Videos indicating that COVID vaccines behave like magnets have recently been going around the internet. These show people sticking magnets onto their skin where they reportedly got their COVID-19 vaccine shots. However, experts explain that these videos are fake.
COVID-19 Vaccines are not Magnetic
Social media videos show that magnets cling to people's arms once they have been vaccinated against COVID-19, reported Full Fact.
These videos contain false information, and experts say that the vaccines do not have anything else other than those ingredients disclosed to the public.
Al Edwards, an associate professor of biomedical technology at the University of Reading, told Newsweek in an explanation, that a magnet could not stick to a person's arm after injection.
In an explanation in Full Fact, he noted that because the body is made up of the same building blocks as the vaccine, "there is simply no way that injecting a tiny fragment of this material could have any impact."
"Most food is made of similar molecules, and eating food doesn't make people magnetic," said Edwards.
In a statement in Fact Check Org by Lisa Morici, an associate professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine, mRNA and vaccines only contain RNA/DNA, lipids, proteins, salts, and sugars. She added that Pfizer-BioNTech's and Moderna's vaccines contain modified mRNA, while Johnson&Johnson's uses an adenovirus modified with DNA.
Randall Victora, head of the University of Minnesota's department of electrical and computer engineering, also discussed why there might be confusion based on simple assumptions in the concept. "Although almost all materials are magnetic in the sense of paramagnetism, diamagnetism, and ferromagnetism, only a ferromagnet has the potential to make a magnet stick to your arm," he explained in Fact Check Org.
U.S. fact checker Snopes reported a Reuters photo of a magnet attracting a metallic object under the skin in an article. The image depicts the flesh seeming to "tent," as one researcher put it, with the skin visibly drawing toward the magnet. There is no evidence of this COVID vaccine magnets tenting effect in any of the videos Full Fact has seen.
The clips are much more likely to display the magnet sticking to the skin due to water on the skin's surface and the fact that the interest is small and compact. These results are similar to how a coin can "stick" to your forehead, or a spoon can sit on your nose.
In many of the videos, the vaccinated person will say that they are "chipped" after receiving the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. All through the pandemic, claims that vaccines contain a computer chip have persisted, as have baseless accusations that vaccines will be used to harvest personal data. Similar arguments have been reported by Full Fact in the past.
Goldsmiths, University of London psychology researcher Gustav Kuhn, who also explores the reason behind illusions at the Science of Magic Association founder, examined a few of the videos. In an email to Fact Check Org, he said, "It's difficult, if not impossible to know why the magnet sticks in these situations."
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