On May 12, Facebook user Shore Shanidze uploaded a video with a caption “Pfizer’s force of gravity! Newton is turning in his grave.” The video is featuring a woman wearing a face mask who claims that her arm has a magnetic reaction after receiving Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. To demonstrate it, she puts a metal coin on her left arm and moves it in a careful manner, showing it stick to her arm. When she does the same thing to her other arm “the magnet” falls off. At the end of the video the woman says: “We’re chipped.” The video is accompanied by a caption “COVID-19 shot has magnetic reactions.”
The claim as if vaccination aims at chipping people, while injection sites have magnetic reactions is groundless:
- COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca) do not contain any metal; thus, the injection site cannot have a magnetic reaction. Chinese vaccines – CoronaVac and Sinopharm – contain aluminum hydroxide that works as an adjuvant; however, aluminum is not magnetic.
- Integrating microchips in vaccines is a conspiracy theory that has long been linked to Bill Gates.
The spread video does not prove that vaccination is being carried out to implant microchips in humans. First, it is unknown whether the woman featuring in the video was really vaccinated or whether she really used a magnet. As for finding a metal under the skin, it is really possible by using a magnet. However, Dr. Robert Brodell from the Northeast Ohio Medical University said that if you hold the magnet up to the skin that’s as good as an x-ray – the skin will “tent” upward toward the magnet meaning there is something magnetic under there. The video in question shows no foreign body, namely a chip under the skin that would start moving towards a magnet.
In addition, COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca) do not contain any metal; thus, the injection site cannot have magnetic reactions. Chinese vaccines – CoronaVac and Sinopharm – contain aluminum hydroxide that works as an adjuvant; however, aluminum is not magnetic.
Foreign fact-checkers have also verified the video circulating on social media. Asked about the issue, Dr Thomas Hope, vaccine researcher and professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told AFP USA that “this is impossible. There’s nothing there that a magnet can interact with, it’s protein and lipids, salts, water and chemicals that maintain the pH.” Dr Stephen Schrantz, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Chicago Medicine, told AFP that such videos are staged and it is better explained by two-sided tape on the metal disk being applied to the skin rather than a magnetic reaction.
According to USA Today, the video claiming that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips or cause magnetic reactions provides no evidence.
Conspiracy theories about Bill Gates’ plan to microchip the vaccine
Multiple fact-checking organizations have verified the conspiracy theory about implanting chips in the process of vaccination. According to Reuters, a viral claim on social media about Bill Gates planning to use microchip implants to fight the coronavirus was based on his authentic quotes from TED Talk and a Q&A with Reddit about COVID-19. Later, Gates’ remarks were manipulatively spread on various platforms. Speculations and conspiracy theories emerged after Gates answered the question: “What changes are we going to have to make to how businesses operate to maintain our economy while providing social distancing?” Gates responded that “we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.” However, “a digital certificate” mentioned by him has nothing to do with a conspiracy theory about human microchipping and Gates simply meant an open platform to ensure broader access to information.
By Ani Kistauri
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