“By the thousands, U.S. service members are refusing or putting off the COVID-19 vaccine as frustrated commanders scramble to knock down internet rumors and find the right pitch that will persuade troops to get the shot. Some Army units are seeing as few as one-third agree to the vaccine.
“An officer said one Marine, citing a widely circulated and false conspiracy theory, said: 'I heard that this thing is actually a tracking device.' The medical staff, said the officer, quickly debunked that theory, and pointed to the Marine’s cellphone, noting that it’s an effective tracker.”
– Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press, February 17
To be clear, other concerns seem to be causing large numbers of service members to refuse the vaccine. Some mention the possibility of side effects or health concerns, including for pregnant women.
Similar to the general population, younger service members are also more likely to decline or ask to wait. In many cases, military commanders said, younger troops say they have had the coronavirus or known others who had it, and concluded it was not bad.
Tracking Device in Vaccine
The wild theory is just that – a crazy, false rumor.
The misconception that vaccines may be used as a vehicle to implant tracking devices isn’t new. At the beginning of the pandemic FactCheck.org wrote about a similar claim that anticipated Bill Gates would use a COVID-19 vaccine to track people with microchips. That was bogus, too.
A video claiming that the vials containing the vaccines have a microchip that “tracks the location of the patient” had been viewed more than 225,000 times on Facebook as of December 2020, according to data from CrowdTangle. The chip, which is not currently in use, would be attached to the end of a plastic vial and provide information only about the vaccine dose. It cannot track people.
The Facebook video also contains an obviously edited clip of Bill Gates made to look like he's saying "innovations like vaccines, we need a measuring system that tracks the vaccine." Reuters tracked down Gates' original speech from a 2013 financial inclusion forum, where he referred to vaccines as a breakthrough innovation and later called for a system to track financial inclusion, not vaccine distribution.
The claim is based on a misrepresentation of an interview with Jay Walker, an executive for a medical device company called ApiJect
That interview was posted in May on the website for the Christian Broadcasting Network, a nonprofit founded by conservative televangelist Pat Robertson. In the interview, Walker explained that his company had received a federal contract to ramp up production of its prefilled syringes so that they would be available for use in administering either vaccines or therapeutics for COVID-19.
The ApiJect syringes work like an eyedropper, Walker explained, with a plastic pouch as the vial. The syringes can also be made with an optional chip that could be attached to the end of the plastic vial to store information about its contents. The chip is an RFID tag, which is short for radio frequency identification, and requires a device to scan and read the data.
Walker said in the original interview …
“What that chip does is it has the unique serial number for each dose. It is designed so that there is no counterfeiting. It is designed so that we’ll know exactly that the right dose hasn’t expired. However, that chip only refers to the dose – there’s no personal information, no patient information. It’s simply like a barcode, only we know instantaneously where and when that dose has been used.”
That portion of the interview wasn’t included in the video that’s currently circulating. Instead, the video includes the falsehood that the chips would be used to track the location of individual patients.
(Saranac Hale Spencer. “COVID-19 Vaccines Don’t Have Patient-Tracking Devices.” FactCheck.org. December 15, 2020.)
This didn't keep Kanye West, who had contracted the coronavirus in February, from expressing reservations about possible vaccines in June 2020. West said …
“It’s so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralyzed. So when they say the way we’re going to fix Covid is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious. That’s the mark of the beast. They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven.”
The truth is passive RFID technology is too large to be injected through a needle; GPS tracking devices require batteries.
When triggered by an electromagnetic interrogation pulse from a nearby reader device, a passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag can transmit its unique serial number back to the reader. The passive tag is powered by the energy of the incoming radio waves. RFID tags are widely used. You’ll find them in library books (eliminating the need to scan barcodes to check books in and out) and ‘chips’ to identify pets. Tags typically need to be within 10cm–1m of the powered reader to be activated.
Small RFID tags have been successfully implanted in researchers and employees, allowing them convenient access to payment and building access control systems. The antennae are typically encased inside a glass capsule – 12mm x 2mm – too large to fit through the needle of a syringe.
(“COVID-19 vaccines and microchip devices.” FactCheckNI. December 10, 2020.)
