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before you discount this long standing fact-checker, read, look at the sources.

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In 2009, biologist Judy Mikovits, who was then the research director of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome-focused Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), published a paper on what she and many others thought to be a major scientific breakthrough in the prestigious journal Science. Her team alleged to have demonstrated an association between a newly discovered retrovirus called "xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus" (XMRV) and the poorly understood condition known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), suggesting a potential viral cause for CFS.

The paper received substantial international coverage. However, as with so many other potentially groundbreaking studies, nobody - including many of the same researchers involved with the original study - was able to replicate its results. Numerous attempts failed to replicate the study, and the research itself came under increasing scrutiny for sloppy methods and its reliance on misleading or manufactured figures.

On 1 July 2011, Science's editors issued a "statement of concern" about the paper. On 14 October 2011, the authors issued a partial retraction of their paper that touched on issues with some of their figures. Finally, on 23 December 2011, the editors of Science retracted the paper in full:

Science is fully retracting the Report "Detection of an infectious retrovirus, XMRV, in blood cells of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome". Multiple laboratories, including those of the original authors, have failed to reliably detect xenotropic murine leukemia virus- related virus (XMRV) or other murine leukemia virus (MLV)-related viruses in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients. In addition, there is evidence of poor quality control in a number of specific experiments in the Report ... Given all of these issues, Science has lost confidence in the Report and the validity of its conclusions ... We are therefore editorially retracting the Report. We regret the time and resources that the scientific community has devoted to unsuccessful attempts to replicate these results.

Three months later, the Whittemore Peterson Institute fired Judy Mikovits amid concerns over the integrity of her work and her collaboration with an outside scientist, as reported in the multidisciplinary scientific journal Nature:

The scientist behind a study that linked chronic fatigue syndrome to a virus has lost her job and is now facing accusations that she has misrepresented data. Judy Mikovits ... was fired on 29 September after she clashed with the institute's president and co-founder, Annette Whittemore, over the work of another researcher.

The following day, in what seems to be a separate development, a blogger posted a figure from a 2009 paper that Mikovits co-authored in Science alongside one that Mikovits used in a recent presentation. The two figures, which are used to describe different results, look identical, except for the labeling.

A few months after that, Mikovits was arrested in southern California "on an 'out of county warrant' from Washoe County, Nevada, for allegedly taking lab notebooks, a computer, and other material from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, after the WPI fired her." The arrest came in conjunction with a lawsuit from WPI that sought a restraining order to block Mikovits' destruction of data which they maintained belonged to the institute:

After Mikovits was terminated on 29 September, she wrongfully removed laboratory notebooks and kept other proprietary information on her laptop and in flash drives and in a personal e-mail account. WPI, a nonprofit organization that's based on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno, also won a temporary restraining order that forbids Mikovits from "destroying, deleting, or altering" any of the related files or data.

The charges were dropped, not because of the merits of the case, but due to a variety of complicating legal factors related to the family that runs the Whittemore Peterson Institute:

On 11 June, the district attorney's office for Washoe County filed a petition to dismiss the criminal charges against Mikovits without prejudice (which means they can file a related complaint in the future), a clerk to the Justice Court of Reno told ScienceInsider.

Mikovits, who was briefly jailed on the charges, is still defending herself in the civil case, which has taken several bizarre twists, including a judge who had ruled against Mikovits recusing himself. The judge removed himself from the case because he received campaign donations from WPI co-founder Harvey Whittemore, who himself has been criminally charged with making illegal campaign contributions to a federal official ...

Assistant District Attorney John Helzer, who filed the dismissal, says Whittemore's legal troubles factored into his decision. "There's a lot going on with the federal government and different levels that wasn't occurring when we first became involved with prosecuting this case," says Helzer. "And we have witness issues that have arisen."

The "Deep State" Version of the Story

Fast forwarding to 2018, we find that Mikovits has become lionized by the medical conspiracy community, appearing on unreliable websites such as Natural News and giving talks at fringe conferences such as The Truth About Cancer and Autism One, with her claims echoing through the various clickbait factories that regurgitate wholesale content from these dubious organizations. For example, the website "Real Farmacy" described Mikovits' saga as follows in a 28 November 2018 post:

If you have been following stories in recent years of scientists and researchers who make discoveries that are threatening to the Deep State and the bottom line of Big Pharma, you will have seen the pattern before. Those doctors are often 'persuaded' to recant their studies, offered bribes or other benefits to distance themselves from or even destroy their data, and even threatened with jail time or, if a legal case is too difficult to fabricate against them, they may simply be killed.

Such is the tale of molecular biologist Judy A. Mikovits, PhD, in the disturbing true story first detailed in this Natural News article that included the video below of how she was thrown in prison for research that led to the discovery that deadly retroviruses have been transmitted to twenty-five million Americans through human vaccines ... It was not long after the implications from the paper became clear and the Deep State saw the threat that was being posed to the vaccine industry that their powerful mechanisms of cover-up, obfuscation, and deception were activated.

Astute readers may note that the 2009 paper discussed above did not concern vaccines. Mikovits, following the publication of her since-retracted paper, made a series of unsupported claims that XMRV was the cause of myriad other medical maladies, including autism and cancer, and that XMRV in humans could have its origins in mouse cells used in the vaccine production process - a notion that has been exhaustively discredited.

Much of the material Mikovits used to make her point was also retracted, including a 2006 paper that alleged to show XMRV was present in human prostate cancer cells but actually produced erroneous results due to laboratory contamination.

An exhaustive body of work, which includes some of the same researchers involved in the original 2009 paper, has discredited any link between XMRV and disease. "The bottom line is we found no evidence of infection with XMRV ... These results refute any correlation between these agents and disease," said co-author Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in a press release.

To suggest that Mikovits' arrest stemmed from a perceived threat to the vaccine industry or "The Deep State" and not her alleged refusal to return scientific data and equipment to the institute that fired her requires completely ignoring this large body of scientific work while solely relying on the narrative presented by Mikovits in her 2014 book, Plague: One Scientist's Intrepid Search for the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases.

In the introduction to that work, which entirely ignored her firing from Whittemore, Mikovits alleged that the federal government had threatened to arrest her if she set foot on National Institutes of Health property to participate in the study that attempted to validate her previous work:

While I was preparing to return to Dr. Frank Rusetti's lab in Frederick, Maryland and participate in the multi-center validation study directed by Dr. Ian Lipkin, an email would be sent to Frank by none other than Dr. Tony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. In the email, Fauci stated I could participate in the study, but if I stepped foot on National Institutes of Health property, I would be immediately arrested!

Dr. Frank Rusetti is a long-time collaborator of Mikovits'. We reached out to Dr. Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institute of Health, about the existence of the email in which he allegedly threatened Mikovits with arrest, and he told us (via email):

I have no idea what she is talking about. I can categorically state that I have never sent such an e-mail to Dr. Ruscetti. I had my IT people here at NIH search all my e-mails and no such e-mail exists. Having said that, I would never make such a statement in an e-mail that anyone "would be immediately arrested" if they stepped foot on NIH property.

We also reached out to both Rusetti and Mikovits via their consulting website for more information about this alleged email but have not received a response.

The Reality

Since 2016, science has reached the consensus view that the XMRV detected in these various studies was a laboratory contaminant which affected the research cell lines used by the scientists conducting those studies, and that it was not a virus that had been transmitted to humans in any way. In a video produced by the conspiracy website Natural News in 2018, however, Mikovits made a series of additional claims that she had been fired and jailed for exposing that millions of Americans had supposedly been infected with viruses "that came from out of labs into humans via contaminated blood and vaccines":

The fact that [these allegedly human-derived viruses] were real was just too much for 25 million Americans are infected with the viruses that came from out of labs into humans via contaminated blood and vaccines. And that was what ... so I was fired, jailed without cause, without hearing, without any civil rights at all, just drug out of my house in shackles one day, November 18th 2011.

As noted above, Mikovits' controversial paper did not demonstrate that XMRV "came out of the lab into humans via contaminated blood and vaccines"; rather, it speculated such after seemingly demonstrating a (now discredited) association between XMRV and CFS. To say Mikovits was jailed for exposing widespread virus transmission via vaccines or blood transfusions is false, not only because she was actually jailed for allegedly stealing property, but also because she never scientifically demonstrated the claim she suggests the government wanted to silence her over. In her interview with Natural News, Mikovits stated that the idea for the connection between viruses and vaccines came from another researcher in a paper published in 2011:

So in 2011 another AIDS researcher in a journal called Frontiers in Microbiology wrote a paper that really cost me a lot. I didn't know he was gonna write this paper but it basically said, "The most likely way that these murine leukemia virus related viruses, these types of viruses entered humans was through vaccines."

That paper, which referenced two other now-retracted papers in its abstract, only presented the vaccine scenario speculatively as a potential route for humans to acquire XMRV:

The novel human retrovirus xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) is arguably the most controversial virus of this moment. After its original discovery in prostate cancer tissue from North American patients [ paper retracted], it was subsequently detected in individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome from the same continent [ paper retracted]. However, most other research groups, mainly from Europe, reported negative results ...

The detection of integrated XMRV proviruses in prostate cancer tissue [ paper retracted] proves it to be a genuine virus that replicates in human cells, leaving the question: how did XMRV enter the human population? We will discuss two possible routes: either via direct virus transmission from mouse to human ... or via the use of mouse-related products by humans, including vaccines. We hypothesize that mouse cells or human cell lines used for vaccine production could have been contaminated with a replicating variant of the XMRV precursors encoded by the mouse genome.

That study did conclude by opining that the "most likely mode of XMRV transmission points to mouse-derived biological products" and stating that the authors hoped the study would "spur further discussion and help to resolve the many remaining XMRV questions." But in a paper published just five months later titled "XMRV: Not a Mousy Virus", those same authors walked back claims of XMRV's prevalence (and even its existence as a true human virus) based on results which called earlier laboratory methods into question:

XMRV was discovered in 2006 in tumor tissue from patients with prostate cancer [ paper retracted] with a viral genome sequence highly similar to that of mouse xenotropic retroviruses. Sequence analysis suggested that XMRV is a novel recombinant derived from two fragmented endogenous murine viruses integrated in the mouse genome. XMRV was subsequently detected in other prostate cancer tissues and in blood from patients with CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) [ paper retracted].

However, most other studies failed to replicate these findings, especially outside the USA, suggesting either that the virus has a limited geographical spread, or that positive results were due to contamination of biological reagents or human samples with mouse DNA. Four recent papers indeed show that murine DNA sequences can be detected virtually everywhere, and that extreme care should be taken when amplifying XMRV sequences. These results certainly put into serious doubt some of the high prevalence results and proposed disease associations that could not be confirmed by others.

Further research determined that all XMRV samples detected in these studies stemmed from a contaminated cell line affecting all the labs performing these studies, that it did not cause disease, and that it did not enter the population via vaccines or blood transfusions:

Molecular biologists traced the development of XMRV to a recombination event in a laboratory mouse that likely occurred circa 1993. The virus was propagated via cell lines derived from a tumor present in this mouse and spread through contamination of laboratory samples. Well-controlled experiments showed that detection of XMRV was due to contaminated samples and was not a marker of or a causal factor in prostate cancer or CFS.

Therefore, Mikovits' speculative claims linking her research to vaccine science, drawing the ire of "Big Pharma" and the "Deep State", and her subsequent arrest are not rooted in science or reality. But although she may have lost the support of the scientific community, she appears to have found a new home in the pseudoscientific conspiracy world.

"In the United States of America ... everything's censored," Mikovits said on the website of a man who guest hosts Alex Jones' Infowars conspiracy ranting, "so to look at things like Natural News, to come to meetings like The Truth About Cancer, I was just floored today because today was the first time I was treated like a human being who had knowledge for a very long time."

In 2020, Mikovits was featured in a film called "Plandemic" that supposedly exposed "the hidden agenda behind the COVID-19" coronavirus disease pandemic.

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Was a Scientist Jailed After Discovering a Deadly Virus Delivered Through Vaccines?

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In 2009, biologist Judy Mikovits, who was then the research director of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome-focused Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), published a paper on what she and many others thought to be a major scientific breakthrough in the prestigious journal Science.

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If you think there is bias in their assessment check their sources.

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If you've been on social media in the past two days, there's a good chance you've seen someone share "Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19," a 26-minute video about the coronavirus pandemic.

The video is a deep dive into conspiracy theories about COVID-19, public health and the pharmaceutical industry. It discusses Dr. Anthony Fauci's efforts to combat the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and Bill Gates' support of vaccination efforts around the world.

The film was produced by Elevate, a California production company run by Mikki Willis, who has more than 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. The video is billed as part one of an upcoming documentary.

Many of Willis' videos highlight conspiracy theories. In one clip, Willis' young son says Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself. In another, Willis floats a debunked conspiracy that the coronavirus was "intentionally released."

In "Plandemic," Willis interviews Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former scientist at the National Cancer Institute. Mikovits, before her work was discredited, was lauded in the late 2000s for her research on chronic fatigue syndrome. Mikovits makes several claims that are either unsupported or outright false.

Several readers asked us to look into Willis' documentary. Copies of the film have been removed from YouTube and Facebook for violating the platforms' community guidelines, but they still received tens of millions of views.

We fact-checked seven of Mikovits' most misleading claims in the film.

'I was held in jail with no charges'

This is inaccurate spin about Mikovits' past legal problems. She was charged in 2011 with stealing computer data and related property from her former employer.

The Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, Nevada, fired Mikovits in September 2011 as research director after her study linking a mouse retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome was discredited and retracted by Science, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. In November 2011, the district attorney in Washoe County, Nevada, filed a criminal complaint against Mikovits for allegedly stealing computer data, notebooks and other property from the institute.

Mikovits was briefly jailed in California on criminal charges. On June 11, 2012, the district attorney's office filed a petition to dismiss the charges without prejudice.

Mikovits says in "Plandemic" that the notebooks were "planted" in her house. She also alleged that the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases "paid off" investigators at the direction of Fauci, the director of the agency.

There is no evidence to support either claim. We reached out to the National Institutes of Health, which houses the NIAID, for a comment.

"The National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases are focused on critical research aimed at ending the COVID-19 pandemic and preventing further deaths," a spokesperson said in a statement. "We are not engaging in tactics by some seeking to derail our efforts."

'It's very clear this virus was manipulated'

Scientists say it's not. The genetic structure of the novel coronavirus rules out laboratory manipulation.

A Nature article published March 17 says the genetic makeup of the coronavirus, documented by researchers from several public health organizations, does not indicate it was altered. Instead, scientists have two plausible explanations for the origin of the virus: natural selection in an animal host, or natural selection in humans after the virus jumped from animals.
RELATED: What we know about the source of the coronavirus pandemic
"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," the article reads.

That finding does not rule out the possibility that Chinese researchers were studying the virus in a lab when it managed to spread outside the lab, although the government there has denied that.

'This occurred from SARS 1 within a decade - that's not naturally occurring'

This is a wrong explanation for the source of the novel coronavirus. The virus that causes COVID-19 is a new disease - it's not derived from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

The novel coronavirus is similar to SARS in some respects. Both are human coronaviruses that originated in bats, cause respiratory illness and spread through coughs and sneezes.

But the viruses only have a 79% genetic similarity, according to researchers. The novel coronavirus is more genetically similar to other bat-derived coronaviruses than SARS.

Hospitals get '$13,000 from Medicare if you call it COVID-19' when a patient dies

This is misleading. We rated a similar claim Half True.

The federal government is giving more money to hospitals that treat coronavirus patients. But there is no indication that hospitals are over-identifying COVID-10 patients as having COVID-19 - if anything, evidence suggests the illness is being underdiagnosed.

Medicare pays hospitals a set amount of money for the treatment of certain diagnoses, regardless of what the treatment actually costs. Medicare has determined that a hospital gets $13,000 if a COVID-19 patient on Medicare is admitted and $39,000 if the patient goes on a ventilator.
RELATED: Fact-check: Hospitals and COVID-19 payments
In addition, Medicare will pay hospitals a 20% "add-on" for COVID-19 patients. That's a result of the CARES Act, the largest of the three federal stimulus laws enacted in response to the coronavirus, which was signed into law March 27.

Experts previously told PolitiFact that Congress included the add-on in the CARES Act because hospitals have lost revenue from routine care and elective surgeries. It is unlikely that physicians would falsify the data, as there are strict policies for reporting.

Hydroxychloroquine is 'effective against these families of viruses'

This is unproven. There is no cure or vaccine for SARS or the novel coronavirus.

