Prominent anti-vaccine figures pushed egregious misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine live on Facebook and YouTube

During a two-hour event, prominent anti-vaccine figures attempted to undermine the FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines by promoting misinformation and repeatedly attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-serving head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The event was streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, even though both platforms have a ban on vaccine misinformation.

On January 5, conspiracy theorist Sacha Stone hosted an event titled Focus on Fauci with known anti-vaccine activists, including Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who starred in the conspiracy theory film Plandemic; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who heads an anti-vaccine organization; David Martin, who was featured in Plandemic; and Rocco Galati, a lawyer who has represented an anti-vaccine group in Canada.

The event was the latest attempt by anti-vaccine figures to influence public perceptions about the COVID-19 vaccine. Anti-vaccine activists have spent months using right-wing media and social media platforms to sow seeds of misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19 vaccines, and Fauci. Social media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, have struggled to stop the spread of dangerous COVID-19 misinformation throughout the pandemic, and videos containing misinformation and conspiracy theories have earned millions of views.

In October, YouTube implemented policies prohibiting content making false claims about COVID-19 vaccines and Facebook followed with its own ban in December. The January 5 livestreams seemingly violate these policies and are already spreading across the platforms. During the event, Stone claimed that there were over 20,000 people watching it live on various platforms. At time of publication, the videos on Facebook have at least 190,000 views and at least 67,000 views on YouTube. Only one of the videos that streamed on YouTube has been removed for violating YouTube’s terms of service. The videos have also been shared thousands of times, including within Facebook groups dedicated to spreading conspiracy theories, opposing vaccines, and protesting preventive measures to stop the spread of COVID-19, such as masks and lockdowns.

During the event, the host and guests repeatedly pushed misinformation about vaccines and attacked Fauci. Here are the six most egregious examples:

Claiming that COVID-19 vaccines are not vaccines and can cause multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease

From the January 5, 2021, event Focus on Fauci

ROCCO GALATI (LAWYER): Can I go on the other flip side of the coin, from censorship to, you know, what I perceive is a vacillating propaganda on the part of not just Fauci but on our own public health chiefs. So, you know in April or May, masks were not necessary, they were dangerous. And now we got to wait for the vaccine to get back to normal, and now our Canada health top officials two days ago said just because the vaccines are here doesn’t mean that we are going to, you know, loosen the measures at least until the end of 2022 and we may tighten them before then. And so my question to you all is how much do you perceive this sort of vacillating contradictory shifting -- perpetual shifting of the official line from people like Fauci and other chief medical officers as sheer negligence and design? How much do you think it’s design and how much is just incompetence?

DAVID MARTIN: Rocco, let’s make sure we are clear on something. Let’s stipulate that this is not a vaccine. We need to be really clear. We are using the term vaccine to sneak this thing under public health exemptions. This is not a vaccine. This is an mRNA packaged in a fat envelope that is delivered to a cell. It is a medical device designed to stimulate the human cell into becoming a pathogen creator. It is not a vaccine.

...

This is a mechanical device in the form of a very small packet of technology that is being inserted in the human system to activate the cell and become a pathogen manufacturing site. And I refuse to stipulate, in any conversations, that this is in fact a vaccine issue.

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GALATI: So what should I be referring to it as? A chemical agent?

JUDY MIKOVITS: Correct. It is a synthetic pathogen. They have literally injected the synthetic -- the very pathogenic part of the virus into every cell of the body.

GALATI: When you say pathogen that says to me that it is going to make me sick.

MIKOVITS: Correct. So they --

MARTIN: It is made to make you sick, Rocco. Rocco, remember that 80% of the people allegedly exposed, allegedly SARS-Cov2. Let’s not get into that rabbit hole --

MIKOVITS: Correct.

MARTIN: Eighty percent of the people who are exposed to allegedly the virus have no symptoms at all.

...

This is about getting you sick and having your own cells be the thing that get you sick.

MIKOVITS: Correct.

GALATI: So it’s going to trigger an autoimmune response?

MARTIN: Among many things.

MIKOVITS: Among many things. It can actually directly cause multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, because that’s what the expression of that pathogenic envelope. It can cause accelerated cancer.

Claiming vaccines are contaminated with viruses and responsible for the spread of viruses, such as HIV

From the January 5, 2021, event Focus on Fauci

JUDY MIKOVITS: The July 22, 2009, invitation-only meeting … [about] our paper was -- we had submitted it on May 6 and it describes a new family of gamma retroviruses of retroviruses -- AIDS-like viruses from mice, really. … This invitation-only meeting -- it was called together, and Tony Fauci was not there. It was mainly National Cancer Institute. There were some representatives of the CDC and other things.

…

But Tony Fauci’s monitoring the meeting. And this is one thing everyone has to understand. What he does is plausible deniability. He sends a henchman. He’s the head of the NIAID. This is an infectious disease. It is a new family of gamma retroviruses and what was my death knoll, really, was that it was associated with chronic fatigue syndrome and autism. What did we know about the plague of corruption in the CDC with the Thompson study and that if you give MMR to Black boys before they’re 3 years old, they have four-fold increased risk of getting autism. Tony Fauci covered up CFS as a viral associated disease, as a viral disease. He called the women crazy. They maligned them. They stigmatized them. The worst kind of misogyny ever and they allowed them to continue to give blood. They’re just crazy. So they spread that virus XMRV through the blood supply.

