Microchip, DNA-Alteration, and Other Nonsense: Anti-Vax Conspiracy Theories Debunked

The Coronavirus pandemic has presented designers and propagators of conspiracy theories with a whole new cornucopia of lucrative opportunities. The conspiratorial con-artists’ imagination has lived up to the occasion above and beyond, producing a wide array of wild fantastical tales to cater to the deception-prone, overly-skeptical public’s insatiable thirst for misinformation. 

Featuring electronics, bioengineering, Bill Gates, Satan, and whatnot, garnished with lots of evil, the circulating fables have excited the anxieties and aroused the passions of millions of institutions-mistrusting individuals worldwide.

Whereas in the past such stories typically attracted the indifference or lighthearted ridicule of the average, moderate public, this time they demand to be seen as a cause of grave worry. Thanks to the Internet, and some dark quarters of it in particular, cliquish voices have reached ears way beyond their traditional audiences, bringing bigotry forth from the fringe to the mainstream, and giving birth to a historic, threateningly vociferous movement of lunatics known as Anti-Vaxxers.

It is not my intention here to discuss how institutions and society as a whole should react to this novel, alarming phenomenon. But in a brief note, I will mention how I believe they should not react: with mockery, reprimand, defensiveness, or aggression. Just like in dealing with an acting-out child, such scolding attitudes will most likely only have the opposite from the desired one effect: further alienating deluded people from reality, radicalizing, and emboldening them.

My goal here rather is to play my own minor part in advocating truth by simply viewing the major circulating anti-vaccination allegations through the scope of crude reason. I obviously do not aspire for this discourse to have any significant effect in changing progressed Anti-Vaxxers’ minds and dissolving their delusions (if that only were that simple!). But who knows, perhaps it may throw some light on someone’s decision-making process who is still wavering on the thin boundary between quixotism and logic.

Is the Covid Vaccine Safe?

Before I move on with my endeavor to debunk the Covid-vaccine-besetting conspiracy theories, I would like to first address some legitimate, general safety concerns… 

Is the Covid vaccine safe? The short and honest answer to this question is that nobody really knows.

At the time of writing, nine Covid vaccines of five different types have been independently developed and approved in at least some parts of the world. These are:

Source: Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society

In addition to them, tens of other vaccines are currently under development and are expected to receive the green light in the near future.

Given the astounding rapidity with which all these new vaccines are being developed, there is undoubtedly solid ground for people to express genuine worries about their safety. Especially in the case of the ones developed in China and Russia – where safety testing protocols are arguably less diligent – it is not far-fetched to assume that, during the development race the urgency of the situation has elicited, potential hazards may have been overlooked.

We are speaking about the human body, after all. Biological organisms are extremely complex and chaotic systems. Anything foreign you put into them – be it medicine or food, via injection or orifices – is bound to cause a profusion of effects and side-effects which often exceed the limits of predictability. Although the scientific community does quite confidently and unanimously endorse the vaccines, there is always an error margin inherent in every human endeavor. However, any rationally conceivable danger associated with the Covid vaccines is bound to be exactly that: a mistake.

To be clear, I am not here extolling the merits of the pharmaceutical industry. I am personally far from fond of medicine, and thanks to my exceptionally hale physique, I walk into the chemist’s only as often as I go to the tax office; to wit, only when absolutely necessary.

Medical laboratories are, after all, profit-motivated organizations. They are run by CEOs and investors; not by Mother Teresa.

But there is a big BUT to be interjected here. Although the primary motivation for the development of new medicine – as well as pretty much everything else, really – is to make money, money is essentially made by serving people’s needs and desires. And the companies that make the most money ultimately are the ones that best satisfy their customers… Just think of how you spend your money to grasp the argument’s validity.

In short, it is one thing to not know whether the vaccine is safe, and a completely different thing to believe it is deliberately harmful; it is one thing to not trust the system, and another to blindly trust masked online personas just because they claim to be “anti-system”; one thing to be a skeptic, another to be a know-all; one to be a questioner, another to be an idiot.

All this being clarified, let us see what they who claim to know claim that they know.

The Plandemic

By this silly pun goes the mother-conspiracy-theory of all anti-vaccination chimerical hogwash. Presupposed by all the various theories on how the vaccine is going to doom us goes the idea that the pandemic was planned; orchestrated by some cabalistic elite – or whatever – that secretly controls the world behind the scenes with the single motive of ultimately forcing the vaccine into our bodies.

The plandemic theory divaricates into two distinct branches:

The first one claims that there simply is no virus, and the entire world population – save the few enlightened Anti-Vaxxers – has been duped to believe there is a health emergency by some sort of Terry Pratchett’s headology. This idea is the easiest one for anyone to rebut by simply paying a visit to a hospital and having a talk with the suffering patients’ relatives. Sure, one may also argue that, besides all the world’s governments, media, and health personnel, an army of a good one hundred million people worldwide has been recruited by the conspiracy to reinforce the claim. By the same logic, one may also believe that oneself is the only real entity in the universe and everything else is but a private simulation, which is a possibility at the end of the day, but let’s not get into ontology here.