While some studies have found that hydroxychloroquine could mitigate some of the symptoms associated with COVID-19, other research has found no such effect. With more than 50 studies in the works, as well as an NIH clinical trial, it's too soon to say whether the drug is a viable treatment for the coronavirus. (The most recent study, a large-scale study of nearly 1,400 New York-area patients with moderate to severe COVID-19, found that patients fared no better by taking hydroxychloroquine.)
RELATED: Hydroxychloroquine and coronavirus: what you need to know
Fauci tempered expectations for hydroxychloroquine during a March press conference after Trump touted the drug. And several states have restricted access to it given how little scientists know about how it affects the coronavirus.

'The flu vaccines increase the odds by 36% of getting COVID-19'

This is inaccurate. Other fact-checkers have debunked similar claims.

In "Plandemic," Mikovits points to a study published in January in the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine. The study found that, among personnel in the U.S. Defense Department between 2017 and 2018, the odds of getting coronaviruses were greater for vaccinated officials than unvaccinated officials.

But that doesn't support Mikovits' claim.

First of all, the study was conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic. And scientists have noted flaws in its experimental design; for example, the number of vaccinated subjects was more than twice as large as the number of unvaccinated subjects.

Finally, nowhere in the study do the authors say flu vaccines increased subjects' odds of getting a coronavirus by 36%. That bogus claim was added to the study in a March 11 story from DisabledVeterans.org.

'If you've ever had a flu vaccine, you were injected with coronaviruses'

This is inaccurate. Similar claims have also been debunked by other fact-checkers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most flu vaccines in the United States protect against four different kinds of viruses: influenza A (H1N1), influenza A (H3N2), and two influenza B viruses. Others protect against three kinds of flu viruses.

There are no coronaviruses in the flu shot. And there are no human coronavirus vaccines.

'Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions.'

There is no evidence to support this. We're not sure what a "coronavirus expression" even is.

The CDC advises anyone who goes out in public to wear a mask. Since it can take up to 14 days for an infected person to exhibit symptoms, the goal is to prevent unwittingly spreading the coronavirus through coughs and sneezes.
RELATED: To fight COVID-19, CDC now says wear masks in public
Wearing a face mask prevents the spread of the coronavirus - it does not make people more susceptible to it.

"There is nothing about wearing a mask that would have any biologically relevant impact on viral activity," said Richard Peltier, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, in an email. "Wearing a mask simply catches the droplets before they reach our mouth or nose. It isn't rocket science, and Dr. Mikovits should know that."

American Hospital Association, " Special Bulletin: Senate Passes the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act," March 26, 2020

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Human Coronavirus Types, accessed May 7, 2020

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Key Facts About Seasonal Flu Vaccine, accessed May 7, 2020

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Information for Clinicians on Investigational Therapeutics for Patients with COVID-19, April 25, 2020

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Use of Cloth Face Coverings to Help Slow the Spread of COVID-19, accessed May 7, 2020

Chicago Tribune, " Covering the stunning fall of Judy Mikovits, researcher of XMRV and chronic fatigue," Nov. 22, 2011

Chicago Tribune, " Nov. 22, 2011: Discredited chronic fatigue researcher in California jail," Nov. 22, 2011

C-SPAN, President Trump with Coronavirus Task Force Briefing, March 20, 2020

Digital Trends, " Facebook will take down viral 'Plandemic' coronavirus conspiracy video," May 7, 2020

DisabledVeterans.org, " Flu Vaccine Increases Coronavirus Risk 36% Says Military Study," March 11, 2020

Email from the National Institutes of Health, May 7, 2020

Email from Richard Peltier, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, May 7, 2020

Factcheck.org, " No Evidence That Flu Shot Increases Risk of COVID-19," April 27, 2020

Kaiser Family Foundation, " Estimated Cost of Treating the Uninsured Hospitalized with COVID-19," April 7, 2020

The Lancet, " Genomic characterisation and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus: implications for virus origins and receptor binding," Jan. 30, 2020

Lead Stories, " Fact Check: The Flu Shot Does NOT Increase Risk Of Contracting COVID-19 By 36%," March 25, 2020

Media Matters, " A coronavirus conspiracy theory film attacking vaccines has racked up million of views and engagements on YouTube and Facebook," May 7, 2020

Nature magazine, " The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2," March 17, 2020

The New York Times, " Fallout From Fatigue Syndrome Retraction Is Wide," Feb. 6, 2012

PolitiFact, " Coronavirus testing: What we know, all in one place," May 5, 2020

PolitiFact, " Don't fall for conspiracy about Dr. Anthony Fauci, hydroxychloroquine," May 6, 2020

PolitiFact, " Fact-check: Hospitals and COVID-19 payments," April 21, 2020

PolitiFact, " Hydroxychloroquine and coronavirus: what you need to know," April 8, 2020

PolitiFact, " What early research actually says about hydroxychloroquine and the coronavirus," April 7, 2020

PolitiFact, " What we know about the source of the coronavirus pandemic," April 17, 2020

Reuters, " False claim: The flu vaccine causes the new coronavirus," April 15, 2020

Science Feedback, " Claim that flu vaccine increases coronavirus infection is unsupported, misinterprets scientific studies"

Science magazine, " Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Researcher Fired Amidst New Controversy," Oct. 4, 2011

Science magazine, " Criminal Charges Dropped Against Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Researcher Judy Mikovits," June 13, 2012

Science magazine, Retraction, Dec. 23, 2011

Snopes, " Was a Scientist Jailed After Discovering a Deadly Virus Delivered Through Vaccines?" Dec. 8, 2018

USA Today, " Fact check: Getting flu shot doesn't make you more (or less) likely to get the coronavirus," April 1, 2020

YouTube video, May 7, 2020

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PolitiFact - Fact-checking 'Plandemic': A documentary full of false conspiracy theories about the coronavirus

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If you've been on social media in the past two days, there's a good chance you've seen someone share "Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19," a 26-minute video about the coronavirus pandemic. The video is a deep dive into conspiracy theories about COVID-19, public health and the pharmaceutical industry.

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Refutation point by point with linked articles

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Refutation point by point with linked articles

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Fact checking takes a great deal of time when so much is wrong.

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It took me a while to write this because I spent most of the morning trying to stand up a broom while searching the television for insight on NASA's mysterious cloud generation machine and the chemicals the weather control experiments. Ok, I usually hate sarcasm, but conspiracy theories are so rampant these days that I couldn't resist.

The latest one making the rounds on my social media feeds is a YouTube "documentary" called Plandemic. I wasn't even aware of it until a Facebook friend shared it yesterday. Another friend then messaged me asking for my opinion about it, and it immediately didn't pass my smell test.

A biologist disinfecting the COVID-19 screening-point at the entrance of the Pasteur Institute , in ... [+]
AFP via Getty Images

According to Derek Beres' blog "The Anti-Vaxx agenda of Plandemic," my smell test detector didn't let me down. The video, which continues to be taken down by social media sites, features an activist, Judy Mikovits, and lots of disingenuous information. Beres writes, "This agenda-based film features contradictory evidence and false claims while being championed as a beacon of truth." At least it is a non-partisan pile of misinformation as both conservative and liberal friends seem to be sharing it. According to the BBC, other conspiracy theories linked to religious groups, software moguls and immigration have been propagated by extreme political tribes. Honestly, I will leave it to folks like Beres and the numerous other outlets to debunk video. My goal is to explore why people are more enamored with conspiracy theories than science.

Yourbias.is is a website that defines cognitive biases. It discusses something called belief bias: "If a conclusion supports your existing beliefs, you'll rationalize anything that supports it." My hypothesis is that science, personal circumstances and the economic distress of the coronavirus pandemic are so overwhelming that people seek alternative realities as some type of rationalization or "soothing balm." Some even may grasp them because it is more understandable than the graphic, exponential talk, and so forth. However, actual science says there is more to the story.

A 2015 study presented at theProceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web discussed a new way of predicting viral misinformation spread on social media. The study reveals that spreading rate, probability to verify a hoax, gullibility, and a person's belief system are key factors. However, forgetting probability and gullibility were the primary reasons stuff like "Plandemic" can take root and thrive. A 2019 study in the Journal of Personality surveyed over 1600 people and found that belief in fake news is mostly driven by the inability to reject weak claims. The study authors referred to that tendency as "reflexive open‐mindedness."

AUSTIN, TEXAS - APRIL 25: Protestors gather outside the Texas State Capitol during a rally calling ... [+]
Getty Images

While the aforementioned studies are published in the scholarly literature, my experiences as a meteorology professor, atmospheric scientist, and former NASA scientist have revealed some more "common sense" reasons. I hear all types of wacky theories and narratives about climate change or why people don't evacuate from a hurricane. My 25+ years of doing science, testifying before Congress, and monitoring social media have also revealed the following factors in why people migrate to conspiracy theories:

1. Lack of or failure to apply critical thinking skills

2. Dunning-Kruger Effect (overestimate of one's knowledge of particular topics)

3. Healthy skepticism because of previous events (See Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments)

4. Sharing content without reading it and the inability to grasp the credibility of the source (Everything on the Internet is credible, right?)

5. False equivalency. While healthy skepticism and careful thought should be always be given in science, many people mistakenly give equal weight to counter arguments when there is often a clear consensus on the other side. I see this all of the time with the climate change discussion. My Forbes colleague Stephanie Sarkis writes an excellent piece at this link on false equivalency.

I am always amused at how many of the odd conspiracy theories or viral claims seem to be linked to NASA. I can only conclude that the conspiracy originators view NASA as viewed as a credible source. I am surprised that the Plandemic documentary didn't interview a disgruntled former NASA scientist instead. I think this actual medical doctor's reaction to Plandemic ( see this link) sums it up for many of us.

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Why People Cling To Conspiracy Theories Like 'Plandemic'

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It took me a while to write this because I spent most of the morning trying to stand up a broom while searching the television for insight on NASA's mysterious cloud generation machine and the chemicals the weather control experiments. Ok, I usually hate sarcasm, but conspiracy theories are so rampant these days that I couldn't resist.

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Want to be more discerning in your news intake, but don't know where to start? It's understandable. We're a long way away from the day when Americans would hunker down to watch Walter Cronkite. In addition to the splintering of our media landscape into hundreds of outlets, you're probably also aware of the swirling misinformation (inaccurate information shared unwittingly) and disinformation (information shared with an intent to mislead) on the internet.

Whether it's a news outlet you've never heard of, or a Facebook post written by your best friend, some key questions can help you better assess online information.

Where is it coming from, who is paying for it, and what do they want to accomplish?

What is their track record and how transparent are they about past mistakes?

Is their claim something I can verify with an original source, reputable news outlet, and/or fact-checking website such as PolitiFact or Snopes?

Duke University's Reporters' Lab has compiled a list of 237 fact-checking sites in 80 countries - a nearly 26% increase since last year. So even as misinformation and disinformation proliferate, so do the "fact cops" determined to stop them in their tracks.

Concerns around the proliferation of disinformation and so-called fake news have gained new urgency with the World Health Organization declaring an "infodemic" around COVID-19. Here are some key questions to consider while reading news or social media posts.

What is misinformation vs. disinformation?

Misinformation is information that is misleading or wrong, but not intentionally. It includes everything from a factoid your friend reposted on Facebook to assertions made by officials or, yes, even journalists.

Disinformation is more deliberate and is distributed with the intent to confuse, disturb, or provoke. It also includes plausible information shared through devious means, such as a fake Twitter account; done en masse, this can create a skewed impression of popular opinion. A particularly deceptive form of disinformation are "deepfake" videos, with imperceptible alterations in the footage making it appear that someone said or did something that he or she never said or did.

Be particularly on guard against misinformation and disinformation during crises, which provide fertile ground for exploiting fear, anger, and other emotions.

How can I tell which news sources are credible?

Here are a few points to consider:

Standards: What information does this outlet provide about who they are, their mission, and their fact-checking process or standards?

Show me the money: Who is paying for their work, and why? Is this news outlet's business model dependent to some degree on generating "clicks"? If so, how might that have influenced this story?

Track record: Does this outlet publish corrections to errors in stories, indicating transparency and accountability? Have they been recognized for journalistic excellence?

None of these methods are fool-proof, but together they will provide a more informed understanding of the sources.

How can I fact-check a particular claim?

Fact-checking sites are cropping up all over the internet to help you do just this. Duke University's Reporters' Lab, run by the creator of PolitiFact, has compiled a list of such sites. Their database includes more than 237 fact-checkers in nearly 80 countries - a 26% increase in less than a year. Some of these specialize in exposing online hoaxes and disinformation.

You can go directly to one of these sites and search for the claim you're researching, or type the claim into Google along with the name of a recommended site, to see if any of them have looked into it. If you don't see the claim you're researching on your preferred fact-checking site, look for a place to submit a claim for investigation, such as these pages on PolitiFact and Snopes.

If it's a photo you're trying to verify, a reverse image search on Google can help to pinpoint its origin. Sometimes photos are reposted out of context, or with false captions about the year, place, and event at which they were taken.

What about bias?

As the media has become more polarized, more bias has seeped into the news - but it has also become easier to spot. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you read an article:

Angle: What discrete aspect of this topic does this article attempt to address, and what does that say about the news organization's priorities and/or worldview?

Scope: Does this do a reasonable job of addressing all relevant points given the space allotted? What is the timeframe, geographical reach, and diversity of people included in terms of age, gender, race, cultural background, professional expertise, political views, etc.?

Sources: Who are the sources, what is their expertise, and how does their background and work inform their approach to this topic? What is the relative emphasis placed on each source? Who is quoted most, first, and last?

Author: Who is the author? What did they study, and where? What do they normally write about? What do they post on Twitter? Do they have any affiliations (past or present) that might affect how they approach this topic?

Yourself: This might be the hardest of all! If you're reading a map and want to follow the blue trail, but don't realize you're wearing red-tinted glasses, you might end up following the purple trail without realizing it. So it's worth asking: What is coloring the way I see this news source, issue, and/or article?

Where can I find more resources on media literacy?

Oxford Internet Institute's Computational Propaganda Project offers a host of resources on disinformation designed for civil society groups, but relevant to individuals as well.

Data & Society, an independent nonprofit, explains the phenomena of misinformation and disinformation in great depth in this report.

The Poynter Institute provides a detailed Verification Handbook and also runs the International Fact-Checking Network, which publishes a weekly newsletter and many online resources.

UNESCO compiled a seven-module course for teaching about journalism, fake news, and disinformation. It's geared toward educators, but is a good template for self-instruction as well. The Center for Media Literacy and the News Literacy Project are also great resources for teachers.

The Enoch Free Pratt Library in Maryland has put together a concise guide for spotting fake news.

There are also online courses, such as the Great Courses' " Fighting Misinformation: Digital Media Literary," offered in partnership with IREX.

Once you feel like you're getting the hang of media literacy, you can test yourself with this fun online game, " Factitious," developed by American University Game Lab to see if you can tell the difference between real and fake news.
Editor's note: The original version of this story misidentified the developer of Factitious.

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Fake news 101: A guide to help sniff out the truth

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Want to be more discerning in your news intake, but don't know where to start? It's understandable. We're a long way away from the day when Americans would hunker down to watch Walter Cronkite.

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From News Literacy Project & The Metcalf Institute

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From News Literacy Project & The Metcalf Institute

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A 4 part webinar series discussing journalism in these uncertain times & fact checking.

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In honor of World Press Freedom Day, NLP's founder and CEO, Alan C. Miller, wrote an op-ed for CNN about why we must allow journalists to do the hard work of keeping the public safe and informed during this pandemic. "Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by attacks on press freedoms and journalists around the world amid the Covid-19...

The next decade is critical for the future of journalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic is deepening existing crises that already threaten free and independent reporting, Reporters Without Borders said April 21 as it released its annual World Press Freedom Index, which ranks 180 countries and regions on the level of freedom they afford journalists. Christophe...

An educator on the EdTech Round Robin episode of Wizards of EdTech Podcast promotes (11:48) the value of Informable as a news literacy resource for all ages as well as the Checkology® virtual classroom.

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COVID-19 in Context: News Coverage and News Literacy in Uncertain Times - News Literacy Project

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In honor of World Press Freedom Day, NLP's founder and CEO, Alan C. Miller, wrote an op-ed for CNN about why we must allow journalists to do the hard work of keeping the public safe and informed during this pandemic. "Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by attacks on press freedoms and journalists around the world amid the Covid-19...

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Memes in general are not a reliable source of information.

