A video from a discredited scientist promoting a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus went viral across every social media platform Thursday. It was initially pushed by anti-vaccination disinformation peddlers.
The new “documentary” is one of dozens of videos from conspiracy theorists and far-right media outlets in recent months in which Mikovits’ myriad baseless claims — among them that vaccines cause harm and that medical experts and government officials responding to the coronavirus outbreak should not be trusted — have been promoted as “expert opinion.”
In reality, after Mikovits was fired from her research job at the nonprofit Whittemore Peterson Institute, “she took her lab materials and computer, she ran away to California, and she got arrested,” Vastag said. She was released from jail when the institute declined to press charges. Vastag had been reaching out to reporters in the last month, trying to warn them that Mikovits was attempting to use the coronavirus to push disinformation through high-profile fringe outlets.When he woke up in his home in Hawaii on Thursday to see friends and family members sharing her video on Facebook, it made him “feel kind of hopeless for science literacy in this country.”
YouTube had removed several versions of the videos by Thursday morning for violating its community guidelines. The video has since been mirrored and reposted to dozens of other channels and across many platforms. On Facebook, one video was shared tens of thousands of times and attracted more than 6 million interactions in less than 24 hours, according to CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics company. Because CrowdTangle does not include data from private groups, the numbers are undoubtedly much higher.
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