Scholars address rhetorical potency of ‘Plandemic’ COVID-19 misinformation

LAWRENCE — Brett Bricker studied the rhetoric around vaccine hesitancy for years before the COVID-19 pandemic caused the phenomenon to explode. Back then, it was mainly fueled by fears that vaccines caused autism.

So when the associate specialist in the University of Kansas Department of Communication Studies was invited to contribute to the new book “Pandemic Resilience: Vaccination Resistance and Hesitance, Lessons from COVID-19” (Springer, 2025), he and his co-author, Jacob Justice of the University of Mississippi, jumped at the chance.

Their chapter, titled “Cross-partisan Conspiracy Theories: How 'Plandemic' Fueled Vaccine Misinformation,” examines the ways in which the 26-minute viral video did so much to spread anti-vax and anti-masking sentiment across the land. Bricker and Justice focus on two rhetorical techniques employed by the video makers: ethos and populism.

Ethotic argument, Bricker said, is “an appeal to a type of credibility that can be seen as valuable on both sides of the political spectrum.”

In the case of researcher Judy Mikovits, the lead character in “Plandemic,” Bricker said, “saying that you have a medical background, saying that you have a history of being right ... They're building credibility, but they're doing it in a very particular way. They're not saying this person is part of the Republican Party. One of the really interesting things about ‘Plandemic' is that although they show very partisan figures, they rarely identify them as such. They show an older man in a white coat labeled ‘Medical Doctor,’ which, while true, hides the fact that he is a conservative Republican from the Minnesota Statehouse. ... It's constructed in an artfully misleading way.”

Bricker defined populism as “a theme that there is a corrupt establishment and that the outsider always has the truth.”

The KU researcher said that gave “Plandemic” a horseshoe effect that both left- and right-oriented Americans could get behind.

“If you were otherwise predisposed to question the pharmaceutical industry or putting chemicals in your body, you could overlook the parts about President Trump and (public health official Dr. Anthony) Fauci and find the cues that you wanted,” Bricker said. “So it wasn't explicitly apolitical, but if you wanted to see it from an apolitical lens, you could, and that's why the left and the right — the left being the anti-vaccine, keep-our-body-pure group, and the right being the anti-government part — could find unity in that theme.”

This two-sided appeal is key, Bricker said, to what the authors called the “most potent” bit of misinformation surrounding COVID-19, saying it is “quite clear the film’s ripple effects live on today.”

“From my original work on vaccines and autism, that has been the thing that has held my interest the most — the way that the most viral or persuasive conspiracies usually find a foothold on both the political left and the right,” Bricker said, “and the way that they do that ... the messaging that allows that to happen, is, I think, a pretty important focus of contemporary scholarship on conspiracy theory.”