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Editors' Note: Snopes reviewed Judy Mikovits' court case and debunked several of her claims in a piece written by Alex Kasprak in 2018. After the Plandemic video went viral in May 2020, an outpouring of reader inquires prompted us to add to our reporting in the interests of ensuring that search engines connect readers with the full story. In the midst of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic, millions of viewers in America and elsewhere were exposed in May 2020 to a 22-minute installment from the forthcoming film Plandemic, a conspiracy-based documentary holding that (as synopsized by The Washington Post) doctors and experts shaping public policy in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic have silenced dissenting voices and misled the public for sinister reasons. The primary (and virtually sole) source offered by filmmaker Mikki Willis for the contentions made by the movie in that 22-minute installment is Judy Mikovits, who over the course of the segment spins a tale of a government conspiracy led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and has been the prominent public face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. That one installment of Plandemic offers far too many bits of misinformation to debunk in a single fact check, so we'll start here by attempting to unpack the introduction of Mikovits the film offers in its opening in an attempt to establish her as a credible expert voice. The installment opens with the following voice-over narration describing Mikovits' background, then segues into a Q&A dialog between Willis and Mikovits: The blockbuster article of Mikovits' that this opening refers to was a paper published in the journal Science in 2009 that seemingly tied chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) to a retrovirus called XMRV -- a finding that, if true, could be a boon to developing treatment for CFS patients. But Plandemic makes absolutely no mention of the fact that, as we detailed in a previous article here at Snopes.com, other scientists couldn’t replicate the results of the study, mounting evidence suggested that Mikovits' findings were actually the result of lab contamination, questions arose over whether Mikovits' had misrepresented data, and in December 2011 the editors of Science retracted the paper in full, saying they had lost confidence in the Report and the validity of its conclusion. Chicago Tribune reported in 2011: Plandemic also grossly misrepresents events that occurred shortly before and after the retraction of Mikovits' paper by Science, presenting them as the result of Mikovits' having made a discovery that conflicted with the agreed-upon narrative -- an act that supposedly made Mikovits the target of a vast conspiracy -- by the ubiquitous and powerful they -- to destroy [her] life. What Plandemic doesn't mention was that in September 2011, a few months before Science retracted her paper, Mikovits was fired by her employer, the Reno-based Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), for insubordination connected with her refusal to share a cell line with a former collaborator, Dr. Vincent Lombardi (the first author of 2009 Science paper that proposed the XMRV-chronic fatigue link). According to an affidavit provided in subsequent legal proceedings by another WPI employee, Max Pfost, after learning of her firing, Mikovits asked Pfost to remove notebooks and samples from WPI's facility and provide them to her. Pfost, who said he worked closely with Mikovits and considered her my boss at WPI (and whom Mikovits called her assistant), stated in his affidavit that he complied with Mikovits' request, and that Mikovits planned to transfer grants and research and projects away from WPI based upon the information she [had] stolen: The materials that Mikovits asserts in Plandemic were not in my possession but planted in my house as part of a conspiracy to make it look like she took intellectual property from the laboratory are presumably the notebooks and samples that her subordinate attested he took from the WPI lab at Mikovits' direction, after she had been terminated by WPI and locked out of her lab, and subsequently delivered to her. In Plandemic, Mikovits declares that she was arrested without a warrant and held in jail with no charges. But according to contemporaneous reporting, WPI filed a civil lawsuit against Mikovits to compel the return of their misappropriated property, and WPI reported the lab notebooks and other materials as stolen to the police force of the University of Nevada at Reno. Mikovits was subsequently arrested as a fugitive in California (where Pfost said she was hiding out on a boat to avoid being served in the WPI lawsuit) pursuant to a warrant issued by University of Nevada at Reno police, which listed two felony charges: possession of stolen property and unlawful taking of computer data, equipment, supplies, or other computer-related property. Mikovits spent several days in a California jail until she was released following an arraignment hearing upon posting $100,000 bail and promising to return to court for a Nevada extradition hearing. She subsequently surrendered to police in Reno and returned some of the notebooks taken from WPI at that time. Mikovits also asserts in Plandemic that the indefinite conspiratorial they searched her house without a warrant, yet in her 2014 book Plague she described three Ventura County (California) Sheriff's deputies arriving at the door brandishing a yellow piece of paper and informing her that they had a search warrant, and later in that same book she referred to a search warrant for her home in Nevada issued by the Washoe County District Attorney's office. As well, in Plague she mentioned her attorney questioning the court as to why Mikovits was arrested on a no bail warrant -- thereby describing a specific aspect of the arrest warrant which she maintains did not exist. (A copy of the California search warrant, which includes reference to the existence of a separate arrest warrant, is viewable here.) Although the criminal charges against Mikovits were eventually dropped, WPI was successful in civil court, obtaining an injunction preventing Mikovits from altering or distributing misappropriated materials and requiring her to return them to WPI. When Mikovits failed to comply with the injunction order because of concerns for the safety of patient data, WPI submitted a motion for an Order to Show Cause why Mikovits should not be held in contempt of court: It appears from the court docket that the civil case was stayed after Mikovits filed for bankruptcy in September 2012, citing among her unsecured creditors a $15,000,000 debt owed to WPI as damages in connection with the default ruling issued against her in WPI's lawsuit. Mikovits’ claims about her research, a conspiracy between Big Pharma and the U.S. federal government to discredit and destroy her, and her arrest are contradicted by multiple documentary sources (including her own words). But, as Snopes reporter Alex Kasprak noted in his earlier reporting, although she may have lost the support of the scientific community, Mikovits appears to have found a new home in the pseudoscientific conspiracy community.
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