Amit Prasad Antiscience Movements

Anti-science Misinformation and Conspiracies:
COVID–19, Post-truth, and Science &

Technology Studies (STS)
AMIT PRASAD
COVID–19 has not only resulted in nearly two and a half million deaths globally but it has also spawned
a pandemic of misinformation and conspiracies. In this article I examine COVID–19 misinformation
and conspiracies in the United States (US). These misinformation and conspiracies have been com-
monly argued to be anti-science. I argue, although it is important to rebut false information and stop
their spread, social scientists need to analyse how such anti-science claims are discursively framed and
interpreted. Specifically, I show how the framing of the anti-science conspiracies utilise the credibility of
science and scientists. I also explore how the COVID–19 misinformation and conspiracies were given
different meaning among different social groups. The article is divided into three sections. In the first
section I analyse the discursive emplotment of the Plandemic video that had Dr Judy Mikovits present-
ing several COVID–19 conspiracy theories and went viral before it was taken down from major social
media platforms. I show how the video draws on the credibility of science, scientists, and scientific
journals to present misinformation and conspiracies claims against vaccination, mask wearing, etc.
The second section explores how COVID–19 misinformation and conspiracies were interpreted among
the African-American community by drawing on the history of black community’s experiences in the
US and as such how their interpretations stand in contrast to the interpretations of the COVID–19
misinformation and conspiracies among the White community. The last section analyses the role of STS
in engaging with anti-science and post-truth issues and emphasises the need to excavate genealogies
of the present even with regard to misinformation and conspiracies.
Keywords: Anti-science, COVID–19, misinformation, conspiracies, post-truth, race/racism
On 1 July 2020, The Alliance for Science, a Cornell University based group that
‘seeks to promote access to scientific innovation as a means for raising the quality of
life globally’,1 bluntly headlined one of its news reports: ‘“Anti-Science” attitudes
Amit Prasad (corresponding author), School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of
Technology, Old Civil Engineering Building, 221 Bobby Dodd Way, Atlanta, GA 30332–0225. E-mail:
amit.prasad@hsoc.gatech.edu
Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/Melbourne
DOI: 10.1177/09717218211003413
Anti-science Misinformation and Conspiracies  89
undermining US efforts as coronavirus cases soar’.2 The report quotes Dr Anthony

Fauci, who has been the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases (NIAID) from 1984: ‘There is a general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-
vaccine feeling among some people in this country {United States}—an alarmingly
large percentage of people, relatively speaking.’
There can be little dispute that the coronavirus pandemic has also spawned
a pandemic of misinformation – not just in the United States (US), but in other
countries as well.3 Coronavirus pandemic has, in fact, become the new flashpoint
in what has been called the post-truth era. The term post-truth was presented by
Oxford English Dictionaries as the word of the year in 2016 and, according to
the Oxford Dictionaries, it means ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which
objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emo-
tion and personal belief’ (as quoted in Lynch, 2020, p. 50).
Michael Lynch in a recent article problematises the above definition of post-
truth. ‘The contrast … between “objective facts” and “appeals to emotion and
personal belief”, Lynch points out, ‘does not quite capture the challenge to science
in the current era’ (Lynch, 2020, p. 50). Lynch argues that ‘instead of an outright
rejection of science and objectivity, what is involved is an effort to produce adver-
sarial claims of objectivity and institutional supports for those claims’ (Lynch, 2020,
p. 50). He concludes that ‘{p}erhaps the problem is not anti-science per se, but the
collapse of more nuanced debate into over-generalized “scientific” claims in the public
airing of disagreements’ (Lynch, 2020, p. 55).
In this article I build on Lynch’s argument about anti-science campaigns and post-
truth era in the context of the COVID–19 pandemic. Specifically, I argue, although it
is important to rebut false claims and stop their spread, in order to better understand
anti-science misinformation and conspiracies, we need to analyse how anti-science
misinformation and conspiracies are discursively framed and interpreted within and
by particular social groups. The social patterns of anti-science claims have been high-
lighted by various studies. For example, a study published in the American Journal
of Public Health found that the percentage of students with public health exemption
(PBE) from vaccination doubled from 2007 to 2013 in California. The study showed
that ‘{a}cross all models, higher median household income and higher percentage of
White race in the population … significantly predicted higher percentages of students
with PBEs in 2013’ (Yang et al., 2016, p. 172) Similarly, a study on climate change
beliefs, based on ten Gallup surveys (2001–2010), found that conservative white males
were four times more likely than all other adults to believe that ‘the effect of global
warming will never happen’ (McCright & Dunlap, 2011). In fact, on Brexit vote too,
which prompted the christening of post-truth as the word of the year of 2016, the
racial divide was strikingly evident: whites were the only racial/ethnic group whose
majority voted for leave and the white vote for leave was around 20% more than the
voting percentage for leave by the other ethnic/racial groups.4
Let me clarify. I am not suggesting that the white racial group is more pre-
disposed towards anti-science or post-truth positions. Rather, I wish to highlight

90  Amit Prasad
that when we investigate anti-science claims, if we do not contextualise our inves-

tigation in relation to particular social groups and in particular temporal/historical
and geographical contexts, we will get a very skewed understanding of what is
happening. Moreover, we would miss an important element of anti-science claims
– how the veracity of a representation (with regard to climate change, effective-
ness of vaccine, and, more broadly, what is considered a ‘scientific fact’) becomes
hostage to its interpretation, mobilisation, and circulation within and by particular
social groups. Hence, as I show in the article, anti-science claims often utilise
certain tropes, which allows the claims to align with existing social concerns and
through that with particular social groups, and then these claims are spread through
the actions of these groups. In short, with regard to anti-science (and post-truth)
claims, we need to move beyond the issue of what representations are, which, not
surprisingly, leads to calls for spreading better understanding of science (and in
some cases spread of ‘scientific temper’), and analyse how these representations
are discursively framed and, thereafter, interpreted and circulated.5
A focus on how anti-science claims are discursively framed, as I show, high-
lights that these claims are often sustained through critiques of certain institutional
relationships of science(s) and rely on idealised and reified constructions of science
to glide over situated critiques of those anti-science positions. Critique of such
idealised constructions of science is, thus, not just necessary, but also urgent. In
relation to anti-science misinformation and conspiracies, it is also important to
explore whether and how they are interpreted differently by different social groups.
Such an exploration, as I show in the article, requires tracing the history of the
present.6 For example, in relation to COVID–19, although there are overlaps in the
interpretative content, it is noteworthy how the misinformation and conspiracies
that became popular among the African-American community in the United States
(US), commonly drew upon the history of exclusion and exploitation of the black
community. In contrast, the misinformation and conspiracies among the white com-
munity often drew on the trope of freedom and protection of the republic, which,
in turn, cannot be separated from the colonising discourse of settler colonies such
as the US that links whiteness to citizenship and property (Harris, 1993; Reardon
& TallBear, 2012).7 My analysis of differing interpretations of COVID–19 misin-
formation and conspiracies as history of the present does not aim at presenting an
underlying unchanging historical logic or cause for present day actions. Rather, in
line with Michel Foucault’s concern with genealogical analysis and exploration of
history of the present, it seeks ‘to trace the erratic and discontinuous process whereby
the past’ becomes genealogically linked to the present (Garland, 2014, p. 372).
The article is divided into three sections. The first section analyses how a video
titled Plandemic, which went viral soon after it was posted on social media plat-
forms, utilised idealised and reified constructions of science, scientists, and scientific
journals to present anti-science misinformation and conspiracies. Thereafter, in the
second section, I explore some anti-science misinformation and conspiracies that
spread in the African-American community and compare the differing responses
to the misinformation and conspiracies among the blacks and the whites. In the last

section, building on Bruno Latour’s recent claim in relation to COVID–19, I analyse