Jane C. Hu of Slate writes …
“If you’re worried about location tracking, look no further than your cellphone. Phones are bona fide tracking devices; people use their GPS functions all the time to find their friends or map their routes. There are serious, worrisome privacy violations that can come from companies collecting and sharing your GPS data, yet we willingly give up that information daily.
“As Slate’s politics editor Tom Scocca puts it: 'Bill Gates doesn’t have to implant a tracker in you because Steve Jobs got you to buy one yourself.'”
(Jane C. Hu. “Microchips Inserted via Vaccine Would Be a Terrible Way to Track People.” Slate. May 27, 2020.)
What's In the Vaccines?
Pfizer has gone public with a list of ingredients that are actually in its vaccine, and a microchip is not among them.
The active ingredient in the shot is a snippet of the virus's genetic material called messenger RNA. As Insider's Hilary Brueck explained, mRNA acts as "a genetic punching bag for the body to learn how to fight against the proteins that help COVID-19 invade our cells."
A mix of sugar, salt, and fats cushion the metaphorical punching bag and make it possible to deliver the vaccine via intramuscular injection.
Here's the full list of ingredients in Pfizer's shot:
A nucleoside-modified messenger RNA (modRNA) encoding the viral spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 (this is what makes the shot work)
Lipids, or fatty substances, including:
(4-hydroxybutyl)azanediyl)bis(hexane-6,1-diyl)bis(2-hexyldecanoate),
2-[(polyethylene glycol)-2000]-N, N-ditetradecylacetamide,
1,2-distearoyl-snglycero-3-phosphocholine,
and cholesterol
Potassium chloride
Monobasic potassium phosphate
Sodium chloride (salt)
Dibasic sodium phosphate dihydrate
Sucrose (sugar)
The Moderna vaccine contains:
Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)
Lipids, or fatty substances, including:
SM(sphyngomyelin)-102
Polyethylene glycol [PEG] 2000 dimyristoyl glycerol [DMG],
1,2-distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine [DSPC],
and cholesterol
Tromethamine
Tromethamine hydrochloride
Acetic acid
Sodium acetate
Sucrose (sugar)
(Andrea Michelson. “Coronavirus vaccines don't contain microchips. Here's what's actually in the shots.” Business Insider. December 21, 2020.)
“The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and Moderna vaccine don’t contain the whole virus,” says Amesh Adalja, MD, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “They contain genetic material from the virus, known as mRNA.” When mRNA enters your body, your cells turn it into a protein called a spike protein, which your body recognizes as foreign and forms an immune response against.
The AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine and Johnson & Johnson vaccine use a different tactic to get spike protein into your body. “They also have the genetic instructions to make spike protein but instead of being written on a piece of mRNA, it’s contained within a harmless adenovirus, which normally causes the common cold,” says Cannon. The adenovirus has been weakened so it can’t infect you—it’s simply used to transport the genetic instructions for your body to make spike protein. From there, the mechanism is the same as with the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccine: Your body sees the spike protein as foreign and creates antibodies to fight against it.
(Abigail Libers. “The COVID-19 Vaccine Has Finally Arrived. Experts Explain How It Works, And When You Can Get It. Women's Health. January 29, 2021.)
It is my hope that this entry will correct any misinformation that still circulates on social media about unfounded concerns associated with the vaccine. I am not a medical doctor or an infectious disease specialist; however, I support vaccines in the arms of everyone who can safely take them. We need a healthy country … and world … a return to life as we used to know it.
Robert H. Shmerling, MD and Senior Faculty Editor of Harvard Health Publishing says
it’s natural to wonder if brand new vaccines against a novel coronavirus, developed at unprecedented speed, are effective and safe to take. Shmerling says, “Let’s review some of what we know. Overall effectiveness has been reported in the range of 70% to 95%. That’s well above the average effectiveness of the flu vaccine, for example.”
How do you know which sources of COVID-19 vaccine information are accurate? It can be difficult to know which sources of information you can trust. Learn more about finding credible vaccine information at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention page titled “Myths and Facts about COVID-19 Vaccines. (Updated February 3, 2021). Click here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/facts.html.
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