The second branch of the plandemic theory accepts that there is a virus, but believes – or rather knows – that it was deliberately released by some evil actor.

Although few sane people believe it to be the case with Covid, it would be naive to outright rule out the possibility. Considering the millennia-long history of biological warfare and the widespread reach of modern genetic technology, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a terrorist organization, a rogue state, or even a lone psychopath potentially developing and setting loose a dangerous germ. But such an instigator’s reason for doing so could be something like narrow geopolitical speculation, afterlife prospects, sheer malice… anything but ultimately vaccinating us.

The Anti-Vaxxers’ plandemic hypothesis presumes that the virus was intentionally released with the very ulterior motive of vaccinating us.

The shallower tier of this theory holds that the virus was created by one or all the vaccine-developing companies lobbying with each other for profit. This allegation falls instantly apart when some rudimentary understanding of economics is involved. But of course, conspiracy theories’ devotees do not commonly exhibit an understanding of pretty much anything, let alone economics. They overestimate the profits that are to be made off the vaccines, and they completely neglect to consider the big picture. They do not count the enormous sums of money that were fed into vaccine research (and would have been fed into plotting and executing a global pandemic). And they altogether fail to consider what the subsequent global recession will cost the pharmaceutical industry, together with everybody else.

Take Pfizer, for example – by far the largest of the vaccine developers, who will be getting the largest piece of the pie… They will surely make lots of money rolling out the Covid vaccine, but they will be likely losing comparable sums by missing sales of other products; millions of sacked workers around the world aren’t going to be as keen to buy Pfizer’s Viagra flagship or other unessential drugs. The investors’ lukewarm reception of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine news and the resulting unimpressive performance of the company’s stock aptly demonstrate this point.

The deeper and most prominent among conspiracy theorists tier of the plandemic scenario claims that the pharmaceutical corporations, alongside all the world’s governments and international institutions, are but obsequious instruments of some surreptitious, omnipotent organization or another that pulls the strings behind closed doors and fabricated the Coronavirus pandemic to vaccinate us for reasons much more sinister than mere profit.

Well, anyone who has tried to function within a human society at any level should be disposed to comprehend why it would not be feasible for any one party to have dominated the world. A thousand strong arguments could be put forth to prove the invalidity and even theoretical impossibility of this supposition. I may submit some of them on a future post, but for our current purposes, let us assume that, indeed, the nefarious cabal is here, among and above us, and is conspiring to vaccinate us… The question is: why?

The Covid Vaccine Causes Impotence

One broadly circulated conspiracy theory suggests that the Covid vaccine was designed to cause impotence and infertilize the world’s male population in bulk. The “logic” behind this theory is that the corporate elite is planning to reduce the world population for, perhaps, getting richer.

The theory’s ground-gaining lies again in its followers’ inability to understand how the economy works; particularly, in their perceiving the global economy as a zero-sum game. They think that wealth is something bestowed upon us by Mother Earth, and there is a set amount of it to be shared amongst us, so that fewer people means richer people. But that’s far from being the case. In reality, wealth is not found, but rather created. Even the primary economic sector – which deals with the extraction of food and raw materials, and hardly comprises 5% of the global GDP – does require labor. Even in the case of the most primitive imaginable economy, where foraging is the only industry, collecting berries is still a job.

In our modern globalized, market-driven, predominantly service-based economy, this holds true more than at any other time in history. Money is not a fixed commodity. Money is simply the representation of the collective useful work people carry out in order to improve their living circumstances. To make more money, companies need more workers and, most importantly, more customers.

If money is power, then, far from reducing the human population, power needs more healthy individuals to turn into laborers and consumers.

Some predict that this axiom is not going to remain valid in an anticipated AI-and-nanotechnology-driven techtopia, wherein the workforce will be downgraded from being inferior but necessary to being irrelevant and useless. There will almost certainly always be relevant work to be done by human minds – if we only tweak a little the definition of what human is. But even if that isn’t going to be so, useless does not mean pestilent; nobody would undertake extensive efforts to methodically eradicate something just because it is of no use. Exponentially evolving technology is irrefutably bound to transform the economy in radical ways over the upcoming decades. But rather than a zero-sum game, the outcome of this transformation is going to get us closer to a practically non-scarcity economy… Would you bicker with your neighborhood over a cupful of seawater when you live on the coast?