the role of science and technology studies (STS) in engaging with anti-science and
post-truth issues. Specifically, I show that Latour’s call to shift our imaginary and
biopolitical strategy towards pathogens and pandemics is important. However,
the COVID–19 pandemic has also highlighted the limitations of Actor Network
Theory (ANT) and thus I argue for the need within STS to carefully explore the
history of the present.8
Discursive Emplotment of Misinformation and Conspiracies About COVID–19
‘We’ve gone through swine flu, bird flu, AIDS. All of the pandemics, epidemics
are perpetrated fraud to control, to drive our healthcare system. Literally, it’s bank-
rupting our country’ (as quoted in The Guardian, 2020).9 Dr Judy Mikovits, who
made the above claim, is a virologist whose 2009 paper in Science was retracted
by the journal because the research on which that paper was based was discredited.
Mikovits made the claim in a 26 minutes video titled Plandemic that was posted
on several social media platforms on 4 May 2020 and soon went viral.
In this video Mikovits is interviewed by Mikki Willis, a filmmaker, and she
makes a number of claims in relation to COVID–19. For example, she states:
‘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’.10 Her reasoning, as she explained in another interview,
is that ‘it’s probable that it’s {SARS-Cov–2 or COVID virus} been in every flu
vaccine since ‘13 to ‘15 because that’s when this work was being illegally done’.11
Thus, according to Mikovits, SARS-CoV–2 (COVID–19) virus has been dormant
in our bodies for years and wearing masks activates the virus.11
Mikovits makes many claims in the video with regard to COVID–19. Another of
her claims that has become a part of COVID–19 conspiracies suggests alternative
therapies for COVID–19 are already available and asks why has the focus been
on the development of a vaccine. This claim is presented as a conspiracy by the
scientific establishment and the drug companies. ‘The game’, Mikovits says, ‘is to
prevent the therapies until everyone is infected and push the vaccine, knowing that
the flu vaccines increase the odds by 36% of getting COVID–19’.11 She specifically
targets Dr Anthony Fauci but also states that the American Medical Association
(AMA) too is behind controlling alternative therapies for COVID–19. She states
in the video: ‘The AMA was saying, ya know, doctors will lose their license if they
use hydroxychloroquine’.11
In the weeks and months that passed since the Plandemic video was first posted
on several social media sites, there were not only numerous responses via videos
and print media that have shown that Mikovits claims are wrong, but the video,
Plandemic, was also later taken down from social media sites such as Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter, etc., for its role in spreading misinformation. I am not going
to go into the details of how Mikovits claims are wrong. It has already been done
very effectively by many scientists and medical professionals and I am not trained

92  Amit Prasad
as a medical scientist. I would instead focus on the emplotment of the COVID–19

misinformation and conspiracies in the video to show how, in fact, the credibility
of science and scientists is mobilised to present anti-science claims. I also analyse
how a network of social media and social influencers resulted in the ‘virality’ of
the video. I use the verb virality to highlight the need to not only focus on the
veracity of claims, but also on how such claims travel, as has been emphasised by
several news reporters and social scientists (see, e.g., Peters et al., 2020).12 Virality,
apart from the obvious reference to the speed with which information travels, can
also create or at least add credibility. The term virality also indicates the mutative
potential of the media, albeit the mutation may not be at the level of the content,
but in the form, which allows the media content to continue to proliferate. The
Plandemic video, for example, in spite of its removal from several social media
sites, continues to be available at several websites and is being viewed and com-
mented upon by a number of people.
Plandemic very slickly uses the credibility of science and the scientist to present
misinformation about COVID–19 and Dr Judy Mikovits. The video starts with
Mikovits and Mikki Willis, the filmmaker, walking together on a street with soft
music in the background and a voiceover (of the filmmaker) making the following
claim: ‘Dr Judy Mikovits has been called one of the most accomplished scientists
of her generation. Her 1991 doctoral thesis revolutionised the treatment of HIV
AIDS. At the height of her career, Dr Mikovits published a blockbuster article in
the journal Science’.13 The video, thus, uses Dr Mikovits work in the field of science
and the reputation of the journal Science, albeit falsely (there is no mention of the
discrediting of Mikovits’s work), to lay the groundwork for the claims that follow
in the interview. I highlight this to show that it is, minimally, intellectually lazy to
argue that anti-science claims are a result of a rejection of scientific objectivity and
value neutrality of science. In fact, as the video shows, the opposite is happening
here – reified construction of scientific objectivity and value neutrality of science
and the scientist are used as the scaffold to present the claims that follow.
The challenge to science follows soon after the above quoted part of the
voiceover:
‘The controversial article sent shockwaves through the scientific community as
it revealed that the common use of animal and human foetal tissues were unleash-
ing devastating plagues of chronic diseases. For exposing their deadly secrets, the
minions of big pharma waged war on Dr Mikovits, destroying her good name,
career, and personal life’.14
It will be useful to note that the criticism here is not of science per se; rather what
is being criticised is the projected alliance (or subservience) of science/scientists to
the interests of big pharmaceutical companies. The introductory voiceover ends by
laying out the reason for the interview with Dr Mikovits, situating it in the context of
COVID–19 pandemic: ‘Now, as the fate of the nation hangs in balance, Dr Mikovits
is naming names of those behind the plague of corruption that places all human
life in danger’.14 Thereafter, Willis, the filmmaker, and Dr Mikovits, are shown
sitting in front of each other in a room and Willis starts interviewing Dr Mikovits:

Willis: ‘So, you made a discovery that conflicted with the agreed upon narrative’.
Mikovits: ‘Correct’.
Willis: ‘And for that they did everything in their powers to destroy your life’.
Willis: ‘You were arrested’.
Willis: ‘And then you were put under a gag order’.
Mikovits: ‘For five years, if I went on social media, if I said anything at all,
they would find new evidence and put me back in jail. It was one of the
few times I cried. It was because I knew there was no evidence the first
time. And when you can unleash that kind of force to force someone into
bankruptcy with a perfect credit score. So that I could not bring my 97
witnesses, which included the heads of Tony Fauci, Ian Lipkin, the heads
of public health and HHS, who would have had to testify that we did abso-
lutely nothing wrong’.15
Willis: ‘So what did they charge you with?’
Mikovits: ‘Nothing’.
Willis: ‘But you were in jail’.
Mikovits: ‘I was in jail with no charges. I was called a fugitive from justice
{police cars are shown making a raid in the night while Mikovits talks}.
No warrant … I have no constitutional freedoms or rights’.
Before we proceed further, it is important to note that the framing of Willis’s first
question genealogically links Mikovits scientific work (although it was later discred-
ited) to the commonly used trope to describe a scientific discovery—‘discovery that
conflicted with the agreed upon narrative’. The video thus presents reaction towards
Mikovits’ work not simply as a conspiracy of the pharmaceutical companies, but
also a result of it being ahead and beyond the accepted scientific knowledge. That is
to say, Mikovits is being presented simultaneously as a revolutionary scientist, who
made an important discovery, and somebody who became a target of special interests.
Such framing of Mikovits and her research reflects the biased view of the film-
maker. Willis does not even discuss the discrediting of Mikovits’s research that had
resulted in the retraction of latter’s paper, which was published in Science. In the
narrative emplotment of Mikovits and her ‘scientific’ claims idealised constructions
of science and scientific research are used to not just gloss over and hide falsehoods
with regard to the scientist and her claims, but to present her as a hero.
In the video, Willis, the filmmaker/interviewer, continues the earlier quoted
exchange, stating that a lot of people would have taken retirement or laid low, but
now that Mikovits’s gag order has been released, instead of lying low she has decided
to publish the book Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science
(the book cover shows on the screen, while Willis reads the book’s title aloud). Willis
thereafter states, ‘apparently their attempts to silence you has failed’ and then says
he has to ask ‘how do you sit here with confidence to call out these great forces and
not fear for your life as you leave this building’. Mikovits replies, ‘because if we

