8 Josh Rottenberg and Stacy Perman, “Meet the Ojai Dad Who Made the Most Notorious Piece of Coronavirus Disinformation Yet,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2020-05-13/plandemic-coronavirus-documentary-director-mikki-willis-mikovits.

9 “Infodemic,” WHO, https://www.who.int/health-topics/infodemic.

10 “Launching the Virality Project,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/content/virality-project.

11 Katherine Schaeffer, “Nearly Three-in-Ten Americans Believe COVID-19 Was Made in a Lab,” Pew Research, April 8, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/08/nearly-three-in-ten-americans-believe-covid-19-was-made-in-a-lab; Aaron Blake, “How the Covid Lab Leak Became the American Public’s Predominant Theory,” Washington Post, March 16, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/16/lab-leak-theory-polling.

12 Blake, “How the Covid Lab Leak Became the American Public’s Predominant Theory.”

13 Leana S. Wen, “How to Investigate the Lab-Leak Theory Without Inflaming Anti-Asian Hate,” Washington Post, June 1, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/01/we-need-investigate-lab-leak-theory-without-inflaming-anti-asian-hate.

14 Meta’s moderation policy on the lab leak hypothesis shifted over time. The date of the origin of the policy is elusive, but by May 2021, they had begun to step back from moderating origin claims. See Elizabeth Culliford, “Facebook No Longer Banning Posts Calling the Coronavirus ‘Man-Made,” Reuters, May 27, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/facebook-no-longer-banning-posts-calling-coronavirus-man-made-2021-05-27.

15 Early in the pandemic, as there was significant concern about transmission even outdoors, authorities made decisions about what could stay open and what had to close, about the kinds of gatherings that were approved and the kinds that were not. While some of these choices could be explained by public health officials simply not knowing where the lines should have been at that point, there was also what could be read as ideological bias to some of the policies (attending outdoor mass protests related to racism in the summer of 2020 was declared reasonable even as attending outdoor church services was banned in many locales). This seeming hypocrisy was quickly seized upon by partisan influencers and media, who saw an opportunity to reinforce ideological divides around “woke” capture of public health officials and institutions who were more concerned about looking antiracist or not offending China than undertaking a clear-eyed assessment of the facts and risks.

16 Roxanne Khamsi, “Coronavirus Is Bad. Comparing It to the Flu Is Worse,” Wired, February 8, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-is-bad-comparing-it-to-the-flu-is-worse.

17 Avery Hartmans, “Silicon Valley VC Firm Andreessen Horowitz Is Asking Visitors to Avoid Handshakes Due to the Coronavirus Outbreak,” Business Insider, February 7, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/andreessen-horowitz-coronavirus-fears-handshake-ban-2020-2.

18 Balaji (@balajis), “The Wuhan mayor is being pressed to resign after approving a group dinner with 40,000 people, knowing that a deadly virus was on the loose…,” Twitter, February 6, 2020, https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1225178842580619265.

19 See, for example, the March update note on this BuzzFeed article: Dan Vergano, “Here’s What We Do and Don’t Know About the Deadly Coronavirus Outbreak,” BuzzFeed News, January 28, 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/coronavirus-cases-deaths-flu.

20 Balaji (@balajis), “Don’t let these wokes rewrite history,” X, April 25, 2021, 9:48 p.m., https://x.com/balajis/status/1386391617167183872.

21 T. A. Frank, “‘The Coronavirus Crisis Was Built for Insurgent Information’: Why Some Early MAGA Adopters Went Against Trump’s Virus Doctrine,” Vanity Fair, March 23, 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-adopters-went-against-trumps-virus-doctrine.

22 Zeynep Tufekci, “Why Telling People They Don’t Need to Mask Backfired,” New York Times, March 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html.

23 Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad, “The Noble Lies of COVID-19,” Slate, July 28, 2021, https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html.

24 Lucy Tompkins et al., “Entering Uncharted Territory, the U.S. Counts 500,000 Covid-Related Deaths,” New York Times, February 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/us/us-covid-deaths-half-a-million.html.

