Scientists Debunk COVID Vaccine Magnet Challenge

Scientists Debunk COVID Vaccine Magnet Challenge

Late last week, I noted a video made the rounds on social media to prove the COVID vaccine was nothing more than a scheme to chip people.

As the COVID-19 vaccine rollout continues, albeit slower compared to previous weeks, and the age eligibility expands to include children 12 and older, one social media post is revisiting fears stirred early on during the pandemic.

The May 10 Instagram post from an account called Keep_Canada_Free shows a video of an unidentified masked woman demonstrating with a small silver magnet that appears to stick to one arm, where she supposedly received the Pfizer shot, but not the other, unvaccinated arm.

“You go figure it out. We’re chipped,” she tells her viewers.

The 25-second video has had over 20,000 views on Instagram and has been shared on social media platforms such as Twitter, where a resized version posted on May 8 also includes the claim the vaccine has “magnetic reactions.”

Experts and the media joined forces to debunk this theory quickly.

Edward Hutchinson, a lecturer with the Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, told Newsweek, that, first of all, the coronavirus vaccine was not produced using materials that are particularly magnetic.

“Secondly, even if it was (and it is not) 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—if you want to give this a go, try getting a fridge magnet to pick up anything, particularly tiny bits of metal, through the skin between your thumb and index finger,” he said.

“Thirdly, even if it was plausible (and it isn’t) why would this have any bearing on whether the vaccine is working—it doesn’t.”

Other scientists called the videos nonsense.

Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at NYU Langone Health and Bellevue Hospital and host of the EPIDEMIC podcast, pointed to the ingredient lists for the two mRNA vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, and the adenovirus-based Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine. Iron is one of the most common metals used in magnetic materials, but “you will see no mention of iron, ferrous, or ferric, which would indicate the presence of iron,” Dr. Gounder explained to POPSUGAR in an email.

Dr. Gounder continued, “That said, many multivitamins contain iron, and you don’t see people becoming magnetized or having magnets sticking to them after taking that vitamin.” Point made! Tracy, a former college professor using the TikTok account @scitimewithtracy, who has a PhD in microbiology and immunology and whom did not wish to disclose her last name, shared the same sentiments, calling it “nonsense.”

During a “debate” about the magnet challenge, I took the challenge and showed the area around my vaccine was not magnetized. Another independent fact-checker from the UK took a similar approach, showing that natural friction and sweat can allow small, metal objects to cling.

However, people did not believe me and dismissed my evidence. The mask-mandates and other pandemic policies promoted and defended by public health officials have eroded the public’s faith in “experts.”

Professor Glenn Reynolds recently reviewed how the failures of our professional class during the last five decades prove the “Suicide of Expertise.”

…{I]t also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.

It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.

And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty.

The magnet challenge indicates we can add the pandemic response to the long list of “expert” failures.

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