of all three categories. This is typical of sophisticated health misinformation, which rarely consists of pure fabrication but typically combines genuine grievances, misrepresented facts, and strategic narrative construction.

Misinformation Elements

Several of Mikovits's claims appear to reflect genuine, if deeply mistaken, beliefs. Mikovits appears to sincerely believe that her research was suppressed by institutional forces, that vaccines have been contaminated, and that alternative health approaches were marginalized by pharmaceutical interests. These claims are false or unsupported by evidence, but the available evidence does not suggest that Mikovits believes herself to be lying. In this dimension, the video contains sincere misinformation — false content spread by someone who believes it.

The vast majority of those who shared the video were also engaged in misinformation: they sincerely believed the video's claims and were sharing what they understood to be important suppressed truths.

Disinformation Elements

The construction of the video and the strategy of its distribution bear the hallmarks of disinformation. The video was produced with professional production values by Mikki Willis, a filmmaker, not as a spontaneous personal statement. Its release was coordinated across multiple platforms simultaneously. A companion website, social media infrastructure, and a Part II follow-up were prepared in advance of release, suggesting organized planning rather than organic sharing.

Research by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center and other organizations found that the Plandemic video was part of a broader information ecosystem of health misinformation content that had been building since at least 2017, involving networks of accounts that coordinated sharing and posting strategies. This infrastructure suggests disinformation in the coordination sense: deliberately created to deceive, even if the primary spokesperson sincerely believed her claims.

Malinformation Elements

Several elements of the video involved genuine information deployed in harmful ways:

Actual statements by Dr. Fauci and other public health officials were presented stripped of their scientific and historical context, creating false impressions of their meaning.
Genuine concerns about pharmaceutical industry conflicts of interest — real issues that legitimate researchers investigate — were weaponized to delegitimize all vaccine development, including safe and effective vaccines.
Real scientific controversies (such as the debate about the origins of SARS-CoV-2) were taken out of their scientific context and presented as evidence of deliberate concealment.

This deployment of genuine but decontextualized information to undermine trust in public health institutions is a textbook example of malinformation: true elements used to construct a false and harmful overall picture.

Applying the Seven-Type Taxonomy

Type 1: Satire/Parody — Not applicable. The video presents itself as a sincere documentary investigation.

Type 2: Misleading Content

This is the most pervasive type present in Plandemic. The video consistently uses genuine information — real names, real institutions, real research controversies — in ways that create false impressions through selective presentation and omission.

Example: The video presents Mikovits's 2011 arrest as evidence of pharmaceutical industry persecution. This presentation omits the actual circumstances of the arrest (a warrant issued in connection with a dispute over laboratory materials at her former employer) and the factual context of her dismissal (findings of research misconduct). The arrest is a genuine fact; the persecution narrative constructed around it is misleading.

Example: The video correctly notes that there are financial conflicts of interest in pharmaceutical research. This is a legitimate issue studied by academics and investigative journalists. But the video presents these conflicts as evidence of systematic, conspiratorial suppression of beneficial treatments — an inference that goes far beyond what the evidence of conflicts of interest supports.

Type 3: Imposter Content

The video does not directly impersonate legitimate sources, but it creates the impression of scientific authority through several strategies: Mikovits is consistently referred to by her academic credentials (Ph.D.); her former institutional affiliations are cited; and the production quality mimics a credible documentary. This is soft imposter content — borrowing the aesthetics and vocabulary of scientific credibility to lend false legitimacy to the content.

The video was also accompanied by supporting websites and social media content that replicated the style of legitimate scientific communication.

Type 4: Fabricated Content

Several specific claims in the video are outright fabrications with no basis in any genuine fact:

The claim that masks "activate" viruses in the nasal passages
The claim about "healing frequencies" in the ocean
The claim that a specific cure was deliberately suppressed

These elements represent fabricated content embedded within a larger package that also contains misleading and false-context elements.

Type 5: False Context

This type is extensively present. Many of the video's most effective claims involve genuine content — real statements by real scientists — presented in false context:

A 2019 Fauci-co-authored paper on influenza research was presented as if it described a plan for mandatory COVID-19 vaccination. The paper discusses natural immunity in a research context; the interpretation applied by the video is false.
Genuine footage of Dr. Fauci making statements about scientific uncertainty during early COVID-19 briefings was stripped of its temporal context (early in a rapidly evolving outbreak) and presented as evidence of deliberate deception.

Type 6: Manipulated Content

The video was later found to contain edited footage in which statements were assembled from multiple sources to create an impression different from any of the original sources. Specific claims attributed to scientific papers were assembled from quotes taken from different sections and even different papers, creating statements that no original source made.

Type 7: False Connection

The video's title — Plandemic — itself represents a false connection: the portmanteau of "planned" and "pandemic" implies a connection between planning and the COVID-19 pandemic that is not established by the video's content. The evocative title drives sharing and emotional response independently of the actual arguments made in the video.

The Actors Analysis

Creators and Producers

Mikki Willis: The filmmaker who produced the video. Willis had previously produced health-related content and was connected to a network of alternative health and anti-vaccine activists. His production choices — narrative structure, music, visual style — were sophisticated and deliberate.

Judy Mikovits: The primary interview subject. Mikovits appears to be a sincere, if deeply mistaken, believer in the claims she makes. Her genuine scientific grievances (a contested retraction, a difficult professional history) provided authentic emotional material for the narrative, even as the video built a false superstructure on these genuine foundations.