94  Amit Prasad
don’t stop this now, we can not only forget our republic and our freedom, but we
can forget humanity, because we will be killed by this agenda’. Thus, the Plandemic,
after presenting Mikovits as a revolutionary scientist, presents her as a hero who is
willing to take on ‘great powers’ in spite of grave dangers to herself, including to her
life, in order to protect the nation at the time of the COVID crisis.
The interview moves on to Dr Anthony Fauci, initially focusing on how Dr Fauci
was central to the coverup in relation to Mikovits. Then, Willis asks, so now the
whole ‘world is listening to his {Dr Fauci’s} advice for how to handle the current
pandemic, how do we know what he is saying is what we need to be learning’.
Mikovits replies, ‘what he is saying is absolute propaganda’. And then Mikovits
links her claim of Fauci’s advice as propaganda to what she calls was propaganda
that started way back in 1984 in relation to the development of a vaccine for AIDS
(see Leavy, 2009 for a report on the controversy over the AIDS vaccine). The
interview continues on Dr Fauci and then shifts to concerns about the COVID–19
infection data in the US. Mikovits suggests that the cases are being wrongly counted.
Willis states that he has seen so many videos of doctors who have been perplexed
by the CDC’s guidelines. One doctor (a white man in coat and tie, but the specific
identity is not provided in the video, so it is difficult to confirm) is shown telling
a news reporter that one of his patients, an 86-years-old woman had pneumonia.
And, although this patient was not tested for COVID–19, since they later came
to know that her son had tested positive for COVID, though the son did not show
the symptoms, he (the doctor) was being told that it would be appropriate to write
COVID–19 on the death certificate of the 86-years-old patient.
This video shot is followed by a white man wearing medical personnel’s gown
(his identity is not given) who states, ‘when I am writing my death report, I am pres-
sured to write COVID. Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add COVID?’
This person then adds: ‘To maybe increase the numbers and to make it look lit-
tle worse than it is. I think so’. The video then moves back to the news report in
which a white male/doctor (in coat and tie) was talking about difficulties in listing
COVID as a cause of death and he is asked by the news anchor ‘why would they
want to skew the number of deaths due to COVID–19?’ The doctor replies: ‘Well,
fear is a great way to control people. And sometimes people’s ability to think for
themselves is paralyzed if they are frightened enough’. He then adds that is not
the situation in which he wants people to be. Again, it is worth noting that in the
misinformation in relation to COVID–19 data in the US the credibility of medicine
and medical scientists are used.
More broadly, the Plandemic sets the stage for a scientist/hero who against all
odds is shown taking on the establishment in which the popular voice of caution
from the medical community, Dr Anthony Fauci, is discredited and people are asked
to take their own decision. The discursive emplotment of the video draws on several
tropes that resonate with existing discourses of particular social groups—that of
David versus Goliath, of white victimhood that emerged in the United States in the
1970s and 1980s (Berbrier, 2000), protection of ‘our freedom’ and the republic,
calls against wearing of masks and challenging of COVID fatality numbers, which,

apart from aligning with interests of particular groups, have been presented as
attempts to malign President Trump, conspiracy of pharma companies in protecting
their self-interest, etc. It is important to take note of these tropes because then it
will make better sense how this video went viral. It will show how ‘manufacturing
consent’ occurs through alignment of interests.
Judy Mikovits’s book, Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise
of Science (Mikovits & Heckenlively, 2020), which was briefly discussed and its
cover displayed in the Plandemic video, for example, went on to become one of
the best sellers on Amazon soon after the video went viral.16 The book continues
to top the selling charts in several categories of books, including virology. On
Amazon the Plague of Corruption had more than 4,500 customer reviews by the
end of October 2020, around six months after it was published, and more than
90% of the reviewers gave the book 4 or 5 stars. One reviewer wrote: ‘Before we
can restore faith in science we have to know how it was lost. Who betrayed us
and why’. Another reviewer states: ‘This book is the second collaboration of a top
scientist and an attorney’.17
Interestingly, Mikovits co-authored the Plague of Corruption with Kent
Heckenlively who ‘bills himself as the “world’s #1 anti-vaxxer”’.18 Heckenlively
too is not overtly anti-science. His author page on Amazon describes him thus: ‘I
worked as a lawyer with my dad for several years, then found myself drawn to my
original love of science and became a science teacher. Now I get to teach science
during the day and write about it at night’ (emphasis added).19 His most recent
book, also co-authored with Judy Mikovits, is titled The Case Against Masks:
Ten Reasons Why Mask Use Should be Limited (Skyhorse Publishing, July 2020).
Plague of Corruption has a foreword written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer
and an activist who is also well-known for his anti-vaccine position. Kennedy, in
the foreword, compared Judy Mikovits’s situation to that of Galileo fighting the
orthodoxies of his time (Kennedy in Mikovits & Heckenlively, 2020). The blurb
of the book quotes well-known French virologist, Luc Antoine Montagnier, who
in 2008 shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the discovery of
the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Dr Montagnier’s blurb for Mikovits’s
book, Plague of Corruption, which appears on the cover of the book, states that
the book ‘delves into the midst of this rampant corruption, which hides from the
public scientific truths which might go against these corporate economic interests’
(emphasis added).
Montagnier also told the news platform CNews that ‘the virus has come out of
a laboratory in Wuhan, which has been specializing in these types of coronaviruses
since the beginning of the 2000s’, thereby adding fuel to another conspiracy in
relation to COVID–19—that the virus was made in a laboratory in China.20 In the
US the conspiracy about SARS-CoV–2 being human-made in a laboratory, in spite
of it being discredited by almost all the scientists, continues to have valence and is
continually used by President Trump in his references to COVID–19 as ‘Wuhan
virus’ or ‘China virus’.21 The Plandemic video was thus linked to a number of
interests and conspiracies from the start. And the video and the book complemented

96  Amit Prasad
each other in spreading misinformation and conspiracies regarding COVID–19.

The virality of the video, after it was posted, also reflects alignment of interests.
‘Just over a week after “Plandemic” was released, it had been viewed eight
million times on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram … On Facebook,
“Plandemic” was liked, commented on or shared nearly 2.5 million times’ far
out numbering Taylor ‘Swift’s May 8 announcement about her “City of Lover”
concert’ and the Zoom wedding video in which the cast of ‘The Office’ reunited,
which was aired on 10 May 2020.22 The virality of Plandemic, according to Renee
DiResta and Isabella Garcia-Camargo, required ‘manufacturing an influencer’.23
In fact, I would argue that the role of the influencers in making the Plandemic go
viral reflects a process in which the influencer was not manufactured, rather, the
influencer, through alignment of interests became key to manufacturing consent.
The influencers, as such, became important nodes in the fast-spreading network
of misinformation.
Mikovits had a ‘Twitter account for her speaking and writing career on the
anti-vaccine conference circuit; it amassed roughly 1,700 followers in three years’.
However, after her book, Plague of Corruption was released on 18 April, within
25 hours Mikovits Twitter account ‘amassed 18,000 followers, even though it had
posted only one tweet during that period’. A tweet, which was later deleted, indi-
cated that Zach Vorhies, ‘a self-styled whistleblower involved with Project Veritas
(a group known for creating misleading ideological attacking videos)’ ‘was run-
ning Mikovits PR’.24 Vorhies’s motivation was tied to his interest in taking down
Dr Fauci, for which Vorhies was also running a GoFundMe page.25
Another such influencer involved in promoting the Plandemic was ‘Dr Christiane
Northrup, a women’s health physician’, who had developed ‘nearly half a mil-
lion Facebook followers’, ‘following … her appearances as a medical expert on
“Oprah”’. Northrup had ‘previously expressed misgivings about vaccines’ and
she shared ‘Plandemic with her Facebook followers the very next day after it was
released on various social media sites’.26 Several other social media influencers
shared the videos with their followers. Not all of these influencers and also different
groups, which included QAnon as well as liberal/left groups, had the same interests
in spreading the video, but their interests aligned with some or the other trope that
were presented in the video. In this regard, it is also important to note, as Renee
DiResta and Isabella Garcia-Camargo have argued, when the video was posted by
Mikki Willis ‘to Facebook on the afternoon of May 4th … it did not highlight the
content of the video, but instead emphasised that the video would imminently be
censored’, which had the effect of ‘framing Mikovits as a whistleblower icon’.27
The emplotment of the Plandemic, stylistically as well as in terms of the con-
tent, as I have shown, uses tropes that aligned with the interests and concerns of
particular social groups, which, in turn, affected its virality after it was posted on
social media sites. It is also important to highlight that the video does not present
itself as anti-science. Instead, it utilises the idealised and reified constructions of
science and scientists to gloss over and hide the veracity of the claims made by
Dr Judy Mikovits. Let me reiterate, the issue with the video is not simply the