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As the new coronavirus has spread across the globe, so has speculative and deceptive information about its origins, how it infects people and what can be done to protect against it.

Many people have found themselves engulfed by a maelstrom of false news, unsubstantiated home remedies, conspiracy theories and propaganda seemingly overnight. That may be due, in part, to the fact that lies travel faster and reach more people than the truth, according to a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who investigated how rumors spread on Twitter.

With the pandemic moving at a pace and a scope that have overwhelmed the coping mechanisms of entire countries, it's no surprise that individuals are left struggling with what to believe, says Jane Bambauer, a professor at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, who is studying why the COVID-19 crisis is particularly suited to breeding bad information.

"A situation like this, where even the best experts and scientists with the most critical minds are dealing with something that they still don't fully understand, creates a low-knowledge environment," Bambauer said. "And when people are desperate for knowledge, when we don't have much light, we try to fill the gaps and share what we can. Even scientists are not immune to this."

No mask and no amount of social distancing can protect people from ingesting information that could be harmful to themselves or those around them.

"When we're forced to make decisions in an environment where much about COVID-19 falls into one of two categories - 'known unknowns' or 'unknown unknowns' - we should not be too credulous," Bambauer said, adding that she would "take anything shared on social media with a grain of salt right now, no matter how rude it may feel in the moment."

Diana Daly, an assistant professor in the School of Information in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, says the timing of the pandemic has made it easy for misinformation to spread unusually fast and far.

"This came at a time when there were some fundamental polarizations already in place," said Daly, who is also the school's director of undergraduate studies.

She notes that studies have shown the more politically divided a society is, the more fertile ground it provides for the seeds of flawed information to sprout into mistaken beliefs, false news and conspiracy theories.

Misinformation, Daly says, typically refers to information that is widely believed to be true or is created with accidental factual errors and published or shared in good will. Disinformation, on the other hand, is used to purposely deceive. Since it's not always easy to tell them apart, Daly prefers the broader term "bad information," which encompasses both misinformation and disinformation, as well as what is often referred to as "fake news."
When false news run in the family
When emotional turmoil is exacerbated by the rigors of social distancing, conditions are ripe for bad information to circulate, Daly says, but there is a valuable lesson to be learned.

"When people feel powerless, and if they ignore feelings of fear, worry, anger and disbelief, they begin to search for alternatives," she said. "And once they start looking, they will find them, or they might even begin manufacturing them. This happens on a personal level first and then within our subcultures."

For those who have family and friends who may deny facts or spread conspiracy theories, Daly says adopting a stance of compassion is more helpful than dismissing false beliefs outright or responding in anger.

"Always ask yourself: Why is someone not accepting facts? What does that piece of bad information offer them that they're not getting out of the mainstream sources? And just recognize that," she said. "Try to recognize that everyone has good reasons to believe in something, and when people feel vulnerable, they may listen to things they shouldn't. Look for the struggles they face and acknowledge them."

Daly recommends that people look for ways to connect on a personal level, express concern for the other person's well-being and share tips on how to find good information. She also encourages individuals looking for reliable information to take advantage of independent fact checking sites such as Infotagion, a project "dedicated to fighting the disinformation contagion about COVID-19."
Everyone can be a fact-checker
To find reliable information, Jeannine Relly, associate professor in the School of Journalism, recommends using multiple dependable news sources and basic, tried-and-proven strategies of vetting of information.

"It's always a good idea to try and track down original sources of data and other information when possible, and to double check the URLs where the information is located," she said.

Many tools that assist with authenticating or verifying information are available online for free. (See this story's Extra Info box.)

In addition, Relly, along with professional fact-checkers, recommends watching for the following warning signs signaling potentially bad information:

Lack of sources: Reputable news organizations rely on many diverse sources, including sources that don't show up in the final piece. A lack of sources signals trouble.

Lack of nuance: With COVID-19, there is still much that is not known, so one should be wary of portrayals of black-and-white knowledge.

Claims of quick fixes: These might come with fabricated testimonies about how to ward off the virus or promotions of a quick cure.

Something's "off:" Subtle details can give away an otherwise flawlessly designed piece as untrustworthy. Some of the most effective disinformation campaigns bury a kernel of false information inside known truths or evidence-based information.

Rhetoric: Sweeping generalizations, like "nobody" or "everybody," may indicate a piece is trying to sway opinions rather than inform. One should also be skeptical of COVID-19 posts alluding to national pride or featuring enduring symbols, such as the American flag, with no relevance to the topic.

Violations of common sense: If a claim sounds unscientific, it most likely is.

Triggering content: Be wary of a piece that elicits a strong reaction, makes you angry, makes you want to buy something or looks too good to be true.

Discrimination: Be wary of any information that stigmatizes groups.

Clickbait: A headline that doesn't fit the story is more likely designed to generate site visits than share information.

Misspelled words and grammatical errors: Trustworthy sources know how to correctly spell technical terms like COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2.

Manipulated visuals or video

A good rule of thumb for those who wish to err on the cautious side is to be skeptical of any information shared in the form of a meme, says Volodymyr Lysenko, an adjunct instructor in the UArizona School of Information who has studied Russian disinformation campaigns for decades.

Lysenko says rather than try to assess the validity of an individual piece of information by itself, especially if that information was received through social media, people should try to "triangulate news" by finding independent information on the issues in question from trusted news sources like reliable newspapers, TV and radio stations.

Another strategy recommended by professional fact-checkers is to look for the "WWWWH" - when, where, what, who and how. This litmus test may reveal, for example, that an otherwise convincing bit of news predates the COVID-19 pandemic by years, proving it was taken out of context.
Some myths have an expiration date
In a situation as fluid as the one we're currently in, where recommendations change and targets keep shifting, even some of the most stubborn myths have a shelf life, and some eventually die of natural causes, Bambauer says.

For example, claims of COVID-19 being "no worse than the flu" soared high on social media during the early stages of the pandemic but have largely subsided.

Bambauer says there might be a "tipping-point phenomenon," where, over time, the cognitive dissonance between what people believe and reality becomes too large, and false beliefs can no longer feed on uncertainty.

"Once people see what is happening around them, they realize they can't maintain these beliefs any longer," she said.

Bambauer says the spread of COVID-19 misinformation may also have been exacerbated by health authorities issuing contradictory messaging - such as advising to the public to not wear masks but later reversing that guidance - as well as a time lag between myths popping up on social media and health officials debunking them.

"Understandably, public health authorities are reluctant to make statements unless they feel enough data has been collected, but in the current situation, where people are trying to make important decisions and are desperate for information, that may not be the best approach," Bambauer said. "Rather, the sort of qualified advice that a doctor or epidemiologist would give their own family would be more useful. Otherwise, the void is going to be filled with quackery and snake oil."

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Why You Shouldn't Trust Memes About Coronavirus

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As the new coronavirus has spread across the globe, so has speculative and deceptive information about its origins, how it infects people and what can be done to protect against it. Many people have found themselves engulfed by a maelstrom of false news, unsubstantiated home remedies, conspiracy theories and propaganda seemingly overnight.

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Infotagion seeks to fight the disinformation contagion about COVID-19. Disinformation about this deadly virus can spread just as far and fast as the real thing - harming you and those you love. So we're fighting back, giving everyone the opportunity to flag false and misleading content, while highlighting trustworthy and sourced information.

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Science denial allows conspiracy to thrive

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Science denial allows conspiracy to thrive

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Posted on 31 March 2020 by John Cook

In 2007, Mark Hoofnagle suggested on his Science Blog Denialism that denialists across a range of topics such as climate change, evolution, & HIV/AIDS all employed the same rhetorical tactics to sow confusion. The five general tactics were conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic.

Two years later, Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee published an article in the scientific journal European Journal of Public Health titled Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond? They further fleshed out Hoofnagle's five denialist tactics and argued that we should expose to public scrutiny the tactics of denial, identifying them for what they are. I took this advice to heart and began including the five denialist tactics in my own talks about climate misinformation.

In 2013, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition invited me to give a workshop about climate misinformation at their annual summit. As I prepared my presentation, I mused on whether the five denial techniques could be adapted into a sticky, easy-to-remember acronym. I vividly remember my first attempt: beginning with Fake Experts, Unrealistic Expectations, Cherry Picking... realizing I was going in a problematic direction for a workshop for young participants. I started over and settled on FLICC: Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, and Conspiracy theories.

When I led a 2015 collaboration between the University of Queensland and Skeptical Science to develop the free online course Denial101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial, we made FLICC the underlying framework of the entire course. An important component of our debunking of the most common myths about climate change was identifying the denial techniques in each myth. A common comment we received from students was how much they appreciated learning about FLICC.

Since moving to the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, I've continued to build the FLICC taxonomy. In my collaboration with critical thinking philosophers Peter Ellerton and David Kinkead, I was introduced to reasoning fallacies that we hadn't included in Denial101x. As I begun developing the Cranky Uncle game, I began a series of fallacy quizzes where I gradually built the taxonomy up as I introduced people to an ever-growing collection of denial techniques (note the differing difficulty levels between quiz #1 and quiz #8). When Stephan Lewandowsky and I published The Conspiracy Theory Handbook, we added seven traits of conspiratorial thinking. Here is the latest version of the FLICC taxonomy (with all the icons freely available and shareable on Wikimedia):

When I visited Brisbane in December 2019, I asked the University of Queensland if I could record a video explaining the updated FLICC taxonomy. They agreed but once they saw my script, including explanations and definitions of each denial technique, they suggested I divide the video into a three-parter. Always a sucker for a trilogy, I agreed - here are the three videos:

As well as the videos, this post includes written definitions and examples of each denial technique. I will continue to update this table as the taxonomy evolves in the future.

False Choice

Presenting two options as the only possibilities, when other possibilities exist.

"CO2 lags temperature in the ice core record, proving that temperature drives CO2, notthe other way around."

Oversimplification

Simplifying a situation in such a way as to distort understanding, leading to erroneous conclusions.

"CO2 is plant food so burning fossil fuels will be good for plants."

Red Herring

Deliberately diverting attention to an irrelevant point to distract from a more important point.

"CO2 is a trace gas so it's warming effect is minimal."

And lastly, a bit of fun. Every year, Inside the Greenhouse hold a competition inviting people to submit climate comedy videos. In 2019, I submitted Giving Climate Denial the FLICC, which received an honorable mention.

This post is reposted from crankyuncle.com.

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A history of FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial

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In 2007, Mark Hoofnagle suggested on his Science Blog Denialism that denialists across a range of topics such as climate change, evolution, & HIV/AIDS all employed the same rhetorical tactics to sow confusion. The five general tactics were conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic.

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This one is extensive. Really extensive but so much good information.

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A rebuttal to the Plandemic “documentary”

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A rebuttal to the Plandemic “documentary”

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A new documentary, "The Plandemic," states that it is uncovering a global cabal trying to implement forced vaccinations.

The first clip's interview subject, Judy Mikovits, is a known anti-vaxxer.

This agenda-based film features contradictory evidence and false claims while being championed as a beacon of truth.

In 1990, American attorney Mike Godwin coined " Godwin's law," which states that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." When Nazis are invoked the debate is over. Godwin has made some exceptions, such as the Trump administration's implementation of refugee detention centers being compared to concentration camps. In general, little actually lives up to the horrors of the Holocaust, though anyone without credible evidence trying to win a debate foolishly invokes Hitler.

Cue COVID-19.

Over the past two days my social media feed has been dominated by a clip from the forthcoming documentary, " The Plandemic." It only takes until the third paragraph of the film's description to discover that the current forced global vaccination program is rooted in Hitler's Germany. A few sentences later we "flash forward to 2020" to find out the "masters of the Pandemic" are finally finishing the job-on us.

Said clip features former researcher Judy Mikovits, who has become a minor celebrity on the anti-vaxx circuit. Her interview doubles as a promotion for her latest book, which is based on an ongoing war she's waging with Dr. Anthony Fauci. Her Twitter feed is filled with anti-Fauci rhetoric alongside glee that Donald Trump is now listening to her. She has explicitly called for the entire leadership of the COVID-19 response team to be fired.

Mikovits' story is not unlike Andrew Wakefield's, the discredited British physician who was paid to invent the vaccine-autism "conspiracy." In 2011, Mikovits attempted to link a newly discovered retrovirus to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, only to partially retract the paper after the study could not be replicated. The journal, Science, later fully retracted Mikovits' paper, just as The Lancet had done with Wakefield's research (which also could not be replicated). In 2017, Mikovits published a book on retroviruses and...autism.

(Interestingly, in "The Plandemic," Mikovits wants to end the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows federal funding recipients to file patents on inventions they've created. She cites a conflict of interest regarding Fauci. There is no mention of Wakefield's filing a patent for a measles vaccine while he was trying to discredit existing vaccines.)

As I wrote about last week, we've entered a strange territory where the far Left and far Right are converging. Truth is colliding with truthiness. "The Plandemic" is based on a serious problem in our market-based system: pharmaceutical companies taking advantage of for-profit health care. We also, as Mikovits recommends, need to take care of our immune system. But to claim that we don't need a vaccine because our immune system will take care of us overlooks people born with pre-existing conditions, as well as the fact that this virus is unpredictable. Her "contrarian" attitude sells books and get clicks. What it doesn't do is help our situation. Contrary to the film's stated goal of waking people up, it accomplishes the opposite: by spreading misinformation, it's making people more fearful and ignorant of the scientific process.

The overall premise is true: Big Pharma is one of modernity's most lucrative industries. Billions are made on our suffering. For example, I've spent the last six months researching the chemical imbalance theory of mental health, which, beginning in the fifties through the present day, has been one of health care's greatest failures. There are real conspiracies that need to be addressed, such as this administration's complete failure to test Americans. But instead of putting our time and energy into, say, voting, we spin our wheels over invented conspiracies that are only furthering fear and confusion.

Below are seven instances that display how conspiracy theories are baked into "The Plandemic." To borrow from Mike Godwin, perhaps Beres' law is number eight: "As an online discussion about vaccines grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Bill Gates approaches 1." Because obviously, he's in there too.

1. Anti-vaccination agenda

The film opens with Mikovits' new book, Plague of Corruption, published by Skyhorse Publishing. This house has skin in the anti-vaxx game. The house's founder and publisher, Tony Lyons, said in 2014 that "my main focus in the publishing field has become books about autism and the connection between autism and vaccines." Skyhorse has published two of discredited physician Andrew Wakefield's anti-vaxx books. ( Note: my last book was published by Carrel, a division of Skyhorse. I was not aware of the anti-vaxx connection until after it was published.) Mikovits' co-author, Kent Heckenlively, is a known anti-vaxxer and a founding editor of the anti-vaxx website, Age of Autism. The book's foreword was written by Robert F. Kennedy, a leader in the anti-vaxx movement. So when Mikovits states in "The Plandemic" that she takes no issue with vaccinations, she sure hangs around plenty of people that do.

2. The flu vaccine linked to coronavirus

Mikovits links COVID-19 with the flu vaccine based on a January 2020 study of Department of Defense personnel. Indeed, getting the flu vaccine appeared to result in an increased risk of being infected with a coronavirus. The problem: the coronavirus studied was the common cold, not COVID-19. This study was also based on one flu season. A previous, larger study covering six flu seasons found no such association. In the film you're led to believe that getting a flu vaccine increases your risk of getting COVID-19. There's no evidence of that.

3. The ongoing debate over hydroxychloroquine

Mikovits expresses consternation that the anti-malarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, is not being used more. She states that it's been on the WHO Model Lists of Essential Medicines for 70 years. Almost: it was approved for medical use in America in 1955. While it has been successfully used to treat malaria, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis, evidence of its efficacy in treating COVID-19 is conflicting. This does not mean that it might not work in combination with other drugs. The way the film is edited, however, makes it appear that Fauci is stating that evidence of hydroxychloroquine's efficacy is anecdotal in regards to any usage. His clip, specific to COVID-19, is right after Mikovits' citation of the WHO list. In this case, Fauci is right: evidence of hydroxychloroquine's efficacy in treating COVID-19 is, to date, anecdotal. The film then flashes to a doctor berating Fauci's assessment. He then angrily asks Fauci if he's going to clinically test a vaccine. Considering over 70 are in various phases of clinical trials around the world, the answer is likely yes, but the film makes it seem the opposite.

4. The Bakersfield doctors

Here they are again. Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, the team that runs an urgent care center in Bakersfield, were forceful in their assessment that sheltering in place is nonsense. Their videos were taken off of social media for spreading misinformation, yet that makes perfect fodder for "The Plandemic." To be fair, in one clip they make a good point: humans needs to be exposed to bacteria. Our immune systems require exposure. In normal times, we've gone overboard with antibacterial soap. Kids need dirt.