Erin Elizabeth: The partner of Joseph Mercola (a prominent alternative medicine figure) who was among the first to promote the video extensively on her platform. Her pre-existing audience of health-concerned individuals provided an initial high-engagement amplification network.

Amplifiers

The video's amplification trajectory illustrates the disinformation-to-misinformation pathway:

Initial seeding in anti-vaccine and alternative health social media communities (where the video was spread by sincere believers in these communities)
Pickup by politically diverse social media accounts drawn by the anti-establishment narrative
Coverage by mainstream media outlets fact-checking the video — which, while providing corrections, also massively amplified the video's reach to audiences who had not previously encountered it
Redistribution through private messaging apps (WhatsApp, Telegram) after removal from major platforms — where the fact-check context could not accompany it

Platform Responses as a Case Study

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X removed the video based on violations of health misinformation policies. This removal was rapid but faced significant limitations:

What worked: Removing the video from major platforms reduced casual discovery by non-committed audiences who might have encountered it through algorithmic recommendation.

What did not work: The video had already been downloaded and redistributed by the time of removal, making complete suppression impossible. The removal decision itself became a story that confirmed the video's central narrative of suppression, inadvertently supporting the video's claims to some audiences.

The Streisand Effect: Platform removal increased search interest in the video and motivated sympathetic audiences to seek it out on alternative platforms, where it circulated without the fact-check labels that major platforms were beginning to apply.

This case illustrates a fundamental tension in platform responses to health misinformation: rapid removal is most important for slowing the initial spread, but removal of widely-seen content may be counterproductive if it serves to confirm the content's conspiratorial narrative.

The Interpreters Analysis

Who Believed the Video?

Survey research and social media analysis conducted during 2020 found that belief in Plandemic-style health conspiracy theories was:

Not uniformly distributed by party affiliation: While slightly higher among Republicans, significant minorities of Democrats also endorsed some elements of the narrative, particularly concerns about pharmaceutical industry influence.
Associated with prior anti-vaccine attitudes: Those who had previously expressed skepticism toward vaccines or pharmaceutical companies were significantly more likely to believe the video's claims.
Associated with conspiracy mentality: Individuals with a general tendency to believe in conspiracies were more receptive, independent of specific political beliefs.
Affected by social context: People who saw the video shared by trusted friends or family members were more likely to engage with it positively than those who encountered it from strangers.

The Role of Motivated Reasoning

The video was constructed to exploit motivated reasoning among multiple, distinct audiences:

For those with existing anti-vaccine commitments, the video provided apparent scientific validation of long-held beliefs.
For those distrustful of pharmaceutical companies (a broad group with legitimate concerns), the video channeled that distrust into a specific conspiratorial narrative.
For those skeptical of government authority, the video offered a narrative of government-pharmaceutical collusion.
For those who felt dismissed by expert consensus, Mikovits's narrative of a credentialed scientist persecuted by institutions resonated as a familiar story of establishment arrogance.

By designing content that activates these different forms of motivated reasoning simultaneously, the video's creators achieved viral spread across ideologically diverse audiences who might not share many other beliefs.

Harm Assessment

The harms caused by the Plandemic video and similar content include:

Direct public health harms: - Increased vaccine hesitancy documented in surveys conducted after the video's circulation - Increased refusal to comply with public health measures (masking, distancing) among viewers who found the video's anti-mask messaging persuasive - Amplification of a broader ecosystem of COVID-19 misinformation that made public health communication more difficult

Institutional harms: - Accelerated erosion of public trust in health institutions, accelerated beyond pre-existing trends - Personal harassment of scientists and public health officials named in the video - Increased difficulty for public health communicators in reaching vaccine-hesitant audiences

Informational environment harms: - Establishment of a template and infrastructure for subsequent COVID-19 health misinformation content - Creation of an adversarial frame for COVID-19 information — "official narrative" vs. "suppressed truth" — that made straightforward health communication less effective

Discussion Questions

The Plandemic video contains elements of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation simultaneously. Does this mixed-category nature make it harder or easier to respond to? How should different elements be addressed differently?
Platform removal of the video contributed to the "Streisand Effect" — increased interest triggered by suppression. How should platforms balance the value of removing harmful health misinformation against the risk that removal amplifies the conspiratorial narrative? Are there alternative responses that avoid this dilemma?
Judy Mikovits appears to sincerely believe the claims she makes. Does the sincerity of her belief change the moral status of the video? Does it change what response strategies are appropriate?
The video exploits genuine, legitimate concerns (pharmaceutical industry conflicts of interest, institutional failures in research) to construct a false and harmful narrative. How does this "trojan horse" structure — embedding false claims within legitimate concerns — affect fact-checking effectiveness?
The Plandemic case predates many of the COVID-19 misinformation policy frameworks developed by platforms in mid-2020. If platforms had had these policies in place from the beginning of the pandemic, would the video's spread have been significantly different? What evidence would you need to answer this question?

Technical Analysis Exercise

Using the code/case-study-code.py file associated with this chapter, run the content classification analysis on sample text from fact-checkers' analyses of the Plandemic claims. The code demonstrates:

How a text classifier trained on the seven-type taxonomy categorizes specific claims
How intent signals can be computationally detected in persuasive health content
Visualization of the taxonomy analysis results

Compare the computational classification results with your own manual classification and identify any discrepancies.