falsehoods and lack of questioning of the veracity of Mikovits’s claims. We also

need to ask how these falsehoods and lack of questioning of Mikovits’s claims did
not become relevant for the viewers. In that regard, as I have argued, we cannot
ignore how the discursive emplotment of ‘science’ and so-called ‘scientific claims’
in the video facilitated a sense of trust for the general public.
Discursive emplotment of a video (or other forms of dissemination of informa-
tion) by utilising certain tropes to create potential alignment of interests cannot,
however, explain some other aspects of the COVID–19 conspiracies. We also need
to investigate how the misinformation and conspiracies were interpreted by different
social groups; in particular, how histories of particular social groups may play a very
significant role in the acceptance and spread of misinformation and conspiracies.
In the next section, I focus on some COVID–19 conspiracies that spread among
the African-American community in the United States (US) and contrast their
interpretations of COVID–19 misinformation and conspiracies with those by the
white community. More broadly, as I show in the following, we need to analyse the
acceptance and spread of the conspiracies among the African-American community
not only as a matter of immediate racial concerns, for example, racial injustice,
but to also situate those concerns in the particular way the US was constituted as
a white settler colony, that is, excavate the genealogies of the present.
COVID–19 Misinformation and Conspiracies Among the Blacks and the Whites
In late February and early March, when the Center for Disease Control (CDC)
first stated that COVID–19 was heading towards a pandemic status, a claim about
immunity of black people started to circulate in the African-American community.
An NBA player tweeted: ‘So NONE of these Corona Virus cases have been black
people?! LEMME FOUND OUT WE IMMUNE. It’s the least God can do after
slavery’.28 Another NBA player tweeted: ‘Not making light of it at all. Serious
question: Has a Black person got coronavirus yet?’29 Soon the claim about black
people’s immunity to coronavirus picked up and it even became an act of resist-
ance. For example, when a white police officer was shown on video appearing to
intentionally cough at a black woman, the latter replied: ‘Oh, I ain’t worried about
that shit! Y’all get that shit, Black people don’t’.30
The belief in black people’s immunity to COVID–19 at least in part stemmed from
the exceptionally small number of infections recorded in Africa. In early March, when
more than 3,000 people had already died worldwide and nearly 90,000 cases were
recorded in 60 different countries, the African countries had reported just a few infec-
tions.31 As Brandi Collins-Dexter of Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public
Policy at Harvard Kennedy School noted in his report, ‘COVID–19 misinformation
and black communities’, this misinformation was sought to be explained through the
presence of melanin: ‘melanin, the pigment found in hair, skin and eyes, offered a layer
of protection from the virus’.32 The belief in the immunity of black people also has a
colonial genealogy. In the eighteenth century, as a result of Dr John Lining’s widely

98  Amit Prasad
circulated belief that black people were naturally resistant to yellow fever, ‘{r}efer-
ences to innate black immunity functioned both as damaging hearsay and as medical
information passed over time and across distinct locales’ (Hogarth, 2017, p. 20).33
The misinformation about the immunity of the black people to COVID–19 could
not be sustained for long. The coronavirus and the spread of the pandemic disrupted
the spread of misinformation about black people’s immunity. By mid-March news
reports had started showing that COVID–19 infections and deaths among black
(and Latinx and Native American) communities were disproportionately high.
COVID–19, in fact, exposed the wide racial disparity in healthcare access and out-
comes. A CDC report showed that in comparison to the whites, Native Americans
had 2.8 times higher cases and 1.4 times higher deaths, African-Americans had
2.6 times higher cases and 2.1 times higher deaths, and Hispanic/Latinos had 2.8
times higher cases and 1.1 higher deaths.34
As the reports of disproportionate COVID–19 infections and deaths in the
black community spread, misinformation and conspiracies behind creation of the
coronavirus and the proposed development of a vaccine started to gain traction. In
mid-March a video was posted on Instagram that promoted ‘the theory that Bill
Gates was responsible for creating the novel coronavirus’. The video soon went
viral–it ‘was viewed more than 2.2 million times {and} was promoted by a number
of social media influencers, including at least 20 verified Instagram users and more
than 50 other users’.35 The conspiracy surrounding Bill Gates’s role in relation to
coronavirus has genealogical links to longstanding conspiracy theories that claimed
that Bill Gates was involved in forcible population control.
The earliest version of this conspiracy has been traced to 2010, when Mame-
Yaa Bosumtwi, a Ghanaian-born, US-educated former communications officer for
a Gates Foundation funded initiative in Ghana, had claimed that a Gates-funded
genocide was being carried out via Pfizer’s contraceptive, Depo-Provera, that was
being provided to women in Africa. In 2011, this particular conspiracy acquired
transnational reach when it was picked up by the US group ‘Rebecca Project for
Human Rights’ that claimed in a report: ‘Researchers allegedly injected thousands
of impoverished and illiterate Ghanaian women with Pfizer contraceptive, Depo-
Provera, and administered other unidentified oral contraceptives during human
research experiments to reduce population and modify health care’.36 This particular
conspiracy had slowly subsided.37
However, as discussed earlier, Bill Gates became the centre of the controversy
during COVID–19, when a video was posted on Instagram and other social media
sites. The conspiracy video took a clip from Bill Gates’s TED talk in 2015, in which
drawing on the example of Ebola and calling for the need to be better prepared for
pandemics, Gates had warned: ‘The biggest risk for the global catastrophe doesn’t
look like this {the image of a nuclear bomb}. Instead, it looks like this {image of
the flu virus}’. The conspiracy video was, however, captioned: ‘Bill Gates either
predicted or planned the coronavirus outbreak’. 38
‘Cedric the Entertainer posted the video to his Instagram account and wrote,
“So they knew”’. Within days the video was viewed nearly 400,000 times.39 Soon
memes started emerging that linked proposed coronavirus vaccine as conspiracy
by Bill Gates. One such meme used a childhood photo of Cardi B, the music artist,
and claimed, ‘my mama said nobody elected Bill Gates to do anything and we ain’t
takin no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet’
(See Figure 1). Similar concerns were voiced by a number of people. In the black
community this conspiracy was articulated through ‘the frame of Black genocide’,
which is a result of ‘longstanding distrust of mainstream media and history of trauma
from interactions with powerful institutions, like medicine and government’.40 The
trope of ‘Black genocide’ also informed the COVID misinformation and conspira-
cies in relation to the role of 5G wireless network.
Amber Butts, writing in a different context, states: ‘Even when black conspiracy
theories are misguided, they are not nonsensical’.41 Butts draws on several examples,
including those from her own experiences to highlight how the conspiracies among
the black community often reflect the long history of mistrust resulting from racial
discrimination and exploitation. She, for example, writes about the deep impact of
her own experience during a visit to a white doctor, because she was ‘feeling like
something was blocking … {her} air passages’ (after her grandmother’s death) and
the doctor ‘stuck a black tube with camera down … {her} left nostril’, a procedure
Figure 1
Source: https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Canaries-in-the-Coal-Mine-
Shorenstein-Center-June–2020.pdf