The problem is that this point is conflated with sheltering at home. What we're avoiding is not bacteria, but overwhelming our health care system. Sure, a large percentage of those infected with COVID-19 are asymptomatic. Doctors are still trying to understand why that is. We're protecting vulnerable populations whose immune systems cannot handle it as well as doctors and nurses. The film's editing is disingenuous. It makes it appear that if we only got a little COVID, we'd all be alright. The debate over herd immunity is a separate conversation. The short-term solution is sheltering at home. It's not about taking away our freedom. It's buying researchers and hospitals time. These doctors should know better.

Judy Mikovits in "The Plandemic."

5. Shady Montage

The film claims that we're being driven to hate one another by our media outlets. That is a debatable but important point. Social media is certainly polarizing. We know that. This claim is made over a montage featuring Alex Jones (who recently contemplated cannibalism) and Sean Hannity (a leading voice for the sheltering at home protest movement) alongside comedians Trevor Noah and John Oliver. Sure, the latter are politically liberal. But since when is cannibalism a conservative principle? This montage makes you feel as if all media is flawed. The implication is that you can only turn to films like "The Plandemic" for the truth. In criticizing the "us versus them" mentality, the filmmakers are trying to win viewers over to "their" side.

6. Cult Dog Whistling

The company behind this film made its mark by distributing and marketing the documentary that led to the book, "The Secret." Barbara Ehrenreich said it best when stating that the self-help techniques inside this book-"ask, believe, receive"-promotes a failure to engage with reality while promoting political complacency. The author, Rhonda Byrne, tows a very old myth: You're the only reason that you're in the shape you're in. If you're having problems, that's on you. You're not asking hard enough. "The Plandemic" relies on a tried and tested cult technique: the world is toxic, but we have the answers. This is indicated when Mikovits says, "Hopefully this is the wake-up call for all America to realize this makes no sense and we win because it will take down this whole program." You're either with us or against us. The same mostly white and affluent demographic targeted by Byrne makes up a large portion of the anti-vaccination movement. Magical thinking is easy when you're not poor or oppressed.

7. Surprise outbreak

The clip ends with Fauci speaking at a 2017 commencement address. He states there is no doubt there will be a surprise outbreak due to a pandemic. This theatrical ending implies that he's been in on this the whole time (wink, wink). But let's consider a 2007 review by a team of scientists in Hong Kong:

"Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination, which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks. The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the re-emergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored."

Obama warned of a potential pandemic too. In fact, a lot of researchers have been sounding the alarm. This Larry Brilliant interview from 2017 is rather timely today. That does not fit the anti-Fauci rhetoric Mikovits is banking her career on, however. Every agenda has a target. While "The Plandemic" says the goal is our freedom, the reality is anything but.

--

Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His next book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

Related Articles Around the Web

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A new documentary, "The Plandemic," states that it is uncovering a global cabal trying to implement forced vaccinations. The first clip's interview subject, Judy Mikovits, is a known anti-vaxxer. This agenda-based film features contradictory evidence and false claims, even though it's being championed as a beacon of truth.

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When amateur fact-checkers unite on Reddit. Possible language 😖

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When amateur fact-checkers unite on Reddit. Possible language 😖

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This fucking gish gallop video was sent to me by my cousin, and I'm now realizing how woo woo So Cal batshit he's becoming. Is there a good rebuttal for him to watch/read to this Judy Mikovits monster?

Here's the video in question, though it keeps getting removed : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQYPi0Wm6OE

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Where can I find a good rebuttal to "Plandemic"?

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This fucking gish gallop video was sent to me by my cousin, and I'm now realizing how woo woo So Cal batshit he's becoming. Is there a good rebuttal for him to watch/read to this Judy Mikovits monster? Here's the video in question, though it keeps getting removed : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQYPi0Wm6OE

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Great for putting things into perspective.

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You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you - The Oatmeal

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This is a comic about the backfire effect.

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Members of the clinical staff wearing Personal Protective Equipment PPE care for a patient with ... [+]
ASSOCIATED PRESS

By now you've probably heard about or even seen the video "Plandemic" that's been spreading like wildfire through social media networks. This article is not the one you should give to your friend or relative or coworker who shared the video. This is an article for those who recognized the video as rife with conspiracy theories, misinformation and false claims, those who are frustrated and unsettled and disappointed in who they see sharing it, and those who want to know what to say when they see it. It explains why the video is successful, how to recognize propaganda like this for what it is, and explain why it is so, so, so important to speak up about this particular video.
What IS this video?
Plandemic interviews a scientist who was appropriately discredited for scientific misconduct and fraud. She is a known, established anti-vaccine advocate (despite her denial in the film), and she presents a long list of unsupported statements that involve COVID-19, various vaccines, HIV/AIDS, Anthony Fauci, pharmaceutical company collusion and other elements of an elaborate, long-running cover-up. It's a doozy, checking nearly every box in the long list of conspiracy theories and disinformation circulating about the coronavirus.
Why did my smart, thoughtful, informed friend share this?
What's most upsetting to many people is who they see sharing it: reasonable, intelligent people who normally don't fall for conspiracy theories or pseudoscience. What is going on?

Many people who are privately or casually sharing it are saying, "This is interesting. What do you think of it?" Most genuinely don't know what to make of it. They aren't trying to spread misinformation. They're not the types to believe or share conspiracy theories. They're taken in by the video's slick appearance and by its use of persuasive techniques and really want to know what you think, so you need to approach them respectfully about it. (We'll get to that.)

Why is this video suddenly everywhere? Why are so many drawn to it?

This video has been extremely successful at promoting misinformation for three reasons: First, it taps into people's uncertainty, anxiety and need for answers-common reasons anyone is attracted to a conspiracy theory. Second, it is packaged very professionally and uses common conventions people already associate with factual documentaries. Third, it successfully exploits ancient but extremely effective methods of persuasion.

There is more uncertainty about our world right now than there has been in decades, perhaps a century, and the stakes are higher than ever. Everyone has so many unanswered questions-including scientists, doctors, national leaders and others we ordinarily look to for answers. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. People want answers. Conspiracy theories can be comforting. This video appears to provide answers that fit together, that seem to make sense, that sound credible, or at least "interesting and worth considering." (That's the hook. Next is the line.)
The video looks, sounds and feels like a documentary even though it isn't
Plandemic is part of a disturbingly successful trend in which deep-pocketed purveyors of pseudoscience produce slick, professional videos as credible-appearing documentaries. The lighting, narrative structure, the pacing, use of imagery, camera angles, editing techniques-these are all common documentary filmmaking conventions that we've come to associate with factual information.

The people producing this video know what they're doing, and they're very good at it. On a subconscious level, no matter what words are being said, this video feels factual simply because of how it was produced. It's intentionally manipulative. It's a textbook example of effective propaganda. (That's the line. Next is the sinker.)
This video successfully employs "pathos" and "ethos" to persuade people
Aristotle introduced a concept over two thousand years ago that remains more relevant than ever: modes or persuasion, or rhetorical appeals. The three main appeals speakers can use to persuade others are ethos, pathos and logos.

Ethos is an appeal to the credibility and authority of the speaker, how they come across. The entire first third of Plandemic is dedicated to setting Judy Mikovits up as a trustworthy expert on everything the video will discuss. She sounds and looks calm, collected and competent. She uses scientific but understandable language. She tells a personal story that helps viewers connect with her and with the interviewer, who also comes across as compassionate, thoughtful and empathetic.

The video doesn't make a scientific argument or mention COVID-19 yet-the only purpose of the first 8-10 minutes is get the audience to trust Mikovits. The problem is that most people will not have heard of Mikovits before this video. This is their first impression of her, and first impressions are very powerful. When people later hear she is anti-vaccine and that she falsified data, it will be harder for them to believe it. They already know she was accused of those things, but she and the interviewer convincingly make the case that she was innocent and framed. The filmmakers have so strongly invested in ethos that it will be hard for someone watching Mikovits for the first time to disregard their first impression of her as a wronged woman.

Pathos is an appeal to emotion. The video appeals to viewers' emotions by portraying Mikovits as a victimized underdog and by repeatedly using stock video of harrowing images, such as patients dying from AIDS and malnourished children in Africa. The video claims people are dying because they cannot get the appropriate treatments they need, appealing to viewers' sense of injustice. The video even uses stock images of a SWAT team arrest to make it look like she was arrested at home in a major operation-but that's unrelated stock footage. In fact, Mikovits turned herself in without incident.

Logos is an appeal to facts and logic. This is where the film falls flat-but it doesn't matter to many people because it so successfully uses ethos and pathos. For logos, the film takes intuitive ideas or those with a kernel of truth to them, and it twists them and amplifies them into exaggerated, false claims that sound reasonable because they're familiar. (The claim that staying home will weaken our immune systems without enough exposure to microbes is false, but it sounds reasonable because it builds on the hygiene hypothesis, which does have evidence.)

Instead of reasoned arguments with supportive evidence, the film uses a common debating strategy called the gish gallop. This technique overwhelms the audience with so many assertions and arguments at one time, without regard to how strong or true they are, that it's impossible to keep up with them or refute them all. It's usually pointless to try because it's the nonstop bombardment of statements coming at you that makes it effective. (This is partly why debunking this video isn't a productive use of time.)

The video also uses images of sciencey things-labs, cells, scientific experiments, pictures of studies-to substitute for logos. They look credible and factual whether they actually support the argument or not.

Hook, line, and sinker.
So what do you do when someone shares it?
First, don't call them or the video crazy. Don't chide them or mock them for sharing it. And don't insist they delete it immediately or tell people not to watch it-that just makes it forbidden fruit, which is all the more attractive. (The filmmakers are already successfully using that strategy by telling people it will get taken down, and it has-for copyright infringement since it uses several video clips without permission.)

They probably really want your opinion because they trust you. Don't violate that trust right off the bat. Use it. How you use it depends on what you know about them already and what's worked in the past. Science communicator and social scientist Liz Neeley has a fantastic piece at The Atlantic on how to talk to people about science-and misinformation-without alienating them. Go read it. Seriously. It will help you.

You might ask what they find so persuasive about it and move on from there, addressing those specifics.

You could also discuss how to know whether Mikovits really is an expert or not. Instead of just dropping a link, explain that it's impossible for her to be an expert in all the different topics she covers in that video-that's not how scientific expertise works.

Emily Willingham, PhD, a science journalist and developmental biologist (and my co-author on a book we published in 2016), has an excellent public post on Facebook about how to vet experts for actually having expertise in a particular area. Having a PhD in biology doesn't make someone an expert in all of biology. No one human can know all that.

"Some people with advanced degrees are perfectly willing to elide their expertise or overreach on their claims just to get attention," Willingham writes. And she makes this extremely important point that's relevant to the final moment in Plandemic when a clip of Fauci warning about an inevitable pandemic in the coming years is used to suggest he caused it: "Science and the process of scientific discovery are never about one giant. Evidence is incremental, data can be slow to come in. But people with expertise collectively know what's on the horizon here and have been warning about it for years. They were informed by history and their own training, their understanding of how novel infectious disease would behave in a globally connected society. No one-NO SINGLE PERSON-is going to have a sudden insight or make some clever connection no one else has considered or uncover some vast deep conspiracy that has eluded the other 7.7 billion people on Earth."

If they like reading long articles debunking it, there are plenty to choose from. I'll list some at the bottom. But a systematic debunking of the video isn't likely to be successful. Talking about it and why it's persuasive might be.
Why should I bother saying anything at all? Can't I just ignore it?
Conspiracy theories like those in this video are actively, directly harmful and dangerous. They can influence people's behavior in ways that harm those people and public health-including you personally-in general. We can't afford to let these ideas run unchecked.

If you don't push back on them, even to those you love or don't want to upset, you're enabling them. You're allowing people to spew harmful, dangerous nonsense that kills people and demoralizes the millions of health care providers trying to save lives.

Many people try to avoid drama or debates on their social media accounts, and I respect that. But this video is not a time to "agree to disagree" because the stakes are too high. It's a matter of life and death. The false statements in this video can cause deaths.

If they share it on your Facebook wall, address it. If you see them share it on their walls, address it. You don't have to debate all night-that's not productive for either of you. Maybe you just make a couple points and drop it. But don't let it go unchallenged.
Should you unfriend them? That depends.
I know many people just don't have the energy right now to push back-we're all strung out, burnt out, stressed, and tired-so be strategic about what you can tolerate. You might need to say, "I'm sorry, I care about you as a person, but I cannot allow you to share dangerous, harmful misinformation about a life or death situation, so I will need to unfriend you until the pandemic is over."

Or, maybe it's vital that they remain connected to you because your posts are some of the only good sources of accurate information they have which might penetrate their bubble. Maybe you can't afford to sever a relationship during a time with so much isolation already. It's your call.

Whatever you do, speak up at least once. The stakes are too high not to-for all of us. We all have a social responsibility to push back against dangerous, harmful information, now more than ever.
Does speaking up even matter? Will it make a difference? Yes.
You might not convince them the video is conspiracy theory nonsense. That's fine. That may not be the goal. But here are three things you accomplish by speaking up even if you know you'll "lose" the battle:

Others see you push back. They'll get accurate information and see you calmly, maturely responding to the false statements. Ethos!

Seeing you speak up erodes the bystander effect, typically used to explain why people are less likely to help in an emergency if others are around. If someone makes a racist comment and no one speaks up, others don't want to be the first. So be the first-and it inspires and emboldens other people to push back on their walls too. Speaking against misinformation is contagious in a good way. If you do it, they realize they can and should too. And if they didn't know what to say before, they can copy/paste what you said and use that.

Speaking up normalizes factual information and contributes to the exposure effect: the more a person is exposed to an idea, the more it becomes familiar and credible, no matter what the idea is. The more they hear it from you and others, over and over, the more they may gradually, unconsciously start to recognize the logical holes and embrace factual information. It won't happen overnight or because of one person, and they'll think it was their idea when it happens. But it can happen.

Where can I get a good debunking of it all?
An incredibly thorough list of all Makovits' misdeeds and mistruths is available on this Facebook post from Ross Grayson; it also includes links to more helpful articles.

... Read More

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Why It's Important To Push Back On 'Plandemic'-And How To Do It

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By now you've probably heard about or even seen the video "Plandemic" that's been spreading like wildfire through social media networks. This article is not the one you should give to your friend or relative or coworker who shared the video.

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Fighting misinformation in the times of Covid-19

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News literacy is the ability to determine what is credible and what is not, to identify different types of information, and to use the standards of authoritative, fact-based journalism as an aspirational measure in deciding what to trust, what to share and what to act on. Being news-literate also means recognizing the critical role of the First Amendment and a free press in a democracy and interacting with news and other information in ways that promote engaged participation in civic life.

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Get smart about COVID-19 misinformation - News Literacy Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
News literacy is the ability to determine what is credible and what is not, to identify different types of information, and to use the standards of authoritative, fact-based journalism as an aspirational measure in deciding what to trust, what to share and what to act on.

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The first installment of a documentary called "Plandemic" stormed through social media this week, promising viewers on its website that the film will "expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system." The video appeared across platforms, with individual uploads each garnering hundreds of thousands of views.

But the viral video, running nearly 26 minutes, weaves a grand conspiracy theory by using a host of false and misleading claims about the novel coronavirus pandemic and its origins, vaccines, treatments for COVID-19, and more.

The video is largely an interview with former chronic fatigue researcher who has Mikovits was an author on a controversial Judy Mikovits, a lobbed a number of accusations against National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director 2009 study linking a retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome that was published in the journal Science, and then retracted in late 2011 after labs were unable to replicate the results and other issues were brought to light. Dr. Anthony Fauci.

That same year, in September 2011, Mikovits was fired from her position as research director at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Nevada and arrested two months later after the institute alleged she stole a laptop, flash drives and other property with institute information. While Mikovits claims in the documentary that she was held in jail despite being charged with "nothing," a criminal complaint from November 2011 shows she was charged with two felonies related to the stolen property. The charges were later dropped.

What followed was a years-long legal battle in which Whittemore won a civil judgment against Mikovits; Mikovits filed for bankruptcy; and Mikovits alleged that Whittemore defrauded the government by misusing federally funded research materials. The latter case was dismissed this year.