25 Renée DiResta and Isabella Garcia-Camargo, “Virality Project (US): Marketing Meets Misinformation,” Stanford Internet Observatory, Freeman University Spogli Institute for International Studies, May 26, 2020, https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/manufacturing-influence-0.

26 Andrei Makhovsky, “Nobody Will Die From Coronavirus in Belarus, Says President,” Reuters, April 13, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-belarus/nobody-will-die-from-coronavirus-in-belarus-says-president-idUSKCN21V1PK.

27 Jason Burke, “Tanzania’s Covid-Denying President, John Magufuli, Dies Aged 61,” The Guardian, March 18, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/17/tanzanias-president-john-magufuli-dies-aged-61.

28 Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 29–30.

29 Hugo Mercier, Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 222.

30 Brian Kennedy, Alec Tyson, and Cary Funk, “Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Other Groups Declines,” Pew Research Center, February 15, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/02/15/americans-trust-in-scientists-other-groups-declines.

31 Daniel A. Cox et al., “America’s Crisis of Confidence: Rising Mistrust, Conspiracies, and Vaccine Hesitancy After COVID-19: Findings from the May 2023 American Perspectives Survey,” American Survey Center, September 28, 2023, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research /americas-crisis-of-confidence-rising-mistrust-conspiracies-and-vaccine-hesitancy-after-covid-19.

32 Ashley Kirzinger et al., “The COVID-19 Pandemic: Insights from Three Years of KFF Polling,” KFF, March 7, 2023, https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/the-covid-19-pandemic-insights-from-three-years-of-kff-polling.

33 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer [Research Report] (Edelman Trust Institute, 2022), https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2022-01/Trust%2022_Top10.pdf.

34 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer: Global Report [Research Report] (Edelman Trust Institute, 2022), https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2022-01/2022%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20FINAL_Jan25.pdf.

35 “2023 Edelman Trust Barometer: Navigating a Polarized World,” Edelman, https://www.edelman.com/trust/2023/trust-barometer.

36 Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369.

37 Tim Miller, “President Candace,” The Bulwark, July 18, 2023, https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/president-candace-owens.

38 Mercier, Not Born Yesterday, 225–247.

39 Rottenberg and Perman, “Meet the Ojai Dad.”

40 This is where Willis’s editing skills are most apparent; Mikovits had done dozens of interviews with conspiracy theorist YouTube channels in the weeks leading up to Plandemic. They got some attention within the communities but were not breakout successes because she often rambled and relied on scientific jargon. Plandemic, by contrast, skillfully worked around the speaker’s tendency toward convoluted explanations.

41 “#1263—Renée DiResta,” The Joe Rogan Experience, Spotify, March 2019, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VX7FJGIYr1eKSEagOeb22.

42 Todd Spangler, “Joe Rogan Tries to Clarify Controversial Comments About COVID Vaccines,” Reuters, April 30, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/variety/joe-rogan-tries-to-clarify-controversial-comments-about-covid-vaccines-idINL4N2MM5PH.

43 E. J. Dickson, “How Joe Rogan Became a Cheerleader for Ivermectin,” Rolling Stone, September 2, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/joe-rogan-covid19-misinformation-ivermectin-spotify-podcast-1219976.

44 Diane Mapes, “Spinning Science: Overhyped Headlines, Snarled Statistics Lead Readers Astray,” Fred Hutch Cancer Center, Hutch News Stories, February 13, 2020, https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/02/spinning-science-overhyped-headlines-snarled-statistics-lead-readers-astray.html.

45 Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 106–107.

46 Sheera Frenkel, “The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online,” New York Times, July 24, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/technology/joseph-mercola-coronavirus-misinformation-online.html.

47 Jon D. Lee, An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perceptions of Disease (Boulder: University Press of Colorado and Utah State University Press, 2014), 59.

48 Tara Haelle, “This Is the Moment the Anti-vaccine Movement Has Been Waiting For,” New York Times, August 31, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/opinion/anti-vaccine-movement.html.

49 Renée DiResta, “Anti-vaxxers Think This Is Their Moment,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/campaign-against-vaccines-already-under-way/617443.

50 Brandy Zadrozny, “Parents Are Poisoning Their Children with Bleach to ‘Cure’ Autism.