100  Amit Prasad
for which she had not given consent: ‘The realities of medical racism, terror and
experimentation on Black, Brown and Native women’s bodies kept me from going
back to that doctor’.41 Butts, thus, highlights how in order to properly understand
an action or event we need to trace the history of the present.
The broader issue that Butts raises—that ‘conspiracies are misguided, {but}
they are not nonsensical’—is an important lesson for us when we study the role of
conspiracies not just among the Black community, but in any community (see, e.g.,
Turner, 1993). Conspiracies, in significant ways, seem to embody displacement
and condensation of not only the past experiences of an individual but also the
history of the social group to which s/he/they belong.42 In that regard, it is useful
to return to one of Mikovits claims—‘because if we don’t stop this now, we can
not only forget our republic and our freedom’. Mikovits’s statement may seem a
general reference to all American citizens. However, it is telling how protecting ‘our
freedom and our republic’ have been invoked in anti-mask wearing protests in the
US largely by the whites. For example, Ashley Smith, the co-founder of ReOpen
NC, a group that was formed in April 2020 with a call to reopen North Carolina,
during one of their anti-lockdown protests stated: ‘We’ve seen a dramatic and sud-
den attack on our Constitutional rights … so this is just a day to stand against that
and memorialize our fallen heroes for the liberty they fought and died for’.43 Some
other anti-mask and anti-lockdown protesters carried signs that read ‘No Liberty,
No Life’ and ‘Give me liberty or give me COVID–19’.44
Similarly, the COVID conspiracy in relation to Bill Gates was articulated
very differently among the whites. Rev. Danny Jones, a white senior pas-
tor of the Northlake Baptist Church in Gainesville, Georgia, called Bill Gates
as the anointed one to lead the new world order ushered by the coronavirus in
one of his sermons that went viral. Citizen Media News posted the video of the ser-
mon on YouTube on 30 April 2020, but the video is available through other sources.
The Citizen Media News video post of the sermon on YouTube had more than
1.5 million views until November 2020. This particular post of the video has had
more than 20,000 likes and more than five hundred comments with viewers writing,
Everything this man is saying is true, verifiable. Bravo!
Rev. Jones goes on to detail how Bill Gates and others are trying to institute a new
world order through the coronavirus pandemic: He states:
On 23 December 2019 the prestigious Scientific American magazine reported that

the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) had developed a biometric tattoo where a nanochip can be injected
into your forearm at the same time you are being vaccinated, therefore, your
arm can be scanned to reveal your identity, your vaccinations, maybe even your
medical records. The biometric tattoo is a part of a bigger plan called ID 2020
that was announced this January {2020} at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
again sponsored by the Bill Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and
several other billionaire organisations.
The eventual goal, the pastor goes on to state, is to make the people submit to the
United Nations or any other form of world government. The reference and scope
of Rev. Jones’s conspiracy theory (he calls it as such in the sermon) of biometric
chip taking away individual freedom is not limited to any particular community.
He does not just refer to Americans, but people from different parts of the world
and the comments on this video post on YouTube too shows global and multi-racial
viewership (at least to an extent).
The issue, however, as I have been highlighting in the article, is not the form of a
particular conspiracy (for example, the role of Bill Gates in relation to coronavirus),
but how it is articulated through the real and perceived experiences of particular
social groups. In this video too, as Rev. Jones quote above shows, science is not
dismissed (he cites the Scientific American, albeit falsely). And, unlike the Black
community, the conspiracy about Bill Gates is not situated in a history of exclusion
and exploitation of the community, but as a concern to protect individual freedom
and the republic. Other articulations of Bill Gates related coronavirus conspiracy
similarly highlight the concern with loss of freedom, although it often also draws
on the trope of white victimhood (see Figures 2 and 3).
The trope of protecting freedoms and the republic that has been expressed in
the white community has to be situated in relation to the colonial discourse of
whitening of Americas as a key element in the making of the nation, which, conse-
quently, results in defining of citizenship among social/racial groups differentially.
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States (1901–1909) in his
response to historian-journalist Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character:
A Forecast (1893) had, for example, reflected, ‘the peopling of the great island-
continent with men of the English stock is thousand-fold more important than the
holding {colonizing} of Hindoostan for a few centuries’ (as quoted in Anderson,
2006, p. 254). Roosevelt categorically states: ‘Nineteenth century democracy needs
no more complete vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the
white race the best portions of the new world’s surface, temperate America and
Australia’ (emphasis added).45
As is evident from Roosevelt’s responses to Charles Pearson the colonial history
of America continued to bear upon imaginaries and practices long after the United
States gained independence. Patricia Hills Collins rightly argues, ‘U.S. national
identity may be grounded more in ethnic nationalism than is typically realized’
(Collins, 1998, p. 70). Collins shows how ‘differential population policies devel-
oped for different {racial and ethnic} segments of the U.S. population emerge in
direct relation to any group’s perceived value within the nation-state’ (Collins,
1998, p. 76). It is important to situate the recent events related to coronavirus in
this broader context. For example, surveys have shown differences in relation to
mask wearing during COVID–19, which Dr Robert Redfield, the Director of the
Center for Disease Control (CDC), had called perhaps the most effective tool in
preventing COVID infections.45 A PEW Research Center survey conducted in
June 2020 showed a striking variation in mask wearing in terms of political affili-
ation with 53% of people, who identified as Republican or Republican leaning, as

102  Amit Prasad
Figure 2
Source: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/04/20/43464468/i-went-to-sundays-anti-lockdown-
rally-in-olympia-and-we-are-so-fucked
Figure 3
Source: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*0V1q453z61MaGiia

opposed 76% of those who identified as Democratic or Democratic leaning saying

they wore the mask all or most of the time. The stark difference in mask wearing in
terms of political affiliation, at least in part, could be because of President Trump’s
position.46 The same survey also showed variation in mask wearing across races:
62% of the whites, 69% of the blacks, 74% of the Latinx, and 80% of the Asians
said they wore masks all or most of the time. However, as I have been arguing,
we need to investigate anti-science claims—for example, not wearing masks—by
situating them in relation to the experiences of social groups and by tracing the
genealogies of those experiences.
There have been several reports of fear in the black community that wearing
masks could result in their being targeted by the police. ‘One black man … a
35-year-old attorney and state senator from Illinois who was shopping at his local
hardware store in Chicago’s South Loop while wearing a face mask’ was stopped
by a uniformed officer to check his id and receipt, ‘{w}hile many white customers
streamed by wearing masks’.47 Such cases are not isolated. Vickie Mays, a professor
in the departments of psychology and health services at University of California,
Los Angles, put it bluntly: ‘Which death do they choose? COVID–19 or police
shooting?’48 In short, the figures of racial differences in not wearing masks during
COVID–19 pandemic has to be situated in the context of experiences of particular
social groups, both historically and in the immediate context.
In relation to anti-mask wearing misinformation and conspiracies the deployment
of the trope of ‘our freedom and our republic’ largely by the whites is, thus, not a
coincidence. It is genealogically linked to the US republic being constituted as a
white settler nation even after the US gained independence in 1776. ‘We the people’,
as the Chief Justice Roger Tanney explicitly wrote in the US Supreme Court rulings
of 1831 and 1857 ‘was never intended to include blacks, slave or free’ (as quoted
in Duster, 2006, p. 490). And, as I showed earlier, Theodore Roosevelt, albeit he
expressed it differently, continued to link whiteness to the American nationhood, at
the turn of the twentieth century. Colonial genealogies of citizenship can be traced,
as I have shown, even in the way COVID–19 misinformation and conspiracies have
been articulated and framed. In the following section I analyse the role of STS in
relation to COVID–19 misinformation and conspiracies.
Anti-science Conspiracies, Post-truth and STS
‘Within weeks of its emergence’, as Warwick Anderson rightly observes, ‘SARS-

CoV–2 was galvanizing celebrity European philosophers and social theorists, most
of them men in a vulnerable age demographic, to reflect publicly and plentifully on
the meaning of the pandemic’.49 Among these philosophical and theoretical medita-
tions, an essay that Bruno Latour wrote, which was initially published in La Monde
and thereafter republished as a blog on the Critical Inquiry website, has gathered
a lot of attention. The blog is provocatively titled ‘Is This a Dress Rehearsal?’50
Latour, as he states in the essay, is ‘advancing a hypothesis’—‘that the health crisis
prepares, induces, incites us to prepare for climate change’.

