Plandemic! Where truth, quasi-truth and truthiness intersect

by Leslie Butler and Alan Wain

One big problem with edgy docs that live in the gray territory between serious inquiry and disingenuous fakery is that the controversy erupting around them can bury some important kernels of truth.

Take the controversial doc, Plandemic! that Netflix refused to air but Sinclair is purportedly planning to. It’s Mikki Willis’s foray into the rich swamp of uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic. The 24-minute teaser for the doc — almost exclusively — features Judy Mikovits, an American research scientist who makes a number of eyebrow-raising claims including:

· COVID-19 was probably a by-product of lab research because natural selection would have taken 800 years to produce this virus

· it’s being allowed to spread so that Big Pharma and other vested interests can profit from vaccines and treatments

· Dr. Tony Fauci had ties to the Wuhan lab and ominously predicted the current pandemic in 2017

· social distancing, wearing masks and staying inside will weaken our immune systems

· powerful state forces have muzzled her research findings

The film has been roundly condemned as misinformation by Politifact, Forbes, Snopes and a host of scientific sources. Mikovits herself has been discredited here, here and here. So we don’t intend to go over this already well-worn territory.

What’s interesting is that in the furious backlash, big important truths sometimes get lost or distorted. Like rumours, a lot of quasi-truths begin with truth. This is what makes them so beguiling.

The specific assertions made in Plandemic! may well be false. The film’s many debunkers say the bullshit is in the details. They say the film’s specific facts do not check out. But criticism of the details does not debunk the more general and very realistic concern that science could become corrupt and is unquestionably open to corruption.

In fact, the only reason the film gains any rhetorical traction at all with ordinary viewers is because it plays upon some legitimate fears about potential threats to the independence and integrity of science.

One does not have to be a crank or anti-science to worry about these threats. One just has to be open to the idea that science is susceptible to the same kinds of threats to its independence and integrity as other fields are. These threats include:

Money negatively influences the conduct of science.

As science has become increasingly dependent on private funding, it has lost some of its independence and some of the luxury it once enjoyed to pursue pure research for the sake of intellectual curiosity alone. Privatizing medical research has been a 40-year project in which Big Pharma has increasingly called the tune by paying the piper.

Big Pharma has, at the very least, set research agendas. At the very worst it has engineered blatantly bogus results and commissioned studies to reach misleading conclusions. Publicly funded universities, squeezed by austerity, became supplicants to rich vested interests for private research grants with big strings attached.

We accept that truth is the first casualty of war. So why should we doubt that truth seeking empirical science could be a casualty of funding-for-profit research? We accept that funding can affect the actions politician will take. So why would we doubt that principle applies to scientists too?

Mikovits plays on our fear of funders corrupting science. And even if she is wrong about the specifics of this pandemic, it does not invalidate the fear in general. And it’s why the film resonates at all.

Property rights negatively influence the conduct of science: The Bayh-Dole Act.

This intellectual property legislation in 1980 allowed private contractors to retain ownership over inventions made with government-funded R & D. It effectively means taxpayers’ millions are being used to fund research for which private companies then obtain a patent and make big profits.

Giving scientific researchers a financial stake in the outcome of their research incentivizes them to exaggerate the benefits, and to minimize the harm, of discoveries they have made that could lead to profit-making products. Willis and Mikovits rightly identify this as a having a potential for serious conflicts of interest.

But it doesn’t at all automatically follow that Dr. Tony Fauci and others did block effective treatments for HIV/AIDS while pushing their own patented ineffective treatments for profit. It doesn’t mean Fauci is personally responsible for millions of deaths in Africa. Willis and Mikovits would have to show us a lot more evidence to prove this, evidence that the film’s debunkers say does not exist.

But that does not invalidate the question of whether repealing the Bayh-Dole Act might be a good idea. A lot of us could get behind that.

Personal ambition and egos negatively influence the conduct of science.

Despite its central claim of objectivity, science is still a human activity. That means it is an activity done by people prone to making biased assumptions, faulty research methods, unsubstantiated claims, unwarranted leaps of logic, honest mistakes and sometimes even deliberate hoaxes.

The scientific method is only as impartial as the men and women who use it. It cannot protect individuals from being seduced by their own dreams of fame, acclaim and personal glory or from falling into hero worship or excessive deference to authority.

So, it is not necessarily anti-science or crankish to be rigorously skeptical of scientific experts.

Plandemic!’s skepticism about the science of masks, or the weakening of our immune systems due to social distancing and excessive hygiene play on our knowledge that science is not infallible. Willis and Mikivitcz tug at the strand that too much deference to questionable authorities can be a very bad thing.

Power corrupts, negatively influencing the conduct of science

Most of us are quite willing to believe that powerful people are capable of using their power to unfairly silence dissenters who displease them. We have heard about this happening in government or law enforcement or big business.

We’ve seen Karen Silkwood, Erin Brockovich and Gary Webb. So when Willis artfully paints a picture of Mikovits as a victim of false charges whose research was buried and whose due process rights have been trampled, the possibility of that having happened resonates.

We are open to the idea that Mikovits could have been like the above-mentioned heroes even though fact-checkers insist, in her case, she was treated lawfully. But lawfully might not be the issue. It is lawful for the funder of scientific research, as owners of the research, to suppress public knowledge of the results.

Likewise, it is lawful for media conglomerates who pay for the exclusive right to publish a story to instead kill the story. It’s called “catch and kill”. Likewise, it is lawful for powerful people to do bad things to people and then buy their victims’ silence under “non-disclosure agreements”.

But catch and kill journalism and NDAs can still be viewed as problems even though they are legal. We might be willing to believe Judy Mikovitz was the victim of catch-and-kill science whose research was buried by her powerful male bosses.

Long serving Czars negatively influence the conduct of science

One of the points Plandemic! makes about Dr. Faucci is that his is very powerful by virtue of having his job for so many decades. Even if he hasn’t abused his power, it is still legitimate to ask about the wisdom of creating such long serving public health czars. One of the problems with the late J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. is that he grew too powerful simply by being in charge too long. Maybe that lesson applies to the conduct of science too.

Plandemic! may be more about truthiness than truth. It may be, as Frances Fitzgerald observed with such breathtaking clarity: “…truer than truth. That which never happened but ought to have.” Willis and Mikovitz may be engineering the details to tell an overarching narrative that is true. But it still raises some issues worth pondering.