Mikovits recently , with a forward by vaccine skeptic co-authored a book with self-described "anti-vaxxer" Kent Heckenlively Robert Kennedy Jr., and has spoken at events aimed at discrediting vaccines.

In the video, she claims, "And they will kill millions as they already have with their vaccines." It's unclear what vaccines she's referring to, but vaccines have been credited with saving millions of lives. For instance, according to one estimate by researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, the measles vaccine has saved more than 20 million lives across the globe from 2000 to 2016 alone.

In the sections below, we break down eight of the false, misleading and unfounded claims aired in "Plandemic."

Unfounded Attacks on Fauci

The first part of the video focuses largely on two sweeping, but unrelated, accusations against Fauci, who also has been a fixture at the White House briefings on COVID-19.

Without offering any evidence, the video claims that Fauci was part of a "cover-up" and that he worked with other doctors to "take credit and make money" on the AIDS epidemic.

Filmmaker Mikki Willis sets the tone for this section of the video, saying to Mikovits, "So Anthony Fauci, the man who is heading the pandemic task force, was involved in a cover-up." Willis, a former model, has a large following on YouTube, where he has previously claimed the novel coronavirus was "intentionally released."

"He directed the cover-up," Mikovits says. "And, in fact, everybody else was paid off, and paid off big time."

But at no point in the video does anyone explain what Fauci supposedly covered up.

We asked Mikovits in a phone interview to explain. She said it was a reference to her 2009 research paper that was later retracted. Mikovits holds Fauci responsible and claims it was part of a "cover-up" on the part of the medical establishment to keep hidden her research linking a mouse retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome. In the years since the research was first published, Mikovits has expanded its reach, suggesting that it could apply also to prostate cancer, lymphoma, and autism.

The NIAID funded Mikovits' initial research related to chronic fatigue syndrome, and, after she was fired, another researcher at Whittemore was awarded the remaining grant money. But there is no evidence that Fauci, personally, had anything to do with it. And the journal that published the paper made no mention of Fauci in its retraction. Rather, it explained it was "fully retracting" the paper because the results couldn't be replicated, even in the same lab, and "there is evidence of poor quality control in a number of specific experiments in the Report."

As for the claim about the AIDS epidemic, that goes back much further. In the early 1980s, Mikovits was working as a technician at the National Cancer Institute. She claims that the lab she was in had identified the HIV virus from blood and saliva samples and prepared a paper detailing those findings that was slated for publication.

But, she says in the video, referencing one of the pioneers of AIDS research, Dr. Robert Gallo, "Fauci holds up the paper for several months, while Robert Gallo writes his own paper and takes all the credit."

Mikovits could not provide the name of her lab's paper or the journal that was going to publish it when we spoke to her, so we couldn't check on that. But here's what we do know about the timeline for AIDS research in the early 1980s:

1981 - The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published an article in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describing a rare lung infection in five young gay men in Los Angeles. Fauci would later recall seeing that article, saying in a 2011 interview, "I remember putting the issue to the side of my desk, thinking, 'Wow, what a bizarre curiosity.' One month later, in July, a second MMWR report came to my desk, and this time, an additional 26 men had it, again all gay, all seemingly healthy, and not only in LA, but now also in San Francisco and New York City. I remember reading it very clearly. It was the first time in my medical career I actually got goose pimples. I knew something was very wrong. It changed the direction of my career."

1982 - The CDC used the term AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, for the first time.

1983 - A group of French researchers identified the virus now known as HIV. Twenty-five years later, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were awarded the Nobel Prize for that discovery.

1984 - A team led by Gallo at the National Cancer Institute published research showing that HIV causes AIDS.

Beyond the unsupported claim that Fauci - who didn't become the director of NIAID until 1984 - stymied early AIDS research at the National Cancer Institute, Mikovits also claims that he has profited from the epidemic.

Referring vaguely to patents, Mikovits says in the video that Fauci was working with other researchers "to take credit and make money" on the AIDS epidemic. It's true that Fauci's name appears on at least six patents related to AIDS research. But it's less clear how much he has profited from them. In 2005, the Health and Human Services Department was criticized for not disclosing how much government scientists were collecting from patent royalties. At the time, Fauci expressed concern over the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest and said that he donated all of his royalty money to charity.

Scientists: Novel Coronavirus Not 'Manipulated'

Mikovits makes a claim that numerous scientists have refuted: that the novel coronavirus "was manipulated" in a laboratory and is not "naturally occurring."

"So it's very clear this virus was manipulated, these, this family of viruses was manipulated and studied in a laboratory where the animals were taken into the laboratory," she says in the video. "And this is what was released, whether deliberate or not, that cannot be naturally occurring. Somebody didn't go to a market, get a bat. The virus didn't jump directly to humans. That's not how it works. That's accelerated viral evolution. If it was a natural occurrence, it would take it up to 800 years to occur. This occurred from SARS-1 within a decade. That is not naturally occurring."

The exact origin of the coronavirus is not known, but scientists have said the genetic features of SARS-CoV-2 indicate it was neither created in a lab nor manipulated.

"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," said an article published in Nature Medicine in March. Instead, the authors said it's plausible that the coronavirus originated in one of two ways: "natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer," which refers to the spread of disease from animals to humans, or "natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer."

The authors said the possibility of an inadvertent laboratory release of SARS-CoV-2 cannot be ruled out, but they "do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible" because they had observed "all notable SARS-CoV-2 features ... in related coronaviruses in nature."

In a statement in April, University of Sydney professor Edward Holmes, who was involved in mapping the genome of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, likewise said: "Coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are commonly found in wildlife species and frequently jump to new hosts. This is also the most likely explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2."

Holmes said there is "unfounded speculation" that a bat coronavirus named RaTG13, which was being kept at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was the origin of the new coronavirus. But, he explained, that is not the case, for several reasons.

"In summary, the abundance, diversity and evolution of coronaviruses in wildlife strongly suggests that this virus is of natural origin," Holmes said. He added that more sampling of other animals "is needed to resolve the exact origins of SARS-CoV-2."

Mikovits also may give viewers a false impression when she says the novel coronavirus "occurred from SARS-1," which is a different coronavirus that caused a global outbreak in 2003.

SARS-CoV, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, is similar but distinct from SARS-CoV-2. The viruses share about 79% of the same genetic make-up, but SARS-CoV-2 is even more closely related (96%) to the bat coronavirus from which Holmes has said SARS-CoV-2 wasn't derived.

We've already written about a bogus analysis that suggested the new coronavirus could have leaked from a Chinese lab because a portion of its genome is similar to part of a viral vector that was used in previous research on SARS.

Kristian Andersen, the director of infectious disease genomics at the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told us in an email that analysis was "completely wrong."

Misleading Claim on Wuhan Lab Funding

Also on the issue of the Wuhan lab, the video shows a clip claiming that "$3.7 million flowed from the National Institutes of Health here in the U.S. to the Wuhan lab in China" and that NIAID "had already been conducting experiments with the Wuhan lab in the past in regard to coronavirus."

That's misleading.

The project referenced, as other fact-checkers have examine the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China," in particular the risk posed by bats, according to a previously reported, is actually funding from NIAID to EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit that researches emerging infectious diseases. The project was done to " 2014 description.

NIH records show the project was awarded nearly $3.4 million altogether. Most of the funding was through a five-year grant awarded in 2014, Robert Kessler, an EcoHealth spokesman, said in an email to us. The group was renewed for a second five-year grant in 2019 and received $292,161 - but NIH recently terminated the grant.

Of that money, only $600,000 (from the first grant) was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Kessler said. The Wuhan lab was a collaborator that was pre-approved by NIH and the State Department, he added, and one that researchers used to conduct genetic analyses of the viruses.

"In each of nearly 30 countries around the world where we work, we collaborate with local institutions, all of which are pre-approved by our federal funders," EcoHealth said in an April 28 statement about the terminated funding. "It's been EcoHealth Alliance's position for the past 15 years that coronaviruses present a clear and immediate threat to our safety. That seems clearer now than ever before."

The group said its research "aimed to analyze the risk of coronavirus emergence and help in designing vaccines and drugs to protect us from COVID-19 and other coronavirus threats. In fact, genetic sequences of two bat coronaviruses that we discovered with this grant have been used as lab tools to test the breakthrough antiviral drug Remdesivir."

So it's incorrect, and also lacks context, to claim NIAID gave "$3.7 million" to the Wuhan lab.

Flu Vaccines Don't Contain Coronaviruses

Mikovits falsely claims that "if you've ever had a flu vaccine, you were injected with coronaviruses."

"She's wrong," Dr. Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told us in a phone interview. "That's not true."

"This person doesn't know what she is talking about," Dr. Lee Riley, professor and chair of the Division of Infectious Disease and Vaccinology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, told us in an email, adding, "I think this person is just seeking publicity."

In an interview, we asked Mikovits what support she had for the claim, and she didn't provide any. She only said that flu vaccines are cultured in chicken eggs and dog kidney cells, and those animals have coronaviruses. It's an extreme leap to then claim animal strains of coronaviruses end up in vaccines tested and approved for people. Mikovits further said she attributes the spread of the novel coronavirus worldwide "at least in part" to the use of the flu vaccine.

As we've explained before, coronaviruses are a diverse family of viruses, and some, such as canine coronavirus, infect animals. Those aren't the same as SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

As for influenza vaccines, most are made using hen's eggs, Offit explained, and about 10% of vaccines in the U.S. are cell-culture vaccines, which use mammalian cells instead of eggs. Specifically, the process uses Madin-Darby Canine Kidney, or MDCK, cells.

"These lines have been around for a long time," Offit said. "This is a well-tested ... cell line that does not contain coronavirus" and "would never be allowed to."

On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more information on how egg-based and cell-based influenza vaccines are manufactured. A cell-based method that also used eggs at the beginning of the process received Food and Drug Administration approval in 2012, and a fully cell-based process got FDA approval in 2016.

The CDC notes that once vaccines are manufactured, "FDA tests and approves the vaccines prior to release and shipment."

This cell-based technology has been used in other U.S. vaccines, "including vaccines for rotavirus, polio, smallpox, hepatitis, rubella and chickenpox," the CDC says.

No Evidence Flu Shot Increases Risk of COVID-19

Mikovits also repeats the unsubstantiated claim that "the flu vaccines increase the odds by 36% of getting COVID-19," which we've previously covered.

Experts say that there has been no study linking the flu shot to elevated risk for the novel coronavirus. The military study cited by Mikovits involved four types of seasonal coronaviruses that cause common colds, not SARS-CoV-2.

More than that, the results in the study that indicate a flu-vaccinated person had an increased likelihood of testing positive for a seasonal coronavirus do not appear to be adjusted for age groups or seasons. Those factors could affect someone's chances of getting a specific virus, regardless of whether or not they've been vaccinated for the flu.

Multiple scientists have pointed out the same issue in other fact-checks, too, and have debunked the erroneous suggestion that the study looked at SARS-CoV-2.

The Military Health System told us in a statement that "the study does not show or suggest that influenza vaccination predisposes in any way, the potential for infection with the more severe forms of coronavirus, such as COVID-19." MHS further said "it remains essential for people to obtain the seasonal flu shot each year as it becomes available."

Hydroxychloroquine: Unproven COVID-19 Therapy

The video makes the unsubstantiated claim that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine is "the most effective medication to treat" COVID-19, citing a survey of doctors.

Shortly after that, Mikovits says hydroxychloroquine is "effective against these families of viruses," referring to the family of coronaviruses, such as COVID-19, but "they keep it from the people."

We have covered this ground before when President Donald Trump encouraged the off-label use of chloroquine and its derivative hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID-19 patients. Both drugs are used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

But there is only limited evidence that hydroxychloroquine is effective for COVID-19, and it carries potential health risks.

The National Institutes of Health says there is "insufficient clinical data to recommend either for or against using chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19."

Despite insufficient clinical data, the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization, or EUA, order on March 28 that allowed for the drugs to be used as a treatment for some hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

A little less than a month later, the FDA issued a warning against using "hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for COVID-19 outside of the hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems." The warning came a few days after a study found that patients at Veterans Health Administration medical centers treated with hydroxychloroquine had an increased mortality risk compared with those that were not treated with the drug.

In the video, Mikovits says, "The AMA was saying doctors will lose their license if they use hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that's been on the list of essential medicine worldwide for 70 years. Dr. Fauci calls that 'anecdotal.' It's not storytelling if we have thousands of pages of data saying it's effective against these families of viruses. This is essential medicine and they keep it from the people."

It's not true that the American Medical Association told doctors they "will lose their license if they use hydroxychloroquine" for COVID-19. The AMA issued a statement saying it opposed "purchasing excessive amounts" of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for possible COVID-19 treatment. But it also said, "Novel off-label use of FDA-approved medications is a matter for the physician's or other prescriber's professional judgment."

As for hydroxychloroquine's effectiveness against coronaviruses, we have written that at least two studies show that it has antiviral activity against the novel coronavirus in cells grown in the lab. But there is only anecdotal evidence that the drug works in people.

Trump cited in a tweet the results of a small clinical trial in France, but the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which publishes the journal in which the study appeared, later issued a statement that said "the article does not meet the Society's expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety."

We cover this more extensively in our story " Trump Hypes Potential COVID-19 Drugs, But Evidence So Far Is Slim."

Wrong Message on Masks

In attacking public health measures taken to address the pandemic in the U.S., Mikovits wrongly suggests that using masks could lead to people infecting themselves with their own breath. " Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus," Mikovits said. "You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions and if it happens to be SARS-CoV-2, then you've got a big problem."

Experts were perplexed by what she meant and said the implication that simply breathing through a mask could lead to self-infection doesn't square with science.

Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who studies airborne disease transmission, told us: " If you're shedding (breathing out) virus, then you're already infected. Even without a mask, infected people who are shedding virus probably rebreathe some of their own viruses, but there are already billions times more viruses in your body. Hopefully, the mask is protecting other people from your exhalations."

And Lisa Brosseau, an expert on respiratory protection and infectious diseases and a certified industrial hygienist, said in an email that "viruses are not 'activated' by anything," as Mikovits suggests.

Viruses instead "require living cells in order to replicate," but their viability or ability to replicate isn't affected whether someone is wearing a mask or not, said Brosseau, a former professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. If anything, viruses in the environment can be "rendered non-viable by exposure to certain temperature" and relative humidity conditions.

"There is nothing magical about our breath that 'activates' or 'reactivates' a virus," Brosseau said.

As we've previously written, while there is little research on cloth masks, the hope is that they can help prevent individuals, even those who do not feel sick, from unknowingly spreading COVID-19 to others. Brosseau said people should frequently wash cloth masks, though, and stressed that masks are not a substitute for social distancing. The CDC notes the same.

False Suggestion About Ebola

Mikovits says in the video: "In 1999, I was working in Fort Detrick ... and my job was to teach Ebola how to infect human cells without killing them. Ebola couldn't infect human cells until we took it in the laboratories and taught them."

It's not clear what she meant by that, and she didn't explain when we asked about her claim.

But the suggestion that Ebola, which includes six species of ebolaviruses, didn't infect people until 1999, or later, is false.

The first two species, Zaire ebolavirus and Sudan ebolavirus, were discovered after outbreaks in 1976 in Central Africa. Combined, those two viruses, which scientists believe may have come from bats or nonhuman primates (such as chimpanzees, apes, monkeys, etc.), killed about 430 people that year, according to the CDC.

Zaire ebolavirus - which is also linked to the largest Ebola outbreak which began in West Africa in 2014 - is said to have initially spread in 1976 through the use of contaminated needles and syringes at a hospital in the village where the first infected person was treated. And the Sudan ebolavirus is believed to have started with workers in a cotton factory.

In fact, the CDC says four of the six species of ebolavirus - Zaire ebolavirus, Sudan ebolavirus, Taï Forest ebolavirus (formerly Côte d'Ivoire ebolavirus) and Bundibugyo ebolavirus - are known to cause disease in people. And three of the four species were discovered prior to 1999.

A fifth species, Reston ebolavirus, was first discovered in 1989 in research monkeys imported into the U.S. from the Philippines. That species "is known to cause disease in nonhuman primates and pigs, but not in people," the CDC says. There have been cases in which individuals developed Reston ebolavirus antibodies, but did not experience symptoms.

The sixth species, Bombali ebolavirus, was discovered in 2018 in a bat in Sierra Leone. It also is not known to infect humans.
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The first installment of a documentary called "Plandemic" stormed through social media this week. But the viral video weaves a grand conspiracy theory by using a host of false and misleading claims about the novel coronavirus pandemic and its origins, vaccines, treatments for COVID-19, and more.