104  Amit Prasad
Latour criticises ‘the noise surrounding a “state of war” against the virus’ that
has propelled the responses of the nation-states, which, according to him, are
‘caricatured form of the figure of biopolitics…straight out of a Michel Foucault
lecture’.52 It is unclear what Latour means by ‘caricatured form of the figure of
biopolitics ….’ However, his concern with the responses to COVID–19 as a ‘state
of war against the virus’ is important, because we have seen how those responses
have not been effective. Latour’s concern has resonance among, at least a section
of influential biologists. Joshua Lederberg, who had received the Nobel Prize in
1958 ‘for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of
the genetic material of bacteria’,51 had, for example, called for a stop to the use of
war as a metaphor for infection and asked biologists and public health officials to
look for ‘{n}ew strategies and tactics for countering pathogens’ (Lederberg, 2000).
Lederberg’s argument is not simply that bacteria and virus are important ‘actants’
whose networks should be carefully unravelled. According to Lederberg: ‘We should
think of each host and its parasites as a superorganism with the respective genomes
yoked into a chimera of sorts’ (Lederberg, 2000, p. 288). The report on the ‘Forum
on Microbial Threats’ of The National Academies, which was dedicated to the ‘life
and scientific legacies of Joshua Lederberg’, pointed out in 2009, ‘a reconsideration
of our interactions with pathogenic microbes is warranted, and it must be based
on a better understanding of the host-microbe relationships in general’, adding,
Estimates indicate that 90% to 99% of the approximately 1014 cells that comprise
a healthy human body belong to the complex microbiota that share our space.
Only a small fraction of the roughly several thousand bacterial species that inhabit
our bodies cause illness; very little is known about the other non-pathogenic
bacteria, or even about microbes that in most cases cause chronic, subclinical
disease in humans (Relman et al., 2009, p. xiii).
These biologists and medical scientists are calling for not simply a reorientation of
biological and medical research of microbial infections, but also a reimagination of our
understanding of the society and the relationship between humans and non-humans.
The report categorically states: ‘An axiomatic starting point for further progress is
the simple recognition that humans, animals, plants, and microbes are cohabitants of
the planet. That leads to refined questions that focus on the origin and dynamics of
instabilities within this context of cohabitation’ (Relman et al., 2009, p. 64). Latour is,
thus, right in claiming: ‘Covid has given us a model of contamination’, which is ‘an
incredible demonstration of network theory’. He adds, ‘I’ve been trying to persuade
sociologists of this for 40 years. I’m sorry to have been so right. It shows that we
must not think of the personal and the collective as two distinct levels’.52
Although, Latour restricts his comments on COVID–19 in relation to France,
the situation in the United States (US) too, in spite of the stark difference in the
American state’s response to COVID–19 under President Trump, can benefit from a
network analysis of the roles of human and non-human actors. However, COVID–19
pandemic has also brought to the fore the underlying theoretical and methodological

limitations of Actor Network Theory (ANT), in particular ANT’s failure to engage

with the history of the present and latter’s constitutive role in understanding the
experiences and actions of different actors.53 Let me illustrate my claim through
the racialised impact of COVID–19 pandemic in the US. It would also show that
COVID–19 is not a ‘dress rehearsal’ that ‘prepares, induces, incites us to prepare
for climate crisis’. Rather, it is also the theatre of action wherein marginalised
people of colour are literally saying ‘I can’t breathe’, not because of air pollution,
but because of racialised violence.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC), as I discussed earlier, highlighted the
striking difference in COVID–19 infection and mortality rates across different racial
and ethnic groups and captioned the statistical information thus: ‘Race and ethnicity
are risk markers for other underlying conditions that impact health’.54 From March to
May 2020, as COVID–19 infections and mortality surged in US, the police killings
of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd started massive ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests
that spread globally, including in France.55 The massive resurgence of Black Lives
Matter protests during the COVID–19 pandemic was not a random coincidence.
During COVID–19 race and ethnicity became health markers because they are also
markers of a range of conditions that affect infections and mortality—‘including
socioeconomic status, access to health care, and increased exposure to the virus due
to occupation (e.g., frontline, essential and critical infrastructure workers)’.56
In response to the Black Lives Matter protests many individuals and social groups
have started counter protests called ‘All Lives Matter’. Several well-known US politi-
cal figures support this latter counter movement, including some black people such
as Ben Carson, the former US secretary of Housing and Urban Development. If we
do not take into consideration the category of race (also class, gender, etc.) and the
history of racism in situating the actions and voices of various actors, forget about
the excavation of the role of race and racism, how will we even be able to show that
Black Lives Matter is not a parochial call and All Lives Matter is not that democratic,
as the name seems to suggest.
Describing the roles of marginalised actors has to take into account the fact that
materialised expressions or inscriptions are critically impacted by experiences of
marginalisation and violence (Biehl, 2005; Das, 1996). Moreover, the experiences
of marginalised actors and the articulation of their experiences may be submerged
within the dominant discourse and as such the dominant discourse needs to be
deconstructed or critiqued (see, e.g., Mbembe, 2017), otherwise we run the risk
of, for example, the colonial discourse continuing to impact even after colonialism
is over, as we witnessed most starkly in the case of Rwanda (Mamdani, 2001).
Descriptions also become tricky because, as Homi Bhabha, drawing on a Native
American proverb pointed out, ‘{t}he discourse of post-Enlightenment … colo-
nialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 85).
In the post-Civil Rights era of the United States (US), another twist has been added
to such forked speech. For example, in one of the anti-mask wearing protests a
white woman justifies her position by stating, ‘when George Floyd was saying
that he can’t breathe and then he died and now we are wearing a mask and we say

106  Amit Prasad
“I can’t breathe”, but we are being forced to wear it anyway’.57 The experiences of
violence, brutality, and exclusions of Black people that, as I showed earlier, became
the trope through which COVID–19 misinformation and conspiracies were given
meaning in the Black community, are thus appropriated and in the process voices
against racial exploitation and hierarchy are diluted.
William Barr, the Attorney General under President Trump, went a step further
stating, ‘putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other
than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion
on civil liberties in American history’.58 Such appropriations of experiences of the
‘other’ are often complemented with calling people who raise the issue of racism
as racists. Lisa Nakamura, for example, shows that when the issue of racism was
raised among the videogame players of the World of Warcraft, one of the players
replied: ‘g2 lv love people who consider things racism when in actuality {sic}
they are rascist {sic} for making the difference {sic} in their head, if every one
just viewed {sic} every one else as “people” theyd {sic} be no problem’. Another
one added: ‘what’s rasict {sic}, no we are only one race the human race, now if
there where another species and he was making fun of them, then it would be rasict
{sic}’ (as quoted in Nakamura, 2009, p. 238).59
In short, describing the ‘inscriptions’ of each individual, humans as well as non-
humans, may seem democratic. However, if it leaves out history of the present and
thereby fails to ‘problematize the present by revealing the power relations upon
which it {the present} depends and the contingent process that have brought it
into being’ (Garland, 2014) such an analytical/theoretical position, analogically,
starts to seem more like the claim of ‘All Lives Matter’, which is symmetrical and
seemingly democratic, but aimed at suppressing the voices (inscriptions) of the
marginalised and exploited social groups.
Conclusion
Today … being in public without a mask on, is comparable to experiencing

racism at its core.
—‘Anti-Mask Lives Matter’—an anti-mask group60
It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1993, p. 6)
On 19 September 2020 the Time magazine carried a report titled ‘COVID–19