Anyhow, during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020-21, such techtopian prospects are not yet actual, and an abundance of healthy humans is to whatever powers control the world as indispensable as never before. Thus nobody – and especially an alleged ruling elite – has an interest to render men impotent and reduce the world population. And if such an all-powerful elite someday wanted to do that, no doubt they could come up with a much more straightforward method than faking a pandemic to covertly inject sterilizer in the entire human population – like releasing a highly lethal virus that will do the job directly, altogether excluding the vaccination step, for example.

The Covid Vaccine Contains a Microchip and Alters our DNA

This conspiracy theory claims that the pandemic and the vaccination undertaking are but a covert scheme aiming to implant microchips in the bodies of the entire human population. Its propagators not only know this for a fact, but they also know who is the mastermind behind the plot: Bill Gates. So much for Windows, get ready for Human 1.0.

The one pinch of truth to be found in this story relates to an injection device developed by Apiject. This is an innovative, prefilled syringe with a microchip embedded in the device itself; not swimming within its contents, ready to be injected into anyone’s body. The chip will only allow health personnel to check whether the dose is authentic and in date; not to collect patients’ personal data. Furthermore, the device has not been even used yet for delivering Covid vaccine doses and it is not established whether it will be used in the future.

The purpose of Bill Gates’ microchip is not entirely clear, either. That’s not surprising, since you obviously could not expect conspiracy-theories adherents to have any cohesive idea of what a microchip is and what it can or can’t do. The vague popular notion suggests that it will be used for tracking people’s location and collecting other personal information.

With regard to location tracking, the required device wouldn’t be exactly a microchip. It would be a GPS tracker, which, apart from a chip, has to contain other parts such as an antenna and a battery. Unless some really astounding progress in nanotechnology and energy storage has been made in secrecy, the smallest GPS tracking unit is no smaller than a penny – still a little too large to fit through a syringe needle – and needs regular plugging. One will, of course, argue that unimaginably advanced technologies exist and are kept hidden from the masses. But come on… If Bill Gates or anyone else had developed a self-charging, micrometers-wide GPS tracking device would be better off to release it in the market than implanting it to all the world’s humans for free. I, for one, would readily pay well for it.

Likewise, to collect any data from the human body – or anything else – you do not need a microchip. A microchip is simply an electronic unit for processing and storing information; not collecting it. To collect any sort of information a device needs to be equipped with sensors. This brings us again to yet-nonexistent, fantastical technologies of nanobots.

Similar to all the above lines of arguments may be employed to counter the phoniest and wackiest of these conspiracy theories’ claims, which asserts that the Covid vaccines are designed to alter our DNA. Gene therapy techniques are being researched for decades, and have produced very hopeful results in numerous experimental treatments of otherwise incurable diseases. If such therapy had been rigorously proven to be effective and safe against the Coronavirus, doctors would unreservedly endorse it without a need to conceal the way it works. But no vaccines have been developed that use gene-editing techniques. Moderna’s mRNA cutting-edge vaccine does introduce genetic material into the subject’s organism to stimulate an immune response. However, these genes are injected into the muscle; they will not by any chance ramble and bore their way into your cell nuclei by themselves to make out with your DNA. People who contemplate this idea with any degree of seriousness do not, of course, have the slightest notion of what DNA is and would as promptly accept that the objective for altering their genes is to turn them into horned, bat-like creatures to populate Satan’s newest inferno that is under construction here on Earth.

Make no mistake, that such advanced technologies are not now applicable does not mean that they never will. Before very long, we will get swarms of nanobots roaming through and around every part of our body; we will get microchips and myriad electronic parts integrated with our bodies and brains; we will alter our DNA. But these changes will not be forced unto us clandestinely by a Satan-worshipping cabal plotting to purport the judgment day. They will rather be received by us voluntarily as much-coveted upgrades for which we’ll pay readily and dearly.

Are you an old enough Anti-Vaxxer, quite positively some ten years back you were rumbling about, lamenting Antichrist’s machinations to usher in his heinous reign by means of smartphones. You probably swore that you’ll never get your hands on one of those diabolic contraptions. But now you are reading this line on one of those. And you did pay for it.

Conclusion

These were some quick thoughts on some of the most common anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. If you have heard of some other ones of them, or some additional points reinforcing the ones mentioned that went unaddressed here, I would be keen enough to hear about them.

My personal verdict with regard to the Covid vaccines is that I don’t know how safe they are, but I do know they are not made deliberately harmful. I am not intent on having a shot anytime soon, but that’s not because of being cautious, but because I am amongst the people who least need it. Although unforeseen side-effects caused by the vaccines may emerge over time, the Coronavirus has already emerged and is definitely dangerous, lethally so.

If you have found yourself hooked on conspiracy theories, you should quit Facebook (or whatever else it is) and check out some alternative, reliable sources of information.

If you figure out that you are inclined to outright reject any piece of information that is undramatic, unintriguing, and positive, it means you are pathologically negative. Try out some meditation and strolls in the park.