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If you are unsure where a source of information lands—Left? Right? Center? Somewhere in between? Check here.

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In a video that has exploded on social media in the past few days, virologist Judy Mikovits claims the new coronavirus is being wrongly blamed for many deaths. She makes head-scratching assertions about the virus-- for instance, that it is "activated" by face masks.

Mikovits also accuses Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a prominent member of the White House's Coronavirus Task Force, of being responsible for the deaths of millions during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The video claims Mikovits was part of the team that discovered HIV, revolutionized HIV treatment, and was jailed without charges for her scientific positions.

Science fact-checked the video. None of these claims are true. The video is an excerpt from a forthcoming movie Plandemic, which promises to "expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system." YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms have taken down the video because of inaccuracies. It keeps resurfacing, including on the Plandemic website, which, in "an effort to bypass the gatekeepers of free speech," invites people to download the video and repost it.

But first, who is Judy Mikovits?

Mikovits started her career as a lab technician at the National Cancer Institute in 1988. She became a scientist and obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from George Washington University in 1991. By 2009, she was research director at the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), a private research center in Reno, Nevada, but she remained largely unknown to the scientific community. That year, however, she co-authored a paper in Science that suggested an obscure agent named xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) caused chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

The cause of CFS, also called myalgic encephalomyelitis, had long remained elusive, and the disease had been neglected by science. The study created hope that CFS might become treatable with antivirals. Some patients even began taking antiretroviral drugs used by HIV-infected people. But the paper also created worries that XMRV might spread via the blood supply.

Other researchers soon questioned the findings, and over the next 2 years, the paper's claims fell apart. Researchers showed that XMRV was created accidentally in the lab during mouse experiments; it may never have infected any humans. The authors first retracted two figures and a table from the paper in October 2011. Around the same time, a study by several labs, including WPI itself, showed that the findings couldn't be replicated.

Two months later, the entire Science paper was retracted. Mikovits refused to sign the retraction notice, but she took part in another major replication effort. That $2.3 million study, led by Ian Lipkin of Columbia University and funded by the National Institutes of Health, was "the definitive answer," Mikovits said at a September 2012 press conference where the results were announced. The rigorous study looked for XMRV in blinded blood samples from nearly 300 people, half of whom had the disease, and none had the virus. "There is no evidence that XMRV is a human pathogen," Mikovits conceded.

Science's news department, which works independently from its editorial side, followed the saga closely and published a detailed reconstruction of the fiasco in September 2011. (The story won a Communications Award from the American Society for Microbiology.)

Around the same time, Mikovits had an explosive breakup with WPI. The institute filed suit against her in November 2011 for allegedly removing laboratory notebooks and keeping other proprietary information on her laptop, on flash drives, and in a personal email account. She was arrested in California on felony charges that she was a fugitive from justice and jailed for several days. Prosecutors in Washoe county, Nevada, eventually dropped criminal charges against her in June 2012.

Mikovits has not published anything in the scientific literature since 2012. But she soon began promoting the XMRV hypothesis again, and attacking the Lipkin study that she agreed had put the issue to rest. She has weighed in on the autism debate with controversial theories about causes and treatments. Her discredited work and her legal travails have made her a martyr in the eyes of some.

Now comes a new book she co-authored, Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science- billed as "a behind the scenes look at the issues and egos which will determine the future health of humanity"--and the viral video, which is an extended interview with Mikovits.

Science asked Mikovits for an interview for this article. She responded by sending an empty email with, as attachments, a copy of her new book and a PowerPoint of a 2019 presentation titled "Persecution and Coverup."

Below are some of the video's main claims and allegations, along with the facts.
Interviewer: Dr. Judy Mikovits has been called one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation.
Mikovits had authored 40 scientific papers and wasn't widely known in the scientific community before she published the 2009 Science paper claiming a link between a new retrovirus and CFS. The paper was later proven erroneous and retracted.
Interviewer: Her 1991 doctoral thesis revolutionized the treatment of HIV/AIDS.
Mikovits's Ph.D. thesis, "Negative Regulation of HIV Expression in Monocytes," had no discernible impact on the treatment of HIV/AIDS.
Interviewer: At the height of her career, Dr. Mikovits published a blockbuster article in the journal Science. The controversial article sent shockwaves through the scientific community, as it revealed that the common use of animal and human fetal tissues was unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases.
The paper revealed nothing of the sort; it only claimed to show a link between one condition, CFS, and a mouse retrovirus.
Mikovits: I was held in jail, with no charges.
The district attorney in Washoe county, Nevada, filed a criminal complaint against Mikovits that charged her with illegally taking computer data and related property from WPI. The charges were dropped, in part because of legal troubles faced by her former employer.
Mikovits: Heads of our entire [Health and Human Services Department] colluded and destroyed my reputation and the Department of Justice and the [Federal Bureau of Investigation] sat on it, and kept that case under seal.
Mikovits has presented no direct evidence that Health and Human Services heads colluded against her.
Mikovits: [Anthony Fauci] directed the cover up. And in fact, everybody else was paid off, and paid off big time, millions of dollars in funding from Tony Fauci and ... the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. These investigators that committed the fraud, continue to this day to be paid big time by the NIAID.
It's not clear which fraud and what cover up Mikovits is talking about exactly. There is no evidence that Fauci was involved in a cover up or that anyone was paid off with funding from him or his institute. No one has been charged with fraud in relation to Mikovits's allegations.
Mikovits: It started really when I was 25 years old, and I was part of the team that isolated HIV from the saliva and blood of the patients from France where [virologist Luc] Montagnier had originally isolated the virus. ... Fauci holds up the publication of the paper for several months while Robert Gallo writes his own paper and takes all the credit, and of course patents are involved. This delay of the confirmation, you know, literally led to spreading the virus around, you know, killing millions.
At the time of HIV's discovery, Mikovits was a lab technician in Francis Ruscetti's lab at the National Cancer Institute and had yet to receive her Ph.D. There is no evidence that she was part of the team that first isolated the virus. Her first published paper, co-authored with Ruscetti, was on HIV and published in May 1986, 2 years after Science published four landmark papers that linked HIV (then called HTLV-III by Gallo's lab) to AIDS. Ruscetti's first paper on HIV appeared in August 1985. There is no evidence that Fauci held up either paper or that this led to the death of millions.
Interviewer: If we activate mandatory vaccines globally, I imagine these people stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars that own the vaccines. Judy Mikovits : And they'll kill millions, as they already have with their vaccines. There is no vaccine currently on the schedule for any RNA virus that works.
Vaccines have not killed millions; they have saved millions of lives. Many vaccines that work against RNA viruses are on the market, including for influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, rabies, yellow fever, and Ebola.
Interviewer: So, I have to ask you, are you antivaccine? Mikovits : Oh, absolutely not. In fact vaccine is immune therapy, just like interferon alpha is immune therapy, so I'm not antivaccine. My job is to develop immune therapies. That's what vaccines are.
In another recent video, Mikovits is wearing a hat that says VAXXED II, which is a sequel to a film that links the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, a debunked theory. She also repeats several claims made by people who are leading the antivaccine movement. In the PowerPoint presentation she sent to Science, she calls for an "immediate moratorium" on all vaccines.
Interviewer: Do you believe that this virus [SARS CoV-2] was created in the laboratory? Mikovits: I wouldn't use the word created. But you can't say naturally occurring if it was by way of the laboratory. So it's very clear this virus was manipulated. This family of viruses was manipulated and studied in a laboratory where the animals were taken into the laboratory, and this is what was released, whether deliberate or not. That cannot be naturally occurring. Somebody didn't go to a market, get a bat, the virus didn't jump directly to humans. That's not how it works. That's accelerated viral evolution. If it was a natural occurrence, it would take up to 800 years to occur.
Scientific estimates suggest that the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is a bat coronavirus identified by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Its "distance" in evolutionary time to SARS-CoV-2 is about 20 to 80 years. There is no evidence this bat virus was manipulated.
Interviewer: And do you have any ideas of where this occurred? Mikovits: Oh yeah, I'm sure it occurred between the North Carolina laboratories, Fort Detrick, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the Wuhan laboratory.
There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. NIAID's funding of a U.S. group that works with the Wuhan lab has been stopped, which outraged many scientists.
Mikovits: Italy has a very old population. They're very sick with inflammatory disorders. They got at the beginning of 2019 an untested new form of influenza vaccine that had four different strains of influenza, including the highly pathogenic H1N1. That vaccine was grown in a cell line, a dog cell line. Dogs have lots of coronaviruses.
There is no evidence that links any influenza vaccine, or a dog coronavirus, to Italy's COVID-19 epidemic.
Mikovits: Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions, and if it happens to be SARS-CoV-2, then you've got a big problem.
It's not clear what Mikovits means by "coronavirus expressions." There is no evidence that wearing a mask can activate viruses and make people sick.
Mikovits: Why would you close the beach? You've got sequences in the soil, in the sand. You've got healing microbes in the ocean in the salt water. That's insanity.
It's not clear what Mikovits means by sand or soil "sequences." There is no evidence that microbes in the ocean can heal COVID-19 patients.

doi:10.1126/science.abc7103

Martin is Science's International news editor. He is based in Amsterdam.

Jon is a staff writer for Science.

More from News

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Fact-checking Judy Mikovits, the controversial virologist attacking Anthony Fauci in a viral conspiracy video

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In a video that has exploded on social media in the past few days, virologist Judy Mikovits claims the new coronavirus is being wrongly blamed for many deaths. She makes head-scratching assertions about the virus-- for instance, that it is "activated" by face masks. Mikovits also accuses Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S.

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A Guided Bibliography by Crisis Informatics Researchers

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Crisis Informatics Research Literature Resource

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An opinion piece but it is the well regarded opinion of a professor at Brown University.  At the end of the article, he details three things to look for to help you decide if information should be disregarded.

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Last week, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver teased his latest project on Covid-19 to his 3.2 million Twitter followers: "Working on something where you can model the number of detected cases of a disease as a function of the number of actual cases and various assumptions about how/how many tests are conducted."

While his attempt at Twitter epidemiology was criticized mostly by academic scientists, it was hardly offensive enough to warrant anything more than an eye roll. For all of the tweet's irony-Silver built his reputation by calling out the naivete of bad interpretations of polling data-his attempt was harmless, exploratory, and he didn't make any claim to being an expert.

C. Brandon Ogbunu (@big_data_kane) is an assistant professor at Brown University who specializes in computational biology and genetics.

That Silver appears to know his place as an outsider on the topic is more than can be said for thousands of people who have rewired their brands, credentials, industries, and research interests to become Covid-19 experts overnight. The growth curve of "experts" mirrors the exponential increase in Covid-19 cases, creating a multiverse of thousands of projections, models, ideas, recommendations, therapies, solutions, and scenarios. Much of it is ripe with dangerous misinformation and threatens to worsen the pandemic.

There are many reasons for the big bang of Covid-19 "expertise." Those wading into the pandemic forum include people who study related topics or have expertise in some scientific domain. Pleuni Pennings, an evolutionary computational biologist and assistant professor at San Francisco State University, says many academics are initially responding to demands from personal and professional circles: "Our students and friends and family members are coming to us for advice. For example, even though I work on HIV, early on, my non-science network came with many practical questions such as, 'Do you think I can still see my grandchildren?'"

For others, many of whom are not professional scientists, the motivation to participate comes from classical do-gooderism: People with resources, which include both skill sets and time, want to help in some way. And while the road to hell can be paved with good intentions, a world of overnight epidemiologists comprising only highly skilled, magnanimous polymaths would be tolerable (if still exhausting): It would be nice to know that all of these new experts were at least smart and caring.

Unfortunately, the majority of Covid-19 carpetbaggers are at the very least opportunists, and sometimes nefarious propagators of misinformation. They seize on the opportunity to use the topic that everyone is talking about to make a name for themselves, which is beneficial in whatever realm they operate in.

One story of a suspected Covid-19 opportunist involves Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley technologist whose five minutes of fame arrived in March after he wrote a contrarian essay proposing that evidence didn't support the "hysteria" over the consequences of the pandemic, that the problem might be sorta bad, but not really, really bad.

Ginn flaunted some unusual credentials in support of his authority on the matter: a talent for making products go viral. "I'm quite experienced at understanding virality, how things grow, and data," he wrote. The logic here would only be amusing if it weren't potentially harmful.

Ginn's story became a lightning rod for the expertise debate: After his piece was panned by critics (including one especially damning refutation by Carl Bergstrom, coauthor of the upcoming Calling Bullshit), it was removed by Medium, a decision that was criticized by The Wall Street Journal as an act of censure. The editorial is off base, of course, as Ginn's missteps were not simply a matter of a preference; poorly vetted ideas and misinformation are often propagated and promoted in digital spaces, which can influence behavior.

Read all of our coronavirus coverage here.

While Silicon Valley has been roundly criticized by the scientific community over this style of aggressive parachuting into Covid-19, tech bros aren't the only ones guilty of opportunism. In fact, some of the worst offenders are academic scientists with strong (even stellar) reputations in their own fields who suffer from a serious case of covid FOMO.

One of the most high-profile examples of a well-regarded academic jumping the Covid-19 shark would be the rise and fall of Stephen Quake, armchair epidemiologist. Notably, Quake is a professor at Stanford and a superstar biophysicist by every professional metric. He doubles as copresident of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub, a $600 million collaborative research initiative, a role that amplified the influence of, and backlash to, his March 22 Medium essay, "How Bad Is the Worst-Case Coronavirus Scenario?"

Based on the popular model developed by Neil Ferguson and colleagues, Quake compared the 500,000 possible Covid-19 cases to other major causes of death and seemed to suggest that, because a comparable number of Americans die of cancer, the fuss around the number of potential Covid-19 deaths is unwarranted. Quake's argument reads like a Thanos-inspired "All Lives Matter" manifesto: People die a lot anyway, and this unusual way of dying will be solved in a short while, so what's the big deal? Quake's attempt at an "I bet they've never heard this" provocation was only successful in telling us that he is either a bad person or didn't think very clearly about the problem (maybe both).

Most charitably, we might attribute misfirings like Ginn's and Quake's to outsized egos, which compels them to question whether studying Covid-19 is really more challenging than studying the market or polymers (or whatever complicated idea that they've built a reputation on). Their egos may conclude that people in the field of epidemiology can't possibly be any smarter than they are, and another flawed Medium article is born.

Elaine Nsoesie, a computational epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, says that people who "have not studied infectious diseases will make assumptions and inferences that are incorrect. People who already have a large following on Twitter, for example, can spread misinformation that could impact the control of the Covid-19 pandemic."

Naïve assumptions can create misinformation. This is where the ego-FOMO opportunism becomes unethical-not only are your naive ideas wrong, they are especially bad because they might be affecting the behavior and wellness of others.

The problems with Covid-19 profiteers-whether they are scientists or not-are many. And in a Covid-19 world already saturated with ideas, it can be difficult for anyone to tell real from fake. Who should we trust? And who, exactly, is an expert?

Nsoesie says she's "part of several infectious disease modeling communities, so I know people who have been working in this space for a while. Those are the people I tend to pay attention to. If I see someone I don't know, I look at the person's previous research if they are academics. If they are medical professionals, then I look at their area of expertise."

Pennings adds, "We all just need to be careful to indicate how certain we are and not pretend like we know everything. And if your opinion goes against guidelines from agencies like CDC, I think you need to be extra careful with sharing that opinion and using your 'credentials' to be critical."

That neither Nsoesie and Pennings, both well-respected academic scientists, require specific credentials in the people they listen to distinguishes them from many of their academic colleagues. Reflexive criticism of the Covid-19 outsider-expert from professional scientists too often sounds like classical gatekeeping.

Samuel Scarpino, a mathematical biologist and assistant professor at Northeastern University's Network Science Institute, is strongly critical of opinions that are too steeped in credentialism. "A lot of the frustration from academic scientists is rooted in the problematic notion that just because someone has worked on a topic for a long time that they should determine who should have an opinion on it."

Despite the fact that Scarpino has contributed to several visible and influential studies on Covid-19 epidemiology, he suggests that "there's not a single card-carrying epidemiologist who would call me an epidemiologist."

"Being an authority on Covid-19," he adds, "should not be about whether someone is an epidemiologist or not. It should be about whether you're trying to be thoughtful and are communicating effectively."

Gatekeeping is antithetical to the growth of science. Many tools of modern biology, for example, came from insights developed by computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. Science works best as a creative, collaborative enterprise.

