Some people on social media say they have proof of the debunked claim that COVID-19 vaccines have microchips in them: videos showing magnets sticking to people’s arms where they were injected.
“We’re chipped,” one person said.
No, we’re not. We have reported extensively on how the available COVID-19 vaccines do not have microchips.
The vaccines aren’t magnetic either.
This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
Florian Krammer, a professor of vaccinology at the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told us the claim is “utter nonsense.”
Krammer echoed what other experts have told fact-checkers looking into this claim.
Al Edwards, an associate professor in biomedical technology at the University of Reading in England, told Newsweek that because the human body is made up of the same kinds of biological materials that are used in the vaccine, “there is simply no way that injecting a tiny fragment of this material” could make it respond to a magnet.
“Most food is made of similar molecules, and eating food doesn’t make people magnetic,” he said.
Edward Hutchinson, a lecturer at the Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, told Snopes that you would need to introduce “a large lump of magnetic material beneath the skin to get the action through the skin that the videos claim to show.”
In some cases it is possible to detect metal under the skin using a magnet, according to 2011 case report that documented the skin on a boy’s body tenting when a magnet was held against where he had injured his arm while hammering (the doctor removed a piece of metal that had punctured his skin).
But according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has published ingredients lists for the COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in the United States, there are no metallic ingredients.
“There’s nothing there that a magnet can interact with,” Thomas Hope, a vaccine researcher at Northwestern University, told AFP. “It’s protein and lipids, salts, water and chemicals that maintain the pH. That’s basically it, so this is not possible.”
We rate these claims False.
