"Towards the middle of the video, Willis asks Mikovits if she’s antivaccine, which, of course, she denies. After characterizing vaccines as an “immune therapy,” she then goes on to buying into the conspiracy that SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19) was “manipulated and studied” in a laboratory and then escaped. She then makes the utterly nonsensical claim that if SARS-CoV-2 had evolved naturally it would have taken 800 years. (Seriously, she’s a virologist?) Her difference is that she claims that the virus must have been released somehow between Fort Detrick and the Wuhan laboratory. She even claimed that in 1999 she worked at Fort Detrick in order to “teach Ebola how to infect human cells,” further claiming that Ebola couldn’t infect human cells until it had been “taught” how to do it. Apparently Ebola came from a lab too.
Indeed, the amount of nonsense, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy mongering in Mikovits’ response to questions is truly epic. She likens COVID-19 infection to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which is even more nonsensical. She agrees with the conspiracy theory that doctors are being pushed to misclassify deaths due to other causes as due to COVID-19. Willis even included a clip of Dr. Dan Erickson making that claim. You might recall that he and Dr. Artin Massihi made a misinformation-laden video claiming that COVID-19 prevalence was so much higher than estimated and using that estimate to claim that COVID-19 is actually five times less lethal than seasonal flu. I emphasize that, in reality, the case and death count from COVID-19 is grossly underestimated. Why the pressure? Because government reimbursement is higher for a diagnosis of COVID-19, apparently. Basically, all the common conspiracy theories about COVID-19 make an appearance, including the claim that it was the flu vaccine that got it started, but with a spin. Mikovits claims that Italy was hit so hard because the virus for the flu vaccine it used was grown in dog cells and dog cells have a lot of coronavirus. She also cites the bogus claim that the flu vaccine increases your chance of getting COVID-19 by 36%. It doesn’t.
Oh, and hydroxychloroquine makes an appearance, too, because of course it does. Hydroxychloroquine probably doesn’t work, but Mikovits is all-in with conspiracy theories about it.
Mark and Chris Hoofnagle coined a term “crank magnetism,” in which a person who believes in one form of pseudoscience or one conspiracy theory will tend to believe in multiple pseudoscientific beliefs and conspiracy theories. When, late in the video, Mikovits asks why we’re closing beaches because there are “healing microbes in the sand,” I had to stop. There’s just so much idiocy I can tolerate.
Sadly, as Judy Mikovits demonstrates, the COVID-19 pandemic is drawing cranks and conspiracy theorists like it moths to a light. Chief among them are antivax grifters like Judy Mikovits. She’s so wrong she’s not even wrong, and she’s gone full conspiracy theorist, taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to be reborn as a COVID-19 crank, grifting with her book and a “doctor education” company. Sadly, she’s not alone."