Nonetheless, lines between the hacks and the wonks can appear thin. But there is a soft algorithm we can use to help us think about who to take seriously and who to ignore.

- Transparency about motivations and methods. A true Covid-19 expert provides open qualifiers for their interpretations, makes their assumptions very clear (sometimes before they've told you what they actually think), provides proper disclaimers and almost never makes rigid predictions. If they've never worked on a disease before, they should share this fact, and explain their motivations. (They do not, however, need to apologize for being interested and wanting to help.) Relatedly, a true Covid-19 expert who analyzes data and creates an algorithm or model of any kind will make their data openly and freely available, so that it can be verified and reproduced. If it is challenging to find the data used by an expert, or hard to run a model that they've produced, then the work (and its author) should be ignored. For a positive example, Harvard mathematical biologist Alison Hill created a tool for Covid-19 modeling that included full access to the available code, notably under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International ( CC BY-SA 4.0) License, which permits the sharing, copying, editing, and remixing of all material (even for commercial purposes).

- Transparency in contributions. A true Covid-19 expert will give proper credit to everyone that contributed to whatever model or set of findings that they've come up with. Covid-19 expertise is not Gregor Mendel, alone in a garden, counting plants en route to discovering the fundamentals of genetics. Understanding an epidemic requires the participation of talented people, often from across the globe. Anyone who proposes an idea that is supposed to be useful or original but doesn't openly and clearly acknowledge the contributions of others should be automatically ignored. This includes properly citing relevant work and data sources.

- Participation in the scientific ecosystem. A Covid-19 expert should make an attempt to participate in the existing ecosystem of science, where findings are produced and shared in the form of a scientific "preprint" or manuscript. That is, findings and results should not live only on a company website or personal blog. They should be cultivated into a scientific format. While the formalism of scientific publishing is far from perfect, it contains features that are essential for honest discourse: It allows us to observe whether an author has read and is citing the proper literature; it allows the author to communicate their methods and interpretations with rigor, in detail; and it allows the community a formal means of being able to criticize, reference and improve upon the work.

I label the three rules above a "soft" algorithm because there is no strict method for ensuring that the good ideas are filtering through. But it provides a start and is effective at identifying some of the red flags of hacks and trolls.

In some ways Covid-19 is not unlike any other paradigm where people feel compelled to become experts overnight. Many fields-ranging from basketball to criminal justice-are mired in culture wars where people who study algorithms and analytics clash with an old guard that relies on domain expertise. And the proliferation of opinions-good and bad-is, in some ways, the price of a democracy of ideas. The alternatives resemble religious authoritarianism, where knowledge is based on the incorrigible opinion of individuals, a system guaranteed to be bad at solving epidemics.

In the end, the challenge of identifying an expert is much like the science of understanding epidemics: tough to achieve with absolute certainty. But in a hyperconnected world, where words and ideas have weight, being able to identify the imposters can save lives.

WIRED Opinion publishes articles by outside contributors representing a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here. Submit an op-ed at opinion@wired.com.

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The Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a "Schools Decision Tool" this week with recommendations for reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Parents are reacting strongly - either in relief or in outrage - at the changes the recommended CDC guidelines for reopening schools would cause. While alarmist posts on social media about the recommendations have upset many, the reality of the CDC guidelines is not so black-and-white.

The CDC tool offers specific suggestions for how to ensure the safety of students and faculty and staff if schools reopen in the fall. These include detailed recommendations for hygiene and face coverings, cleaning and disinfecting, classroom layouts and lunchtime procedures, and class and bus schedules.

It's not a simple checklist. The CDC states each school "should be guided by what is feasible, practical, acceptable, and tailored to the needs of each community."

After the CDC released the guidelines, some of their recommendations were paraphrased in memes that went viral on social media. In simplifying the recommendations into memes, a few essential words were left out, making them seem like rules instead of suggestions.

For instance, the CDC recommends that schools "teach and reinforce use of cloth face coverings," while acknowledging that "face coverings may be challenging for students (especially younger students) to wear in all-day settings."

So the CDC advises that staff and students should wear masks "as feasible," especially when physical distancing is hard to do. It says that children younger than 2, anyone who has trouble breathing, or anyone who would be unable to remove the face covering without help should not wear them.

But the memes paraphrasing the guidelines just state, "Wear face masks if over the age of 2."

Although the meme says things like "No field trips, assemblies, or external organizations," the actual recommendation from the CDC is to "limit" these activities or pursue alternatives "as possible." It recommends the same for areas like playground equipment: "Clean and disinfect as much as possible."

Parents have mixed feelings about what the CDC guidelines might mean for their children.

Juliana Bloom, a mother of two children ages 8 and 10 in Maitland, Florida, told TODAY Parents she believes the CDC's recommendations are reasonable, but the memes spreading around social media make them seem like they are not.

"Masks are not required, they are to be 'taught' and 'encouraged,' especially when kids have to be close to one another," she noted. "Limiting class size and movement around the campus to avoid spread of the disease is reasonable too. No, it's not ideal, but there's a global pandemic."

If schools don't implement measures like these, Bloom said, "We will end up back on full lockdown again as outbreaks spread through schools. I'd rather my kids be able to attend school and have some social interaction than none at all."

The CDC recommendations are necessary to save lives, Dr. Céline Gounder told TODAY Parents. Gounder is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine & Infectious Diseases at NYU School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital and hosts the podcasts " AMERICAN DIAGNOSIS" and " EPIDEMIC."

"We have to get used to the fact that we're looking at a new normal for the next year or so," said Gounder. "If we want to minimize the damage to our economy and social lives during that new normal, it will mean having to make some compromises."

This includes masks and distancing for children at school, she said. "Wearing a mask and abiding by six-feet rules have become political statements when they are in fact evidence-based public health measures."

Until there is a vaccine, Gounder said, these basic public health measures will be our only defense to suppress a resurgence of the virus without more shelter-in-place orders.
Download the TODAY app for the latest coverage on the coronavirus outbreak.
"Am I excited and happy about all these restrictions? No, of course not," New Jersey mom Vera Hough told TODAY Parents.

Hough's daughter Maggie, 18, is heading to Bard College in the fall. Her son Thomas, 11, suffered a brain injury after contracting meningitis as a newborn in the NICU. He is blind, non-verbal and non-ambulatory.

Hough noted she is not an expert in public health. "But I am kind of an expert on what you do when life happens and you were busy making other plans. You make the best of it," she said.

"Why would I boycott school just because it doesn't look the way it used to, the way we expected it to? My son's life - which, by the way, was nearly ruined by a microbe that ravaged his body in a sterilized hospital environment - doesn't look the way we expected. So we found a school for him that isn't spooked and does their best, day after day, to make his life better. When they are permitted to open their doors, whatever the conditions are, I will be there with bells on," Hough said.

Blogger Meredith Ethington wrote a post on Facebook voicing her concerns about the new guidelines.

"I'm thinking out loud and throwing worst case scenarios out there, of course," Ethington wrote. "I know there are good people putting a lot of time and energy and thought into this. But, I know there are a lot of people that will take these recommendations as gospel, and that worries me.

"I don't want my kid sitting alone in a square on the playground shouting to his friends through a muffled sounding mask," she wrote.

Some parents may opt out. Alisen Prida, a Longwood, Florida, mother of three boys ages 7, 11, and 13, told TODAY Parents that she would rather join a homeschool co-op before sending her children back to a school with the current CDC guidelines.

Coming from a family of educators, Prida said, "I believe I could give my children the education they need and the social interaction that would be better for both their educational AND psychological growth than the public school could provide if it were to change like these guidelines state."
Related video:

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CDC guidelines for reopening schools: What's really going to happen?

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The Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a "Schools Decision Tool" this week with recommendations for reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents are reacting strongly - either in relief or in outrage - at the changes the recommended CDC guidelines for reopening schools would cause.

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A decade of health disinformation has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia leading a coronavirus meeting by videoconference at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow on Tuesday. Credit... Sputnik, via Reuters

As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information - an "infodemic," according to the World Health Organization. Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.

His agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics - including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus - were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.

Moscow's aim, experts say, is to portray American officials as downplaying the health alarms and thus posing serious threats to public safety.

"It's all about seeding lack of trust in government institutions," Peter Pomerantsev, author of "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," a 2014 book on Kremlin disinformation, said in an interview.

The Russian president has waged his long campaign by means of open media, secretive trolls and shadowy blogs that regularly cast American health officials as patronizing frauds. Of late, new stealth and sophistication have made his handiwork harder to see, track and fight.

Even so, the State Department recently accused Russia of using thousands of social media accounts to spread coronavirus misinformation - including a conspiracy theory that the United States engineered the deadly pandemic.

The Kremlin's audience for open disinformation is surprisingly large. The YouTube videos of RT, Russia's global television network, average one million views per day, "the highest among news outlets," according to a U.S. intelligence report. Since the founding of the Russian network in 2005, its videos have received more than four billion views, analysts recently concluded.

Because public interest in wellness and longevity runs high, health disinformation can have a disproportionally large social impact. Experts fear that it will foster public cynicism that erodes Washington's influence as well as the core democratic value of relying on demonstrable facts as a basis for decision-making.

"The accumulation of these operations over a long period of time will result in a major political impact," Ladislav Bittman, a former Soviet bloc disinformation officer, said in explaining the Kremlin's long-game rationale.

Sandra C. Quinn, a professor of public health at the University of Maryland who has followed Mr. Putin's vaccine scares for more than a half-decade, said the Russian president was drawing on an old playbook. "The difference now is the speed with which it spreads, and the denigration of the institutions that we rely on to understand the truth," she said in an interview. "I think we're in dangerous territory."

As a young man, Mr. Putin served in the K.G.B., the Soviet Union's main intelligence agency, from 1975 to 1991. He worked in foreign intelligence, which required its officers to spend a quarter of their time conceiving and implementing plans for sowing disinformation. What Mr. Putin accomplished is unclear. But public accounts show that he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and that his 16-year tenure coincided with a major K.G.B. operation to deflect attention from Moscow's secret arsenal of biological weapons, which it built in contravention of a treaty signed with the United States in 1972.

The K.G.B. campaign - which cast the deadly virus that causes AIDS as a racial weapon developed by the American military to kill black citizens - was wildly successful. By 1987, fake news stories had run in 25 languages and 80 counties, undermining American diplomacy, especially in Africa. After the Cold War, in 1992, the Russians admitted that the alarms were fraudulent.

As Russia's president and prime minister, Mr. Putin has embraced and expanded the playbook, linking any natural outbreak to American duplicity. Attacking the American health system, and faith in it, became a hallmark of his rule.

At first, his main disseminator of fake news was Russia Today, which he founded in 2005 in Moscow; in 2008 it was renamed RT, obscuring its Russian origins.

Early in 2009, a particularly virulent flu, named H1N1, swept the globe, and thousands of people died. That year, the network featured the conspiratorial views of Wayne Madsen, a regular contributor in Washington whom it described as an investigative journalist. In at least nine shows and text bulletins, Mr. Madsen characterized the deadly germ as bioengineered. "The world is actually fighting a man-made tragedy," one bulletin declared.

That June, Mr. Madsen told RT viewers that the virus makers had worked at a shadowy mix of laboratories, including the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. The institute's official job is to help defend the United States against the kinds of pathogens that Mr. Madsen accused it of creating.

In a follow-up show, Mr. Madsen said the virus had been spliced together from other flu strains, including the virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic, and likened its creators to the mad scientists of "Jurassic Park," the hit movie about resurrected dinosaurs. RT's chyron for the show characterized the result as "Germ Warfare."

In 2010, the network founded a new arm, RT America, a few blocks from the White House. Mr. Madsen became a regular on-camera guest.

A rich opportunity arose in 2014 when Ebola swept West Africa. It was the worst-ever outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever, eventually claiming more than 10,000 lives.

RT's gallery of alleged criminals once again included the U.S. Army. The network profiled an accusation by Cyril Broderick, a former plant pathologist, who claimed in a Liberian newspaper article that the outbreak was an American plot to turn Africans into bioweapon guinea pigs, and cited the AIDS accusation as supporting evidence.

The RT presenter noted that the United States was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to aid Ebola victims in Africa but added: "It can't buy back the world's trust."

Mr. Putin's campaign of health misinformation was now a global enterprise, with the creative energy of a fun house and the ability to strike anywhere.

A rush of tweets turned up the volume. "Panic here in ATL!!" one stated. Another exclaimed, "OMG! Ebola is everywhere!"

As the Kremlin grew more confident, it began to simply recycle old narratives rather than wait for new epidemics to emerge. In 2017, Russian trolls used Twitter to give the AIDS falsehood new life. This time the claimed perpetrator was Dr. Robert Gallo, a scientist who in 1984 had actually helped discover the virus that causes AIDS. The tweets quoted him, falsely, as saying he had designed the pathogen to depopulate humanity. The trolls cited a website, World Truth. Its video attacking Dr. Gallo registered nearly four million views.

Six researchers centered at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that, over decades, the false narratives around AIDS had fostered a "lack of trust" among African-Americans that kept many from seeking medical care. Their 2018 study, of hundreds of black men in Los Angeles who have sex with men, reported that nearly half the interviewees thought the virus responsible for AIDS had been manufactured. And more than one-fifth viewed people who take new protective drugs as "human guinea pigs for the government."

Within Russia, Mr. Putin has been a staunch proponent of vaccines.

Calling the issue "very important," he warned of possible administrative steps to speed the pace of childhood immunizations. Last fall, Russia's health authorities laid out expanded rules that require strict new adherence to protocols for childhood vaccination.

At the same time, Mr. Putin has worked hard to encourage Americans to see vaccinations as dangerous and federal health officials as malevolent. The threat of autism is a regular theme of this anti-vaccine campaign. The C.D.C. has repeatedly ruled out the possibility that vaccinations lead to autism, as have many scientists and top journals. Nonetheless the false narrative has proliferated, spread by Russian trolls and media.

Moreover, the disinformation has sought to implicate the C.D.C. in a cover-up. For years, tweets originating in St. Petersburg have claimed that the health agency muzzled a whistle-blower to hide evidence that vaccines cause autism, especially in male African-American infants. Medical experts have dismissed the allegation, but it reverberated.

In a series of 2015 tweets, Russian trolls promoted a video of a black minister in Los Angeles addressing a rally. "They're not just shooting us with guns," he told the audience. "They're killing us with needles." The minister and accompanying text in the video claimed that childhood immunizations had caused autism in 200,000 black children.

Russian trolls fired off tweets containing links to the film and a fund-raising site for its promotion. One claimed that autism rates were about to skyrocket to "1 in 2" vaccinated children.

On the site's About page, under the heading "Some more reasons for our existence," is a quote attributed to President Abraham Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."

The site epitomizes the complicated nature of the new threat, parts of which have evolved to become more open, while others have grown stealthier. "It's a cloud of Russian influencers," said Dr. Linvill, a professor of communications who has studied millions of troll postings. The players, he said, probably include state actors, intelligence operatives, former RT staff members and the digital teams of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a secretive oligarch and confident of Mr. Putin's who financed the St. Petersburg troll farm.

The new brand of disinformation is subtler than the old. Dr. Linvill and his colleague Patrick L. Warren have argued that Mr. Putin's new methodology seeks less to create than to curate - to retweet and amplify the existing American cacophony, raising the level of confusion and partisan discord.

Much of the disinformation, like the Russophile site, lies hidden in plain sight. But other elements embody a new sophistication that makes it increasingly hard for tech companies to ferret out the interference of Russia, or any other country. Experts say that Russian trolls may even be paying Americans to post disinformation on their behalf, to better hide their digital fingerprints.

On March 5, Lea Gabrielle, head of the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which seeks to identify and fight disinformation, told a Senate hearing that Moscow had pounced on the coronavirus outbreak as a new opportunity to sow chaos and division - to "take advantage of a health crisis where people are terrified."

"The entire ecosystem of Russian disinformation has been engaged," she reported. Her center's analysts and partners, Ms. Gabrielle added, have found "Russian state proxy websites, official state media, as well as swarms of online false personas pushing out false narratives."

RT America dismissed the department's charges, which were first made in February, as "loosely detailed." In her March testimony, Ms. Gabrielle said that her center had intentionally made public few details and examples of the disinformation, so that adversaries could not decipher "our tradecraft," presumably in an effort to foil countermeasures.

Beijing now appears to be borrowing from Mr. Putin's playbook, at least the early drafts. It recently declared that the coronavirus was devised by Washington as a designer weapon meant to cripple China.

