Does this video prove there is no COVID-19 pandemic and that public health measures and vaccination campaigns are all part of a well-planned conspiracy that "globalists" planned 10 years ago to seize power and profit? No, that's not true: These recycled conspiracy theories are offered without citing specific peer-reviewed research by scientists with relevant expertise and/or clinical experience treating COVID.
Nor is the claim paired with concrete evidence of a worldwide conspiracy of elites to profit from COVID testing and treatment. Meanwhile, directly refuting remarks made with the claim, multiple peer-reviewed studies prove the virus exists, is highly transmissible, can be diagnosed with PCR testing and can be lethal.
The claims, recycled from debunked articles and videos found online, were published in a video (archived here) posted June 8, 2021, to the Rumble account of "The War Room" internet radio show. Titled "REVEALED: How Globalists Planned the Covid-19 Pandemic for 10 Years," it opens with the host introducing German trial lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, saying:
This is signal, not noise.
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:
REVEALED: How Globalists Planned the Covid-19 Pandemic for 10 Years
REVEALED: How Globalists Planned the Covid-19 Pandemic for 10 Years
Here are false claims Fuellmich makes in his interview with "War Room" host Steve Bannon, who was indicted for fund-raising fraud, but then pardoned by President Donald Trump, whose 2015 campaign he helped run and in whose White House he was a senior advisor.
Claim: There is no coronavirus pandemic
At three minutes into the video, citing "all the really important people in the field" Fuellmich says "... what is happening right now, in our view is not a pandemic, at least it's not a corona pandemic, rather it's a PCR test pandemic."
However, clinicians and lab researchers working to stop the spread and to treat the most stricken of the 33 million Americans infected so far with COVID-19 rely on the following proof:
- The SARS-CoV-2 virus has been isolated and its means and ease of transmission has been proven by multiple scientists working independently of one another. For examples, see this Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) footnote list of 25 published research papers about airborne spread of the virus.
- The lethality of COVID-19 has been characterized by researchers from several continents, including this team that reported on new variants for the British Medical Association's journal: BMJ.
Claim: The PCR test is creating false positive tests for COVID-19
Fuellmich, at 13 minutes, 51 seconds, declares without evidence that PCR test results are invalid.
It is absolutely impossible for a PCR test to detect infections. Why do I say this? Well, the inventor of this PCR test ... technique kept telling the world that this is a great test, it can make things visible to the human eye which are otherwise not visible, but it cannot tell you anything about whether someone is ill or not or somebody is infected or not. ... This test can't distinguish between dead or live matter.
PCR test inventor Kary Mullis, who died in August 2019, shared a 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for it, but his employer, Cetus Corp. , sold the patent to other firms, which developed tests from his method of amplifying DNA segments, using it to find specific viruses in the saliva swabbed from a person.
The PCR test for COVID, used to quickly determine if a person has been infected, is accepted by private industry, government health agencies and medical professionals, three groups that often disagree. Though none call it perfect, the Infectious Diseases Society of America says the PCR test detects viral RNA if it is present in swab samples from patients: "a positive result is highly specific for the presence of the virus."
Claim: The pandemic was staged by power- and profit-mad elites
Fuellmich, at three minutes 18 seconds, begins the first of his two recitations of the conspiracy theory on Bannon's show:
The plans for this were made, concrete plans for this pandemic were made by very rich and powerful people some 10 years ago, amongst them the Rockefeller Foundation.
Without providing names, dates or positions, he goes on at five minutes 40 seconds, to say he interviewed people who used to work for the World Health Organization who were pressured to declare a pandemic, "... they were pressured by the pharmaceutical industry, maybe the tech industry ... that is what you need in order to be able to use a vaccination or a drug that has not been tested and that's the final goal ..."
Fuellmich provides no basis for the Rockefeller claim and cites no documents, named witnesses or other concrete proof of conspiracy.
At six minutes 21 seconds, Bannon cuts in to say "What you're talking about is at such a scale, right, it's probably mind-boggling to a lot of people. Some of our audience, I know, probably not. But people coming in for the first time, it looks like a conspiracy so vast ... you've got to think about Occam's Razor, which is the simplest explanation."
Citing Fuellmich's credentials as a legal David taking on Goliaths, Bannon asks the German lawyer to tell how he took on Volkswagen, winning verdicts against the company for rigging its system to falsely pass emissions tests. But Fuellmich says he was not the originator, as he wasn't able to bring those cases in Germany until U.S. regulators and university investigators proved their case.
Claim: Video "reveals" how pandemic was planned
Fuellmich himself undermines the video's headline, which promises revelations.
"The evidence that I have collected wasn't really collected by myself, but it was collected by the Berlin Corona Investigative Committee," he says at one minute 45 seconds into the video.
"... in March of last year [2020] my wife and I were still staying at our ranch in Northern California and we were trying to figure out what's going on." Fuellmich said a doctor friend told him governments would not explain and so lawyers would have to dig into it.
He said he helped create the German Corona Investigative Committee, a team of German lawyers who doubt the official account of the pandemic and hope to sue the government or convene a panel to try leaders for crimes against humanity over public health measures undertaken in 2020 and 2021.
Even Bannon, who invited Fuellmich on his show and let him speak for almost 20 minutes straight, breaks in to express concern about this idea, saying, at 11 minutes into Fuellmich's monologue "... It sounds crazy on the face of it."
Fuellmich concedes he once would have thought so, but responds: "This is not a figment of my imagination. This is the result of the hearings," referring to the German Corona Investigative Committee, a nonofficial group that has summoned anti-vaccine activists, COVID deniers and a variety of homeopaths, natural medicine experts and other skeptics to share their claims of conspiracy and wrongdoing.
Fuellmich's general summary is as follows, starting at 12 minutes 19 seconds:
The whole thing did in fact start with that accident at the Wuhan Virology Lab ... This was their springboard or triggering point because they've been planning for this, the other side, meaning very powerful and rich people who through companies, funds like Black Rock ... these people have been planning for this for at least 10 years.
Fuellmich offers no evidence to explain the global death toll of the disease he calls a fake, nor does he explain the experience of medical doctors and nurses treating patients for a viral infection not seen before.
The number of persons killed by COVID-19 neared 600,000 in the third week of June, 2021, according to the reports filed by independent medical examiners from each of the 50 states, who do not answer to the CDC, which only compiles the reports.