Conspiracy Theories Are Spreading Rapidly—and They’re a Public Health Risk’.61
The report traces spawning of conspiracies during public health crisis to the medi-
eval ages and argues how COVID–19 conspiracies, because they have become
obstacles to minimising the spread of the pandemic, are posing public health risk.
COVID–19 conspiracies have been widely reported and followed even when their
false claims have been discredited and removed from social media. The anti-science

positions and the anti-science attitudes expressed in these conspiracies have also
been frequently highlighted. The spread and acceptance of scientific falsehoods
seems to show how people are either acting as dupes or being duped by others in
the context of uncertainties propelled by the pandemic.
The anti-science misinformation and conspiracies, among other things, again
brought to the fore a long-standing criticism of the field of Science and Technology
Studies (STS)—that STS’s symmetrical treatment of scientific controversy and
rejection of neutral or value-free science has ‘lowered scientific facts to the level
of beliefs’ (Lynch, 2020, p. 51). Michael Lynch, responding to such criticisms,
argues that ‘{a}s originally proposed, symmetry and relativism in STS were cir-
cumscribed as part of an effort to approach diverse forms of knowledge without
initially classifying particular instances as true, false, rational, irrational, successful
or mistaken and doomed to failure’ (Lynch, 2020, p. 53).
In this article, I have argued that the methodological symmetry of STS towards
true and false beliefs is in fact useful and necessary in order to investigate
COVID–19 misinformation and conspiracies more carefully and thereby act more
effectively against conspiracies and misinformation. We need to investigate how,
for example, a reified and idealised understanding of science becomes a tool to
spread anti-science and other misinformation. In the first section of the article, I
analysed a viral COVID–19 conspiracy video, Plandemic, and showed how it draws
on the credibility of science, scientists, scientific journals, and doctors to spread
anti-science falsehoods. In particular, I focused on how the video was discursively
emplotted to make it seem credible and align its claims with the interests of different
social groups. After the video was posted online on different social media platforms
the alignment of interests, which were reinforced and propagated by social media
influencers, resulted in the video going viral and it continues to inhabit the social
media ecology through different mutations.
A careful investigation of the COVID–19 misinformation and conspiracies
shows, although it is important to quickly and effectively rebut the false claims, we
also need to carefully analyse how these anti-science misinformation conspiracies
are crafted and thereafter interpreted and mobilised by different social groups. In
that regard, I also examined some COVID–19 misinformation and conspiracies
that spread in the African-American communities and showed how they draw on
the histories of exclusion and exploitation of the black community. Moreover, as
I showed, the tropes used to defend the misinformation and conspiracies in the
black community was often very different from those used among the whites. I,
thus, argued that even in relation to misinformation and conspiracies we need to
carefully investigate the history of the present. More broadly, my concern, much
like Joshua Lederberg’s and Bruno Latour’s suggestion in relation to the pathogens
that cause pandemics, is that the war metaphor that aims to put a complete stop to
misinformation and conspiracies is hardly going to be useful. In the present times,
when access to world wide web has become instantaneous, an era characterised by
some as ‘viral modernity’ (Peters et al., 2020), we will have to learn to live with
misinformation and conspiracies and their virality and in order to better deal with
them we need to critically and carefully study misinformation and conspiracies.
108  Amit Prasad
DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/about/mission/, accessed September 3, 2020.

2. https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/07/anti-science-attitudes-undermining-us-efforts-
as-coronavirus-cases-soar/, accessed September 3, 2020.
3. The Frontline show of PBS titled one of its podcasts – ‘Covering Coronavirus: United States of
Conspiracy’ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/podcast/dispatch/united-states-of-conspiracy/,
accessed November 12, 2020.
4. https://www.statista.com/statistics/519308/eu-referendum-voting-intention-in-uk-by-age/, accessed
September 3, 2020.
5. https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/the-un-scientific-temper-of-india-opinion/story-
u89JHpuMR7ecdeMIeeddxL.html, accessed October 9, 2020. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/
op-ed/revisiting-scientific-temper/article31092673.ece, accessed October 9, 2020. Interestingly,
arguments such as lack of scientific temper to explain responses to COVID have been more common
in erstwhile colonized countries such as India. In the context of India such explanations are more
common also because spread of scientific temper is one of the directive principles in the Indian
constitution.
6. Michel Foucault used the phrase ‘history of the present’ to describe uncovering of ‘an ontology of
ourselves, of the present reality’ (Foucault, 2011, p. 21). Ian Hacking draws on Foucault to unravel
historical emergences of concepts and techno-scientific objects (Hacking, 2004).
7. This imaginary of the nation that emerged in settler colonies, as Warwick Anderson puts it, involved
‘the “ethnic conquest” of a territory, a place that must henceforth be kept entirely white’ (Anderson,
2006, p. 254).
8. Warwick Anderson argued that ‘postcolonial study of science and technology suggests a means of
writing a “history of the present”’. Drawing of Stacy Leigh Pigg’s, Adele Clarke and her colleagues’,
and Stuart Hall’s arguments, Anderson suggests ‘that postcolonial studies have enabled this sort of
“decentered, diasporic, or ‘global’ rewriting of earlier nation-centered imperial grand narratives”—a
“re-phrasing of Modernity within the framework of ‘globalization’”.’ (Anderson, 2002, p. 644)
9. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/coronavirus-viral-video-plandemic-judy-
mikovits-conspiracy-theories.
10. https://www.wthr.com/article/news/health/verify-plandemic-documentary-full-
misinformation/531–448b1c58-cc77–445b-a862-ac7a37b876d0
11. https://www.wthr.com/article/news/health/verify-plandemic-documentary-full-
misinformation/531–448b1c58-cc77–445b-a862-ac7a37b876d0
12. According to Peters et al. (2020, p. 3), ‘COVID-19 pandemic is the first global exercise of
bioinformationalist viral modernity where viral behavior of the … coronavirus … is dialectically
intertwined with non-biological viral information and viral media’.
13. https://www.bitchute.com/video/TuzSyJkjvS4d/. Hydroxychloroquine was touted as possible cure
for COVID-19 by a group called ‘America’s Frontline Doctors’. In July 2020, several doctors
belonging to this group held a press conference in front of the Supreme Court and openly advocated
the use of Hydroxychloroquine, although various medical experts warned that there is no evidence