Analysts see an effort not only to undermine American officials but also to accomplish something more basic: to damage American science, a foundation of national prosperity. American researchers have won more than 100 Nobel Prizes since 2000, and Russians five. Geographically, Russia is the world's largest country, but its economy is smaller than Italy's.

As Dr. Quinn of the University of Maryland put it, Mr. Putin's salvos are targeting "the institutions that we rely on to understand the truth."
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Putin's Long War Against American Science

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A decade of health disinformation has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses. As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information - an "infodemic," according to the World Health Organization. Analysts say that President Vladimir V.

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Beware of bots feeding confirmation bias

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There's been a surge in bot activity in the past month in online discussions about reopening America from COVID-19 shutdowns, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said this week.

The researchers analyzed over 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 and found that roughly half the accounts were likely bots.

They identified the bots by looking for accounts that tweeted more frequently than humanly possible or whose location appeared to rapidly switch among different countries.

It's unclear who's behind the surge in bot activity or whether they're originating from the US or abroad.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As parts of the US have lifted shutdown orders during the COVID-19 pandemic, there's been a fierce argument online about the risks and benefits of reopening. New research suggests that bots have been dominating that debate.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers analyzed over 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 and related issues since January and found that roughly half the accounts - including 62% of the 1,000 most influential retweeters - appeared to be bots, they said in a report published this week.

That's a far higher level of bot activity than usual, even when it comes to contentious events - the level of bot involvement in discussions about things like US elections or natural disasters is typically 10% to 20%.

The researchers identified bots using artificial-intelligence systems that analyze accounts' frequency of tweets, number of followers, and apparent location.

"Tweeting more frequently than is humanly possible or appearing to be in one country and then another a few hours later is indicative of a bot," Kathleen Carley, a computer-science professor who led the research, said in a release.

"When we see a whole bunch of tweets at the same time or back to back, it's like they're timed," Carley added. "We also look for use of the same exact hashtag, or messaging that appears to be copied and pasted from one bot to the next."

The researchers said they found that among tweets about "reopening America," 66% came from accounts that were possibly humans using bot assistants to spread their tweets more widely, while 34% came from bots.

There are a few possible explanations for the surge in bot activity. People may have more time to set up elaborate bot networks during stay-at-home orders, and the availability of botnets for hire has exploded recently. Carley also said that the global nature of the pandemic meant that countries and interest groups were using it to advance political agendas.

However, the researchers did not determine the origins of the bot activity or narrow down whether it was coming from foreign nation-state actors or from within the US.

"Even if someone appears to be from your community, if you don't know them personally, take a closer look, and always go to authoritative or trusted sources for information," Carley said. "Just be very vigilant."

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Roughly half the Twitter accounts pushing to 'reopen America' are bots, researchers found

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There's been a surge in bot activity in the past month in online discussions about reopening America from COVID-19 shutdowns, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said this week. The researchers analyzed over 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 and found that roughly half the accounts were likely bots.

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CLAIM: Wearing a mask can cause hypercapnia, and lead viruses to travel into the brain.

AP'S ASSESSMENT: False. There's no evidence that wearing a mask causes hypercapnia, or that masks can trap the virus and lead to an infection in the brain. Hypercapnia occurs when there is too much carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. Mild cases can lead to issues such as headache and anxiety; severe cases can interfere with breathing.

THE FACTS: Dozens of posts circulated on social media this week claiming that wearing a mask would cause more harm than going without one.

"By wearing a mask, the exhaled viruses will not be able to escape and will concentrate in the nasal passages, enter the olfactory nerves and travel into the brain," several false posts on Facebook and Twitter stated.

One Facebook post featured the quote and falsely noted that wearing masks over a period can cause hypercapnia.

"Wearing masks causes hypercapnia which causes severe respiratory problems which will be BLAMED on 2nd wave of C O Vid not the masks," the post stated. The post featured an illustration from Wikimedia Commons, which was labeled as showing "carbon dioxide toxicity."

Social media posts displaying the illustration also had a statement edited onto the graphic: "This is hypercapnia. It can be caused by rebreathing your own exhaled CO2 by wearing a mask continually."

There's no evidence that wearing a mask will trap the virus in the nose and lead to an infection in the brain, said Sarah Stanley, associate professor of infectious diseases and vaccinology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.

"Keep in mind that many people -for example surgeons or certain kinds of scientists-have routinely worn masks for long periods of time without clear adverse effects," Stanley said. "With how common mask wearing has always been, even before COVID-19, we would know if hypercapnia was a problem with wearing masks."

Stanley also noted that when infected with COVID-19, the tissues in the nose already harbor the virus. "Breathing out the virus is not going to appreciably change the amount that is there," she said in an email. "Therefore, there should be no reason why wearing a mask would increase your chance of infection in the brain."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised their guidance on wearing face masks in April. The organization now says that wearing face coverings helps to prevent transmitting the virus.

This is part of The Associated Press' ongoing effort to fact-check misinformation that is shared widely online, including work with Facebook to identify and reduce the circulation of false stories on the platform.

Here's more information on Facebook's fact-checking program: https://www.facebook.com/help/1952307158131536

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False health claims circulate about wearing masks during pandemic

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CLAIM: Wearing a mask can cause hypercapnia, and lead viruses to travel into the brain. AP'S ASSESSMENT: False. There's no evidence that wearing a mask causes hypercapnia, or that masks can trap the virus and lead to an infection in the brain. Hypercapnia occurs when there is too much carbon dioxide in the bloodstream.

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Scholarly sources are written by experts in a particular field or area of study (discipline). These sources are used by others in the same discipline to stay informed and up to date on the most recent research, research findings, and news in that discipline. You might also hear scholarly sources referred to as peer-reviewed or refereed.

What does peer reviewed mean?

Peer reviewed sources are scholarly scources that have gone through a rigorous review process by a review board of colleagues in the author's discipline. This review board evaluates the source submitted for publication to determine its value as a contribution to the body of research in that discipline. The submission may be accepted, returned for revisions, or even rejected by the review board.

Why use scholarly sources?

Using scholarly sources is an part of your academic course work because these sources are and authoritative ; they are written by academically recognized experts. These types of sources will help you produce quality papers and presentations.

You are now a part of the scholarly community and need to join the scholarly conversation. Here is how it works and why these sources are important:
Building Blocks

Scholarship builds on previous ideas and discoveries. For example, medical care improves due to research. That research is published and/or presented. Other researchers consult this scholarship and produce their own research to be published and/or presented, etc.
Creating Pathways to Discovery

Researchers credit ideas and discoveries through citations and references in their papers/presentations. You, as a student researcher, also need to credit the ideas and discoveries of the researchers referenced in your own papers/presentations.
Creation of New Knowledge

Students write papers/present and cite previous research in their own work. They become the next generation of researchers and part of the scholarly conversation.

How can I tell if a source is scholarly?

Scholarly sources have particular characteristics as follows:

Articles are written by a scholar or expert in the field.

Scholarly journal articles and books generally have sources cited in footnotes and a bibliography (also called "works cited" or "references").

The main purpose of a scholarly journal is to report on original research or experimentation in order to make such information available to the rest of the scholarly world.

The language used in scholarly sources is typically the language used in the discipline covered.

Scholarly sources generally assume some prior knowledge of the topic being discussed.

Many scholarly journals are published by a professional organization of the discipline.

Many scholarly journals are "peer reviewed" or "refereed". The author of an article must submit the article for review by a panel of experts in the field to be accepted for publication.

See the next tab of this guide, Evaluation Criteria, for help evaluating your sources. For additional help evaluating books & journal articles, see the Scholarly Characteristics tab of this guide.

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LibGuides: Evaluating Sources: Scholarly Sources

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Scholarly sources are written by experts in a particular field or area of study (discipline). These sources are used by others in the same discipline to stay informed and up to date on the most recent research, research findings, and news in that discipline. You might also hear scholarly sources referred to as peer-reviewed or refereed.

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How to present facts to friends and family.

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Fact-checking your friends and family on social media is not as weird as you think - and it could help slow the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus.

A recent survey found that 34% of people reported seeing someone else get corrected for sharing about COVID-19 on social media. Nearly one-fourth of respondents said they had fact-checked coronavirus misinformation themselves, and more than two-thirds agreed that people should respond when they see someone sharing false claims.

This is good news - research shows that, when people correct misinformation on their social media feeds, misperceptions decrease. For coronavirus-related falsehoods, correcting the record is even more important.

Since the pandemic began, PolitiFact has fact-checked several inaccurate claims about how to prevent or treat COVID-19. Many of them are dangerous, such as the bogus claim that drinking bleach can destroy the virus or that wearing a mask in public is harmful. If taken seriously, that kind of misinformation could have dire health consequences.

To make swatting down falsehoods a little easier for everyone, we created a guide for how to fact-check your friends and family on the coronavirus pandemic. Below are six tips to make your timelines a little more truthful.

When you see someone you know share something false about the coronavirus, take the matter seriously. Health misinformation has the potential to cause harm.

"In the middle of a pandemic, personal choice is inherently tied up in community. Every choice I make about being more safe and more risky has implications not just for me, but for a lot of other people," said Emily Vraga, associate professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota. "That makes it more important that we do correct other people."

Even though it may feel like a small action, fact-checking social media can make a difference. A study Vraga co-authored in 2017 found that corrections can decrease health misperceptions online - even among the most ardent conspiracy theorists. This is especially true when you fact-check someone you know.

"For conspiracy theories this can actually be easier," said Drew Margolin, an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, in an email. "It's often the case that the theory is really a way of communicating distrust in a particular individual or entity. This is why the theories adapt so easily - they are motivated by distrust, not specific facts."

In short: facts matter, and anyone can wield them to correct misperceptions about the coronavirus.

2. Consider your approach

Once you've decided that you want to correct someone, the next step is to think about how you're going to do it. The goal is to convey accurate information in an analytical, scientific way - not make people mad or prove that you're smart.

"Try to avoid provoking them to defend themselves," Margolin said. "This means either not embarrassing them - such as doing it in private - or, possibly, correcting diplomatically in front of others so that they do not lose face."

When people feel attacked, they may think their worldview or reputation has been challenged. That leads to less analytic thinking, Margolin said, making a fact-based discussion much harder.
RELATED: 7 ways to avoid misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic
Whether you correct someone in a private message or in front of others depends on the person. If you think they won't react well to a public correction, it's fine to reach out directly, especially if you want to preserve that relationship. But researchers say there's a benefit to fact-checking someone in front of other people.

"Social media actually makes it more important that we're willing to engage in those corrections because we know other people are going to see it, and we want to make sure that they're not left with the wrong information," Vraga said.

3. Watch your language - or don't

When you're fact-checking someone, it can help to use language that isn't too abrasive or belittling. A gentle approach can help the person you're correcting see that you have their best interest at heart.

"Particularly if it's a family member or a friend, there are also other things you might want to consider than just encouraging belief change," said Briony Swire-Thompson, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University's Network Science Institute. "You might want to give the correction in a kind way, just because no one wants to be wrong."

But that's not always the case - how you phrase a fact-check depends on the person you're correcting. Preliminary research from Vraga, Leticia Bode of Georgetown University and Melissa Tully of the University of Iowa suggests that corrections are good at changing misperceptions regardless of their tone.

"When you correct someone, the correction works equally well when it's uncivil or neutral," Vraga said. "You can use the language you think is most appropriate. Maybe a snarky tone is appropriate for that relationship."

Regardless of how you speak to the person you're correcting, experts agree that compassion is key. Try saying things like "I was confused, too" or "I understand why you shared this."

"You can refute the hoax but acknowledge the validity of the concern," Margolin said.

4. Avoid repeating misinformation. Say what's true

When writing your fact-check, try to emphasize what's right instead of what's wrong. This works two ways.

First, focusing on the facts could resonate more with the person you're correcting, as they may feel less attacked. Second, research shows that, the more people hear a false claim, the more it resonates with them - even if it's presented alongside a correction.

"Repeating the misinformation is the biggest thing that we really need to be careful about," Vraga said. "The more we hear something the more we think it's true."
RELATED: Top 10 uncertainties about the coronavirus
Instead of repeating the false claim, try using just a link to refer to it. Or speak about it in vague terms, such as "I saw your post about wearing masks." The goal is to get to your correction as quickly as possible.

"Clarity is certainly one of the main goals," Swire-Thompson said. "If you make it really wordy and complicated so that no one reads it, or when you bury the corrective element in a way that people just kind of skim past it, it can be less effective."

5. Choose your sources wisely

The backbone of any fact-check is its source list. The same goes for corrections on social media.

One 2017 study found that corrections of misinformation about the Zika virus were more effective when a source was provided. Fact-checks are even more effective when they come from expert sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization, which maintains a list of debunked coronavirus myths.

However, experts say the kind of source you use should depend on the person you're correcting. Try to find a credible source that the person respects.

"If you can debunk misinformation using Fox News and this is a Fox News user, you should try to do that," Vraga said. "Think about who are the sources they're going to trust. If they're not going to trust the CDC, maybe go to your local health organization."

Don't rely on a single link to correct someone, either. Experts say two sources are better than one.

"It's not exactly clear why this is, but one theory is that it helps people identify relevant information to reconstruct their understanding, rather than just telling them to excise some specific beliefs from their knowledge, leaving it with weird holes," Margolin said. "Another possibility is that it's harder to attack the source when there are many sources."

When in doubt, try linking to articles from independent fact-checking organizations. They've debunked more than 6,000 claims about COVID-19 around the world.

6. Focus on facts, not values

This tip holds true when fact-checking any kind of misinformation, whether it has to do with health or politics.

A 2017 study found that, when people were presented with a fact-check correcting a falsehood, they changed their belief in the claim. That finding held across party lines. However, the study noted that corrections did not change people's voting patterns.

In short: fact-checking changes specific ideas, not votes - a finding that is echoed by other studies on the effect of corrections.
RELATED: 7 steps to better fact-checking
"In the context of the coronavirus, a common subtext is President Trump," Margolin said. "If this is an ongoing struggle you are having with a family member, and you'd like to correct them, find a way to defuse this point."

A good way to do this is going back to tip No. 4: Focus on the facts. Research shows that fact-checks can decrease health misperceptions, but it's much harder to change the way people think or see the world.

"Frames that focus on the falsity/misleading nature of just the claim itself, without forcing substantial bigger changes, will work better," Margolin said. "Avoid frames that make it seem like a struggle between you and them for power or reputation. These only make people more resistant."

Email interview with Drew Margolin, assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, May 21, 2020

Health Communication, " See Something, Say Something: Correction of Global Health Misinformation on Social Media," June 16, 2017

Information, Communication & Society, " I do not believe you: how providing a source corrects health misperceptions across social media platforms," Nov. 14, 2016

International Fact-Checking Network, Fighting the Infodemic: The #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, accessed May 22, 2020

Interview with Briony Swire-Thompson, postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University's Network Science Institute, May 21, 2020

Interview with Emily Vraga, associate professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, May 21, 2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology, " Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news." 2018

Political Behavior, " The Elusive Backfire Effect: Mass Attitudes' Steadfast Factual Adherence," Aug. 6, 2016

PolitiFact, " Fact-checking COVID-19 prevention, treatment myths," March 26, 2020

PolitiFact, " Here's how to fact-check your family at the Thanksgiving dinner table," Nov. 25, 2019

PolitiFact, " No, drinking bleach will not ward off coronavirus," Jan. 30, 2020

PolitiFact, " There's no evidence that wearing standard masks is harmful to your health," May 19, 2020

Poynter, " Fact-checking changes minds but not votes, according to new research," March 1, 2017

Poynter, " Study: On Twitter, you're better off fact-checking your crazy uncle than a complete stranger," Sept. 11, 2017

PsyArXiv Preprints, " Searching for the backfire effect: Measurement and design considerations," May 14, 2020

Science Communication, " Correcting Misinformation About Neuroscience via Social Media," Nov. 26, 2019

Science Communication, " Using Expert Sources to Correct Health Misinformation in Social Media," Sept. 14, 2017

The Washington Post, " Americans are fighting coronavirus misinformation on social media," May 7, 2020

World Health Organization, " Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public: Myth busters," accessed May 22, 2020

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PolitiFact - How to fact-check coronavirus misinformation on your timeline

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Fact-checking your friends and family on social media is not as weird as you think - and it could help slow the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus. A recent survey found that 34% of people reported seeing someone else get corrected for sharing about COVID-19 on social media.