Our work was funded by an NIAID pathophysiology grant from 2008 or so through 2011 late or '12. It was a five-year grant funded by the NIAID. Well, Tony Fauci knows about the publications. Tony Fauci knows what’s coming out of government labs. Tony Fauci -- we showed the data. And we published this paper after the invitation-only meeting. The statement was, “Oh my God. You mean all those sequences we saw in the '80s were real.” That there were many animal viruses contaminating the vaccine. That in fact probably HIV spread through the contaminated vaccines to millions of people. And we know he was in charge of these programs over in Africa. And it is really important because in the '90s, in the mid-'90s around '95 I worked in the biosafety level 4 facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in association with [USAMRIID] -- the US Army Institute of Infectious Diseases. So, I was mixing bat tissues with viral monkey kidney cells. What do we use polio vaccine to grow that virus? Viral monkey kidney cells. Many of our vaccines -- so you’re injecting gamma retroviruses, coronaviruses, bird viruses, of HIV, you know, this new virus has an HIV-envelope express as well as gamma retrovirus envelope express.

Accusing Fauci of being “a puppet” and “a stooge for a much darker story of the hijacking of America”

From the January 5, 2021, event Focus on Fauci

DAVID MARTIN: Dr. Anthony Fauci failed. He is not America’s doctor. He’s actually a puppet and he is a stooge for a much darker story of the hijacking of America and the world’s definition of health. In 1984, when Dr. Anthony Fauci took over the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as director, he began what at the time was a few hundred million dollar exercise where at various points in time he would attempt to diverge from his obsession with HIV and sexually transmitted diseases into areas of influenza vaccine. In his own words, in his annual reports which are a matter of the congressional record and the public record, Dr. Anthony Fauci was seeking an elusive effort to find a way to -- and I’m quoting -- “imprint on infants a universal influenza vaccine.” Something that would be a wonder drug that would allow a manipulated form of infant humanity to be imprinted with a vaccine that would carry with it his definition of what health was, his definition of what life was.

Claiming “all Tony Fauci cares about is being on The Tonight Show”

From the January 5, 2021, event Focus on Fauci

JUDY MIKOVITS: What I can say is, you know, they literally at one point -- Tony Fauci attempted to bribe Frank Ruscetti into working for him and isolating the viruses. All the money you want as long as I decide authorships on publications. And so, Frank Ruscetti said no and all Tony Fauci said is -- he said “Oh yeah.” Frank Ruscetti said, “I’ll isolate the viruses and I’ll get fired again,” and Fauci said, “All I want to do is be on The Tonight Show.” So here are men dropping like flies, dying. We were all looking around at these beautiful, healthy people dying, and all Tony Fauci cares about is being on The Tonight Show and threatening 25-year-old women.

Claiming that Fauci has a “list of crimes that would actually make Al Capone blush”

From the January 5, 2021, event Focus on Fauci

DAVID MARTIN: Beginning in 2005, an allocation of approximately $1.7 billion per year was funneled through the hands of none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci for projects that actually were not competitive grants. They were not competitively bid. These were appropriations. These were market allocations, another criminal violation of the Sherman and the Clayton Act of the United States. Antitrust violations of interlocking directorates, antitrust violations of market allocations, antitrust violations of price fixing, antitrust allegations of the setting of noncompetitive pricing both for research and for the drugs that were developed and the research tools that were developed from this illegal activity. All of them managed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is not America’s doctor any more than Al Capone was America’s banker. He, in fact, was and remains an individual who has a list of crimes and I mean that in the literal sense of the word. A list of crimes that would actually make Al Capone blush. Would he have had 25% of the $748 billion that has been granted to the NIH during his tenure, would he have had the nearly $200 billion of disclosed funding, Al Capone could have done some real damage. But he was no Anthony Fauci. And Anthony Fauci had the audacity, against the backdrop of everything we have lived through over the last four years of the craziness of allegations of people lying to Congress, and lying to the public, and doing all sorts of malfeasance -- Anthony Fauci had the audacity in October of 2020 to lie to Congress again.

Claiming Fauci controls “the outcome” of all institutional research studies because “he has the capacity to ruin” the institutions by withholding grants if he doesn’t like their studies

From the January 5, 2021, event Focus on Fauci

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: As Tony Fauci basically turned NIAID over to the pharmaceutical industry to become an incubator for pharmaceutical drugs. So the really important job that NIAID is supposed to be doing, which is to be trying to find a source of all these chronic diseases that began exploding under Tony Fauci’s watch, he’s supposed to be in charge of preventing those diseases. And yet, not one vaccine of those 72 doses that are now mandated for American children has ever been subject to prelicensing clinical trials where that compare a placebo group to the health outcomes of a vaccinated group and that ultimately is Tony Fauci’s problem. Tony Fauci -- it’s the outcome he wanted. But he has become the incubator for drugs.

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He can not only control the outcome of your study, if your institution does a study that he doesn’t like, he has the capacity to ruin your institution and to destroy you, because he can say you are not getting any money from NIH anymore.

Prominent anti-vaccine figures pushed egregious misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine live on Facebook and YouTube

Claiming that COVID-19 vaccines are not vaccines and can cause multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease

Claiming vaccines are contaminated with viruses and responsible for the spread of viruses, such as HIV

Accusing Fauci of being “a puppet” and “a stooge for a much darker story of the hijacking of America”

Claiming “all Tony Fauci cares about is being on The Tonight Show”

Claiming that Fauci has a “list of crimes that would actually make Al Capone blush”

Claiming Fauci controls “the outcome” of all institutional research studies because “he has the capacity to ruin” the institutions by withholding grants if he doesn’t like their studies

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