that it is effective against SARS-COV-2 or COVID-19 and could in fact even harm the patient.
President Trump openly supported the use of Hydroxychloroquine. https://gizmodo.com/who-are-
americas-frontline-doctors-the-pro-trump-pro-1844528900, accessed October 30, 2020.
14. https://www.bitchute.com/video/TuzSyJkjvS4d/. Transcription of the interview mine.
15. Ian Lipkin is the Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University. In
2011, he was asked by Dr Fauci to ‘design a study that would address whether Dr Mikovits and
others could reproduce her research showing an association between XMRV, the mouse retrovirus,
and chronic fatigue syndrome’. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/technology/plandemic-judy-
mikovitz-coronavirus-disinformation.html
16. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/plandemic-judy-mikovits-plague-of-
corruption-998224/
17. https://www.amazon.com/Plague-Corruption-Restoring-Promise-Science/dp/1510752242
18. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-41104629
19. https://www.amazon.com/Kent-Heckenlively/e/B00J08DNE8%3Fref<hig>=</hig>dbs_a_mng_
rwt_scns_share
20. https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Disputed-French-Nobel-winner-Luc-Montagnier-
says-Covid-19-was-made-in-a-lab-laboratory, accessed 19 September 2020. Interestingly,
Montagnier cited a study of Indian scientists that has claimed to have highlighted the similarity
between SARS-CoV-2 and HIV, which had not undergone peer review as yet and was pre-published.
21. This particular controversy has global spread as well. For example, ‘a study by polling agency
Ifop—published at the end of March—found that more than 26% of French people believe that
the new coronavirus “was intentionally made in a laboratory”; a figure that jumps to 40% among
voters of far-right part le Rassemblement National’. Ibid.
22. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/technology/plandemic-movie-youtube-facebook-
coronavirus.html
23. https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/manufacturing-influence-0
24. https://twitter.com/perpetualmaniac/status/1252341972859142147?lang<hig>=</hig>en
26. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/technology/plandemic-movie-youtube-facebook-
coronavirus.html
28. As quoted in https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020–03-14/no-black-people-aren-t-
immune-to-covid-19
29. https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Canaries-in-the-Coal-Mine-Shorenstein-
Center-June-2020.pdf
30. As quoted in https://speakpatrice.substack.com/p/frustrated-by-coronavirus-conspiracy
31. https://www.france24.com/en/20200301-with-only-three-official-cases-africa-s-low-coronavirus-
rate-puzzles-health-experts
Center-June-2020.pdf. The report states that this misinformation emerged when ‘a since-deleted
news blog CityScrollz released on Valentine’s Day proclaimed that “Chinese Doctors Confirmed
African Blood Genetic Composition Resist Coronavirus After Student Cured”’. This blog soon went
viral, although ‘it was removed and eventually debunked by several fact-checking organizations’.
33. Ironically, in 1793 when yellow fever struck Philadelphia, then the temporary capital of the nation,
Dr Benjamin Rush, ‘one of North America’s most respected physicians’, who was known for his
‘anti-slavery leanings’, requested and got support from the local black community to take care of
the white city dwellers based on this racialized construction of black immunity (Hogarth, 2017). The
interplay of race, medicine, and law has had profound impact on medicalizing and pathologizing
blackness (Duster, 2006).
34. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-
death-by-race-ethnicity.html

110  Amit Prasad
36. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/coronavirus-bill-gates-conspiracy-theories.
‘The Rebecca Project for Justice’ calls itself ‘a transformational organization that advocates
protecting life, dignity and freedom for people in Africa and the United States’ and one of its key
concerns, as stated on its website, is negative effects of Depo Provera. http://rebeccaprojectjustice.
org/who-we-are/. However, as a result of this report, the founders of ‘The Rebecca Project for
Justice’ had to leave and the organization has been co-opted for anti-abortion politics. https://www.
typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2017/08/17/new-war-birth-control/
37. The genealogical link of Depo Provera with concerns of colonial control of population in Africa is
much longer. The contraceptive was, for example, introduced in colonial Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and
after independence its usage in Zimbabwe was stopped because of concerns of continuing colonial
domination, which had support among the postcolonial Zimbabweans, because ‘{f}or much of the
1970s, Depo {Provera} was a drug inflicted by white men on brown and black women’. However,
there was a gender politics in this as well—women, in spite of concerns of negative side effects,
were supportive of the drug. Eventually, in 1992 the drug was again legalized (Kaler, 1981, p.
373).
38. https://www.corona24news.com/c/2020/03/17/bill-gates-has-predicted-a-pandemic-since-2015-
viral-video-on-instagram.html
39. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/coronavirus-conspiracy-video-spreads-instagram-
among-black-celebrities-n1158571
41. https://racebaitr.com/2019/10/01/even-when-black-conspiracy-theories-are-misguided-they-are-
not-nonsensical/
42. Displacement and condensation are frequently used terms in psychoanalysis. I do not use these
terms to suggest that there is a point de capiton such as the Oedipus Complex that can explain the
process of displacement and condensation. I simply wish to highlight that the sign or representation,
expressed through articulations of different actors, is better understood if we its displacement and
condensation.
43. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article242972936.html. ReOpen NC’s publicly
accessible Facebook page shows that they have 83,426 members. https://www.facebook.com/
groups/1071729406534210/
44. https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/4/25/21234774/coronavirus-covid-19-protest-anti-
lockdown
45. ‘Some experts say part of the resistance to masks could stem from confusing public messaging
that came from public health officials in the beginning of the pandemic’. https://www.theguardian.
com/world/2020/jun/29/face-masks-us-politics-coronavirus
46. Mikovits had also presented misinformation in relation to wearing masks in the video, but anti-
mask conspiracy and misinformation gained currency significantly because of President Trump’s
position on not wearing a mask. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-
masks.html
47. https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/03/which-deamany-black-men-fear-wearing-mask-more-than-
coronavirus/
48. https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/03/which-deamany-black-men-fear-wearing-mask-more-than-
coronavirus/.
49. http://somatosphere.net/2020/epidemic-philosophy.html/
50. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/711428, accessed March 23, 2021.
51. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1958/summary/
52. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/bruno-latour-coronavirus-gaia-hypothesis-
climate-crisis
53. Monica Casper in her analysis of the agency of the foetus in the context of foetal surgery and research
criticizes ANT for ignoring how historically agency has been hierarchically assigned based on race,
gender, etc. (Casper, 1994). According to Steven Shapin, ‘the “dog” that—so to speak—“doesn’t

bark” in Latour’s picture of scientific travel is a conception of normative order’. He argues for
a focus on the role of ‘trust’ in scientific practice in order to understand how ‘transactions occur
between places’ (Shapin, 1998, p. 7).
54. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-
death-by-race-ethnicity.html
55. https://france-amerique.com/en/black-lives-matter-in-paris-an-american-movement-in-france/
56. https://france-amerique.com/en/black-lives-matter-in-paris-an-american-movement-in-france/
57. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v<hig>=</hig>HMdf_GW354M. The video is of a news report
by the news agency ABC, but it was reposted on YouTube by somebody or some organization
called Rebel HQ that has 316,000 followers.
58. https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/16/politics/barr-justice-department-speech/index.html
59. The digital age that was initially hailed as ushering the elimination of race and gender distinctions
has become a particularly fertile ground to not only enact and spread social distinctions such as
race, gender, etc., but also to suppress criticisms of, for example, racialization (Nakamura, 2008;
Nelson, 2002).
60. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/10/02/facebook-anti-face-mask-groups-trump-
covid-19/3597593001/
61. https://time.com/5891333/covid-19-conspiracy-theories/
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Amit Prasad Antiscience Movements

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Anti-science Misinformation and Conspiracies:

COVID–19, Post-truth, and Science &

Keywords: Anti-science, COVID–19, misinformation, conspiracies, post-truth, race/racism

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

undermining US efforts as coronavirus cases soar’.2 The report quotes Dr Anthony

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

that when we investigate anti-science claims, if we do not contextualise our inves-

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

section, building on Bruno Latour’s recent claim in relation to COVID–19, I analyse

Discursive Emplotment of Misinformation and Conspiracies About COVID–19

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

as a medical scientist. I would instead focus on the emplotment of the COVID–19

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

each other in spreading misinformation and conspiracies regarding COVID–19.

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

falsehoods and lack of questioning of the veracity of Mikovits’s claims. We also

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

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Everything this man is saying is true, verifiable. Bravo!

On 23 December 2019 the prestigious Scientific American magazine reported that

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Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

opposed 76% of those who identified as Democratic or Democratic leaning saying

Anti-science Conspiracies, Post-truth and STS

‘Within weeks of its emergence’, as Warwick Anderson rightly observes, ‘SARS-

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

limitations of Actor Network Theory (ANT), in particular ANT’s failure to engage

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

Today … being in public without a mask on, is comparable to experiencing

It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

On 19 September 2020 the Time magazine carried a report titled ‘COVID–19

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS

1. https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/about/mission/, accessed September 3, 2020.

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

Anderson, W. (2002). Postcolonial technoscience. Social Studies of Science, 32(5), 643–658.

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

Science, Technology & Society 27: 1 (2022): 88–112

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